Hacker News

points by bronco21016 3 days ago | 0 comments

Gotta have your SuperBox set up to watch 24 hr cable news working late into the night.

For those who don't know what this is, here's a decent podcast about it:

There's a transcript if you want to read, not listen. At the start, you'll be "hey! I gotta get me one!" and later you'll be like "burn it with fire!"

[–] yard2010 3 days ago

> I get a hit in my vulnerability log, like in the threat log on my Palo Alto firewall, and it’s for a SCADA vulnerability. ... A SCADA vulnerability. This makes no sense. SCADA is the control systems used in large-scale industrial settings. Think pumps, valves, conveyor belts, compressors, elevators, railway switches. This is where SCADA systems live. Why in the world is this box that’s here to deliver TV and movies attempting to trigger a SCADA exploit on D3ada55’ network? This is very concerning.

Such things are threats to humanity imho. They can get us back to the times we couldn't exploit the internet to run a society.

[–] mryijum 3 days ago

Interesting! According to this, a lot more going on beyond the residential proxy element, which was the only bit I had considered (or heard about). I wish there was an accompanying article with some more specifics.

[–] thenthenthen 3 days ago

I aso would like a technical deepdive, the transcript comes out as not very well informed and borderline conspiratorial.

“ Most of the infected devices were manufactured in China. ” uh… most devices are manufactured in China period. Very strange article/podcast.

[–] thenthenthen 2 days ago

So many downvotes. This is a technical forum. The transcript provides almost no technical insights but manages to mentions China 18x. Would be nice to have a discusion on that.

[–] muddi900 9 hours ago

Maybe that is the goal.

[–] qingcharles 1 day ago

That shit is wild. Especially them mailing boxes unsolicited to people working on power utility projects.

[–] JTbane 3 days ago

I have seen these at mall kiosks advertising "free cable", and today I learned they are proxying from your home network.

[–] cowlevel 3 days ago

That is the least bad thing they could do btw. Unless your internet is data restricted, go for it if you want free cable. If questioned by your ISP (extremely unlikely but theoretically possible) pretend you have no idea what they're talking about.

Firewall it from your local network if you want to - it'll still work - they're not after that.

[–] drnick1 3 days ago

Absolutely, and this is why I refuse to run connected devices on my network that do run software I can reasonably trust. This is also why every computer, phone or appliance I own runs Linux. This includes my TV box, which I recently migrated to an x86 port of Android with Claude's help.

[–] thehodge 3 days ago

That was the first thing I thought of!

[–] ethagnawl 3 days ago

A friend in Texas claims they recently bought one at Wal-Mart. I don't know anything about how these work but that can't be true ... right?

[–] mplewis 3 days ago

It's absolutely true, these are sold all over the place

[–] Good4boothee 3 days ago

There are plenty of people selling IPTV access on g2g, few bucks for a month, all TV channels from entire world. I am not sure if it is profitable to let such piracy boxes work forever, even with them being used as residential proxy, but I also don't know how low you can go if you skip middlemen.

[–] gaudystead 2 days ago

Yes. I've also seen them sold on other online retailers, including Amazon. They're pre-infected boxes, acting as a voluntary network implant under the guise of being a sneaky way to consume otherwise-paid-for content.