To start off with the bad news, as is our wont, DirecTV kits have a rather serious code injection problem.  A researcher was able access the root shell on the Linksys WVBR0-25 wireless video bridge in less than 30 seconds, once he had access to one of the devices that the bridge was streaming to.  As there are many infected machines out there, often PC's used only as video players as simple, poorly secured machines, this would mean your machines could be recruited into a botnet or mining pool quite easily.  The researcher passed on his research to AT&T and Linksys 181 days ago he is quite disappointed they have yet to start develop a patch, according to The Register.

On a more positive note, AT&T is testing broadband over powerlines in Georgia and an undisclosed location outside the USA.  They did not release any specifics of the current bandwidth which they can provide, though their goal is to surpass 1 gigabit per second.  This will be quite the project as the testing we have done with powerline adapters did not show network connectivity anywhere near that speed in the best case scenarios, let alone when less than perfect wiring nor distance degraded the overall performance.  You can check out more on that topic over at Slashdot.

"AT&T's DirecTV wireless kit has an embarrassing vulnerability in its firmware that can be trivially exploited by miscreants and malware to install hidden backdoors on the home network equipment, according to a security researcher."

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