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Read this before you buy that TV streaming stick

krebsonsecurity.com

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Re: Read this before you buy that TV streaming stick

#301

Post by crote »

mschild wrote: post #132
bayarearefugee wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't use a device like this for a lot of reasons, but the fact that what they are doing might be taking advantage of the incredibly predatory digital advertising system is neutral to positive for me, if I'm being fully honest. If they were using the system to rip off random people, I'd be 100% against it, if they are fucking Google and the giant corps that advertise with them, ehh.. not my problem and can't be…

Wouldn't this ultimately make money FOR Google and only cost money to the company that placed the ad? Sure, Google's paying but they get their money regardless.

It reduces the value of their ads.

Let's say you are an ad buyer. Previously 1M clicks resulted in 1000 sales, now 2M clicks result in the same 1000 sales. If you previously paid $1000 for 1M clicks, you paid $1/sale. If they are now asking you to pay the same $1000 / M clicks you'd be paying $2/sale, so Google would have to drop to $500 / M clicks to offer the same value to advertisers.

But the same applies to ad sellers as well. Google would have to slash payouts to websites displaying ads by the same 50% / click or they'd be cutting into their margins. A competing ad platform without fraudulent clicks would be able to slide into this space, offering both a better value to ad buyers and a better payout to ad sellers, so they'd be taking market share from Google without having to do anything themselves.

Of course that assumes a market in which the value of ad clicks, views, and placements is clear to everyone and switching between ad platforms is trivial, which is not even remotely the case.

Re: Read this before you buy that TV streaming stick

#302

Post by ColdStream »

glitchc wrote: post #4

Defrauding ad networks doesn't seem like a bad thing, although using my internet connection as a proxy is obviously terrible. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that my connection is being sold as a VPN service by the vendor.

They took the idea of the 'Ad-nauseam' add-on for Firefox and used it for their own gains I see.

Re: Read this before you buy that TV streaming stick

#303

Post by taneq »

ephemeral67 wrote: post #220
al_borland wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the main value propositions for retailers in a world of endless cheap garbage being sold online, is to vet products so customers can trust that what their buying is from a legitimate company and not junk or stuff like these streaming sticks. This is the problem with being an “everything store”. “Everything” includes a lot of things most consumers would like to be protected from, and assume they are due to the…

interesting bit of information: most EV mower companies now do not provide replacement parts - if a mower dies within warranty, a 'certified' warranty repair shop does basic troubleshooting, and if it's beyond a piece of cheap plastic, the mfr just ships a new mower to the 'repair shop'. Once out of warranty, you're on your own.

I think that’s “most mass produced item manufacturers”. It’s just cheaper to ship a new one than waste time trying to troubleshoot.

Re: Read this before you buy that TV streaming stick

#304

Post by cryptoegorophy »

scottydelta wrote: post #230
emacdona wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, knee jerk reaction any time I see “contact sales” instead of a price.

No worries. If you message me via the contact form or chat support on the website, I will try my best to provide you with one. The more feedback I can get, the better. Thanks for liking my product enough to want to buy it right away :)

Sales friction is how you lose sales. Make your website one click purchase product page. One button - apply pay, customer pays with preset shipping and then you handle everything from there.

Re: Read this before you buy that TV streaming stick

#305

Post by [deleted] »

bityard wrote: post #225
mmooss wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can imagine many on HN having excited discussions about their satellite descramblers. > do it because they can get away with it. Lots of people on HN download and upload copyrighted materials. Is it really different?

Fine, you've nerd-sniped me. I tinkered with Dish Network descrambling 20 years ago. Not because I wanted to just watch a bunch of free TV (I hardly watched any TV anyway, we mostly watched DVDs from the video store and Netflix). More because it felt like an interesting rabbit hole. And it was pretty interesting! I picked a good (newer!) satellite dish and LNB from the trash and had a friend help with the installatio…

[deleted]

Re: Read this before you buy that TV streaming stick

#306

Post by crote »

scottydelta wrote: post #230
emacdona wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, knee jerk reaction any time I see “contact sales” instead of a price.

No worries. If you message me via the contact form or chat support on the website, I will try my best to provide you with one. The more feedback I can get, the better. Thanks for liking my product enough to want to buy it right away :)

Your device seems to be an off-the-shelf Raspberry Pi running custom software. Have you considered making the platform available in a BYOD form, either for fulltime use or for evaluation?

Re: Read this before you buy that TV streaming stick

#307

Post by taneq »

zdragnar wrote: post #253
bdamm wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My electric mower has lasted longer than the gasoline mower before it, which literally had plastic valves inside the carbeurtator.

Counter anecdote, I've had gas mowers survive decades and EV electrical equipment (in this case, a chainsaw and a battery pack for a mower) both die within 14 months of purchase.

Counter counter anecdote, I was just tidying up the yard with my 18V whipper snipper and contemplating the fact that I bought it in 2012 and it hasn’t skipped a beat.

Re: Read this before you buy that TV streaming stick

#308

Post by ChuckMcM »

SoftTalker wrote: post #145

> Despite repeated warnings from the FBI and security industry leaders about the security and privacy risks of using these streaming devices, major e-commerce providers like Amazon, Best Buy, Newegg and others continue to sell hundreds of different models and brands I scanned the comments and I didn't see anyone suggesting that these companies should share any responsibility for selling these harmful products. Why is…

In the US at least there is a lot (and by that I mean like maybe more than half) of civil case law around seller liability for defective or 'dual use' products. In the 70's some cities tried to sue hardware stores for selling spray paint that taggers were using, in several jurisdictions you can find authorities trying to sue vendors of lock picking and/or safe opening tools, etc. My non-lawyer reading of all that is that if it is reasonable to assume that the vendor didn't know, at the time of sale, what the customer was going to do with it, they aren't liable.

Once a vendor has been notified that these units are doing these sorts of things they will stop selling them. Its sadly very prescriptive in that if Newegg gets a notice that "WatchFunTV" streaming sticks are doing this, they will remove that brand but if the same hardware shows up from the same vendor as "SuperTVStreamer" or some such, that product won't be banned until someone does the test and then notifies the sellers. It's cat and mouse all the time.

Now the people who could do something about it, the ad networks like Google, do not do anything because ad revenue is ad revenue, people buying the ads cannot prove that the click was false so hey who can say it was? Which is why ad fraud is a perennial favorite of crooks. The people being ripped off don't have any way to prove it without a lot of support from the ad network traffic data which is "proprietary". Really stupid ad fraud gets shut down, but put a bit of care into it so that the Ad network and claim ignorance? You can do that all day. Just don't get greedy and try to pull in more than say 30 or 50 thousand dollars a month. Remember, the IAB said in 2025 alone Ad Revenue was $300B[1] so 2% of that is only $6B and any network with 2% or less of undetected fraud is considered a "high quality" ad network.

So yeah, ad fraud is the gift that keeps on giving.

[1] https://www.iab.com/insights/internet-advertising-revenue-re...

Re: Read this before you buy that TV streaming stick

#310

Post by swatcoder »

Aerroon wrote: post #277
al_borland wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the main value propositions for retailers in a world of endless cheap garbage being sold online, is to vet products so customers can trust that what their buying is from a legitimate company and not junk or stuff like these streaming sticks. This is the problem with being an “everything store”. “Everything” includes a lot of things most consumers would like to be protected from, and assume they are due to the…

You go to an online store to buy a hard drive. It's listed as "in stock" and you buy it and pay for it. A week later you get an email from the store that the specific hard drive is now available at a third party warehouse and they can order it from there, but the price is about 10% higher. The above actually happened to me. That's what online retailers were like before Amazon's reach properly extended here. That's al…

The late-Amazon process for this is to just send you whatever's marked as the hard drive in their warehouse, which may be that actual product, a counterfeit, or a brick in the hard drive's package.

Later, when you want to try the return, a black box algorithm asseses your transactional value to Amazon and decides whether your concerns are worth attending and to what degree.

Maybe that really is better than whatever you were used to in your own market, but it's a profound regression on the traditional retail experience for most of us here.

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