Android's new anti-theft features
(blog.google)
from funn@lemy.lol to technology@beehaw.org on 16 May 2024 10:17
https://lemy.lol/post/25062085
from funn@lemy.lol to technology@beehaw.org on 16 May 2024 10:17
https://lemy.lol/post/25062085
cross-posted from: lemy.lol/post/25062075
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Many of these are Google Play Services features, so it won’t be available to users open-source Android flavors that are google-free.
Which is a fraction of a fraction of Android users.
I’m all for de Googling if that’s what tickles your fancy, but ask anyone on the street and they’ll have no idea what you’re talking about
Edit: This also allows Google to push some of these features to older devices which may not ever see another system update
In that blog post, google does not commit to open sourcing these play services features, to integrate in future system upgrade.
I would love to be proven wrong.
Yep, no one claimed otherwise.
Lol, who wants these anyways. One more reason not to use google play services. (Though I have google play services on this phone.)
One good thing you could try is use this app:
Find My Device
Why would we need AI for that? That just makes the function unpredictable. There must be a real solution to detecting this.
The real solution is, a heuristic analysis of the phone’s gyroscope and accelerometer data.
Marketing calls that, “AI”.
Not just marketing, that’s the term it’s always been called. Plug a bunch of parameters into a non-deterministic model and you’ve got an AI, at least by what seems to be the common definition of the term.
“AI” used to mean “whatever we don’t fully understand yet”. A lot of processes have walked the path from “fantasy” to “AI” to “algorithm”. Doesn’t need to be non-deterministic, the original tic-tac-toe playing software was “AI” at the time.
Until we get some AGI, the term “AI” will remain a moving technological target, and a static marketing target.
That’s my concern too. They should have baked those into AOSP making it available for all ROMS.
It isn’t clear which of these features use Google servers and which ones don’t. The “Find My Device” definitely does, and has no place in AOSP. If they’re actually using AI to compare phone state with some tracked “habitual” behavior, it may also have no place in AOSP, but who knows.
While I agree with you, the first step for user centric Android flavors regarding security is to support relocking the bootloader, with a custom (preferably the user’s own) digital signature. As long as we dont have that, an attacker could flash or just boot a custom bootloader through fastboot that does its own thing.
However that doesn’t really depend on Android system developers, I think, as the problem arises from the inferiority of almost every phone’s bootloader (chain) (because most phones does not support setting up a custom signature for bootloader verification), and probably that can only be reasonably solved by device manufacturers, because as I understand, bootloaders do a lot of heavily device specific things, so there cant really be a common (primary) bootloader, and making one for each phone is a lot of work that also involves lots of reverse engineering, and maybe the early bootloaders cant even be overwritten on some phones…
It’s kind of both Google’s and manufacturers responsibility. Google has made available a Dynamic System Updates feature:
source.android.com/docs/…/dynamic-system-updates
developer.android.com/topic/dsu
…but it requires manufacturer support to allow adding custom keys.
Hmm, this is interesting, it looks like if it was a multiboot solution
Trunk Monkey Mobile would have been better. 🐒