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Hacking a weird TV censoring device

🕑 Added 2022-11-20 01:20:49 +0000 UTC

Comments

Xuyi Wang

that is cool

Florian Rian

I love the way how you strategicly disassable things,.. how long did you mess around with excel until it made what you wanted it to do? for me its always try and error for hours,.. I recently programmed my first eprom programmer for an arduino - so basically the same what you just did - and I missused it to steal all data out of the SRAM of a computer to get its data - included some hardware hacking also because you cant read SRAM when a CPU tries to use it,.. but I got no usable data out of it,.. sadly!

Maurice

But these words are replaced. :-)

Tyler Arbogast

That’s what I’m hoping!

Michael McDonnell

I wonder if you just stumbled on to a future video

Michael McDonnell

to it looks like the scammers found out to mimic handles. there is someone with the handle @beneater. with a period(.) at the end of the handle spamming the comments.

Don Costello

This is awesome. Reminds me of the first season of Halt and Catch Fire where they decoded the BIOS of an IBM PC in order to make a clone. One concern I have is if the video violates YouTube's policies on explicit content. Although Ben isn't speaking the words, you can clearly see there are R-rated ones in there.

Michael McDonnell

nice video and analysis of the data. now it would be interesting to see how manipulating the dictionary would work. like reversing and make clean words dirty or have it make close captions into a sort of mad libs.

Jim Kelly

This is absolute genius and will go viral. I can’t stop laughing! So glad you are back Ben!

Chris Bates-Keegan

Thanks for this, that makes sense. Was that explicit in the video, should it be?

Richard Wells

It's because the EEPROM has no internal clock; Ben's Arduino program was supplying the clock "pulses". While CS was set the EEPROM simply responded with the next bit on each CLK transition.

Gecko089

Pause, watch and like everything he has ever published ^^ Absolutely. He covers a muich wider range of technology, but it´s always so very interesting and entertaining!

Joseph Holley

BTW, did columns C & D on DICK get swapped in the spreadsheet? It's the only row with a 01 in C and a 00 in D.

Joseph Holley

@Ben yeah, good point. Wish we could get the program code ;P

Diego Corazón

It might also account for words like "balls", which are almost always going to be innocent, unless they're preceded by a possessive like "my" or "his"

Ben Eater

I think you're on to something! I wasn't able to figure out a pattern, but that totally makes sense that Dick and Woody are names. That would explain the 01 byte on those two words. It doesn't account for everyone in the comments of TC's video who has memories of it making a hash of Toy Story, but I guess with as often as Woody would come up in that movie, even a 5% error rate would be quite noticeable. But Joseph, I'm not sure how much further it goes. The reason "what the f*** is that" was filtered to "what is that" is because "THE F***" is explicitly blacklisted and removed. (And yeah, that means my video thumbnail is a lie, but welcome to YouTube)

Diego Corazón

Yeah that make sense, a censored word is deleted along with any preceding pronoun or article.

Joseph Holley

In addition, I think, the last bit being a 1 in column G for some allowed words is a flag for allowed words that should be dropped from output when they they occur just before a word that is filtered. In TC's video, in Goodfellas 'what the f*** is that' gets filtered to 'what is that'. Since 'the' has a 1 in the low-order bit and immediately preceeds a word to be filtered, it also gets filtered to try and improve the grammar of the resulting caption?

Diego Corazón

The C column seems to be used to protect proper names like "DICK" or "WOODY", so that's why "A" "AN" "THE" "THESE" or "THAT", and possessives like "HIS" and "YOURS" are in the dictionary, because the Guardian knows that if a definite or indefinite article or possessive precede a word like "DICK" or "WOODY" it's being used as a slur or an epithet, and if not, then it's probably just a person's name and should not be replaced. That's also why they had to go to the heroic length of whitelisting "DICK VAN" because the full title of his show is "THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW", which would otherwise be identified as a slur.

Tyler Arbogast

Wait - the thumbnail shows a logic analyzer hooked up, but that’s not in the video.

Shelton

Fun! Not only does this video bring me back to the 90's, it reminded me of my pre-Arduino days of playing with the PICAXE chips based on this family of PIC's. (The 16C62x used in the TV Guardian is close to the PICAXE 18). Anyway; keep up the good work!

Stephen Post

My first thought after watching that Technology Connections video was “I bet if Ben Eater got a hold of this thing he could extract those words - that’d be cool to see!”

Auctoris

Nice video.

Carl-Mikael Zetterling

Really nice explanation of all the steps, from finding the ROM, removing it, hooking it up on the breadboard and programming the Arduino, even the Excel analysis. Thanks!

Dylan Speiser

So excited for this! I immediately thought of you when he mentioned that in his video.

Chris Bates-Keegan

I thought it was excellent as usual, the only thing that I missed was why there was no timing issue between the Arduino and the eeprom?

Euro Micelli

Indeed, Alec (Technology Connections) pointed out this quirk in his video.

SonOfSofaman

I see what you did there :)

David Craig

If this device used closed captioning to identify the words then they would have ran into situations where the word was spoken and not spelled out. I have a hearing loss and I always found it kind of amusing that they had no problem with saying the word but were a little squeamish about spelling it out. Usually they would have the leading characters and then some asterisks.

Edward Meewis

I would have expected a list of only 7 words. - Ed.

Latent

I quite enjoyed this video. I had seen TC's video on this, but this very much fit with your approach, thank you for breaking down the steps of board analysis as much as the steps of actually accessing and decoding the data.

Peter Stevens

"sex -> hugs, fuck -> wow" .. hilarious! .. now I get the video title! .. "What the Wow, better ignore those Hugs Bots"

Ryan Maples

This is some good crud. Please give us more like this.

Josh Smith

Very cool. I grew up around these so very interesting to see how you went through all the data in the spreadsheet and set up the Arduino.

Jeff Geerling

Haha, the point where he said "there's a whole dictionary of words in here, but I couldn't find it" I immediately thought of your debugging videos. Thanks for doing this teardown!