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Comment by grishka | Hacker News Reader

It should be illegal for a general-purpose device like a smartphone to be remotely controllable like this by anyone but its owner.

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That would merely incentivize locking down general purpose devices until they can no longer be considered general purpose. Perhaps by restricting the set of programs that can be installed. Probably you'd end up with some kind of "app store" that... wait...

It is a general-purpose device if its official SDK is publicly available and does not require an NDA.

Just make all remote bricking and all forced updates on devices with a UI illegal outside of safety of life applications.

It’s good that there is nothing of that sort happening here.

Is there not a forced update?

What's your opinion about the Samsung Galaxy Note 7? That's the one whose battery tended to explode, maybe ten years ago. Samsung offered to replace them, and eventually bricked the remaining devices.

It's still Android though, you can still downgrade the system and/or root it. Android, unlike iOS, is not tied to any servers whatsoever.

As I heard the story, Samsung bricked them. No downgrade possible, no root, no use, no explosion.

Let’s add for completeness’s sake that most Androids will literally wipe their proprietary firmware for e.g. their cameras, giving you a very expensive device that takes much shittier photos then it is capable of. They are not at all like laptops where you can freely change the OS, the only devices like that are Pixels.

The category for "general-purpose device" is really broad here =)

I, for one, WANT my phone to be as hard to steal as possible.

Thank the Lord iphones need to be "activated". That way if you steal mine you can't use it. If I wasn't interested in this kind of security I wouldn't buy an iphone: everybody has that choice.

Android also has activation lock, except it is implemented locally and you can still unlock the bootloader if you don't want that feature. You can complete the initial setup on a new device and get to the launcher all completely offline.

There are also zero technical obstacles to implementing the activation lock such that you can use your own server. All that this requires is little bit of non-volatile storage that is not cleared during factory reset. Which is what modern Android devices already have.

What you mean is the FRP lock and it's not local because you have to log into a Google account to complete activation of the phone. You can factory reset or change ROMs or do whatever you want and the phone will still refuse to work until you log in using the last Google account the device had.

That's not how it works. If the bootloader is unlocked, it won't work, obviously — and that's a prerequisite for flashing custom ROMs. Unlocking the bootloader on modern devices requires enabling the unlock in developer settings in the stock OS, and this requires unlocking the device.

what do you consider security here? you still lose the phone - the thief isn't going to return it to you, and he will still get some money for it from a fence.

A bricked iPhone is worth way less than a functional one, making the victim much less of a “juicy” target (lower odds of a violent mugging, broken car window, home burglary, etc). It’s a perfectly rational decision to want iPhones to be known as worth 5% of their retail value if stolen. Less funding for organized criminal cartels, too.

the junkie who has drawn a knife on you, broke your car window or broke into your house is going to take your shit first and ask questions later

From an economic perspective the thief doesn't have any incentive to steal the device in the first place.

do you picture a mugger or a pickpocket caring about the economic perspective?

Of course they do. Until third party repair shops created a huge market for stolen iPhone parts, stealing them was significantly less attractive than other phones.

Well, they do. iPhones are still valuable after being parted out, although Apple has been combating this by requiring parts to be registered by them (and shamed for much of the same on HN)

> and shamed for much of the same on HN

Deservedly. If there was a normal market, or at least access to spare parts, there would be no need for donor devices.

What does that look like? Stolen parts will always be cheaper.

The warehouses full of people in Shenzhen tearing down millions and millions of stolen iDevices would still be chugging along, inserting stolen parts into the supply chain.

Apple enforcing DRM on parts is very much a pro-consumer move, steadily taking us towards a world where a stolen iPhone will be worth nothing.

Stolen parts are always going to be cheaper unless the cost of producing the parts is lower than the disassembly cost. That could happen for screws but it’s never going to happen for the advanced components which are why the devices are actually being stolen.

> he will still get some money for it from a fence.

From my understanding of the activation lock, the phone is effectively bricked - no-one can ever use it again. No fence is going to pay for a useless device.

The motherboard is useless. The rest of the parts can still be resold.

But it lowers the incentive significantly regardless.

Thankfully Apple is working on that by pairing the parts to the motherboard and showing error messages if they don't match.

That's one way of looking at it. Another one is that it complicates DIY repairs.

the lucrative parts (screen, camera arrays) are serialized and will not work on phones other than the one they were built for

almost everything else is soldered onto the logic board and is futile to transfer

so i think that stolen iphones with activation lock are 100% paperweights.

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