21–30 of 120 posts
Time to switch to open source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinephone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librem_5
There seems to be some confusion on the authors' behalf about what a DSP is, and what an SoC is ("software" on chip, as they call it...) I'm just nitpicking, of course.
(As it happens I read the slides and this is a legit vulnerability but you'd never know it from the press release.)
Seriously I'm beyond pissed at the state of Android, patches and open-source compliance. If we are lucky 10% of current phone models will get any form of update. The rest will be vulnerable for years until the devices finally break. And that's only the Qualcomm stuff. There is another CPU vendor beginning with M who is big in el-cheapo hardware - look at their Android kernel leaks, wherever you dig you find horrid, H…
Time to switch to open source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinephone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librem_5
An Open Source OS can help, sure, and is a start. A DSP is a programmable hardware device. Both phones to which you linked use variants of ARM processors and then use third-party baseband systems. You're not getting rid of closed-source hardware vulnerabilities by replacing Android or iOS.
Seriously I'm beyond pissed at the state of Android, patches and open-source compliance. If we are lucky 10% of current phone models will get any form of update. The rest will be vulnerable for years until the devices finally break. And that's only the Qualcomm stuff. There is another CPU vendor beginning with M who is big in el-cheapo hardware - look at their Android kernel leaks, wherever you dig you find horrid, H…
Still getting updates for my one plus 6. YMMV.
My older OnePlus 3 got updates for almost 4 years I think. Not bad, but it's not like apple's 5-6 years. Still, it was half the price of an iPhone with better hardware to boot so fair trade I guess.
I don't like frivolous spending on phones but I never keep a phone more than 4 years anyway. The progress of camera, microphone and speaker quality alone across 4 years is enough of a quality of life improvement for me to upgrade.
At this rate of Android security issues, my next phone will probably be the next iPhone SE but only if they update the display to a larger 1080p 90Hz panel and add an ultrawide camera lens, I don't care about anything else.
I wonder if Apple/others knew about such vulnerabilities, and passed up on using the chip as a risk? Or, was it just dumb luck that they avoided this?
From Apple's perspective Qualcomm has been insufficient for a long time for many reasons, the security issues here would only be one of the many factors involved in the decision to do their own development. For what it is worth, a modern chip as complex as the A* series is essentially guaranteed to have vulnerabilities. Maybe not 400, but definitely not 0.
Seriously I'm beyond pissed at the state of Android, patches and open-source compliance. If we are lucky 10% of current phone models will get any form of update. The rest will be vulnerable for years until the devices finally break. And that's only the Qualcomm stuff. There is another CPU vendor beginning with M who is big in el-cheapo hardware - look at their Android kernel leaks, wherever you dig you find horrid, H…
Still getting updates for my one plus 6. YMMV.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From Apple's perspective Qualcomm has been insufficient for a long time for many reasons, the security issues here would only be one of the many factors involved in the decision to do their own development. For what it is worth, a modern chip as complex as the A* series is essentially guaranteed to have vulnerabilities. Maybe not 400, but definitely not 0.
This is a thing I think people constantly underestimate... Intel's cores are not necessarily dramatically more broken than everyone else's chips, they just pay for more auditing and public research.
Did Intel finance the research that turned up any of the major headline vulnerabilities over the last few years (meltdown, spectre)?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From Apple's perspective Qualcomm has been insufficient for a long time for many reasons, the security issues here would only be one of the many factors involved in the decision to do their own development. For what it is worth, a modern chip as complex as the A* series is essentially guaranteed to have vulnerabilities. Maybe not 400, but definitely not 0.
This is a thing I think people constantly underestimate... Intel's cores are not necessarily dramatically more broken than everyone else's chips, they just pay for more auditing and public research.
Seriously I'm beyond pissed at the state of Android, patches and open-source compliance. If we are lucky 10% of current phone models will get any form of update. The rest will be vulnerable for years until the devices finally break. And that's only the Qualcomm stuff. There is another CPU vendor beginning with M who is big in el-cheapo hardware - look at their Android kernel leaks, wherever you dig you find horrid, H…
Heh, I once found a "feature" in a kernel driver in my Xperia (with a SoC from the company with a name starting in M) that allowed you to read arbitrary kernel memory from userspace, by passing the appropriate structures via a ioctl interface. Didn't even have to dig around too much.
Ah well, at least I got a t-shirt from Sony.