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Comment by ta988 | Hacker News Reader

A familly member had one of those (he had to pay a yearly subscription in addition to the stick). Network would be unusable as soon as it was on for anyone else, and it also tried to scan things on the local network. It was indeed connecting to all kind of services all over the world (and saturating some tables in the router doing so which blocked other clients). Definitely evil, definitely on purpose.

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Reading this, I caught myself wondering how we distill what's in this excellent write up into something the average consumer understands, including the dangers from buying and using devices like this.

Is it a graphic that's shared? Something else? I am sure we all know or have heard of people with these devices that promise free streaming.

I warned them about the risk of those things and showed them what I found, they continued buying the next generation (that person and his two >40yo kids). They NEEDED to watch those soccer games more than they cared about security...

The bigger problem is convincing them to care. Botnets are abstract - where's the pain to them? Ad farms? That's "just hurting big corporations".

Remember, a significant portion of the population got angry (often violently so) when just asked to wear a mask to protect their neighbors. And the threat there was significantly easier to explain.

Just tell the anti mask types the TV sticks come with CCP hacking software preinstalled.

In the world of auto-updates of software and firmware, even the hardware which is now completely legal and crap-free, could convert itself to a proxy or ad network later any time.

And don't forget about counterfeit products (which look like original but different in firmware) and supply chain attack vectors, which are really, really common.

If you want to buy something as simple as a feature phone, going to a store with 10 of them will give you at least 1/10 chance to buy a phone with a trojan/backdoor.

You can't. This is a legitimate thing the government needs to step in and deal with on behalf of their people via legislation because their people cannot be reasonably taught to protect themselves.

Protect themselves from what?

First you'd have to figure out what the dangers actually are. Most of what's cited in TFA and this comments section are only dangers to large evil companies, and why should anyone care about them?

If it wasn't scanning your own network or using all of your bandwidth, would you still consider it evil?

yes

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