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It should be illegal for a general-purpose device like a smartphone to be remotely controllable like this by anyone but its owner.
by grishka 4y ago
It should be illegal for a general-purpose device like a smartphone to be remotely controllable like this by anyone but its owner.
- Arnt 4y agoWhat's your opinion about the Samsung Galaxy Note 7? That's the one whose battery tended to explode, maybe ten years ago. Samsung offered to replace them, and eventually bricked the remaining devices.
- grishka 4y agoIt's still Android though, you can still downgrade the system and/or root it. Android, unlike iOS, is not tied to any servers whatsoever.
- Arnt 4y agoAs I heard the story, Samsung bricked them. No downgrade possible, no root, no use, no explosion.
- kaba0 4y agoLet’s add for completeness’s sake that most Androids will literally wipe their proprietary firmware for e.g. their cameras, giving you a very expensive device that takes much shittier photos then it is capable of. They are not at all like laptops where you can freely change the OS, the only devices like that are Pixels.
- dTal 4y agoThat would merely incentivize locking down general purpose devices until they can no longer be considered general purpose. Perhaps by restricting the set of programs that can be installed. Probably you'd end up with some kind of "app store" that... wait...
- grishka 4y agoIt is a general-purpose device if its official SDK is publicly available and does not require an NDA.
- eternityforest 4y agoJust make all remote bricking and all forced updates on devices with a UI illegal outside of safety of life applications.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- kaba0 4y agoIt’s good that there is nothing of that sort happening here.
- eternityforest 4y agoIs there not a forced update?
- szdva 4y agoThank the Lord iphones need to be "activated". That way if you steal mine you can't use it. If I wasn't interested in this kind of security I wouldn't buy an iphone: everybody has that choice.
- grishka 4y agoAndroid also has activation lock, except it is implemented locally and you can still unlock the bootloader if you don't want that feature. You can complete the initial setup on a new device and get to the launcher all completely offline. There are also zero technical obstacles to implementing the activation lock such that you can use your own server. All that this requires is little bit of non-volatile storage that is not cleared during factory reset. Which is what modern Android devices already have.
- szdva 4y agoWhat you mean is the FRP lock and it's not local because you have to log into a Google account to complete activation of the phone. You can factory reset or change ROMs or do whatever you want and the phone will still refuse to work until you log in using the last Google account the device had.
- grishka 4y agoThat's not how it works. If the bootloader is unlocked, it won't work, obviously — and that's a prerequisite for flashing custom ROMs. Unlocking the bootloader on modern devices requires enabling the unlock in developer settings in the stock OS, and this requires unlocking the device.
- throwaway0x7E6 4y agowhat do you consider security here? you still lose the phone - the thief isn't going to return it to you, and he will still get some money for it from a fence.
- snovv_crash 4y ago
- theshrike79 4y agoThe category for "general-purpose device" is really broad here =) I, for one, WANT my phone to be as hard to steal as possible.