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Replicant Hackers Find and Close Samsung Galaxy Back-door
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?"
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?"
Yeah we know.
http://mobile.slashdot.org/sto...
When I heard this news earlier today I couldn't help but think that it's not really a back-door. Samsung has had a service on their phones for years that allows you to track your phone and remotely wipe it if someone stole it or you lost it or something. Performing file I/O on the system? Well, that sounds exactly like something you'd need to do if you were to wipe the phone clean!