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Comment by frollogaston

3 hours ago

Since these are poorly engineered, wonder how easy it'd be to reverse-engineer one and just get the free streaming on a non-scam device.

See CoreELEC/LibreELEC/etc - totally replaces the (potentially dodgy) Android OS on these kind of streaming boxes with a stripped down Linux+Kodi setup

If it's something like a Firestick (or the knock-off featured in the article), you're really just connecting to Content Provider servers to handle auth and content streaming, right? They're just OSes designed to run Netflix and Hulu. Would be hard to spoof I think

  • Indeed. Owning the streaming box lets you loose on whatever network it's on, but it doesn't actually get you inside the content gardens; those are separately managed by teams of people much more motivated to protect their IP.