this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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I've seen way too many reports about how those things are filled with spyware to ever trust them.
That's the great thing about Android, you can just disable everything you don't want to run. That's what I did.
I'm sure that's perfectly fine in 99.9% of cases but I can never rid that niggling doubt in the back of my head that thinks the cheap devices (especially Chinese) are backdoored or have some deeper malware embedded on the system. It's the unknown that kills me, as stupid as that is. At least I know what type of shit LG TV is phoning home.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/18/popular-android-tv-boxes-sold-on-amazon-are-laced-with-malware/
Well, they seem to work pretty well. They sell these on the shelf in Walmart. Seems to be mostly bloat free, if not disable the stuff. They are pretty fast, the remote is good. I run a VPN on mine anyway. For the price they are probably the best bang for the buck.
I'll have to look into it more seriously. I've been considering a ChromeCast for a while but this is swaying me more to the Android TV side. I usually don't make these purchases lightly or until I have a really strong motivation to.
I mean for twenty bucks, you wouldn't be out much. Check out it