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from the reality-distortion-field-is-impenetrable dept.
Chris Smith writes that Apple CEO Tim Cook, speaking during the WWDC 2014 opening keynote, took clear hits at his company's main rival, making fun of Google's Android several times. "Over 130 million customers who bought an iOS device in the past 12 months, were buying their first iOS device," Cook said. "Now, many of these customers were switchers from Android." "They had bought an Android phone... by mistake," Cook added, igniting the crowd in attendance, "and then sought a better experience, and a better life, and decided to check iPhone and iOS." Cook went on to say that nearly half of Apple's customers in China in the past six months came from Android.
Cook took another hit at Google for its fragmentation issues. "If you look at a broader group, over a third of [Android] customers, are running a version of Android from four years ago," Cook said. "That's like ancient history." Cook also addressed Android's vulnerability to malware. "Android dominates the mobile malware market," the exec said, because of its fragmentation. "No wonder experts are saying things like this," Cook said, quoting ZDNet's Adrian Kingsley-Hughes: "Android fragmentation is turning devices into a toxic hellstew of vulnerabilities."
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday June 05 2014, @06:51AM
But shouldn't a phone be able to isolate that chip, so it effectively is its own device (that is, the relation between the chip and the rest of the phone is roughly the same as between a computer and a modem)?
Yes, you cannot get rid of possible vulnerabilities at the phone level (that is, anything you could do also to a dumbphone, like the Java engine in GSM chips). But it should be possible to protect the computer functionality of the smartphone.
I'm pretty sure you meant "couldn't".
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by tibman on Thursday June 05 2014, @01:46PM
If they are separate chips, then yes for sure. You can talk with the GSM/GPRS over TTL serial or something. I think the problem is it is more expensive to isolate peripherals from the cell chip. The microphone for example needs to be connected to the cell chip but controlled externally by "our" chip. So we can completely cut signal to peripherals to prevent unauthorized access. Unfortunately some peripherals are integrated with the cell chip, such as GPS (potentially the most privacy invading one).
Here is an easy to use example: http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/GPRSbee-rev-4-UFL-p-1777.html?cPath=19_20 [seeedstudio.com]
You can drop it into any XBee carrier. There are a lot of hobby platforms out there with XBee shields/capes/breakouts.
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