Hell, there's a section of comments that would probably going "hey, RELAX guy" because it's not US companies doing this. For any American companies that do this though, sure - block/suspend/prosecute.
Or if I open up a gas station and allow any company without oversight to sell "supplements" through my shelves and cops arrest me for selling heroin, I don't get a free pass.
Why should amazon or Walmart get a free pass just because they sell more items?
You have to be able to show damages you incurred and assign a dollar value to them to sue people.
That doesn’t work at all for a something that sells your bandwidth to a proxy service. People wouldn’t even be aware that it was happening they weren’t told.
Not legal advice.
(It would surprise me greatly if we as a society let these gadgets be sold openly from here on.)
The cybercrime raids happen when they run into someone who looks like a hacker and has a lot of computers.
Its incredibly obvious to anyone applying any thought at all to this that its a malicious to sell a product that labels itself as a TV streaming stick which is in fact a paid for relay server with the money made from providing the internet connection to a random third party unrelated to the person who bought the thing without ever telling the customer.
While there would be oversight, it is highly unlikely that a person opening a home improvement store would perform any meaningful safety testing. They simply would not be qualified. The oversight would lay in selling certified products, pulling recalled products off the shelf, and (perhaps) removing products if there is a reason to suspect safety issues.
Now consider streaming sticks. There are safety standards for the physical device but, to my knowledge, there are no such standards for the software itself. Heck, there aren't even standards for the engineers who work on the software. One can make highly prejudiced decisions based upon the country of origin. Perhaps there are even good reasons to avoid products from certain countries. Yet the lack of standards also means that products from trustworthy sources can be suspect, since all it takes is a management decision to change things.
You already answered it: block it from being sold.
1) Make Amazon responsible for the products they are selling. 2) Introduce a law banning malware tv sticks 3) Sue Amazon for a percentage of their yearly revenue when caught violating it 4) Amazon will finally start caring and do some kind of review on the crap they sell.
That's the biggest problem with any device that updates.
Yea, this will work for the moment and the seller will be covered in the sense that "well, it wasn't infected when we sold it".
You don't want to penalize someone selling their Xbox or lawnmower on Ebay but you want to stop what is going on here. A place like Etsy where people are selling their crafts is an interesting edge case but I think they should probably be a little regulated.
US retailers can be told they can't sell it here. If you buy it outside of that, well that is buyer beware, but 99% of people aren't buying things from Alibaba or ordering from some random foreign store, they are buying them off US Amazon, Walmart, big box retailers, etc. You don't have to ban things consumer level to deal with 99% of it, you just gotta tell big corporations no and stop dismissing any ideas that put responsibility or liability on big business.
And the "retailer" on record is of course not a real company. They'll just pay some third-party to file a bunch of paperwork in Delaware, pay the $110 fee, and let it go bust if anyone tries to investigate it or make it liable.
While it's great we're getting the manufactures to just stop sending out straight malware and it should be stopped the next most obvious means of attack is just having the device update and add superaids to it's new functionality.
So, no, it won't stop 99% of it at all.
And honestly this isn't that much different from what US companies are already great at by providing updates that take away features we bought with the device.
And not just updating really doesn't save you, instead of being part of a factory botnet, you're just open to become part of some other botnet.
Some manufacturers will try to cheat on the tests, but we have AI security checking now, so maybe that would make it harder to cheat?
(I’d be open to a rule that devices must allow users to wipe the devices and install their own OS.)
Buying in bulk for a resell without testing even one product is kinda insane.