Hacker News Reader

Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Since smartphones are already locked down by their vendors, the cops have a point.

Some smartphones are locked down by their vendors. There's plenty of options to get full root access on something that's for all intents and purposes a smartphone, especially if you don't particularly care about warranty and/or keeping commerical apps functional.

The radio on all commercially available smartphones are locked down to meet regulatory requirements and runs on an entirely different CPU from the Android OS that you might have root on.

The same's true for the radio on a Raspberry Pi, though.

True but they are commonly used to control other non-consumer (e.g. unregulated) radios via GPIO, and in POCs for threat exploitation demonstrations which are all over YouTube for idiots to mimic... and unlike phones they aren't carried around by almost everyone on a daily basis.

I simply adore how flexibly-placed the goalposts are in this particular game of Calvinball.

Seriously, this thread reads almost as if 5 different people have chimed in with their own individual thoughts

I'd reply very directly and in earnest, but such a reply would violate the guidelines.

I can host a wifi router and a Raspberry Pi with a web server that then connect to my phone regardless of OS and now I can run anything remotely. You cannot lock down any OS that has a browser and wifi. I don't need root, just under $50 worth of equipment.

It is trivial to get an older, unlocked cell phone that you can root. You then have a device equally or more powerful than a Raspberry Pi with built-in radios.

Smartphones need to remove their agnostic USB-C power source, otherwise nefarious parties will use it to power a radio jammer!

Pretty soon we'll all be texting each other on tin cans tied together with string. Until one of the cops trips over our cables.

> Smartphones need to remove their agnostic USB-C power source, otherwise nefarious parties will use it to power a radio jammer!

OTG SDRs usually come with power splitter cables to power the radio from a battery pack anyway :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com