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Is there a reason no group has popped up to jailbreak the few major TV "OSes"? Given how prevalant this issue is it seems like a reasonable use of time akin to jailbreaking/rooting cell phones.


I imagine most people capable of rooting a TV would already have better alternatives at hand: an Apple TV, an Nvidia Shield, a PlayStation, etc. There’s not much daily incentive to tinker.


All of these still require a Display.


Personal example. I already have an nVidia Shield. It works out of the box, it's nice, and it already does everything I want. Even if I jailbroke my TV's smartness, then said TV's smartness probably still wouldn't work as well as the Shield. And if the Shield ever messes with me, I can just replace it with a Roku or AppleTV or Chromecast or whatever.

There's just no strong motivation to try to root my TV. I don't like my smart TV but I don't need to, because the smart parts can be "replaced" by any number of external devices. My point is that I suspect many would-be TV hackers are in the same happy situation.


And the respective TVs work without internet - the only possible attack vector (by the manufacturers) is if they start trying to connect to random unprotected wifi networks, or god forbid the Amazon Sidewalk network[0].

0: https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Sidewalk/b/?node=21328123011




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