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> #ACAB At least for me, this comment loses its thrust with this hashtag. It takes a potent observation and adds unnecessary partisanship. It's also connected with the mother of all blowback slogans: defund the police.
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France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone
91–100 of 465 posts
Re: France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone
#92[flagged]
in the US yes, at least from what I have heard but not all countries have as absurd little police accountability and oversight as the US
France being like: hold my beer.
The Police watchdog in France (IGPN) has no independence whatsoever and has always been heavily criticized for being a whitewashing institution more than a real watchdog.
Re: France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone
#93what tech does this even use? Do they mean using Pegasus or similar malware that the govt has to first get onto the suspect's devices, or is this via Google/Apple or the device manufacturers that makes 'remotely and secretly activating a microphone' even possible?
Is this even possible on an iPhone? My memory may be failing me or confusing things so please correct me, but I seem to recall reading somewhere that the baseband lives segregated (with only a narrow communication cannel, kinda as if it were a remote machine) from the remainder of the hardware, so while it could be made to run stuff itself it has no way to physically access to main cpu, ram, mic, nor cams (barring, o…
Apple is good at /marketing/ their security, not being good at security.
Re: France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone
#94> But lawmakers agreed to the bill late Wednesday as Justice Minister Eric Dupond-Moretti insisted the bill would affect only “dozens of cases a year.” Technically he is not lying or naive, because any number, including large numbers like 66 million, can be expressed in units of dozens.
66 million is 5.5 million dozens for anyone else wondering. Or, 5,076,923.08 baker's dozens.
Re: France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone
#95And here ladies and gents we see the reason why the riots were allowed to stay as long and why they were so violent.
Expect the riots to end in a couple of days.
Re: France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it expensive to compromise a phone? Is it sensitive to compromise a phone, now that there is a national law allowing it, passed through a democratic process?
This might be quibbling but true democratic process could be interpreted as direct democracy where the law is directly voted for and people give a specific assent to the law (which ancient Athens did do). This is more of a democratic republic where officials elected through democratic process then make decisions, which usually works more smoothly than a pure democracy, but it does mean that the population at large do…
> but it does mean that the population at large does not necessarily support this specific law
If the population does not support the law, the government could be potentially replaced.
But the most probable conclusion is that the population at large would not care.
Re: France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Saying all cops are anything is exactly the same thing as saying all blacks are thieves, all Jews are greedy, or any of the other blanket statements that can never apply to any large group of people. It’s disgusting.
Absolutely not. It's a profession, every cop out there can just... not be a cop. Comparing that to skin color or someone's ethnicity is absolutely ridiculous.
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Re: France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone
#98Physical switches are necessary on devices.
And easily physically removable batteries, which used to be the norm and are still available for some devices (like the Nokia C30). It isn't mere coincidence that device manufacturers have made it impossible to power off mobile phones (short of refusing to charge a device) and impossible to positively disconnect ripe-for-abuse subsystems like the microphone(s) or cameras at the same time that governments and other en…
Are you suggesting widespread conspiracy between governments and tech companies?
I'm strongly in favor of physical switches and I detest where technology is nowadays, but it seems pretty likely to me that they removed the physical switches because:
1. It simplifies (cheapens) production costs
2. It eliminates points of failure
3. It reduces user error opportunities
4. It makes it easier to waterproof devices
5. It makes it easier to make devices smaller
And surely others that don't require a major conspiracy.
Re: France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone
#99I think it's unpracticable unless they install a backdoor on each phone.
Zero-touch OTA exploiting a cellular baseband processor in a phone is 100% possible if you control the network (which governments absolutely do). From there, it's just a matter of pivoting over to the application processor in order to enable the camera and mic. This path will almost certainly be less hardened than a userland to kernel privesc since the application-to-baseband interface will already be considered a trusted channel by the OS.
Re: France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone
#100> But lawmakers agreed to the bill late Wednesday as Justice Minister Eric Dupond-Moretti insisted the bill would affect only “dozens of cases a year.” Technically he is not lying or naive, because any number, including large numbers like 66 million, can be expressed in units of dozens.
it most likely really will only be a small number of cases
BUT that doesn't matter
it being abused against just one or two times in very important contexts (political, human right activists, etc.) can already be a major negative impact
for laws like that the "it's just a few" argument was always worthless even if true