Hardware Hacking and Local Control Keep Growing

Several threads today were about people taking physical control back from manufacturers. Someone reverse-engineered a Mitsubishi AC unit to get Home Assistant integration because Samsung wanted to charge a subscription for what should be a basic feature. Someone else rewrote their e-scooter firmware in Rust. A German blogger hacked a smart kettle running Tuya firmware and found code execution vulnerabilities in the bootloader.

JetKVM Mini also appeared, a hardware KVM-over-IP device that generated both enthusiasm and reliability complaints. Two of three units failed for one commenter. The Apple Neural Engine reverse engineering thread was another data point: people are investing serious effort to understand and reclaim hardware they own.

The pattern across all of these is the same: manufacturers are building lock-in at the hardware and firmware layer, and a motivated subset of users is systematically dismantling it. LG's denial of TV tracking claims fit here too. Nobody in the comments believed the denial, and the discussion was mostly about how to opt out of features that shipped as opt-in defaults.