alt Hacker NewsI'm seeing "average" people adopt piracy at astonishing levels because of these decisions. I went over to a friend's house the other day and his relative sent him one of those Android TV devices with access to all the pirated content you could ever want. I would never have imagined him to be ok with it. This has been happening in my social circle at an accelerating rate. People that would have scolded me for doing the same 10 years ago are now doing it.
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This will be what makes companies start pursuing legal action. Once it's not mostly people in poor countries who are pirating, companies will try to reclaim that lost revenue. I'm not sure if they can do anything about torrenting, but I would be surprised if TV devices like what you mentioned are still available in a couple years.
> People that would have scolded me for doing the same 10 years ago are now doing it.
I can see how they could tell themselves it's not the same. This is a device that just shows a library of content that they can watch. There's no needing to know that P2P, warez, torrents, seeding, etc even exist let alone know what they are or how they work. They couldn't sell these devices if it was illegal, right?
The unfortunate reality is this is why we have residential botnets. Your friend is probably paying for his free TV by attacking things over the Internet.
Those things are probably infected with malware.
https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/cyber/alerts/2025/home-inter...
Oh no, that's terrible! Please send me an example of one of those devices so I know what not to buy.
Friends don't let friends use those shady streaming boxes
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/11/is-your-android-tv-strea...