Linus Tech Tips
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2023
10:20 · 4.6M views · Apr 13, 2023
Linus Tech Tips warns against cheap Android TV boxes, many of which ship with preinstalled malware. It looks at several boxes and suggests safer alternatives such as Chromecast and Nvidia Shield.
HN cites it as broad, accessible evidence that cheap Android TV boxes often come loaded with malware.
5 comments from Hacker News
Beware that a lot of cheap Android TV boxes come pre-loaded with heaps of malware. You don't want them in your network. Linus Tech Tips has a video about it: this video
This has been well covered by Linus Tech Tips very recently. this video There's a great submission a couple hours ago on why LTT has been so effective covering it. [LINK] LTT cites some other major sources that were already publishing the absurd shit packaged on the various boxes. LTT didn't go super deep, but they did go pretty wide, & looked at a bunch of boxes, & were like, yup, all horrible, just absolutely deplorable garbage! So sad that arm is such a lowly immature ecosystem. If these were more like the computers we know love & take for granted we'd just do a fresh install of a regular OS like Debian & these would be potentially useful interesting boxes. Instead they're just garbage forever, unless you are an embedded kernel hacker. It's crazy that arm has been around so long & is still nowhere near being a viable software platform, that the whole stack is a giant deck of cards from flakey weird bootloader, to janky forked kernels with hacked together blobs & shitty kernel code, to godforsaken abominable user lands riddled with junkware. It's incredible to contrast to the PC world, where interoperability lead to choice lead to making things better. ARM as an ecosystem has had no need to deal straight with it's users & that's why it's been such a rotting cesspool of tech for so many decades now.
Because unlike cybercriminals operating out of their home who can't consider a lawsuit because it'd only serve to surface their presence to law enforcement, companies can and do sue others on libel and similar grounds, even when there is no merit to the lawsuit. LTT did a video[1] on the same topic showing a few Chinese smart TV boxes with malware. There is no reason to believe the report is illegitimate. [1] this video
Linus Tech Tips YouTube channel also did a review and found many cheap Android TV boxes were infested with malware. this video It was perfect timing since I am trying to find some simple solution to my old Roku I use to bypass my "smart" TV. But Roku is probably just as invasive privacy-wise.
The problem with buying stuff off Amazon is, we don’t know if the stuff itself is compromised[1][2]. I wish some well-known manufacturer would offer something like this. [1] [LINK] [2] this video (Youtube)