The manufacturer is Videostrong Technology Co.

These are some of the devices they make.

The FBI doesn't call them bad boxes for nothing.

Don't understand. So the TV boxes are stealing users' information?

Seems like this is the main purpose of all IoT devices at the end of the day

This is the tip of the iceberg.

I wait for the day LG and Samsung are held responsible for their practices that 100x worse than this. Sure, the default apps aren’t so bad, but their app ecosystem is tainted.

My estimates are over 1/3 US households have residential proxies installed, and they’re operated by homogeneous groups that are able to make guarantees to their clients about address uniqueness. This bother isn’t even 1% of the problem. Realistically the number of infected devices is actually higher, probably more than half of residential connections have at least one infected device — I was only able to establish a floor.

I’m not a malware researcher though, I was only doing this for a one-off job earlier this year.

So the whole Android certification program is just a lock-in procedure, not really to "improve security"? Who'd have thought.

Smart TV are trash of the trashiest sort. Cheapest components, painfully slow, 4 GB flash stuffed with outdated buggy Android and preinstalled adware, with 200 MB free space for anything usable, zero chance of updates, tons of security holes, and pretty much abandoned by Google.

Is there a list of known affected models? It wasn't clear from the article whether they were a contract manufacturer for Google's own devices or if they were a 3rd party brand option.

Paywall removed

https://archive.is/20261102210449/https://www.theverge.com/1024807/google-botnet-android-tv-shut-down

But it's so important to Google that you can't install your apps on Android, you need them to keep you safe and secure!

Wasn't botnet as a service a longtime monetization strategy for some ad sdk's on Android?

Everything that Google makes is lowest grade shit hiding beneath the rounded corners and their dev outreach.

So basically the devices where doing what Google does, but Google was not in the loop, so it's illegal.

I build my own TV stack to replace my NVidia Shield. It's way better... has a kick ass weather app with radar and wind lines. I can push notifications from any home assist or integrate with any api... integrates with Jellyfin... a photo sharing app I built... youtube is awesome. Super snappy. I gave one to my 80 year old Dad and it's now his d daily driver. The only thing I cant do is get streaming 4k from Apple and HBOMax due to their drm.

This why I don't buy cheap Chinese devices anymore

So i should be able to get one cheap and put coreelec on it??

Is this my my hands get clammy whenever I look and the Walmart onn stuff??

I wouldn’t trust most streaming devices out of the box. Definitely no generic Android streamer but Roku and Nvidia Shield are terrible for privacy too.

Google probably only noticed & did something due to the advertising click fraud.