This is the tip of the iceberg.
I wait for the day LG and Samsung are held responsible for their practices that 100x worse than this. Sure, the default apps aren’t so bad, but their app ecosystem is tainted.
My estimates are over 1/3 US households have residential proxies installed, and they’re operated by homogeneous groups that are able to make guarantees to their clients about address uniqueness. This bother isn’t even 1% of the problem. Realistically the number of infected devices is actually higher, probably more than half of residential connections have at least one infected device — I was only able to establish a floor.
I’m not a malware researcher though, I was only doing this for a one-off job earlier this year.
Seems like this is the main purpose of all IoT devices at the end of the day
The odds are non-zero that someone has argued with their own toaster.
Dude, I’ve argued with my microwave and it isn’t even smart.
I argue with my breadmaker. It beeps ten times when it’s finished making pizza dough. Fucking ten! Dumb clanker has no right to talk to me that way
A comedian had a whole bit about something like this.
Out of curiosity, who won the argument?
The microwave, it refused to change.
Nobody wins when humans and microwaves argue
So the whole Android certification program is just a lock-in procedure, not really to “improve security”? Who’d have thought.
But it’s so important to Google that you can’t install your apps on Android, you need them to keep you safe and secure!
Smart TV are trash of the trashiest sort. Cheapest components, painfully slow, 4 GB flash stuffed with outdated buggy Android and preinstalled adware, with 200 MB free space for anything usable, zero chance of updates, tons of security holes, and pretty much abandoned by Google.
I can’t even find dumb TVs anymore
Digital signage.
What the alternative if I want to run my own media server
Separate box with Raspberry Pi and Kodi, and don’t connect your TV to WiFi or any other network connection, just an HDMI cable.
Or buy a TV box specifically supported by LineageOS or other opensource Android TV ROM.
In theory you can try to root and replace your TV firmware, that gets messy fast because most of them do not have any custom ROMs.
Is there a list of known affected models? It wasn’t clear from the article whether they were a contract manufacturer for Google’s own devices or if they were a 3rd party brand option.
Wasn’t botnet as a service a longtime monetization strategy for some ad sdk’s on Android?
Everything that Google makes is lowest grade shit hiding beneath the rounded corners and their dev outreach.
So basically the devices where doing what Google does, but Google was not in the loop, so it’s illegal.
This why I don’t buy cheap Chinese devices anymore
Is this my my hands get clammy whenever I look and the Walmart onn stuff??
So i should be able to get one cheap and put coreelec on it??
I wouldn’t trust most streaming devices out of the box. Definitely no generic Android streamer but Roku and Nvidia Shield are terrible for privacy too.
