> TVs doing analytics on what you watch, always-on cameras
Who's doing the watching now? That sounds ridiculously Orwellian...
> As long as we have the power to root these devices and install our own software on it, we will be fine. But for how long is that going to keep up?
The most interesting part of this is that "rooting" often relies on finding and exploiting a vulnerability, something that would be considered detrimental to security and normally thought of as a bug. In other words, this power is coming from having not-so-secure devices. Imagine if this TV was more secure; it used DNSSEC and HTTPS to authenticate/encrypt communications, and was designed to be resistant to tampering via hardware (secure processor, encrypted memory, etc.) -- ostensibly for things like DRM. Do suggestions like "all Internet traffic should be encrypted" start to look less appealing now? To say it plainly, in this case "insecurity is freedom."
Who's doing the watching now? That sounds ridiculously Orwellian...
> As long as we have the power to root these devices and install our own software on it, we will be fine. But for how long is that going to keep up?
The most interesting part of this is that "rooting" often relies on finding and exploiting a vulnerability, something that would be considered detrimental to security and normally thought of as a bug. In other words, this power is coming from having not-so-secure devices. Imagine if this TV was more secure; it used DNSSEC and HTTPS to authenticate/encrypt communications, and was designed to be resistant to tampering via hardware (secure processor, encrypted memory, etc.) -- ostensibly for things like DRM. Do suggestions like "all Internet traffic should be encrypted" start to look less appealing now? To say it plainly, in this case "insecurity is freedom."