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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

> Android was designed with security and privacy at the center.

Right. That's why ostensibly local apps can make unfettered connections to the internet without my having any knowledge or way of stopping it, right?

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This is relative to desktop where traditional apps don't even run in a sandbox and app permissions weren't a thing.

A Linux app can not only create Internet connections, it can read and write all your personal files. (But we thought that was pretty secure since it didn't run as root.)

This feels almost obligatory: https://xkcd.com/1200/

What harm does exposing $HOME to the world anyway. /s

Linux apps aren't infested with malware and tracking trojans though, if the threat doesn't exist then there's no reason to protect from it. With android collecting this sort of data is it's very reason for existence.

We don't usually see widespread infections, but Linux malware does exist.

Also, many apps do send telemetry by default, though there are usually instructions to disable it.

Sure it exists, but it's not an infestation. Even then I'm not aware of it or telemetry enabled apps in any trusted sources like the debian repositories (if you're aware of any please let me know), they'll even disable it from organisations like Mozilla that don't care about privacy. The play store cannot reasonably be considered a trusted source.

If your going to download stuff from random places, which is how most telemetry enabled apps end up on linux systems then no sandboxing will work anyway, it will simply be disabled as part of the installation process. It's not a technological problem, you can't fix it with technology.

Yes, a Linux distro like Debian has some security advantages since they won't ship just any app. But relying on code review isn't the same as having sandboxing in the OS.

There's two successful systems I know of out in the real world, Linux distros that rely on code review and iOS that relies on code review and sand boxing. There's two failures, android that relies purely on sandboxing and windows, which was too gimped by sandboxing to take off.

> But relying on code review

It's not just code review, it's having a degree of seperation between the developer and the packager/authorizer.

Some things are more successful than others, but it's not a one-bit distinction. Arguing over whether to set the "success" bit would be silly. But it seems arbitrary to say that Android is a failure when it has more users than iOS or Linux.

Browsers are another important example of sandboxing.

> But it seems arbitrary to say that Android is a failure when it has more users than iOS or Linux.

I'm not saying android is a failure, I'm saying it's sandboxing has not prevented malware and spyware being ubiquitous. This was a problem way back before android itself was a huge success.

> Browsers are another important example of sandboxing.

This has been pretty effective at preventing malware, but the web is a privacy nightmare and constantly getting worse.

Ok, I see what you mean. Caveats: Android doesn't rely solely on sandboxing. They also do automatic scanning and do often find stuff [1]. I also wouldn't say malware is so bad it's "ubiquitous" on Android since it's in the news quite often but I don't think the average user is likely to encounter it?

My take on it is that current-generation sandboxes have permissions designed for security (preventing takeover by hackers), not privacy. In particular, preventing an app from phoning home isn't something they try to do. You can't have privacy without security so sandboxing is a prerequisite, though.

[1] https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2019/02/how-we-fou...

Of course not, given the failure of the year of desktop GNU/Linux, there is hardly any money to be made.

That's just because few people use Linux, not because Linux has some inherent ability to stop people downloading malware. In fact it has less than any other major OS. Mobile OSes have vaguely curated app stores and proper permission systems. And Mac and Windows have at least attempted to help with their code signing systems (even if they are pointless and annoying).

Linux has "run this `curl | exec` command as root".

> Linux has "run this `curl | exec` command as root".

You've clearly not used Linux much of you think that's the normal software installation method. That's the normal installation method on windows, minus the GUI to download and run for you.

> That's just because few people use Linux, not because Linux has some inherent ability to stop people downloading malware

You can't stop them downloading it, you have to direct them to trusted sources to get software, that's where Linux and iOS work, they have same approach but different implementations, it's where windows and Android fail.

> Windows have at least attempted to help with their code signing systems

Their best attempt so far is the windows store, but that was still born because they went for the sandboxing instead of verifying approach.

> That's just because few people use Linux

And all those servers aren't high value targets? We'd be seeing a lot more issues if "curl | Sudo exec" was how things were done.

And furthermore, "privacy" against everyone except Google, which has a lot more access than just unfettered internet connections.

> Android was designed with security and privacy at the center.

iOS does enforces code signing to avoid app modiﬁcation since it was last signed while Android allows the code to be modiﬁed even after installation.

Under a lot of aspects I do agree Android was built as a secure by design system, but the aforementioned problem seems to be in the opposite direction, at least IMHO.

Can someone up on current Android tell me how things like this are still common?

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19380012

Personal interest: I’ve been using Linux since the early 90s, and was psyched to see what the Danger HipTop people could do with Google backing. The first time I looked closely at Android phones I ran into multiple articles on the topic “what anti-virus software should you run on your new Android phone”, and I haven’t done more than play with Android since then.

Based off of the actual research ( https://research.checkpoint.com/simbad-a-rogue-adware-campai... ) it looks like TechChrunch just got critical details very wrong. The adware didn't "install itself" at all, it was just bundled into the app up-front.

But the overwhelming majority of this attack, popping open URLs & showing ads, is something Q is looking to put a stop to wholesale: https://developer.android.com/preview/privacy/background-act...

It's just apps including tracking code to make money. These days that's how apps monetize. They upload whatever amount of data they can get in exchange for pennies. There's not much you can do short of not allowing apps to do literally anything.

Adwares are just that, ads. Sadly, the mobile app economy runs on ads.

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