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Comment by Hydraulix989 | Hacker News Reader

I should just be able to have root on the TV that I bought and paid for and own.

Same would apply to mobile phones and tablets and yet a lot of people here defend mega corps for locking them down

It's an odd state of the world but here I am defending unrooted phones. Rootable phones mean rootkitable phones, and considering how many bank accounts are now accessible via touches and swipes, phones that are rootkitable do present a big financial danger.

Then again, we all still use browsers on rootable PCs, where the browser extension protection scheme is Google (hah) and Firefox (double hah) saying "Just trust us, users!".

Heaven forbid the financial system should be inconvenienced. Nevermind that downstream of all the technologies to lockdown finance are the tools to enable an oligarchic tyranny.

That's not how it works, though. There's still a root-level UID 0 user identity on non-rootable Android phones, it's just not accessible to you, it's only accessible to manufacturers and hackers. Both rootable and non-rootable phones can be rootkitted.

Agreed. But in the meantime this type of hacking is entirely legal under DMCA, that's actually quite clear.

Though it would be nice if it didn't require such work.

> this type of hacking is entirely legal under DMCA, that's actually quite clear.

Woah! I had no idea. Is that also true in the US? Do you have some sort of authoritative source?

Yes I mean the US, the DMCA is a US law. You can google it but "The specific legal source that allows you to hack or jailbreak your own smart TV is the U.S. Copyright Office's Triennial Section 1201 Exemptions."

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