Google TV Hackers Open a Shell on the Chromecast; More Hacks To Follow

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.'"

Comments

Re:Any Ideas?

[CastrTroy]

It's obviously quite highly subsidized. At $35 for the Chromecast and 3 months of free Netflix (even with an existing account), the cost to existing Netflix subscribers is about $11. They are planning on making money from renting/selling movies on Google Play store, and probably more money through affiliate programs sending new customers to Netflix and other programs that will probably be on there in the future like Hulu and Amazon Prime. If everybody just buys them and installs another OS on them, they won't make much money. With the phones, tablets, and chromebooks, they are selling them above cost price, so they don't have to make up the difference by people renting movies and such.