If you haven’t heard, the Big 12 is going to do something really interesting: the conference have an LED court for its basketball tournament.
Here’s a video that shows some of its potential and here’s one from the NBA. It looks like a blast in a lot of ways…but we have questions.
The first one is pretty basic: how long until some 13-year-old hacks it?
That’s been possible for a long time of course. Jonathan James hacked NASA when he was 15, and we’re pretty sure NASA has better security protocols than does
the Big 12.
However, there is a new wrinkle: the rise of AI, and in particular, the new class of AI tools like OpenClaw.
If you haven’t paid attention to that, you probably should. While it’s rife with its own security issues, OpenClaw and the services like it mark a profound shift. It’s an open-source AI agent that can live locally, has its own memory (so it builds on what you ask it), and early indications are that it can in some sense learn. Users have posted videos about OpenClaw doing things like noticing when you eat and ordering food without being asked. One user said that when his OpenClaw couldn’t find a credit card to use, it just went out and found one that it could access and ordered with that.
In another case, one user’s setup turned rogue and started scamming him.
You don’t have to strain your brain too much to imagine how this might be applied to an LED court, particularly in the hands of a teenager or perhaps college student eager to cause a little mayhem. Or perhaps that someone gets into someone else’s AI, hacking that system to hack the Big 12’s LED court.
The possibilities of this system being hacked range from ingenious to hilarious to disturbing to possibly criminal, and by criminal we mean not just the act of hacking it, but also the content posted on the court.
And we can all but guarantee you that no one in the Big 12 offices knows as much about OpenClaw and similar emerging services as the kids who are busy feverishly figuring them out.
What happens if someone starts posting insulting messages to players on rival teams? What if someone generated an AI video of people on the court in, shall we say, compromising positions? What happens if someone just posts porn to the Big 12 faithful? How would ESPN react to that?
The LED court is going to be fun, it’s going to be flashy…and it’s almost certainly going to be vulnerable. And odds are it’ll never be as vulnerable as it is this month and next, because by this time next year, people will understand what OpenClaw and similar services are and have some idea of how to defend against them.
This spring?
Probably not.
One hopes the Big 12 understands the risks and is prepared to deal with whatever might come.
