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>Nokia has ever been accused or guilty of spying Which Nokia timeline are you talking about? The current Nokia HMD which outsources to China and was found to h

>Nokia has ever been accused or guilty of spying Which Nokia timeline are you talking about? The current Nokia HMD which outsources to China and was found to have Chinese botnet in them ?

yorwba 7y ago
You seem to misremember what that scandal was about, or maybe you read a particularly hysterical article that misrepresented the situation. Nokia had accidentally enabled an option intended for phones sold in China with a China Telecom contract. To verify that they were eligible for use with the contract, the phones would connect to China Telecom servers on first use. For the phones that had that option incorrectly enabled, the request failed (because they weren't in China Telecom's database) and was retried relatively frequently. Based on this behavior, the initial report assumed the worst, but in the end it was misconfigured telemetry. You can call it spyware if you want, but no botnet was involved.
- utouq 7y ago
  All telemetry is spyware. Sending telemetry from European users to China is a glorious fuck-up. They deserve to get hurt for that.
- NullPrefix 7y ago
  >Sorry we sent your private data, we did not mean it. Can we still be friends?
- iamnotacrook 7y ago
  Always ignore intention. Either a device sent data to china (etc) or it didn't. Otherwise you're concerning yourself more with PR than the technical aspect. I don't care why the process allowed exfiltration of data.
  - yorwba 7y ago
    Intention matters if you want to know the reason behind the technical details, and whether a similar incident is likely to happen again in the future. In this case, Nokia likely won't reintroduce an obfuscated version of the leak to evade detection, because it wasn't intentional. On the other hand, it's certainly possible they'll configure a phone for the wrong carrier again, since the configuration process apparently involves passing a bunch of carrier-specific feature flags at build time.

>Nokia has ever been accused or guilty of spying Which Nokia timeline are you talking about? The current Nokia HMD which outsources to China and was found to have Chinese botnet in them ?

yorwba 7y ago

You seem to misremember what that scandal was about, or maybe you read a particularly hysterical article that misrepresented the situation. Nokia had accidentally enabled an option intended for phones sold in China with a China Telecom contract. To verify that they were eligible for use with the contract, the phones would connect to China Telecom servers on first use. For the phones that had that option incorrectly enabled, the request failed (because they weren't in China Telecom's database) and was retried relatively frequently. Based on this behavior, the initial report assumed the worst, but in the end it was misconfigured telemetry. You can call it spyware if you want, but no botnet was involved.

utouq 7y ago
All telemetry is spyware. Sending telemetry from European users to China is a glorious fuck-up. They deserve to get hurt for that.
NullPrefix 7y ago
>Sorry we sent your private data, we did not mean it. Can we still be friends?
iamnotacrook 7y ago
Always ignore intention. Either a device sent data to china (etc) or it didn't. Otherwise you're concerning yourself more with PR than the technical aspect. I don't care why the process allowed exfiltration of data.
- yorwba 7y ago
  Intention matters if you want to know the reason behind the technical details, and whether a similar incident is likely to happen again in the future. In this case, Nokia likely won't reintroduce an obfuscated version of the leak to evade detection, because it wasn't intentional. On the other hand, it's certainly possible they'll configure a phone for the wrong carrier again, since the configuration process apparently involves passing a bunch of carrier-specific feature flags at build time.