Google TV Hackers Open a Shell on the Chromecast; More Hacks To Follow 65
Via Engadget comes the news that Google's latest (and quickly sold-out) toy, the Chromecast, may soon be hacked out of one-trick-pony status; just a few days after it came out, the folks at GTV Hacker have successfully turned their attention to the Chromecast, and managed to exploit the device's bootloader and spawn a root shell. Some interesting findings, as explained in their blog post: "[I]t’s actually a modified Google TV release, but with all of the Bionic / Dalvik stripped out and replaced with a single binary for Chromecast. Since the Marvell DE3005 SOC running this is a single core variant of the 88DE3100, most of the Google TV code was reused. So, although it’s not going to let you install an APK or anything, its origins: the bootloader, kernel, init scripts, binaries, are all from the Google TV. We are not ruling out the ability for this to become a Google TV 'stick.'"
Any Ideas? (Score:5, Interesting)
Google's "Chromebooks" have a fairly trivial (and documented/vendor-provided) mechanism for booting whatever you want on them. They default to using the crypto-tastic signed image; but it's not a hack to turn that off.
The phones that they sell directly (at least if you don't count the...um...wonderful people at Motorola) also tend not to be terribly touchy on that score.
Google TV devices, though, and now this 'Chromecast' thing they lock up tight. Are they trying to appease some paranoic video rightsholder? Is there some benefit to Google that I'm not seeing? Why the (comparatively) hands-off treatment of other devices compared to the freaking out about things that connect to TVs by default? It's doubly odd because many contemporary phones and tablets can connect to TVs, though that isn't their primary use case.
Re:Any Ideas? (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyone could pickup 50 1.5GHz A9 usb/hdmi sticks with 512MB ram, 4GB flash and wifi for about $28 each from china (that's just from a very quick look for something from a reliable looking supplier). So it's really a question of how much you value the 3 months of netflix how much of a subsidy this thing has (with it's less flash, ports and what I'm guessing is a cheap as possible SoC). Personally I'd say it has no subsidy at all as I'm sure the hardware (including adding all duty/taxes) comes out under $35 to google and probably under $25. Even if google paid netflix half what you imply the normal price is (i.e. $4/month or $12 for the 3 months included) they would probably still not be losing money on it. Of course I really doubt google are paying netflix a cent.