I just received a new Fire TV cube gen 3, because my old one is malfunctioning. I know, I hate these devices myself, but it’s the only option right now, since a new version of the Nvidia shield isn’t coming in the foreseeable future.
So, I plugged in the power chord and the HDMI cable into the cube.
When it booted up it showed a screen that it’s downloading the newest update. At first I thought this must be some typo-bug on the initial boot steps, because I haven’t even connected it to the internet yet, neither via cable nor did I go through the wifi setup.
After the update has finished, I was greeted with my real name and the cube indeed had the actual WiFi settings!
WTF?! How’s that even possible?
“Freely” if you enable the setting as the user posted above.
The verification still needs one of the devices listed in my post to be active on your wifi to allow the setup and communication.
The auth is likely done by device to device handshake. Its just that there isn’t a human involved.
Don’t get me wrong I hate Amazon as much as anyone and would never have one of their devices in my home.
But most of the other posts in this thread are missing the technical aspect of the question.