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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

#291

Post by everforward »

burkaman wrote: post #199
izacus wrote: post #183

Earlier 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…

Fwiw, I stopped looking at them when I got the 4th or 5th one. I got good at sliding to unlock and silence the alert without even looking.

Once I found out that I could disable them, I turned them off entirely.

I'd be more okay with them if they didn't all use that horrible klaxon noise. That noise usually indicates an immediate threat to life, which doesn't feel appropriate for Amber or Silver (which indicate a potential threat to a particular person's life in a rather large area). Save the klaxon for "we're getting nuked" and tornadoes.

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

#292

Post by f1shy »

Tomte wrote: post #177
f1shy wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No required. In iOS can be disabled. Also in Germany.

No, the highest level cannot be disabled.

I have 2 phones. In one I disabled it, and did not get the alarm. The other one was enabled and received the alarm. It can be disabled. Period.

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

#293

Post by burkaman »

everforward wrote: post #291
burkaman wrote: post #199

Earlier 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…

Fwiw, I stopped looking at them when I got the 4th or 5th one. I got good at sliding to unlock and silence the alert without even looking. Once I found out that I could disable them, I turned them off entirely. I'd be more okay with them if they didn't all use that horrible klaxon noise. That noise usually indicates an immediate threat to life, which doesn't feel appropriate for Amber or Silver (which indicate a pote…

That might be a country or phone-specific thing, with various Android phones in the US I've never gotten any kind of sound, just persistent buzzing until you dismiss it.

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

#294

Post by K0balt »

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…

The sim basically doesn’t matter. The imei identifies the phone to the network, the sim identifies the subscriber. So the network sees phone x unknown subscriber prepaid carrier. Airplane mode does not prevent the phone system from triangulating your phone, or from turning the baseband on remotely even when the phone is “off”.

The carrier definitely knows where you live if you take your phone to your house at night, even if it is off. The only way to prevent that is to put it in a faraday pouch at your “airplane mode” checkpoint.

Why do you think basically zero phones have trivially removable/changeable batteries? Any phone that clams to be security first and doesn’t at least have a switch (an actual switch) that disconnects the battery altogether is a joke.

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

#295

Post by blep_ »

petodo wrote: post #277
blep_ wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not... really? It's not the setting for whether the phone receives alerts; it's the setting for what the UI does in response (make a bunch of noise vs accept silently). The UI is very much on the user-controlled side of the phone.

they try to avoid people accidentally switching it off, it's much less harm if you hear it than vice versa

I'm aware that this is their reasoning. I do not accept this as an argument for it being a carrier setting.

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

#296

Post by omniglottal »

plausibility wrote: post #255
blep_ wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your phone is transmitting every network you saved. That's not how saved networks work, as far as I know. If you have a source saying otherwise, I would like to read it.

The WiFi spec has something called "active scanning" [0] for clients (as opposed to passive scanning, where the client listens for the periodic AP beacons). There's something called a "directed probe request" [1] that a client can send during active scanning which will contain the AP's SSID it's directed towards. Whether or not your particular device sends these direct probe requests is probably configurable and diff…

Active scanning (where the client sends the SSID of an AP it's trying to connect to) is ironically limited to just hidden AP SSIDs.

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

#297

Post by azeemh »

autoexec wrote: post #264
ethbr0 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 orde…

I guess Clapper needs to see consequences.

I think I got hacked for trying to run for Congress.

"If video games have taught me anything, it's that if you encounter enemies then you're going the right way." - Ali G

lol

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

#298

Post by azeemh »

autoexec wrote: post #265
ActorNightly wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

intel's ime is a perfect example

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

#299

Post by iLemming »

i_am_jl wrote: post #111
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…

>I can totally understand why Americans would want to silence these. Oh, it gets better. We also, by default, get alerts for severe/extreme weather. Nothing like getting an emergency alert because a tornado touched down on the other side of the state, or a flash-flood warning while you're at home, 300' above the nearest body of water.

I live in North Texas, the weather alerts are pretty accurate here. With climate change, tornadoes and hurricanes are being pushed out of their natural places and regular seasons, and it's becoming normal for having a storm coming seemingly out of nowhere. We do appreciate here those alert broadcasts.
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