It gives you the ability to run arbitrary code with the same privileges as the media player. Going beyond that would require exploiting some other vulnerability to gain root access.
That probably wouldn't be too hard. Local privilege escalation seems to be a lot easier to accomplish. It's harder to secure a system from code running on it than from data coming in from the outside. It's sort of a bigger version of the article's suggestion to "watch out for scripting in unexpected places!"
You also don't necessarily need privilege escalation to do a lot of damage. If the media player isn't sandboxed in some way, then it'll have full privileges to access all your user's files. Traditional UNIX permissions means that you need special access in order to write to the kernel, but not to read your e-mails or that spreadsheet you have with your bank account details.
That probably wouldn't be too hard. Local privilege escalation seems to be a lot easier to accomplish. It's harder to secure a system from code running on it than from data coming in from the outside. It's sort of a bigger version of the article's suggestion to "watch out for scripting in unexpected places!"
You also don't necessarily need privilege escalation to do a lot of damage. If the media player isn't sandboxed in some way, then it'll have full privileges to access all your user's files. Traditional UNIX permissions means that you need special access in order to write to the kernel, but not to read your e-mails or that spreadsheet you have with your bank account details.