If only Steve Irwin had this in 2006.
Advanced versions can even instruct your phone to change important settings under the hood and expose you to significant vulnerabilities.
The scariest thing for me.
At one point I got something along the lines of “Your carrier has changed some settings, tap to review.”, once again showing me that my phone isn’t mine.
In this case it was emergency alerts, but I don’t know what all they can change. It wasn’t a carrier phone, by the way.
I also found apps related to (I think) multiple carriers, just disabled by default on Moto G52 5G. Orange was definitely one of them.Generally speaking, no programmable networked device is guaranteed to be under your control.
You can make strong arguments about certain types of hardware and software, but it is always possible that it contains a backdoor from the manufacturer, and it is almost guaranteed that it has multiple vulnerabilities that would give a remote attacker full control.
Edit: Generally, I agree with the sentiment that things shouldn’t be this way, but that’s the world we live in. Given how we build software and hardware, we need to be able to update our devices to fix vulnerabilities. As long as that requirement exists, no device can be considered trustworthy.
As someone in the software/networking space, I have a hard time with the author’s lack of attribution of the control/evasion characteristics of networks to people (developers of protocols, network operators, and users). Yeah, he admits the MPAA exists, but dude doesn’t mention Bram Cohen.
Describing files as “artificial life” in
Because peer-to-peer networks on which all files replicate are unpredictable complex systems, the files themselves can be seen as a form of nonorganic life. The reproduction of files can be described with a family tree in the same way that genetic family trees show the relationships between biological relatives.
is tortured.
Yeah, control/evasion is an arms race, but it isn’t meaningfully described as interactions within file sharing networks. It’s interactions between people, institutions, laws, legislators, courts, and software owned by different actors.