But it didn’t take long for people to realize that the Fire Stick was running Amazon’s customized version of Android, and what’s more, was particularly easy to install additional software onto.

Millions of Fire Stick owners have made the switch For Amazon, the Fire Stick is to video content as the Kindle is to books: sell the hardware cheap, and make money on the subsequent content purchases. Ostensibly it allows you to stream content from all the big name providers out there, but realistically Amazon is hoping it will get you to spend more money within their ecosystem. The somewhat awkwardly named “Fire TV Stick” is a cheap little device that you stick in the HDMI port of your TV to turn it into a “smart” TV. The Seedy World of “Jailbroken” Fire Sticks

Why would so many devices manufactured by Amazon all have network ADB enabled? I realized there must be a connection, and it didn’t take long to figure it out. The number of users who would have legitimately needed to enable network ADB on their devices is surely rather low, so to see a half dozen of them on the network at the same time seemed improbable to say the least. Port 5555 is used for Android Debug Bridge (ADB), a development tool used to control and perform various administrative tasks on an Android device over the network or (more commonly) locally over USB. I was as picking up a number of Amazon-made devices, all of which had port 5555 open.Īs a habitual Android tinkerer, this struck me as very odd. But buried among the seemingly endless number of smartphones charging next to their sleeping owners, I found something rather interesting. As you’d probably expect, I saw a veritable sea of Samsung and Apple devices. I recently spent a largely sleepless night at a hotel, and out of equal parts curiosity and boredom, decided to kill some time scanning the guest network to see what my fellow travelers might be up to.

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