5 ms·

Given 5, it sounds pretty reasonable to recommend everyone to turn it off. Given 6, it sounds difficult to follow that advice.

smaudet 4y ago
This is exactly why kill switches an user-unlock-able boot-loaders should be the norm, not the exotic edge case. Phones (as they are today) are a massive exercise in insecurity and privacy violation, to the point where they are actually banned in some settings.
- saagarjha 4y ago
  Those are great things to have, but I'm not entirely sure how they would help at all here. An unlockable bootloader would let you install…what, exactly? The patches for this have not been disclosed. What would your kill switch do? Turn off cellular communication? Good luck being able to use your phone…
  - smaudet 4y ago
    Bootloader ROMs let you install open source Android, which typically you can arrange how you see fit. So, either patch the vuln yourself (extreme) or toggle a setting somewhere. Hardware switch lets you disable wifi completely - I own one phone like this actually, you can flip about 6-8 different seperate switches this way. Then just wait untill patch becomes available/you have time to configure properly, then this becomes trivially resolved, instead of pulling teeth to get your carrier to push an update, replace your whole phone, etc...
    - saagarjha 4y ago
      Right but that’s exactly my point: you can’t patch the vulnerability yourself because you don’t know what it is, and the alternative of disabling radios is debilitating and you can do that in software too, since this isn’t a bug in that switch itself.
ggm 4y ago
yes. this is the collision of goals in between telco led protocol stacks, google led s/w development, authorized & signed blob binaries and users.
Kwpolska 4y ago
It doesn't sound reasonable to me to recommend disabling something without providing even minimum information on how someone could exploit it so that I can determine if it's likely to be exploited against me. I could live without VoLTE and Wi-Fi Calling, but some people live in areas with bad cell coverage, or no 2G/3G coverage, so they just can't turn it off.

smaudet 4y ago

This is exactly why kill switches an user-unlock-able boot-loaders should be the norm, not the exotic edge case. Phones (as they are today) are a massive exercise in insecurity and privacy violation, to the point where they are actually banned in some settings.

saagarjha 4y ago
Those are great things to have, but I'm not entirely sure how they would help at all here. An unlockable bootloader would let you install…what, exactly? The patches for this have not been disclosed. What would your kill switch do? Turn off cellular communication? Good luck being able to use your phone…
- smaudet 4y ago
  Bootloader ROMs let you install open source Android, which typically you can arrange how you see fit. So, either patch the vuln yourself (extreme) or toggle a setting somewhere. Hardware switch lets you disable wifi completely - I own one phone like this actually, you can flip about 6-8 different seperate switches this way. Then just wait untill patch becomes available/you have time to configure properly, then this becomes trivially resolved, instead of pulling teeth to get your carrier to push an update, replace your whole phone, etc...
  - saagarjha 4y ago
    Right but that’s exactly my point: you can’t patch the vulnerability yourself because you don’t know what it is, and the alternative of disabling radios is debilitating and you can do that in software too, since this isn’t a bug in that switch itself.

ggm 4y ago

yes. this is the collision of goals in between telco led protocol stacks, google led s/w development, authorized & signed blob binaries and users.

Kwpolska 4y ago

It doesn't sound reasonable to me to recommend disabling something without providing even minimum information on how someone could exploit it so that I can determine if it's likely to be exploited against me. I could live without VoLTE and Wi-Fi Calling, but some people live in areas with bad cell coverage, or no 2G/3G coverage, so they just can't turn it off.