Name: The accidental hacker.
Age: It doesn’t matter how old Sammy Azdoufal is. What he did is what’s important here, and what he did is very much of the age.
And what did Azdoufal do? He hooked up his DJI Romo vacuum cleaner to his PS5 controller.
Why? Because, he told the New York-based tech news publication the Verge, it sounded fun.
OK, each to their own. And how did he do this? He used an AI coding assistant, Claude Code, to reverse-engineer how the home robot vacuum communicated with DJI’s remote cloud servers …
Whoa, you’re losing me. I’m losing myself too, to be honest. Look, Azdoufal is a software engineer, he’s the head of AI strategy at a holiday rental company, he knows how to do this stuff. But what’s interesting is what happened next …
What happened next? Presumably he lay on the sofa, directing his vacuum cleaner with his joystick – which does actually sound fun, even if it slightly negates the whole point of a robot. He found that not only could he control his own robot, but that he had gained access to data from other robot vacuum cleaners.
What kind of data? Live camera feeds, microphone audio, maps from nearly 7,000 devices across 24 countries.
What is up with the writing style of this article?? Seems like AI Slop, but it’s worse than usual. The Verge article has more details and isn’t written poorly. Check it out and not The Guardian.