That's one of the main reason why I don't use smartphones: I wouldn't be in control of my own device. With iOS, Apple is in control. With Android, apparently nobody is in control.
But on my Linux machines, I'm arguably in control. If I can find stuff somewhere, I can install it. And nobody else can, unless they root them. It happens, I know. But with LUKS FDE, even booting is arguably hard unless they could read the key from RAM.
So how come we got this smartphone crap, instead of actual portable computers that could, among other things, work as cellphones?
A thousand times this.
The state of the mobile universe right now is such that you have to either effectively trust Apple, or you have to effectively trust everyone. That's why HN User qwerty456127's choice to go to Android was fine, if he wants to be able to install his own apps, but it seriously compromised his privacy and security.
What if you do not want to trust anyone?
Nope. Sorry. No easy to use options for you out there.
>Nope. Sorry. No easy to use options for you out there.
Sure but to an extent that's true about almost everything in modern society. If you don't want to have to trust those supplying you with food or water, there's really no easy options to completely supply yourself with either of those. And even with all the oversight and regulation there's still often good reasons not to fully trust (we all know about Flint at this point even if it was a bit overblown by the media)
It's hard to imagine a situation where someone would supply you with something without you needing to trust them on some level.
That's very different from trusting only Apple. I mean, if you want to use Apple's equipment, you must also use their software. And perhaps we can trust their software. They also curate apps in their store, but sometimes they miss stuff.
Given Apple's position vs the FBI, it seems pretty clear that they won't intentionally pwn their customers. But it's clear from TFA that they do remove apps when governments demand.
Maybe that doesn't directly pwn users, but some of the apps that they've pulled could have protected users better than remaining alternatives. For example, I gather that it's impossible to build custom email or VPN apps in iOS. You can just build wrappers for Apple's stuff. For email, that apparently limits ability to securely encrypt messages.
Imagine a Free Software utopia with open hardware running an open source OSes and apps. Someone is writing that code. Someone is manufacturing that device. Someone is compiling and packaging that distribution for you. Someone is running the network.
Having access to the (alleged) source code for everything, and being able to compile it all yourself, would surely be worth something. But it'd be way too much code for you to audit alone. So you're going to have to trust Someone (security researchers, open source contributors) to be doing this for you...
But it's not always rational, and sometimes it is more like they're LARPing through some exciting narrative about the world, and in that narrative they're the heroes who know stuff that the normies don't. They're more like survivalists living an adventure in their head than rational people making rational choices. And that's where people can also get into trouble, both for having a false sense of confidence about their ability to avoid risk, and for giving others bad advice based on excessive confidence or rose-colored glasses about the same things.
I'm all for better security practices based on ever more openness, but I agree 100% with your example: people are kidding themselves if they think just because they run binaries built by other people from open source, it's almost as good as if they had personally inspected every line of code themselves. And when people are making those sorts of utopian statements, it's generally coming from the LARPing survivalist narrative part of the mind rather than the skeptical rational part of the mind and should be viewed with that much more skepticism. Not rejected, but just considered with an extra dollop of skepticism, because they hopefully at least mean well.
But here's the thing: It's always just a game. So sure, call it LARPing. However, consider that the US came out of LARPing.
However, you can distribute trust. With open-source software, you distribute trust across many developers, researchers and other users. It doesn't always work. But you're not stuck trusting just one entity.
Another example is Tor. You can't trust any one relay operator. But Tor does onion routing through three relays (guard, middle and exit) and so it's the design that you're trusting. Basically, the difficulty is identifying what relays you're using, and getting data from them. Plus the fact that the routing changes frequently (10 minutes by default) so adversaries would need data from many relays.
Even so, Tor's design can't resist traffic analysis by adversaries with access to global network data, and global attack networks. That was an explicit choice. Because resisting such adversaries would require stuff (random mixing and latency, padding to provide ~constant throughput, etc) that makes the network far less usable, and not scale well.
You can also use FDE on Android devices. That won't stop the border police from forcing you to unlock your device or deny entry, though.
So my comment about iOS vs Android only applies once the phone is unlocked. And I wouldn't be comfortable with just the root passphrase protecting me.
My main complaint is Apple -- and so anyone who can pressure Apple -- controlling what I can install on the device.
But Apple can revoke certificates, and then your stuff is gone. Right?
That's the fine print that kind of makes FDE a bad fit for mobile. (At least FDE as it's typically implemented.) I don't think it's any secret that Trust Zone has a larger attack surface than Secure Enclave, but cold boot attacks to extract data from RAM are stupidly pedestrian. At least make it hard for them.
Apple's self destruct is extremely poor UX for any user cursed with the misfortune of forgetfulness, but it's a lot more secure than Android's Trust Zone.
I have been looking for such a thing for a long time. Sadly, there is no good solution. If you want a not-horrible one, get a samsung tablet with cellular capabilities and run linux on dex on it.
It uses the radio "Quectel EG-25G with worldwide bands". I wonder how well isolated that is from the OS.
Better or worse than the Librem 5 radio?
Because we are not the average smartphone user. The market for people that cares about this is tiny.
The only smartphone that will approach a sane philosophy seems to be the Librem 5.
I think because they care about milking users, not about them being creative. I myself is very disappointed about what smartphone could've been for people and what it actually is.
How so?
If you show up at the border and the agent demands you install the software or your machine will be confiscated and you will be denied entry, then they are just as much in control as they are with android. At current all systems seem vulnerable to this attack that shares something in spirit with rubber hose cryptography.
Even Apple could be, but I suspect it is a case of it not being worth the effort since androids are the majority of phones.
Anyone paying attention knows that it's foolish to take sensitive devices and data across borders.
I was talking about what stuff I can install on my gear.
"The iPhones are plugged into a reader that scans them, while Android phones have the app installed to do the same job."
Yes, they cannot install an app, but that doesn't make your data secure from being taken.
At that point they could jailbraik or install MDM.
Or just dump all your browsing history, apps and email.
I think the OP is looking to be the Apple in his Apple-style mobile-verse.
Edit: when I wrote this comment, my original comment was at -4 points.
That’s all.
I mean, if you wanted a hidden, non-standard launchd type app, you'd have to modify the filesystem, install it, they'd need to create special tooling to do so, and modify the updaters to preserve it across an iOS update, etc. All without anyone at Apple speaking out.
Apple refused to create an unlock tool for the US government that was a one-off, to create spyware for China seems like they last thing they'd do. Could they? I guess. Once detected - and it definitely would be (as this was), or leaked by employees - Apple would get bowled over by buyers and the stock market. It's just not in their interests. Their current business model is selling privacy.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
These biases are in the eye of the beholder. People with opposite feelings about Apple (or whatever the corp of the moment is) see exactly the opposite bias.
Today Android phones have this malware on them and iOS phones do not, so the actual facts in the real world are that iOS is free of this intrusion.
That might change, but the situation now is what it is. This is why you are getting downvoted.
We just don't have a sample to reverse-engineer yet.