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Very interesting! A tutorial to check if kimwolf is running on your network would be nice
Like seriously, many of them are sold for stupid cheap prices like $5/ea. Or advertise unlimited movies/shows/etc for similarly unbelievable prices.
Putting aside the copyright infringement aspect of it, to me it's extremely obvious "wait... _why_ am I paying so little here?".
No, it's not because movies and shows are 99.9999% profit (spoiler: they aren't), it's because you're _paying_ to install a backdoor that will rip and tear everything on your network it can.
You like having a credit card? That's precious, it's mine now.
Look at me, I'm the network now.
How is it not obvious to everyone reading HN that janky Android "TV" boxes (like the article references) are a by-default threat? Like seriously, many of them are sold for stupid cheap prices like $5/ea. Or advertise unlimited movies/shows/etc for similarly unbelievable prices. Putting aside the copyright infringement aspect of it, to me it's extremely obvious "wait... _why_ am I paying so little here?". No, it's not…
I mean, maybe. More likely imo you're paying for the absolute cheapest hardware and fastest never-updated software someone could throw together and make _any_ profit on. Someone probably had 100k shitty little chips sitting in a warehouse and this was a way to do something with them.
The outcome is really the same, it's just the steps to get there are more human nature.
So is there some catch all setting I can enable in my router to prevent my devices talking to eachother on the local network?
You can look around for something like device isolation, but I doubt you'll find it unless you go a couple of steps up from whatever router ISPs ~give away these days.
How is it not obvious to everyone reading HN that janky Android "TV" boxes (like the article references) are a by-default threat? Like seriously, many of them are sold for stupid cheap prices like $5/ea. Or advertise unlimited movies/shows/etc for similarly unbelievable prices. Putting aside the copyright infringement aspect of it, to me it's extremely obvious "wait... _why_ am I paying so little here?". No, it's not…
> it's because you're _paying_ to install a backdoor that will rip and tear everything on your network it can. I mean, maybe. More likely imo you're paying for the absolute cheapest hardware and fastest never-updated software someone could throw together and make _any_ profit on. Someone probably had 100k shitty little chips sitting in a warehouse and this was a way to do something with them. The outcome is really th…
Oh no, let me get my tiny violin! Really hard to feel bad here. For most home users (that don’t expose anything sensitive on their LAN) these boxes are not a threat, seem to be doing a useful service in providing a superior streaming service that the balkanized official ones, and also shits on internet spammers/advertisers and frees up loginwalled content - sounds like a pretty good box really.
> to relay malicious and abusive Internet traffic — such as ad fraud , account takeover attempts and mass content scraping Oh no, let me get my tiny violin! Really hard to feel bad here. For most home users (that don’t expose anything sensitive on their LAN) these boxes are not a threat, seem to be doing a useful service in providing a superior streaming service that the balkanized official ones, and also shits on in…
Also, is there a better word than ad fraud? It needs an innocuous sounding euphemism like pretty much everything else involving that industry has. “Monetizing ad display”? “User-agent driven conversions?”
How is it not obvious to everyone reading HN that janky Android "TV" boxes (like the article references) are a by-default threat? Like seriously, many of them are sold for stupid cheap prices like $5/ea. Or advertise unlimited movies/shows/etc for similarly unbelievable prices. Putting aside the copyright infringement aspect of it, to me it's extremely obvious "wait... _why_ am I paying so little here?". No, it's not…
How is this different from buying hardware and software from big market players?