For Great Justice
All your base are belong to us! Buwahaha.
Chromecast-owning households may be set to endure Rick Astley's ghastly oeuvre, thanks to a new device that can hijack victims' TV sticks and insert replacement content. Dan Petro's device, the "Rickmote", is a slick Raspberry Pi box that can knock the Google Chromecast video streaming utility off wireless networks allowing …
Never quite understood how this is supposed to work.
The Pi needs to be connected to a WiFi network with internet access, and obviously needs to be powered.
When the Chromecast deauths from the WiFi the Chromecast will enter config mode - which the Pi must take advantage of, and tell it to connect to the Pi's AP - which I get.
But then in order for the Pi to tell the Chromecast to load YouTube and then to load a YouTube video - the Pi needs to have internet access.
How does the deauth thing work - does the Pi have to be connected to the target WiFi network to issue the deauth command?
I read the article and watched the linked video and even followed a link in there to someone's blog about this (more of a fan-squee note than anything useful). The article says:
"The Rickmote Python configuration available on Github was prepackaged with Astley's internet-wrecking hit set to loop."
Does this mean that the device contains a stored video (possibly a few tens of Mb) that it sends to the Chromecast as a continuous locally sourced video stream?
Does the device contain the stored Internet address of the YouTube video, with some parameters causing loop-play and force the Chromecast to connect to it via the Chromecast's 'normal' internet connection?
Does the device have its own internet connection and obtain the video feed from this connection to send to the Chromecast?
The exact method is not clearly explained.
I thought it works like this:
It uses aircrack to discover the network the chromecast is currently using.
It broadcasts bad packets in order to disrupt the chromecast's wifi connection.
When this happens, the chromecast will accept new connections, as it thinks it needs to be configured.
When this happens, the pi-rickroll box sets up a new network and instructs the chromecast that it is the new controller.
Once it has control, it sends content to the chromecast.
It's only funny if it's not damn obvious.