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For a hacker news article, it misses the crucial option - hacking a smart TV! I have LG OLED jailbroken using rootmy.tv, it was pretty trivial. It's basically a
by taxmeifyoucan 10mo ago
For a hacker news article, it misses the crucial option - hacking a smart TV! I have LG OLED jailbroken using rootmy.tv, it was pretty trivial. It's basically a linux computer with a huge screen, you can customize it, SSH into it, map any commands to the remote, etc.
Before I only used monitor, simple DP/HDMI input is all I wanted. But being able to take full control of the tv and connect it with other devices in the house I would normally get Rpi for is pretty convenient!
- throwaway63467 10mo agoIs there much you can do with it? Does it still work as before, does it still have a GUI? Sounds really cool.
- montymintypie 10mo agoI think the parent commenter is perhaps a little over-selling the LG rooting. It is definitely root, you can write whatever you want on the filesystem (at your peril), and theoretically do whatever you want, but the homebrew exploit launches a bit later in the boot chain than you'd want (so blocking update nags isn't quite reliable), and a lot of the inner system things are proprietary and require reverse engineering to extend. It's the same system software, just with root capacity. That being said, there's still a bunch of nice homebrew: - Video screensavers ala Apple TV - DVD logo screensaver - Adfree (and sponsorblock-integrated and optional shorts-disabling) Youtube - Remote button remapping (Netflix button now opens Plex for me) - Hyperion (ambilight service that controls an LED strip behind the TV) - A nice nvidia shield emulator for game streaming from my PC with low latency - VNC server (rarely useful, but invaluable when it is) Sponsorblock and remote remapping are killer features for me, and the rest is just really pleasant to have.
- rssoconnor 10mo agoI used my rooted TV to root my PS4. I'm not even joking. https://youtu.be/NzBBfGnAWM0 https://youtu.be/NzBBfGnAWM0
- taxmeifyoucan 10mo agoI am doing the same! I have been jailbreaking PS4 for few years and Modded Warfare is where I learned about the LG TV jailbreak
- slig 10mo ago> RootMyTV (v1/v2) has been patched for years, and your TV is almost certainly not vulnerable. We recommend checking whether your TV is rootable with another method.
- montymintypie 10mo agoThe one-click method has been patched, but there are other methods that will work if you haven't been religiously updating your TV: [0] https://github.com/throwaway96/dejavuln-autoroot https://github.com/throwaway96/dejavuln-autoroot [1] https://github.com/throwaway96/faultmanager-autoroot https://github.com/throwaway96/faultmanager-autoroot
- Retr0id 10mo agoOne day I will buy a new TV and develop a new one-click method... but for now I'm still rocking my B9.
- ashirviskas 10mo agoOh, hi! Love your work! I'll be rooting for you that day (though most likely after that day, unless you're a superhuman).
- ashirviskas 10mo agoReligiously updating my TV? It has been patched since spring, someone clicking by accident "yes" for the update notice that appears randomly on the middle of the screen in the past 9 months would ruin it. I was religously *not* updating my TV and it still got too new software for the exploit :')
- jmward01 10mo agoSeems like there is a big opportunity here for something a router distro to combine with a tv jailbreak. How good is the hardware? It would be nice to have my tv serve a couple purposes if it has the hardware to do it.
- wolrah 10mo agoMost smart TVs only have 100mbit ethernet, even "high end" TVs like LG OLEDs. They'd be terrible routers.
- taxmeifyoucan 10mo agoIt's a modest ARM CPU, I wouldn't rely on it for a router but it can run Rpi Hole! Also Home Assistant integration, I use the TV remote to control LEDs/lights around the apartment
- cess11 10mo agoNice!
- jmward01 10mo agoI totally forgot about the remote. That really opens up possibilities for home assistant type stuff. I hadn't looked at this space a lot before. I see some articles on how to jailbreak various devices but nothing about standardized distros to put on things out there. Something like dd wrt but for TVs could be pretty amazing. A project that is designed to give you a good interface, is privacy aware and hacker friendly (things that aren't just entertainment like home assistant stuff) would get a lot of interest. There has to be a reason this isn't a thing. I am guessing it is 99% a hardware reason. Maybe that is changing though? Modern devices have to have more capability so I bet the hardware on newer tvs is getting pretty strong.
- pabs3 10mo agoYou shouldn't have to hack it, you should have the right to repair the software on your device. Hopefully the Vizio lawsuit will help with that for Linux based devices, signs are looking good though. https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html
- Retr0id 10mo agoThis is just about GPL compliance though (afaik LG TVs are already GPL compliant, or at least, I haven't noticed any noncompliance). The bigger problem here is tivoization. You can build a fresh kernel from source but you have no way to install it because the bootloader is locked down.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- pabs3 10mo agoAs Conservancy would say, a device with no way to modify isn't GPLv2 compliant either. https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/mar/25/install-gplv2/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/mar/25/install-gplv2/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/jul/23/tivoization-and-the-gpl-right-to-install/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/jul/23/tivoization-and-t... https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Safely-Copylefted-Cars-Reexamining-GPLv3-Installation-Information-Requirements-ALS-Bradley-Kuhn-Behan-Webster-1.pdf https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017...
- darkwater 10mo agoWe should really be happy that Torvalds decided to license Linux as GPL software. If it was BSD these discussions would simply not exist, and corporate power over software would be even greater. I would dare to say we would probably not even have an open source scene at all...
- paxcoder 10mo ago
- jader201 10mo ago> It's basically a linux computer with a huge screen Why would I want a Linux computer with a huge screen? I just want a huge screen. I’ll provide my own connected devices, independent of the screen.
- Underphil 10mo agoYeah, I'd absolutely agree here. The article didn't "miss" this option. It just isn't relevant here.
- stravant 10mo agoWhy wouldn't you want it to be a computer? Then it can be connected to your devices AND also do the job itself in a situation where it's awkward to connect to a device. If already needs a computer in it to drive menus / modern display protocols. Having that computer be powerful enough to also decode content is barely an extra cost.
- fulafel 10mo agoA rooted piece of trashy IOT is trashy IOT. It's an acquired taste, the excitement of putting a black box insecure linux device on the home network to add to your home infra admin duties.
- pessimizer 10mo agoA rooted computer is the opposite of a black box. This makes no sense.
- fulafel 10mo agoRooting gets you additional means to reverse engineer the proprietary software system but doesn't automagically lighten the box. It's all relative of course, maybe you view anything you can Ghidra as not-black-box. (though this is kind of tangential to rooting - for a many/most devices you can get a hold of the blobs to reverse engineer without rooting anything)
- whatsupdog 10mo agoI have 2 LG OLED TVs, different sizes. Rootmytv failed to root both of them. I forgot which step and which error it was giving, but I tried everything including factory reset etc. I'm glad it's working for some people.
- scoot 10mo agoThe first line of the homepage says "RootMyTV (v1/v2) has been patched for years, and your TV is almost certainly not vulnerable.", so that's hardly surprising
- taxmeifyoucan 10mo agoWhat I didn't mention is that I specifically looked for older TV on the second hand market to find a hackable model. I mean, I didn't wanted to buy a brand new one anyway, it's very expensive and I don't need latest AI features. I found a year old model with firmware that was listed as supported by the jailbreak at the time
- wltr 10mo agoI’d do exactly as you did. It’s pity it didn’t work for you. I’m on the market to buy a TV (not hurrying though), so I’m not sure what to do here. I’d like to have Dolby Vision (otherwise why would I want a TV if my computer display is good enough for everything else), so perhaps that worsens things. As otherwise I’d just pick any TV, even FullHD (not 4K), and even not smart (attaching some SBC with Kodi to the back). But ideally I’d prefer to jailbreak it and have Kodi installed without any extra device. Now I’m puzzled whether these lists of ‘compatible’ TVs are trustworthy.
- _pdp_ 10mo agoI was thinking the same. While it is not for everyone, hacking the TV to make the dumb is possible.
- amelius 10mo agoFor the real hackers: https://www.panelook.com/ https://www.panelook.com/ Global Panel Exchange Center
- ssl-3 10mo agoHoly Toledo. That's like Alibaba, except for small(ish) quantities of LCDs of any possible description.
- sryButLvLdUp 10mo ago[dead]
- andrepd 10mo agoHow would you block ads on such a TV? The problem is you still cannot connect it to the internet without unknown privacy intrusion... Maybe to the LAN only? But then it's usefulness is still limited.
- duskdozer 10mo agohosts file block?
- andrepd 10mo agoBlock what? Which domains? How do you know what the TV will connect to?
- dh2022 10mo agoBlock everything except for what you want. For e.g. block everything but Netflix.
- prmoustache 10mo agoIt can be complicated when streaming companies use same cloud vendors and thus share same ip ranges as the traffic you want to protect yourself from.
- nolok 10mo agoPi hole is enough for me on a modern Samsung
- andrepd 10mo agoSo, entirely orthogonal to the issue of rooting the TV?
- albert_e 10mo agoI want the ability to add my own picture-in-picture display or overlay of text and other dynamic content. Example: watching a movie but want the live score of a sports match scraped from a public website to be displayed in a corner. OR while watching a sports match -- i want a overlay feed of text from a chat stream for a select web source Looking forward for some public experiments / open projects in this space i could leverage. Dont have the skills to attempt it myself from scratch.
- afavour 10mo agoHonestly your best bet is going to be buying a mini PC and hooking it up to any TV of your choice as the only input. Most bespoke hardware is too locked down to make anything like that possible.
- pxc 10mo agoCan you actually replace the firmware with an open-source, privacy-respecting one? If you're still left running all the same proprietary background "services" and telemetry, I don't see how this kind of hack relates to any of the reasons for preferring a dumb TV.
- bee_rider 10mo agoAgreed. This “proprietary telemetry” is basically malware, just, it was put on the thing at the factory. Once a system is fully rooted by malware, the least-bad option is to nuke it entirely and install from scratch. In this context where the locked-down device probably also doesn’t have a fully open source kernel and drivers, this becomes a bit tricky. Better just to use a device that doesn’t have malware on it in the first place.
- mikepurvis 10mo agoI’ve been pretty happy with the smart apps on my LG OLED; it’s got the streaming things I want including jellyfin. Really the only one missing is steam link.
- sander1095 10mo agoHave you tried moonlight? An alternative to steam link. You can use install it on the lg tv by sideloading the app. Alternatively, you can plug in a Raspberry Pi that runs steam link :)
- mikepurvis 10mo agoOh yeah I’m aware of various “plug in a thing” options, just thinking it wild be nice to have to, particularly if a single controller paired to the TV itself could operate the outer shell as well as Xbox and steam streaming.
- steine65 10mo agoMy LG C2 hardware isn't powerful enough to stream higher than 60hz at 1080p, if I remember correctly. It also needs a LAN cord for consistency since the tv wifi adapter is not good. Instead I put moonlight on my steam deck and plugged that into the tv.
- Teknomadix 10mo agoIt took a bit of extra effort but `faultmanager-autoroot` script worked on my LG WebOS Smart Monitor
- ori_b 10mo agoThat still gives money to the people producing this garbage.
- broof 10mo agoI don’t know the finances, but I wouldn’t be surprised if their margins are low enough that their profit comes from advertising and data gathering post sale. So all this bloatware and advertising is subsidizing a high quality product and if you can strip out the unwanted stuff you’re probably getting a good deal at the expense of the company
- ori_b 10mo agoYou're showing the company that shoving advertising and data gathering into products will help them make products that sell. What you buy is what companies put out into the world.
- autoexec 10mo agoOften what you buy is either all you can afford or all that that has been made available to you. There are plenty of companies, industries even, which refuse to give consumers what they'd prefer simply because it's more profitable for them not to. Too often consumers are left with choosing the best of terrible options or just making due with what they can can.
- ori_b 10mo agoWhich is why making this trash profitable for them is a problem.
- upfrog 10mo agoJailbreaking is definitely an option, but there is value in spending money to provide a market signal instead.
- gosub100 10mo agoI have a no-name brand smart tv and it runs an OS called Tizen, and with a very little bit of googling, you can enable developer mode and install 3rd party apps on it. It probably doesn't solve the "spying-on-you" part, but it is nice to have the option of more apps.
- SilverElfin 10mo agoWhat’s the difference between that and just using the LG TV without any of the smart features? Like if you don’t connect it to the internet and only hook up something else through HDMI, isn’t it the same?
- port11 10mo agoSadly, modern Samsungs use signed Tizen and there are no roots/hacks available! Shame.
- immibis 10mo agoUnfortunately, this is Hacker (founder of the next AirBNB) News and not Hacker (one who tinkers with devices) News
- gala8y 10mo agoDid you know that a not jailbroken smart TV would spy on your HDMI, if connected to the network? I did not. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45737312 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45737312