Guy accidentally takes command of 7,000 robots in the homes of 7,000 strangers while trying to control his vacuum with a gamepad

Guy accidentally takes command of 7,000 robots in the homes of 7,000 strangers while trying to control his vacuum with a gamepad | PC Gamer Skip to main content Open menu Close main menu PC Gamer THE GLOBAL AUTHORITY ON PC GAMES US Edition UK US Canada Australia Subscribe Sign in View Profile Sign out Search Search PC Gamer Games Hardware News Reviews Guides Video Forum More PC Gaming Show PC Gamer Clips Software Codes Coupons Movies & TV Magazine Newsletter Affiliate links Meet the team Community guidelines About PC Gamer PC Gamer Magazine SubscriptionWhy subscribe?Subscribe to the world’s #1 PC gaming magTry a single issue or save on a subscriptionIssues delivered straight to your door or device From$1Subscribe now Don’t miss these Third Person Shooter Congrats, you played yourself, Arc Raiders’ machines aren’t actually learning: ‘That’s just the way we author them’ Platforms Open-source game engine Godot is drowning in ‘AI slop’ code contributions: ‘I don’t know how long we can keep it up’ AI Reports claim an AWS outage last year was caused by an AI coding tool deciding to ‘delete and recreate the environment’ from scratch, while Amazon says ‘misconfigured access controls’ were to blame Hardware Age verification checks are now in force in the UK because of the Online Safety Act, but with the Discord fallout, it seems like one bad idea after another Gaming Industry Doom co-creator John Romero adores Ghost Recon and has over 3,000 hours in World of Warcraft: ‘God, I lived in that game every day for five years’ Third Person Shooter Helldivers 2’s siege of Cyberstan is the greatest galactic campaign the game has seen so far AI ‘I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb’: OpenClaw AI chose to ‘speedrun’ deleting Meta AI safety director’s inbox due to a ‘rookie error’ Hardware Dutch defense secretary says ‘you can jailbreak an F-35 just like an iPhone,’ and I’m here to tell the Dutch defense secretary that this is a great opportunity to run Doom on a fighter jet AI Judging by the GPT-4o situation, game developers will have a big problem if they get serious about AI chatbot NPCs Hardware ‘I do not have enough self-preservation. 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When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. (Image credit: DJI) Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter PC Gamer Get the PC Gamer Newsletter Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team. Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over. You are now subscribed Your newsletter sign-up was successful Want to add more newsletters? Every Friday GamesRadar+ Your weekly update on everything you could ever want to know about the games you already love, games we know you’re going to love in the near future, and tales from the communities that surround them. 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From first-look trailers, interviews, reviews and explainers, we’ve got you covered. Signup + Once a month SFX Get sneak previews, exclusive competitions and details of special events each month! Signup + An account already exists for this email address, please log in. Subscribe to our newsletter Software engineer Sammy Azdoufal had a humble goal: He wanted to control his robot vacuum with a PS5 gamepad, because controlling things with a gamepad is cool. Shortly after pursuing that dream, however, Azdoufal found he had gained control of over 7,000 robots that were happy to provide him camera feeds and floor plans of strangers’ homes in two dozen countries across the globe (via The Verge).Azdoufal’s field promotion to international robot commander occurred after tasking Claude Code with analyzing the traffic between his newly purchased DJI Romo vacuum and the manufacturer’s servers. But when the security token it provided gave him access to not just his DJI Romo, but to all DJI Romos around the world, it was clear that he’d stumbled upon a glaring security flaw. (Image credit: DJI)Every three seconds, Azdoufal’s Claude-built app collected the serial numbers of thousands of robots pinging back to home base, reporting information about their cleaning routes, their charge states, obstacles they’d encountered. He could activate their on-board cameras and microphones. He could reconstruct the 2D floor plans of their owners’ homes using their recorded spatial data. And with each machine’s IP address, he could approximate the rough location of each robot vacuum’s household. Related articles ‘I know how stupid this is, but it had to be done’: YouTuber gets Doom to run on touchscreen cooking pot A human software engineer rejected an AI agent’s code change request, only for the AI agent to retaliate by publishing an ‘angry’ blog about him Audio devices that use Go