Re: Its not smart to buy a smart TV
I did think of touching on security, but the main focus of this piece was driven by that latest crop of kit to have services withdrawn, and IoT security has been covered in some other articles on here lately.
But yes, I agree, there is often sod all thought put into some of these things, and they can be surprisingly simple to hack. By setting up a Squid proxy on your own network, for instance, you could grab the pages used by the original VieraCast sets, and ultimately serve alternative ones, as described here.
While there are certainly insecurities, and it may be possible to exploit them in interesting ways, I suspect that a lot of the time it's going to be relatively speculative for now, because of the number of different platforms out there. Where this may become ripe for exploitation is if a single platform comes to dominate the world of 'smart tv', allowing mass exploitation much more easily. (Or, in other words, if Android TV takes all, we're probably all screwed)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
