Exploitation of Philips Smart TV | Hacker News Reader

Exploitation of Philips Smart TV

fredericb.info

50 points__Joker9 comments

Be careful some TVs like Vizio, have USB ports that will supposedly let them connect to the TV, debug it, update firmware etc. However it also has a feature where it will lock itself in cases it detects an un-authorized device plugged in. Then you have to call the company to fix it.

It could be a DRM thing or a "we don't like to let people break our TVs".

I found about it because I wanted to play with it, and after reading that on a forum gave up.

Context: http://www.reddit.com/comments/m16fd

Samsung actually has a bug bounty program for their Smart TVs: https://samsungtvbounty.com/Home.aspx

I would not have been willing to connect my Samsung TV to the internet if their bug bounty program didn't exist. (But, just to be safe, I always keep the TV's camera retracted :-))

I stated somewhere else that I did a factory reset and pulled the cable after connecting my Samsung 'Smart' (it's not) TV to the internet the first time.

It installed some updates and gazillion apps. Crappy apps. Oh are these apps awful. Think 'shiny laptop, plain Windows' and after connecting to the internet for the first time you see mandatory mal- and crapware installations, and the applications are unmovable on your desktop all the time. Customer supports says that these aren't optional/cannot be removed.

Please. Samsung is not a decent example for how to run a so-called 'smart' TV.

At least on the 2013+ models, you can choose to make the TV not show the "smart" interface every time it boots. And you can disable the "Smart TV" boot-up splash screen, too.

I only bought the "smart" TV because Samsung's best plasma panel is not offered in a dumb TV (http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-tv/#apps ). But, since I had to buy it anyway, it does make a decent Netflix/Amazon Prime/Hulu player, which saves me an HDMI input and also means one less remote control.

If only these companies would just say "plug a jack into port S, 115200 bps, 8 bit, no stop, no parity, enjoy. let us know if you do something cool"

Is this one of the ones that has an always-on microphone for "voice control"?

Very interesting! What could be done with this type of exploit? Custom SmartTV OS?

Sweet. Now how can we get the chromecast firmware running on this?

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