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Replicant Hackers Find and Close Samsung Galaxy Back-door

Posted by timothy on from the in-their-spare-time dept.

gnujoshua writes "Paul Kocialkowski (PaulK), a developer for the Replicant project, a fully free/libre version of Android, wrote a guest blog post for the Free Software Foundation announcing that whlie hacking on the Samsung Galaxy, they "discovered that the proprietary program running on the applications processor in charge of handling the communication protocol with the modem actually implements a back-door that lets the modem perform remote file I/O operations on the file system." They then replaced the proprietary program with free software.

While it may be a while before we can have a 100% free software microcode/firmware on the the cellular hardware itself, isolating that hardware from the rest of your programming and data is a seemingly important step that we can take right now. At least to the FSF anyhow. What do others think: is a 100% free software mobile device important to you?"

4 of 81 comments (clear)

  1. Wow! Two backdoors in one day? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    Wow! Two backdoors in one day? The Replicant team is really on a roll! And both of the backdoors in the exact same place! Impressive.

  2. Replicants? by rossdee · · Score: 3, Funny

    Someone call Harrison Ford

  3. Re:Who's behind that back-door ? by jason.sweet · · Score: 3, Funny

    NSA ?

    GCHQ ?

    Or their equivalent from South Korea ?

    AT&T

  4. Re:Dupe by cant_get_a_good_nick · · Score: 4, Funny

    This story is a replicant...