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Comment by Intermernet | Hacker News Reader

From the article "It is currently unclear how isolated the baseband processor is from the rest of the system's hardware."

Is this a problem? I was under the impression that the baseband controller was regarded as one of the more likely areas to insert "extra functionality", but I'm only going on info from security conference presentations.

EDIT: First Item in the TODO section: "Reverse engineer details relating to the Qualcomm MSM8610 baseband processor." Good to know they're on it.

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Nothing in the posted web page inspires confidence that Appelbaum has any idea what he's doing. Everything on the page is something a primary school kid might do after reading XDA. Anything requiring skill is in the TODO.

Appelbaum is a software guy. I suspect that he is out of his depth here.

Agreed, although I respect Appelbaum very much for his work on TOR. His time and knowledge would be more effectively spent on TOR, while letting the people with Replicant, Osmocom, OpenMoko, and hardware hackers who know what they're doing focus on freeing telephones.

Jacob Appelbaum is known for overstating his abilities and trying to pass himself off as someone who knows what he's doing. Glad to see others are realizing this.

Yeah, you don't exactly see 'lawful intercept' code getting checked into AOSP. It's basically all handled by the baseband AFAIK.

The risk is reduced here though because they have removed almost all the sensors, so even if you used the baseband to transmit the mic it wouldn't achieve much. Your position could still be accurately tracked though.

>Your position could still be accurately tracked though.

If by triangulation alone...

Seems like adding a (nationwide) pager to the loop could improve that situation. Phone is in airplane mode, gets a page, user decides to exit airplane mode or not, if they do, phone calls outbound to a personal PBX and is patched in. All while the inbound caller hears ringing.

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