Conspiracy Theory: Dark OS | Hacker News Reader

Conspiracy Theory: Dark OS

7 pointsconsprtheo21 comments

I suspect that a second, covert operating system has been installed on our phones, designed to operate surreptitiously like a ghost, allowing it to clandestinely collect data from our cameras and microphones without our knowledge or consent. This secondary operating system could be meticulously optimized to remain undetected while efficiently performing its data harvesting functions. Essentially, it's conceivable that there are two operating systems coexisting on a single chip, with one serving its intended purpose and the other quietly conducting surveillance activities. This scenario raises concerns about privacy breaches, as users remain unaware of the invasive practices occurring on their devices. Additionally, the implications of such clandestine operations extend beyond individual privacy violations to potential exploitation by various entities for surveillance or data mining purposes.

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Well, it's entirely possible there's a firmware layer below the OS doing some nefarious things or opening backdoors. I read something a long time ago about the wireless or baseband chips in Samsung phones being shown to be active even when turned off through an IR camera. A lot of people have expressed concern about and discovered vulnerabilities in the black-box baseband processors.

Microphone and camera data sounds like a bit of a stretch to me. The data storage and network throughput required to do such a thing on a large scale would be astronomical, not to mention it would be easily exposed. I think the well-known monitoring of call records and text messages and ubiquity of cloud storage for photos combined with ease of obtaining warrants and buying information more than suffices for government or large corp use, and if they do monitor mics and cameras that would be using a targeted approach.

You could always try buying a mobile base station and setting up a lab to analyze everything your phone is transmitting. I'm sure people have done similar experiments before.

Microphones and cameras may sound like a stretch, unless it's a super top-secret alien technology that hasn't been publicly revealed. For example, the data collected might be so minimal and in a different format exclusive to the top-secret alien technology file systems. Cameras would likely not capture HD pictures but rather minimum images that are still useful. Similarly, audio data might be compressed to the smallest usable format.

It was done in the past to Windows PCs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Lantern_(software)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivore_(software)

It is what Edward Snowden tried to warn us about that turned him from a hacker to a criminal.https://theintercept.com/2014/03/12/nsa-plans-infect-million...

Not only that this website tells you the OSes to use and apps to avoid being spied on by the NSA: https://prism-break.org/en/

You are describing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseband_processor#Security_co...

By isolating the memory the baseband processor can access, it's possible to limit the impact of its compromise. So of course it's nearly impossible for a consumer to figure out which phones do this isolation.

Detecting a second operating system within a baseband processor is extremely challenging, as it operates independently and is designed to handle communication tasks discreetly.

It doesn't need a second OS - just a few "accidental" vulnerabilities in the baseband itself (and keeping the source closed to make them harder to find). Free plausible deniability.

I once found myself randomly drinking with a guy at a bar in SF who claimed he was there for a law enforcement conference. He told me that there was indeed code in the baseband processor of most phones (brought in together with the E911 requirements) that allow law enforcement to not only send the location of any phone but also record audio.

Of course, he might have just been bullshitting me.

Why do you think so? If there are two os then the battery would drain very badly, right? On battery saver, my phone survives hours together.

So let's expand on this theory: all battery metrics are calculated and faked. This second OS is so lightweight that it does not even affect battery life. It's a conspiracy theory, so it's assumed to be alien technology, the most secret one ever.

This second OS performs very few operations, such as recording and sending data to the network over time when it's connected to the internet. Or it doesn't even need an internet connection. It sends the information every six months, so you don't even feel it. The data is collected in a very lightweight, encrypted, zipped, alien technology way, so it's inconspicuous.

You always hedge the hedges both ways, don't you?

Not if the dark OS is only activated when a special message is sent to the baseband processor.

> If there are two os then the battery would drain very badly, right?

I don't think this is a viable argument because we have no baselines here. In case phones have been running a shadow OS for many years now across the board there just are no phones around to compare battery usages in a meaningful way. "Drain very badly" isn't a figure I can measure when all phones do the same. All the older phones that run through my hands have generally a "bad" battery life cycle; I ascribe that to battery degradation plus technological advancements that have raised the bar.

Did you write this with ChatGPT?

Of course, who doesn't. GPT constructs and decorates my sentences and fixes grammar. For this one, maybe it was too obvious, lol, and it's GPT-3.

What if GPT is the real Dark OS

ITT: we think about what Android actually does

Evidence?

Aliens

The aliens (and far more worrisome deep state thought control) can simply listen in through our minds.

Though they are also plugged in to the technology stack for yet other reasons.

Evidence or it didn't happen.

It's one thing to have an idea ("Oh I know my phone could be eavesdropping on me"), another to estimate its plausibility ("But that could never happen, unless—aliens!"), and yet another to find evidence ("We were able to identify on-chip circuitry that structurally amounts to a CPU-in-a-CPU", "We were able to intercept signals from the device that cannot be explained by regular usage and would appear to have been initiated by the device without user action").

That's a slippery road indeed when the manifestation of a thought in one's brain is enough to convince one of the reality of it. I have to deal with people who suffer from this, and just as an aside, it often seems to be connected to outlandish claims; in the matter discussed here, that's happening when OP writes "Microphones and cameras may sound like a stretch, unless it's a super top-secret alien technology that hasn't been publicly revealed". Not even sure "alien" here is to mean "extra-terrestrial" or just "outlandish", but at any rate I sure can make any narrative sound plausible by introducing an improbable factor. Fairy tales work that way.

As for the assumption of "alien" tech that enables clandestine transmission of (useful, therefore voluminous) video data, there are mathematical boundaries here that we can use as guardrails for sanity: even not-yet-public and / or alien tech has to abide by the laws of physics and mathematics. For the narrator of a fairy tale, that is not a problem, of course: "But what if they use undetectable carrier waves? X-Waves??" OMG we're DOOMed.

If the pandemic has taught me something it is that some people come with a veneer of "critical", "independent" thinking, only to then, under the pressure of lockdowns, turn out to be someone who doubts everything related to vaccines ("it's not natural", "vaccines actually cause polio") while readily believing any kind of striped BS they heard somewhere on the internet or from an acquaintance. Any kind of striped BS.

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