this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2024
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275
Redbox’s disc rentals are over (www.theverge.com)
submitted 4 months ago by jeffw to c/technology
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Allowing people to take rewritable media home and return it sounds like it would open the door for malware.

[–] atrielienz 1 points 4 months ago

To be fair you could do that with blurays and DVD's.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

It's possible, but with copy protections, it's incredibly unlikely. You'd run an app on your computer or TV to decrypt and view the media, just like you do with Netflix or whatever.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

that wouldn't stop someone from dropping a "media player" on the drive with your logo on it that's actually malware. People unfamiliar with how it's supposed to work would plug that in and run it without even thinking about it. I guess you could have the machine format the drive every time it comes back and have it test for counterfeits to prevent that though now that I think about it more.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I guess you could have the machine format the drive every time it comes back

Yup, that's the plan. You turn it in, it reimages it to whatever the next customer is likely to need, and if a customer asks for something out of left-field, it would reflash and take a bit longer.

Flashing on return is essential because it checks whether the returned item is still in working order, so it really wouldn't be an issue.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

The USB port of the machine is also an attack vector.

  1. Infect the machine and reprogram it to infect every drive being flashed
  2. Hacked media would install Bitcoin miners on the victim’s “smart” TV
  3. ???
  4. Profit
[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Eh, I suppose, but they could design the USB drive really hard to infect. The more narrow your use-case, the more options you have to secure it.

They could even limit it to just HDMI, which would probably be a lot harder to attack since HDMI doesn't support much besides audio and video.