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Tell HN: Your Android carrier can remotely turn settings on

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Re: Tell HN: Your Android carrier can remotely turn settings on

#101

Post by oarsinsync »

warkdarrior wrote: post #78
bjt2n3904 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gotcha. I'll just draft a law saying all devices must automatically unencrypt themselves when they enter my country's borders. Hey, it's the law! You must comply, and for your convenience, your phone will do that automatically for you! Good grief.

If you do not like the regulation, fight to change it. Do not expect your devices to do the fighting for you.

Given that the fight is between megacorps, megastates and ~mega~individuals, it feels like a slightly uneven fight.

The people who have the power to make the phones vs the people who have the power to make laws and prevent the makers from selling, vs a few individuals who actually care and a large majority who do not have the time to care.

I’d love to vote with my wallet, but I live in a country that 90%+ votes against me, so my vote is meaningless.

Re: Tell HN: Your Android carrier can remotely turn settings on

#102

Post by mschuster91 »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #89
bjt2n3904 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gotcha. I'll just draft a law saying all devices must automatically unencrypt themselves when they enter my country's borders. Hey, it's the law! You must comply, and for your convenience, your phone will do that automatically for you! Good grief.

If you are in fact the monarch of a sovereign nation, you can indeed give companies a choice: "either design your products to automatically decrypt themselves when they enter my territory, or don't do business in my country." Companies will then be forced to make a decision based on the market size of your country. Or they will break the law, and you will have to deal with enforcement. Most companies would like to do…

> Companies will then, of course, be forced to make a decision based on the market size of your country.

And as we've seen time and time again, China can get away with a lot of bullshit with demands anywhere from tech to culture (e.g. MCU films that ended up censored). At least now, Apple has woken up and begun moving off production to Vietnam, and Marvel has decided to ignore Chinese demands after all.

Re: Tell HN: Your Android carrier can remotely turn settings on

#103

Post by petee »

willyt wrote: post #77

I can totally understand why Americans would want to silence these. I'm from the UK and I was in Central Park with my wife and kids when we got an 'Amber Alert' which said something like 'Black Ford SUV reg XYZ123' or something equally cryptic. It was not long after the terrorist attack in Nice where a guy drove a truck thorough a crowd of people walking beside the beach. Everyone's phones started going at the same t…

Ex boyfriend disappearing with a child is totally worth an Amber Alert, and a couple hundred miles is only a couple hours drive by the time they put the alert out...its easy enough to just keep an eye out for a license plate.

Nobody is going to know for sure if its a false alarm, or if we'll wind up with a murdered child until after the fact, so why wait or ignore it?

Re: Tell HN: Your Android carrier can remotely turn settings on

#104

Post by remram »

Leaving the evil carrier issue aside, how much security is there? I know GSM security is not very good, as older protocols are kept around for decades.

Is there strong crypto preventing anyone who's not a carrier or government from changing settings on device?

Re: Tell HN: Your Android carrier can remotely turn settings on

#105

Post by jvanderbot »

kornhole wrote: post #95
qbasic_forever wrote: post #51

Wait until your learn what a country or local government/police can do remotely to the baseband firmware of your phone with a court order... 10-20 years ago the FBI was regularly remotely programming firmware to listen in and record cell phone microphones to capture conversations of suspects. IIRC a mafia case hinged on data gathered in this way so it is not some abstract theoretical or crackpot theory ( https://www.…

I rotate burner SIM's. I never make calls with the SIM. Instead I use jmp.chat if I need to use OTA calls or SMS. I am in airplane mode 99% of the time and use WIFI instead of cellular. I never activate cellular near my home. I am always connected to VPN so that the traffic cannot be analyzed. My phone is anonymous without any identifiers. I think all this mitigates the baseband attacks, but tell me if I am missing s…

Your location data. Tower associations can still happen with data "off", since there's plenty of "listen" components. All your home wifi connections are well Geo-located, thanks to other Android users picking up the ESSID as they walk / ride / drive past your house. Your shopping / outings? Forget it, fully known.

VPNs hide the content of connections, at least from MITM / eavesdroppers, but server-side data scrapes are quite effective at figuring out who you are (or what your phone is ... see below). Nothing really does a good job of hiding the fact that you are connected to a VPN except TOR, and where that connection originates (e.g., your wifi network, which is well Geo-located, remember?). And de-anonymization of VPN connections to identify downstream connections are possible, IIRC. Details about your phone are well recorded (MAC, SID, etc)

And always remember, your phone can be implicated based on location data, which will implicate you once it's discovered you own the phone. And that's as simple as looking up the SIM purchase / use.

Re: Tell HN: Your Android carrier can remotely turn settings on

#106

Post by sph »

willyt wrote: post #77

I can totally understand why Americans would want to silence these. I'm from the UK and I was in Central Park with my wife and kids when we got an 'Amber Alert' which said something like 'Black Ford SUV reg XYZ123' or something equally cryptic. It was not long after the terrorist attack in Nice where a guy drove a truck thorough a crowd of people walking beside the beach. Everyone's phones started going at the same t…

Do we have Amber Alerts in UK? I never got one, and I'd like to be told if I'm about to get nuked or an asteroid is imminent.

Re: Tell HN: Your Android carrier can remotely turn settings on

#108

Post by Blue111 »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #51

Wait until your learn what a country or local government/police can do remotely to the baseband firmware of your phone with a court order... 10-20 years ago the FBI was regularly remotely programming firmware to listen in and record cell phone microphones to capture conversations of suspects. IIRC a mafia case hinged on data gathered in this way so it is not some abstract theoretical or crackpot theory ( https://www.…

> It's only gotten worse as phones have gotten more capable

I wish my cellphone would not have all those sensors for this reason...

Re: Tell HN: Your Android carrier can remotely turn settings on

#109

Post by vic-traill »

at-fates-hands wrote: post #82
nine_k wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each phone takes time to be detected, identified, and tampered with. So it may make sense to activate a new burner phone, talk about something sensitive, and destroy it right afterwards, before the law enforcement understands what phone was that.

When I worked in a wireless repair shop in early 2000's, we handled the local FBI field office account. Field agents would come in and I'd chat them up as they sat and waited for me to fix their phones. This was also around the time remote meth labs were getting really common out in rural areas. Multiple agents were talking about how frustrated they were with getting access to burner phones since most of the companie…

In The Wire, Lester sells Bernard tapped burners. It's the only way they could get up on the burners before they were thrown away.

There are a tonne of reddit links on this one so I'll leave it to the Interested Reader.

Re: Tell HN: Your Android carrier can remotely turn settings on

#110

Post by thih9 »

jmole wrote: post #92

I bought a Pixel 7 recently. When setting up the device, I was asked to insert my SIM card. Usually, I'd have skipped past this screen, but I thought "Ok, let me swap out my SIM", since I was trading in an older device. Worst mistake ever. Even on an unlocked phone, all the verizon crapware was silently installed in the background. This doesn't happen when you put in the SIM after setting up the phone. Such a backwar…

Sneaky.

Is it reversible? As in: can you eject the sim, reset the phone to factory defaults and restart the setup process, now inserting the sim card later?

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