Newest Google Android Cell Phone Contains Unexpected 'Feature' (New America) [LWN.net]

Newest Google Android Cell Phone Contains Unexpected 'Feature' (New America)

Posted Oct 6, 2010 14:49 UTC (Wed) by rvfh (guest, #31018)
Parent article: Newest Google Android Cell Phone Contains Unexpected 'Feature' (New America)

> (...) the new Google Android hardware rootkit acts just like a virus -- overriding users preferences to change settings and software to conform to the desires of a third party. (...) We are seeking further clarification as to the legality of this malicious software.

This guy needs to stop paraphrasing Steve Ballmer.

Come on, telecom operators just want to make sure they know what connects to their network so it does not take it down. Rooting your computer has little chance of harming anybody but yourself, whereas a rooted phone could do a lot more damage. Think of a phone not respecting frequency and/or time slices. It's not you local router's wifi connection!

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Taking down the cell network

Posted Oct 6, 2010 14:53 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (9 responses)

Umm...we're talking about the application processor here, not the baseband processor. A rooted G2 is not going to "take down" the cell network. The article is over the top, but the problem (a user-hostile device) is real.

Taking down the cell network

Posted Oct 6, 2010 16:51 UTC (Wed) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828) [Link] (7 responses)

It sometimes surprises me the extent to which people will support corporate controls like this.

No-one would support an ISP putting limits on which devices and OSes connected to their network - people scream when they start blocking port 25 or rate-limiting bittorrent - yet there are similarly "valid" reasons for ISPs to want to do that.

Having some kind of licensing system for radio devices makes (a small amount of) sense, but locking down mobiles to the extent talked about in the article is pretty vile.

Taking down the cell network

Posted Oct 6, 2010 18:20 UTC (Wed) by rvfh (guest, #31018) [Link] (5 responses)

> It sometimes surprises me the extent to which people will support corporate controls like this.

I hope you're not referring to me post here, or you'll have to explain where I said I supported it. Quite the contrary.

But I can see some reasons why the operator want to lock the phones on their network. Tethering is one of them...

Taking down the cell network

Posted Oct 6, 2010 18:58 UTC (Wed) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link] (4 responses)

Mobile carriers shouldn't care about tethering; they should care about *traffic*. If I use more bandwidth than the carrier can provide me without impacting other people, it doesn't matter whether I used that bandwidth from my laptop or my smartphone.

Taking down the cell network

Posted Oct 6, 2010 22:19 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (3 responses)

If they metered bandwidth then it would be different. They would encourage usage and put a lot of effort into improving performance and making things faster since the more information you transfer the more money they make.

But they burned some bridges in the past with the outragous data fees so most people are scared away from metered internet.

Taking down the cell network

Posted Oct 7, 2010 16:09 UTC (Thu) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link] (2 responses)

I think that's mostly a US thing. Here in the UK it doesn't seem to be possible to get unmetered internet usage on a mobile phone, at least not without paying truly staggering fees.

(Obviously most of the carriers *claim* that their data plan is unlimited, but usually that means up to 512MB/month, maybe 1GB if you're lucky. T-Mobile are ahead of the pack in that their smallprint notes that your limit is 3GB if you have an Android phone, and that's a large enough limit that I really don't have to worry about going over it.)

Taking down the cell network

Posted Oct 7, 2010 18:56 UTC (Thu) by joey (guest, #328) [Link]

This is true in the US too AFAIK. Very buried in the fine print.

Taking down the cell network

Posted Oct 10, 2010 8:52 UTC (Sun) by efexis (guest, #26355) [Link]

Vodafone have a 5G option, currently at £15/month

Taking down the cell network

Posted Oct 6, 2010 20:09 UTC (Wed) by job (guest, #670) [Link]

No one would accept a mobile phone operator deciding which phone you could use either, with a few exceptions.

In most parts of the world the mobile networks accept any standard GSM terminals. Operators filtering on IMEI numbers would be no more accepted than operators filtrering on MAC in the IP world.

Customers in countries which are exceptions to this should wield their economic and political powers to remedy this. It is bad for customers and bad for economic development in the long run.

Taking down the cell network

Posted Oct 6, 2010 17:57 UTC (Wed) by SecretEuroPatentAgentMan (guest, #66656) [Link]

The distinction between application and baseband processor can be hazy these days as virtualization is used to make one physical processor appear as these two processors. The benefit stated in the trade press is cost saving though it reminds me a bit of the "Win modems" of yesteryear where the PC did the DSP work.

I don't know what solution is used in this particular cell phone but rooting a physical processor at the lowest level can be different from rooting the application processor.

A modern cell phone is loaded with more or less specific processors of various kinds handling baseband, Bluetooth, USB, sound, Zigbee, GPS, WLAN and who knows what more. This means virtualisation can be quite attractive. I guess that can make rooting harder. And it could impact the baseband functionality.