Comment by simojo
3 hours ago
We purchased a Chinese-made projector from Amazon, which was surprisingly inexpensive (~40 USD). Upon connecting it to the internet, it placed a constantly running feed of ads on the corner of the screen, even while movies were playing. There was no way to disable it either. Even though it's not a stick, it's a similar principle.
I remember reading an analysis on one of those projectors; the author found a residential proxy running on their device. I would recommend keeping these things off the internet.
I'd be very interested to see it if you still have access to it.
Dunno if this is the same issue, but someone found malware in their projector. I'm not sure about the accuracy since the report is blatantly AI generated: https://github.com/jrm360seclab/aodin-vo1d-malware
I mean, did you have to connect it to the internet though? Did it not just have a dp/hdmi port?
Capitalism!
Absolutely, there's no scam outside capitalism!
Outside of capitalism is outer space, so your snarky comment is actually true.
1 reply →
Upon connecting it to the internet…
I hesitate to blame the victim here, but why on earth would you do that? “$40 Chinese-made” didn’t give you pause?
To be fair, everything is Chinese made. I would be even the Apple TV and NVIDIA Shield are made in China and if a state actor is determined to get a malicious payload in....
To play devil's advocate, when someone says "Chinese made" they're usually well aware of your point, and are more using it as a common way to describe product mills spitting out countless devices with dubious quality or configuration.
Of course theres good products made in China, and plenty of entirely Chinese brands killing it doing their thing.
This isn't about state actors though. There's a world of difference between a name brand (possibly even a Chinese one) versus what I would term "chineseum". It's nothing to do with China per se and everything to do with purchasing from the extreme low end of the market. It just so happens that the vast majority of that segment is manufactured in China at present.
Made in China and random Chinese brands are two very different things
I think normally when people say Chinese made in this way, what they're really communicating is that there's no (meaningful) brand. All they know about it is that it is from China.
My Samsung phone is made in Vietnam.
> To be fair, everything is Chinese made
Yes. Chinese manufacturing is quite a phenomenon, useful and everywhere
But to be completely fair, a $40 video projector has a warning label. The price
This is an age where even teacups demand internet connectivity to fetch firmware updates
I mean I get why my cups need frequent java updates, but still.