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Void captures over a million Android TV boxes

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Re: Void captures over a million Android TV boxes

#41

> such devices often run on outdated Android versions, which have unpatched vulnerabilities and are no longer supported with updates. Many of them NEVER received a single update ever. There are so many shady companies producing TV boxes with no plan to ever provide any updates. Unless one of the larger brands make such a device, I don't see any reason to recommend anything but the ChromeCast or whatever Google calls…

99% of these devices are purchased to view pirated content. You think the guy selling boxes off Craigslist should be providing support? The company who manufactured the computer? You are responsible to update your device.

[deleted]

Re: Void captures over a million Android TV boxes

#42
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A HTPC (with an Intel N100, etc) can work amazingly well too.

I never got mine working as a chrome cast target. Does that work now?

Not really, google specifically doesn't want you to run chromecast receivers on commodity hardware. There are some hacks and reverse engineering attempts but they are not very reliable.

Re: Void captures over a million Android TV boxes

#44

> such devices often run on outdated Android versions, which have unpatched vulnerabilities and are no longer supported with updates. Many of them NEVER received a single update ever. There are so many shady companies producing TV boxes with no plan to ever provide any updates. Unless one of the larger brands make such a device, I don't see any reason to recommend anything but the ChromeCast or whatever Google calls…

99% of these devices are purchased to view pirated content. You think the guy selling boxes off Craigslist should be providing support? The company who manufactured the computer? You are responsible to update your device.

An AppleTV is perfectly happy playing pirated content.

Just because you're doing something insane/illegal doesn't mean you can't do it safely.

Re: Void captures over a million Android TV boxes

#45
post #36

How does this work? Are those TV boxes not running behind routers with firewalls?

What makes you assume the vector is an incoming connection? Routers and firewalls won't protect a device from a user lured into installing malware with promises of "free Netflix, completely legal" running off some pirate mirror, or simply wrapping stolen credentials (note how people trying to break into your computers can not always be trusted with legal advice). And neither from simply luring them onto some malicious website (or just getting them to see a malicious ad) in case there's the juicy combination of a media decoder vulnerability with some privilege escalation that can be reached from the decoder.

Re: Void captures over a million Android TV boxes

#47
> such devices often run on outdated Android versions,

Ah the new economical divide.

Most "real people" also have phones which aren't receiving updates for a few years by now.

In south america the median android version is 8.

And phones are not optional as most countries already jumped into both digital government and money transfer.

Re: Void captures over a million Android TV boxes

#48

> such devices often run on outdated Android versions, which have unpatched vulnerabilities and are no longer supported with updates. Many of them NEVER received a single update ever. There are so many shady companies producing TV boxes with no plan to ever provide any updates. Unless one of the larger brands make such a device, I don't see any reason to recommend anything but the ChromeCast or whatever Google calls…

99% of these devices are purchased to view pirated content. You think the guy selling boxes off Craigslist should be providing support? The company who manufactured the computer? You are responsible to update your device.

How are people supposed to install updates that don’t exist? This is a massive vulnerability in the overall Android ecosystem.

Re: Void captures over a million Android TV boxes

#49

> such devices often run on outdated Android versions, Ah the new economical divide. Most "real people" also have phones which aren't receiving updates for a few years by now. In south america the median android version is 8. And phones are not optional as most countries already jumped into both digital government and money transfer.

mobile first was a mistake

Re: Void captures over a million Android TV boxes

#50

> such devices often run on outdated Android versions, Ah the new economical divide. Most "real people" also have phones which aren't receiving updates for a few years by now. In south america the median android version is 8. And phones are not optional as most countries already jumped into both digital government and money transfer.

Updates for Android continue to be a huge problem.

Android OEMs have historically been terrible at releasing timely updates (it can take months), releasing updates at all (particularly cheap Android phones get EOLed long before an admittedly way more expensive iPhone would) and such updates aren't typically pushed in the same way.

One big problem with Android is the way driver updates work. It's a nontrivial process to add hardware support for a later Android version because of the Linux roots and having no stable ABI.

I think back to how Windows has changed over the last 2 decades. Once Windows updates were all paid and people would hang on to old versions of Windows forever. Microsoft eventually realized this was a problem for them so paid upgrades aren't what they once were.

Additionally, driver instability used to be a massive problem on Windows. Microsoft to their credit spent a lot of effort improving their driver situation to isolate drivers and have a stable ABI. Windows is way more stable than it was 20 years ago.

Even OSX has adopted user space drivers (DriverKit).

By the way, the above reasons is why some at Google have pushed Fucshia as essentially an Android ecosystem and architecture reset. It's been close to 10 years now. I don't see this going anywhere despite billions being poured into it at this point.

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