I didn't read the full legal contract that came with my phone, but I assume it enumerates (in soporific detail) many of the ways in which I don't control my device. The price of convenience is a real doozy!
Tell HN: Your Android carrier can remotely turn settings on
261–270 of 299 posts
Re: Tell HN: Your Android carrier can remotely turn settings on
#262Wait 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…
You sound interesting and likely good company for a nice meal somewhere exclusive. In SF by chance?
Re: Tell HN: Your Android carrier can remotely turn settings on
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think most criminals are dumb. Quick google search shows average IQ of a criminal is 85.
Average IQ of all criminals, or criminals that got caught?
It must just be the ones who got caught. If they weren't caught how can anyone be sure they were a criminal?
Honestly though they might as well just use the average IQ for the population. There's not a person alive who hasn't violated some law at some point. We're all criminals.
Re: Tell HN: Your Android carrier can remotely turn settings on
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
When have intelligence services used warrants? They gather evidence illegally and pass it to law enforcement who then do parallel construction.
Whenever they don't want Congress up their ass. Four things can simultaneously be true, despite seeming contradictory: 1) Prudent opsec against nation-state adversaries dictates that you assume 0 time for them to have a tap on a device. 2) In reality, it takes >0 time, because people processes aren't instantaneous. 3) Intelligence services sometimes break the letter of the law. 4) Intelligence services usually follow…
> Whenever they don't want Congress up their ass.
That's not really a problem when intelligence services can just "remind" any would-be annoying congress person that they have endless amounts of data showing exactly what they and their family members have been doing and could plant whatever they want into the data they already have.
One of the things that finally convinced Snowden to give up everything he had in order to tell the American people that the NSA was violating their constitutional rights was when he watched NSA director James Clapper outright lie right to the faces of congress. After the truth came to light, do you think Mr. Clapper faced any meaningful consequences for that? Nope. Can you guess why not?
Intelligence services are too powerful to be held accountable by anyone. They'll do whatever they want.
Re: Tell HN: Your Android carrier can remotely turn settings on
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are attacks like these still possible? I've read here on HN that hardware makers are isolating the baseband processor as much as possible to prevent attacks like these. Surely there are countermeasures?
Most modern phones have signed firmware for everything, so the FBI would have to go to the manufacturer and court order them to hand over the signing key. Or take advantage of a leaked key.
I really wouldn't be surprised if some three letter agency hasn't shown up to every one of the major chip manufactures out there and forced them to install backdoors for them.
Re: Tell HN: Your Android carrier can remotely turn settings on
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
The phone "buzzing once in a while" teaches everyone to ignore this buzzing and makes this massively counter productive - people will ignore it when serious disaster happens.
I guess I just don't believe you, and it will take more than people complaining to convince me. In the situation described in this thread, I cannot imagine everyone in Central Park dismissing this notification without anyone saying "hang on everyone, it says missile instead of amber this time". I have lived in several big cities in the US and have gotten these alerts less than once a month, sometimes with years in be…
If you knew the alert could be about something hundreds of km's away, and that it usually is, it's very likely people would instinctively turn off the very loud alert instinctively. There's a reason why "alert fatigue" exists. And it has been documented in tons of different settings. Too many alerts and warnings are worse than none. Is there any reason to believe the same phenomenon wouldn't happen in this case?
Re: Tell HN: Your Android carrier can remotely turn settings on
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess I just don't believe you, and it will take more than people complaining to convince me. In the situation described in this thread, I cannot imagine everyone in Central Park dismissing this notification without anyone saying "hang on everyone, it says missile instead of amber this time". I have lived in several big cities in the US and have gotten these alerts less than once a month, sometimes with years in be…
If you knew the alert could be about something hundreds of km's away, and that it usually is, it's very likely people would instinctively turn off the very loud alert instinctively. There's a reason why "alert fatigue" exists. And it has been documented in tons of different settings. Too many alerts and warnings are worse than none. Is there any reason to believe the same phenomenon wouldn't happen in this case?
Yes, because they happen so infrequently and are widely known to only be used for alerts that most people think are actually important, even if they aren't always relevant to every recipient.
Re: Tell HN: Your Android carrier can remotely turn settings on
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If they were, they wouldn't have been criminals in the first place. What does intelligence have to do with whether someone is a criminal? There are dumb criminals and smart criminals; I'm not sure what the correlation here is.
Excluding ideological motivators, if you are technically competent to pull off a cybercrime and escape unseen, you are technically competent enough to work at a tech company making 300k+ a year while only doing about 10 hours of actual work per week. Treating this just like investments, over your lifetime, its a no brainer on which is the better path to take.
And a smart enough person would also know that there's a long chain of caveats to this specious claim, significant enough that being a criminal and getting away with it is much more compelling.
Re: Tell HN: Your Android carrier can remotely turn settings on
#269Back in the day my phone carrier in Argentina would send me ultra-high-priority alerts with ads several times a day. A lot of people in this thread are understandably okay with good carriers doing this for good reasons, but it's very easy to abuse if there aren't strong enough communication laws. From the amount of spam I got when I lived there, I'm surprised this is not happening in America.
Wow, that's obnoxious. I'm sorry you had to suffer that. I live in Brazil and I get constant advertising and phisshing SMS messages, it got to the point I had to kill SMS notifications and forget it even exists. I still get robots trying to call me at random times during the day, there seems to be no way to turn off telephony but it's less disruptive. If my phone had unblockable advertising disguised as high priority…
use Silence app from fdroid. it let's you mute sms selectively
Re: Tell HN: Your Android carrier can remotely turn settings on
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
Phone (call, data) interception is mandated in a lot of countries (i.e. operators have to do it is presented with a judicial mandate) against the wishes of user too. This setting is in the same vein, in order to allow authority controlled public broadcasts.
Governments hijacking infrastructure is not remotely the same as governments hijacking personal devices.
You are at mercy of the whims of your local government. You don't like it? Then fight to join the local government.