The Vietnam government has banned rooted phones from using any banking app • Hacker News Board

Re: The Vietnam government has banned rooted phones from using any banking app

#641

Post by superkuh » Tue, Jan 13, 2026, 3:20 PM UTC

Magnusmaster wrote: post #356

superkuh wrote: post #6

Smart phones are not personal computers. They're shopping/government/etc terminals. You don't and never have controlled them, even with root (re: tight integration of the baseband computer which only the telco has a license for, not you). Their best use re: computing is acting as wifi hotspot for their cell telco CNAT connection. The time to stop using them as computers is now, not when your local government passes t…

You don't own your PC either. All modern PCs have a Trusted Platform Module that the authorities can and will use to lock down PCs eventually. Multiplayer games are already using hardware attestation on PC for anti-cheat.

I don't run any OS or games that would require such a thing. The two modern AMD cpus do have an fTPM but they are certainly not enabled in my UEFI firmware. My 3 other desktop computers including the one I'm typing to you on have no TPM and indeed this computer doesn't even have an Intel Management Engine (ME). And in my other old intel CPUs that do have ME I disable it and coreboot.

I can do whatever I want to my PC hardware and my software remains under my control. This is quite different than cell phone based computer platforms.

So, it's not locked down now. I won't lock my existing PCs I hand assembled down in the future, and I'd never buy any hardware that was locked down. In fact, I've never bought or used a smartphone because of this.

>You don't own your PC either.

Yes, I do.

Re: The Vietnam government has banned rooted phones from using any banking app

#642

Post by skirge » Tue, Jan 13, 2026, 4:44 PM UTC

SXX wrote: post #624

skirge wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

when exactly Communist Party of Vietnam abandoned Marxism - Leninism? Any official statement claims that?

Does it really matter what official statements say if a country have stock exchange, group of billionares and market economy? Iived there for quite some time to understand its likely less regulated and government controlled than many ex-USSR countries (im from russia). Of course politically Vietnam is what it state it is compared to e.g Indonesia that I now explore. But economically it's the same capitalism as everyw…

yes, socialism is goal and "capitalism" is a tool to reach the goal.

Re: The Vietnam government has banned rooted phones from using any banking app

#643

Post by morshu9001 » Tue, Jan 13, 2026, 11:51 PM UTC

freddie_mercury wrote: post #552

basilikum wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TOTP is pretty standard. Give the user backup codes and just use normal recovery methods. For most things that might be email. For a bank it's probably identity verification.

The vast majority of Vietnamese I know do not have an email account. So that would be a dumb thing for a Vietnamese bank to use as a recovery method.

Email shouldn't be recovery for bank anywhere, you go to the bank for that. But TOTP is so user-hostile that I can see it causing too many recovery requests for the bank.