Newest G2 Android Phone Contains Unexpected ‘Feature’ -- Root Kit.

Newest G2 Android Phone Contains Unexpected ‘Feature’ -- Root Kit.(oti.newamerica.net)

26 points by pmikal 15 years ago | 8 comments

teilo 15 years ago |

FTA: "A Malicious Root Kit"

This article is nothing but hyperbole. First: there is no root kit. Second: "Malicious" implies that some damage is being done to your phone or your data.

FTA: "the new Google Android hardware rootkit acts just like a virus -- overriding user’s preferences to change settings and software to conform to the desires of a third party."

A virus, by definition, exploits your hardware and spreads from machine to machine. By any definition, this is not a virus.

Here's what's actually happening: The new HTC hardware has a copy of the system partition locked away in its iNAND chip, in an area that, as far as anyone as able to determine, is inaccessible by the running kernel, the bootloader, or recovery. If any changes are made to the System partition, at boot, the hardware re-flashes the system partition with the backup.

Yes, this means that you can't flash custom firmware on this phone - yet. But that's ALL it means.

peregrine 15 years ago | |

Its likely someone will find a work around for this, probably reverse engineered from the OTA updates. Cyanogen and his team are pretty resourceful folks.

radley 15 years ago | |

Doesn't this also mean you can't do regular system updates, since the chip would replace it with the old system?

teilo 15 years ago | | |

I would presume that there is some sort of new method for OTAs on this phone, that overwrites the hidden portion of the iNAND. However, whether that method can be exploited to permanently root the phone remains to be seen. At present, no one knows how it works.

mycroftiv 15 years ago | |

For some users that behavior meets our definition of "malicious". This design certainly seems to be motivated by malice directed at users who jailbreak their phones.

msy 15 years ago |

So given the relaxing of the iPhone development guidelines and the increasingly locked down nature of Android phones and impending fragmentation of the app store as every big player tries to grab a slice of the pie how far are we from the point where where the iPhone is the more open platform?

Google made a deal with the devil and now the carriers are going to laugh all the way to the bank on the back of Google's baby.

ergo98 15 years ago | |

Just to fully grasp the incredibly stretch you're attempting here, what you're saying is that if you combine the worst restriction of all possible implementations of Android together, apply some hyperbole worst-case scenarios about offshoot stores, you can contrive a platform that is "less open" than the iPhone.

Only even then it still isn't less open.

Is the G2 less open than the iPhone? Not even remotely.

msy 15 years ago | | |

No, what I am doing is merely looking at recent data points and suggesting where the trend is going and the motivations of the players involved.

Is the G2 less open than the iPhone? I'm having trouble finding much difference, both are locked to a single version of a single OS controlled by a single third party, the only difference now is app provision. How long until a provider provides their own app store and only their own app store? Months, weeks? Verizon is already working on it. Go on Bing it on your new Droid, once you finish using the undeletable Blockbuster app.

ajro 15 years ago | | |

I agree that we are far from the point when we can say Android is less open than the iPhone. But at the same time I wouldn't be surprised if 'features' like that would drag some developers from Android to iPhone.