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People Are Using AI to Hack Everything They Own – Transcript
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This TV was wallto-wall with ads until AI ripped them all out. This $50 photo frame was just for pictures of grandma. Until AI hacked it into a custom family dashboard and Lululemon spent $500 million on this smart mirror and eventually gave up on it. Then AI turned it into somebody's personal assistant.
And all this started with a GitHub project called Reverse Engineer Anything or REA for short. In this video, we'll cover how REA works, why you'd want to hack your own stuff, the coolest stuff people are building, what they found hiding inside, and who's trying to shut it all down. And stick around because later on, I'll show you a little project I've been working on myself. All right, so at the start of October, aka Sloptober, REA had under 10,000 stars on
GitHub. 3 weeks later, it's nearing 400,000 stars, and that puts it in the top 10 most starred projects of all time on GitHub, right behind OpenClaw. Rea did it in less than a month, and nobody really knows who made it. The accounts called Moruto. No real name, no company.
The bio just says member of technically staff. Interesting. Concerning, but interesting. Real quick on how this stuff works. Every smart thing you own, your TV, your printer, your air fryer, keep at least two secrets. The first is the code running inside. On a device, that's called firmware. You can't read it. It's just machine code that your device runs. The second is how it talks to its app over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. Your phone and your smart stuff speak their own private language. Rea hands an AI
agent like Claude Code or Codex the tools to crack both. It can dig through the code with the same tools human reverse engineers use, and it can listen in on that conversation. Then it tells you how the whole thing works and it shows you where it found each piece.
Their pitch is pretty blunt. See a feature in an app that you want in your own product. Ask your agent to investigate it with REA. It can inspect the app without the source code. Explain how the feature works and build a version for you. It's being called the new wild west of AI. Funny thing is a lot of what you're about to see didn't even use REA. Once people saw it was possible, they just started asking their agents to do it. Rea was just the spark for what I call the Rea movement. All
right, guys. Before we go any further, between a full-time job and taking care of my one-year-old, these videos get made in whatever free time I have left. So, here's our gentleman's agreement. If you're enjoying this so far, hit subscribe, drop a like, and leave a comment for the algorithm, and in return, I'll keep bringing you GradeA USDA certified slop. Okay, so why would anybody want to take apart their own TV?
Cory Doctoro, the guy who coined the word in shitification, put it simply. You bought the TV, it's yours? But it doesn't really feel that way anymore, does it? One commenter under one of the big REA videos got almost 3,000 likes.
It said, "Companies will own nothing and be happy." Imagine this. You buy a lamp, a literal light bulb with a stand, and the only way to turn it on is through some trash app that shows you ads. And somebody at the lamp company probably got promoted for this. or the keypad on your treadmill dies and now it's a really expensive coat rack. Or your printer is working perfectly fine, but nobody bothered to make it work with your new computer. For years, the answer to all this was you can't. You don't
know enough. That's for engineers to do. And then a whole bunch of regular people figured out you can just do things. Okay, let's start with the TV because the TV is where this whole thing blew up. One guy's parents had a Xiai TV and it was showing a sponsored ad before you could even get to Netflix on a TV they paid for. That's a non-consensual ad.
Somebody should be in jail for that. So, he gave Claude Code the model number. It found the TV on the Wi-Fi, ripped out a bunch of Xiai apps, and wrote a whole new home screen. In his words, quote, "Looks like an Apple TV now, lol." That posted over 8 million views. And then everybody wanted one. He turned it into a free project. And within a couple of days, people all over the world were sending in photos of their own TVs, and it works on hundreds of different models now. Then people started getting
creative. So this guy jailbroke a Samsung TV over Wi-Fi, ripped out the ads, and also gave it that Apple TV style. Then he built a little app for his wife that shows a cheesy photo montage on the TV. Fellas, this is the barn now. Flowers aren't enough anymore.
You have to jailbreak the television. And then this one's my favorite. Somebody set up their TV to take a screenshot of whatever's playing and send it to an agent on their computer. If it's an ad, the TV mutes itself and throws a card over the screen until the ad is over. But it's not just TVs. It's anything with a screen or anything that comes with an app. West Boss, a web developer with a huge following, used a coding agent to root a cheap $50 Amazon photo frame and turn it into a little
home display. It's got Wi-Fi and a touchcreen, and it runs off USB. He even made a whole video about it on his YouTube. So now it's got the family calendar, the chores, the grocery list, and when piano lessons are companies sell this exact thing as a smart family calendar for about 300 bucks, plus a yearly subscription for extra features.
And now you have tons of people hacking these things. This guy replied with his own. His has lights, door locks, the garage, and he summed up the whole movement in one line. quote, "Pretty cool to be able to plug in the frame and just tell your clanker to hack it."
That's where we're at, folks. Just tell your clanker to hack it. And side note, I looked up the word clanker. Apparently, it's a slur for AI agents, so be careful how you use it. Okay. Now, Lululemon. Back in 2020, Lululemon bought a company called Mirror for $500 million. It's literally a mirror with a screen inside it. You stand in front of it and do workout classes. And these things cost well over $1,000 new. So Lulu bought it at the peak of the
pandemic when everybody was working out at home. Now, I'm no MBA, but maybe a $1,000 mirror wasn't the smartest. Then the home workout boom faded. The mirrors didn't sell like they expected, and they wrote off almost all that money and stopped selling the thing. So now there's a bunch of these on Facebook Marketplace for a couple hundred bucks, which makes them the perfect thing to hack. One guy turned his mirror into an AI assistant made out of glowing particles. It shows the time, his music, the cars charging in his garage, and it
even listens. And this person said they paid $100 for theirs and it was quote the best project they ever did. And then there's Kindle. This guy plugged his Kindle into his computer, let Claude Code jailbreak it, and had it strip out all of Amazon's stuff. And somebody else turned an old Kindle into a dashboard for the whole family. It runs for weeks on one charge and it doesn't show you a single ad, which ironically, if you want the ads removed, Amazon will charge you an extra 20 bucks. Now, people have been
jailbreaking Kindles for years, and it's not just Kindles. Open-source communities have spent hundreds of hours bringing the abandoned smart gadgets back to life by hand. The difference is that you don't need to know how anymore. You just hand the task to your agent, and that's kind of the whole point of this video. Okay, now let's talk about the terrible apps. And I'll start with mine. I recently bought two air purifiers from two different brands. One of them for my room and one of them for
my kids' room. Each air purifier has its own app, and they're both complete dog Now, a normal person would just use the buttons on the air purifier. But remember, my one-year-old, this guy is an absolute madman. He can't keep his hands off it. So, the air purifier has to stay locked in child mode, which means the only way I can control it is through an app. So, I got sick of the apps and decided to take matters into my own hands. I spent about 30 seconds writing a prompt. And a few minutes
later, Claud had built me a Mac OS app called Slo House that lets me control both air purifiers straight from my computer. I even added a video feed from the baby monitor so everything's all in one place and I can pop the video out and pin it to my desktop. Now, I bet some of you are already thinking it.
Does this mean the air purifier and the baby monitor aren't secure? Can any perve just hack in and watch my kid sleep? Well, no. The app didn't actually break anything. The official apps don't talk to the device by magic. They send the requests to the company's servers through an API. They have a set of endpoints for things like turn the fan on or give me the camera feed. Claude reverse engineered those endpoints, what each request looks like, where it goes, and what comes back. Slop House just
calls the same ones directly. And it still has to authenticate first. It logs in with my account and password, and it gets the same kind of access token the official app gets. And if you don't have my login, you can't get in. Okay, next example. This guy did the same thing with his air conditioner so he'd never have to look at the remote again. Now it's just a little button at the top of his laptop. His caption, quote, "No first world problems remain unsolved in
2026." And then he put it on his AR glasses because why not? And this next one has to be the most ridiculous. This guy got tired of pushing the buttons on his air fryer, so he used REA and got his voice enabled. Now he just says 190 for 30 minutes and it starts cooking. Probably onion rings. Still has to put them in himself though, so there's room for improvement. And sometimes it's not the crappy app.
Sometimes the thing just breaks and nobody's coming to fix it. The keypad on this guy's treadmill has been dead for over a year. So he went digging, found a second Bluetooth connection hidden inside the thing, and now he can run the treadmill directly from his phone. The guy had one complaint about the AI part.
quote, "After 4 days of cyber security denials from both Claude and Chad GBT, meaning for 4 days, both AIs refused to help him because their safety checks flagged it as hacking." So yeah, apparently Cardio is a security threat now. And then there's the final boss of technology, printers. This guy had a laser printer that worked perfectly fine, but Brother's last Mac driver for it came out in 2019, and it was only built for the old Intel Macs. Then he
says the latest Mac OS, stopped running it, and just like that, a perfectly good printer was dead. Nothing wrong with it. His Mac just wouldn't talk to it anymore. So he pointed Rea at brother's old driver to figure out exactly what it does and had Claude build a new one that runs natively on his Mac. He says it only took two prompts. Okay, so when you open something up, you'd better be ready for what you find. A guy who goes by log 4J owns a brand new Samsung TV and he
kept getting what he called quote weirdly targeted ads. So he got rude access to his own TV and when he dug through the software he found code for an always on voice service code for detecting faces and sound detection that classifies noises in your living room into labels like a dog barking or a baby crying. So riddle me this. Why does your TV need to know that your dog is barking? Creepy as And we already know what TVs do with what you watch.
They use it to sell ads. So, how does your TV know what you're watching in the first place? Well, there's actually a name for it. It's called ACR, automatic content recognition. It's described as the TV identifying what's playing on your screen using screenshots and audio clips. Another Samsung owner went through his TV, turned that off. He also turned off the feature that keeps track of what's plugged in the HDMI ports.
Ironically, he says the TV runs a lot faster now. And this is all crazy because for decades what your stuff actually does was secret by default. Now anybody with these tools can take a look. So who's trying to stop this? Well, you'd think it'd be the TV companies, but as far as I can find, Samsung, LG, Xiai, Amazon, none of them have said a word. If there's any push back, it seems to be coming from the AI side. So remember, most of this stuff