Google as Benevolent Dictator Yanks Smartphone Apps With Kill Switch | Hacker News Reader

Google as Benevolent Dictator Yanks Smartphone Apps With Kill Switch

bloomberg.com

32 pointsJ3L240416 comments

Not related to the article itself, but:

> and is considering reinstalling her operating software, the nuclear option of virus cleanups.

I'm a bit surprised this still gets framed as the last thing you'd do. If you get one virus, that means you could have any number of them using the same mechanism. You've been compromised and can't really be sure what else is affected. Why is it the final option, rather than the default action to rollback to known state (and I mean rolling back everything, not reinstalling just your OS on a disk with executables which are already affected...)

I'd say the nuclear/final option would be getting a brand new system. Does malware which clings to the BIOS or specific hardware still exist today?

I think the point is that malware has the ability to put itself into your system in any way once it has access. that might include ways in which your removal software won't be aware of. the only "safe" option is to revert to a state previous to the malware being present. if no state like that is saved, then a reinstall from scratch.

That's true, but what prevents the states from earlier times from having been compromised as well?

(There appears to have been some confusion on my part here. When reinstalling the operating system was mentioned, I thought only of doing it from scratch. If there is a way to reinstall the system but keeping your files, it should clearly not be used in this case.)

Encrypted backups kept off the main machine help with that. Even if they're on the machine, keeping them encrypted and with hash stored somewhere, you can tell which ones were tampered with (not that you can change an encrypted image without corrupting it of course).

Most users don't have an automated process that regularly performs full backups of their hard drive, so reinstalling the OS is painful. Hopefully software will solve this problem permanently for us in the near future. Until then it will be too much of a bother for most users to set up an automated full backup process.

Even as a software developer who's familiar with technology, I don't do full hard disk backups for my personal machines. It's just too much of a pain, and I've decided to take it as an acceptable risk.

I've been using http://www.backblaze.com for a while now and it's worked great so far. It's not a full hard disk backup, but essentially everything non-system.

It's not as much of a pain as you think. I just drop a couple of lines in a cron job and that gives me full disk, incremental, encrypted backups:

https://grepular.com/Secure_Free_Incremental_and_Instant_Bac...

This might be a shocker, but my personal machines run Windows. Anyone familiar with a simple automated full disk backup tool for Windows?

Oh come on. You're clearly not "most users" if you can just set up cron jobs. It's important for us to remember who most users are and that they are not us.

Obviously. I was addressing his second paragraph; offering personal advice to him and anyone else here who might be interested.

Pleonasm and power terms make it sound like there's something terrible happening. The option is there to purge malicious content; which appears useful to me. If "they" would purge random items/apps the hue and cry of the masses would create damage to the brand and it's continuity; which in turn is a self regulating property that such events should not occur for the sake of the companies involved.

I think the main problem with this type of technology is it's very easy to imagine the RIAA/AT&T/US Gov/whoever suing or pressuring Google to remove (Insert Non Malware App Name Here) for whatever reason.

One word: Grooveshark.

But they didn't kill the app from users phones, they removed it from the marketplace.

Slippery slope is a logical fallacy.

I'll save my future outrage for if/when they abuse the function. As it stands, they've been nothing but responsible and show every intention of remaining that way.

I'm pretty sure they understand that if they abuse the kill switch, even once, the resulting shitstorm will be of sopa-esque proportions.

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