Slashdot Mirror
South Korea's "Smart Sheriff" Nanny App Puts Children At Risk
Starting in April, the South Korean government required that cellphones sold to anyone below the age of 19 be equipped with approved monitoring software that would allow the user's parents to monitor their phone use, report their location, and more. Now, however, researchers have discovered that one of the most popular of the approved apps, called Smart Sheriff, may not actually be very smart to have on one's phone.
Researchers from Citizen Lab and Cure53, at the request of the Open Technology Fund, have analyzed the code of Smart Sheriff, and found that it actually endangers, rather than protects, the users. Reports the Associated Press, in a story carried by the Houston Chronicle:
Children's phone numbers, birth dates, web browsing history and other personal data were being sent across the Internet unencrypted, making them easy to intercept. Authentication weaknesses meant Smart Sheriff could easily be hijacked, turned off or tricked into sending bogus alerts to parents. Even worse, they found that many weaknesses could be exploited at scale, meaning that thousands or even all of the app's 380,000 users could be compromised at once.
gathers GAY NIGGERS from all over America and abroad for one common goal - being GAY NIGGERS.
Are you GAY ?
Are you a NIGGER ?
Are you a GAY NIGGER ?
If you answered "Yes" to any of the above questions, then GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) might be exactly what you've been looking for!
Join GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) today, and enjoy all the benefits of being a full-time GNAA member.
GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the fastest-growing GAY NIGGER community with THOUSANDS of members all over United States of America. You, too, can be a part of GNAA if you join today!
Why not? It's quick and easy - only 3 simple steps!
First, you have to obtain a copy of GAY NIGGERS FROM OUTER SPACE THE MOVIE and watch it.
You can watch GAY NIGGERS FROM OUTER SPACE on Youtube.
Second, you need to succeed in posting a GNAA "first post" on slashdot.org , a popular "news for trolls" website
Third, you need to join the official GNAA irc channel #GNAA on EFNet, and apply for membership.
Talk to one of the ops or any of the other members in the channel to sign up today!
If you are having trouble locating #GNAA, the official GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA irc channel, you might be on a wrong irc network. The correct network is EFNet, and you can connect to irc.secsup.org or irc.easynews.com as one of the EFNet servers.
If you do not have an IRC client handy, you are free to use the GNAA Java IRC client by clicking here.
If you have mod points and would like to support GNAA, please moderate this post up.
This post brought to you by Penisbird , a proud member of the GNAA
G_____________________________________naann_______ ________G
N_____________________________nnnaa__nanaaa_______ ________A
A____________________aanana__nannaa_nna_an________ ________Y
A_____________annna_nnnnnan_aan_aa__na__aa________ ________*
G____________nnaana_nnn__nn_aa__nn__na_anaann_MERI CA______N
N___________ana__nn_an___an_aa_anaaannnanaa_______ ________I
A___________aa__ana_nn___nn_nnnnaa___ana__________ ________G
A__________nna__an__na___nn__nnn___SSOCIATION_of__ ________G
G__________ana_naa__an___nnn______________________ ________E
N__________ananan___nn___aan_IGGER________________ ________R
A__________nnna____naa____________________________ ________S
A________nnaa_____anan____________________________ ________*
G________anaannana________________________________ ________A
N________ananaannn_AY_____________________________ ________S
A________ana____nn_________IRC-EFNET-#GNAA________ ________S
A_______nn_____na_________________________________ ________O
*_______aaaan_____________________________________ ________C
Gary Niger gary_niger@gnaa.us GNAA Corporate Headquarters 143 Rolloffle Avenue Tarzana, California 91356
Enid Al-Punjabi enid_al_punjabi@gnaa.us GNAA World Headquarters No.33 Kyutei Bld. 2F, Shinjuku 2-11-7, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo, Japan ????????2??11-6
Copyright (c) 2003-2015 Gay Nigger Association of America
Ich Bindawalross (London) - GNAA (NYSE: GNAA) President Nigger released a statement today regarding the immediate Internet rele
There will always be shoddy code that makes it into apps, though this is pretty awful and unacceptable. I'm also really troubled by the government mandate that such a program be installed on children's phones. Shouldn't it be up to the parents if they want this level of monitoring or not? Also, can't this be implemented by wireless carriers in a secure fashion by monitoring traffic from the device instead of apps on the phone? Surely such a thing would be more secure and probably a lot harder to circumvent. Why is the government of South Korea turning into a nanny state and requiring something that should be solely the decision of the parents?
. . . and then they won't worry about being spied on by the government later in their lives.
I find this Korean law very creepy. I think that "trust" is one of the most important aspects of the parent-child relationship. If parents need to spy on their children . . . there is a lack of trust.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Daaaamn, that is a train wreck of an app. There's nothing at all that excuses such a complete disaster security-wise. Those issues are the kind that should have been caught by even a completely cursory security review of the app, though anybody doing their job here damn well should have insisted on a lot more than a cursory review.
So... what was the approval process for these apps like? Who approved this app? How nice is their new yacht?
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
forced this on them so they could stalk children. Stalk children. Their kind rapes children. Rapes children. You should never vote for a Republican.
Meanwhile Windows spies on the entire world.
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8033285&cid=50553063
It isn't exactly news, even if it's impolite to say so in as many words; that there are a lot of architectural similarities between the remote management tools used for IT admin work, the 'child safety' remote monitoring stuff; and good old fashioned spyware. The main difference is in who authorizes the deployment(and the license fees).
Now, we have a market where use of this software is mandated, which means that there is going to be a race to the bottom to put the cheapest-possible product that ticks the checkbox into service; because if the reason you are doing something is to say that you did something, why try harder?
And there we are, software that is basically spyware, because that's its job; but totally incompetent, since no handset vendor wants to pay extra for high quality shovelware. Basically a rehash of the various 'support/management' agents that US carriers were sneaking into their handset builds: also basically spyware, because that's implied by the job description; also not wildly competent, since that would cost more.
It is just the first step of a two step process to protect the South Korean youth from one of the five most common causes of injury or death. The second step is to install gps devices on all electric fans. When the system shows a youth in the same location as a working fan for more than 30 minutes, the authorities will be alerted.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
I lived in Japan for some years. In 2008 Mobiles with such functions started to appear in Japan. My Boss (Japanese) told me his daugthers (around 12/15 back then) got phones with such functions. I asked him what the function exactly does, if it can be triggered by the children, if it can be triggered by the parents, orr if it logs the position all the time, and how the connection is secured.
He was not interested, but just said that his wife (housewife) decided on the phone and that he did not get into the "details". The funny part is: my boss had a PHD in physics and we worked in a field related to cryptography.
So I wonder: People are so fucking uninterested in what their kids are doing that they donâ(TM)t even go "into the detail" if they actually could; this brings me to the conclusion that the money they spent on these apps is "just to do something about something and feel betetr since it costs money" instead of talking to their kids and making real, respectful decisions.
Give you child a panicbutton - ok. Give you child something which is triggered by specific circumstances - ok. Put your child on an electronic leash - and you will wonder that you child will easily cut the leash at some point, without you noticing.
I shot the sheriff and I shot that motherfucking deputy too, big whup, you want to fight about it!
Butt let's be seriouser. It's fucking Korea. Land of the morning dung. It's not something that fucking matters. Stop it.
Sue the government. Hahahahaha!
When will people start to realize that all of the shit they do because they think will solve one technology problem usually creates another one?
If you start putting in an app to track your children and monitor what they do ... any exploit in that is going to have really bad results. And your band-aid solution slapped together is always going to have exploits. If you poke holes in encryption for law enforcement, law enforcement will never be the only ones who can exploit those holes.
As long as corporations aren't under any legal standard for encryption and security and bear no penalty for doing a bad job, this will always happen. Because they write the stuff which looks cool in a demo, and they may or may not ever get around to realizing they've been totally inept at security. And if they do realize they've been inept at security, they're likely to do nothing.
Almost without fail, these schemes of "won't someone think of the children" or "yarg, teh terrorists" end up with stupid solutions being implemented by people without a clue. And almost without fail someone loudly says "this has huge holes and issues in it and won't work".
And almost without fail, this proves to be true.
So, this is unfortunate. But, it's also something which was pretty much 100% predictable as something doomed to fail ... because the people demanding it, and the people implementing it are seldom aware of, or qualified to deal with, the security holes created by shit like this.
This was kind of inevitable from the start.
If you institute something to track your children under the guise of protecting your children ... you better be damned sure you're doing it to the highest possible standard. Otherwise, all you're doing it creating the situations where you're going to make this information available to someone else.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.