- Google on Tuesday released the second annual security report on its “toxic hellstew of vulnerabilities,” or what the rest of us know as Android.
Maybe I won't get an Android when I finally get my smart phone: resolution: before September 2016. OK already.
There are a few ways to avoid being in that 29%. 1. Get a device that runs stock android e.g., nexus phones. 2. Get whatever device you want, then root and flash it with an actively maintained rom. This will be more difficult with some devices than others. 3. Don't get an android device. That leaves Windows phone (why torture yourself?), iPhone (what is customization?), and Blackberry (is Blackberry still relevant?). 4. Don't get a smart phone. 5. Relinquish all of your worldly possessions, and meditate under the Bodhi Tree until you reach enlightenment. I'm currently transitioning from state 2 to state 4. I've turned my Note 3 into a dumb phone in preparation for my return to the world of flip phones and no apps.
That feels really weird to me that someone wouldn't know what a flip phone is. I've had a smart phone longer than I've had any other type of phone, but the idea of a basic cell phone never left me. I suppose there is an entire group of younger folks who have only ever owned a smartphone, which is a little surreal and a little frightening. Maybe it's just me, but I feel like something is lost when you have the internet at your fingertips 24/7. I am by no means a luddite; I'm a programming student, after all. I do, however, think that moderation is a good idea when it comes to technology. That's just my 2¢, though.
Think of a smartphone as "laptop lite," not "better flip-phone," and I think that might help answer your question. Since you don't have a smartphone, you know objectively "no apps" and "no wifi," but what that means is: - no online banking at my fingertips so I always know how much money I have - No personal e-mail directly at my fingertips so, for instance, when a recruiter hits me up, i can respond relatively quickly despite being at work (At my work I cannot in any way access personal email, only my work email address) - No MyFitnessPal which allows me to track my calorie consumption throughout the day and monitor my macros, if I care enough to try to meet them - No pedometer/Fitbit/Health app to help me know my step count for the day and if I need to "step it up" a notch to meet my daily goal - No music to listen to (it's all on my smartphone) - Not to mention the apps which are solely for entertainment, which again, especially at work, are pretty nice to have. In response to this, you might say, "Well, you can do all of these things without a smartphone!" and yes, that's true - but with a smartphone, you can do them easily, and you can do them all in one place, and you can access every single one of them almost immediately, without having to page through notes, find trackers you've saved on the computer, run iTunes/YouTube on your work computer, what-have-you. It's a huge difference in experience, where the smartphone allows you to do a ton of different things at once, all in one place, neatly; none of the things I've mentioned are really "entertainment" items, yet they are probably the most frequent ways I use my smartphone on a day-to-day basis. Well, that and texting.
Before I got my first smartphone my Dad warned me to make sure I could afford it long term because as soon as I got it it would be a bill for the rest of my life. Back then I thought he was being ridiculous of course but he was absolutely right. I don't need a smartphone, and if I didn't have one I would likely see more cons than pros while observing others. Sure it's cool that we can look stuff up easily but I'm becoming increasingly more annoyed by how often I see them. If I didn't have one I would see how the bad outweighed the good but since I have one the pros are right in front of my face (ha) so I see them easily. The pros will be different for each person at different points in their life. For myself having a smartphone was great when I couldn't afford to get a laptop because it enabled me to do almost everything I would normally need a laptop for. For a lot of people it's simply an appealing device. It's like carrying a multi tool instead of a bunch of inidivual tools. Except there are no cons to a multi tool whereas there are cons to smartphone which is why we would never have this conversation about multi tools. They're fucking great. So it's perfectly normal that you don't see the appeal behind a smartphone. Just because there are pros to having a smartphone doesn't mean there aren't cons which wreck the appeal of the device. Number of pros alone don't dictate how appealing a device is. There are pros to a lot of things which don't seem appealing because of the cons. The device is appealing to different people because to them the pros outweigh the cons. That's how appeal works in all situations. Those pros and cons change for each person though so trying to "understand the appeal" is a tad useless since each person is different. Sometimes there really are a lot of pros and other times people just ignore the cons like they do with meth so the pros look better.
You honestly do understand the appeal, you just feel like pointing out how retro you are by not needing any of "that stuff." Your phone has a 2500ah battery. It's got 16 hours of talk time and 52 days of "standby" time. My phone has a 2500ah battery and 17 hours of talk time. Do I need to charge it up every night? Yes. Yes I do. But if I turned it off it'd have around 52 days of "standby" time, too. Here, lemme revise your list. PROS: - is phone CONS: - is only phone I probably have an average of one call a day or less. But I got all that shit _refugee_ has and needs and more. I understand that you're very proud of the fact that you don't need any of that shit and good on ya, mate. But suggesting that somehow the rest of us are out of our minds for needing it is ire-raising.
Either you, and everyone you know, has never used snapchat, twitter, vine, facebook, yelp, maps, spotify, tumblr, tinder or the mobile web at all or you're posturing. As you live in a cosmopolitan European city and are under the age of 50, I vote posturing.
Okay. Apology accepted. Sorry for calling you out. Because you seem genuinely confused by what happened, I suggest you consider the empathy of the situation. Smartphones are all over the place. Plenty of people use them for all sorts of stuff. They're hardly a deviant possession. You, yourself, are conversing on an esoteric social network that leans toward technology. And while you do not possess nor desire a smartphone, odds are good that many people here do. You likely have a good sense that your position is the outlier. Yet you do not speak from an outlier footing - you enforce your viewpoint on everyone else: "This is a serious question: why would anyone want a smartphone? Never owned one, don't think I would seriously consider getting one instead of my phone." Your arguments are borderline fatuous - yes, your phone has a keyboard but if you want to text someone you're stuck in the T9 backwater of 2001. And while I'm sure your phone gets great reception, the possession of an operating system does not make reception worse. The fact of the matter is you have no need for LTE, no need for 4G, no need for anything other than the raw voice carrier so really, it's not that you're getting better reception than everyone else it's that your phone is so primitive that you can't use a decent signal. And you're not an idiot. It's not like you haven't thought about this before. It's not that you've succinctly determined that everyone else that possesses a smart phone is completely wrong about their wants and needs. But that's the way you present your argument. Know what wins arguments? Empathy. An understanding of your counterpart's position, argument and logic so that you can address their concerns on their terms. Any casual student of culture will recognize that people with smart phones use them too much, not too little so arguing that they're irrelevant only serves to alienate yourself from the person you're addressing. And we know we're not weird. Anybody walking into a store right now is about three times as likely to buy a smartphone as a conventional handpiece. So if you're going to argue that three out of four people own something they don't need, you should probably start by acknowledging the truth on the ground that you're the outlier, not them.
Might be a good idea then to not start the discussion with statements like these: I honestly have no idea what is the appeal. 'Not fitting your needs right now' is completely different from 'I don't see any appeal for any person'. Anyway, do you know the saying "don't knock it 'till you tried it"? How much time have you spent with smartphones? Genuine question. The thing about smartphones is that you can do so many things with it that it's extremely likely that a smartphone will enhance your life.This is a serious question: why would anyone want a smartphone? [...]
I've read your bio before. I was going to respond to your first paragraph more extensively, but saw that kleinbl00 already stole my thunder. Go read the book he recommends, I am also reading it and enjoying it. The main reason I wrote that it might not be a good idea to phrase it that way is that even though you stated your honesty pretty clearly, your tone and pros / cons didn't really made that believable. Try replacing 'smartphone' with 'laptop' in your post and it might become more clear; it's what _refugee_ was arguing. Kleinbl00, combining your response to ref with your original post, also noticed the discontinuity in your statements and thus thought you might be intentionally flippant. I think that was a reasonable statement to make. And yeah, most flimsy smartphones have dumb touchscreens that aren't perfect but it is a price well worth paying for the insane amount of use most people get out of it. Have you taken a look around the app stores, like beyond the well-known brand apps? There are so many niche apps, like for tracking sleep or predicting when your train arrives or giving you a Pomodoro timer or for tracking cryptocurrency or for having all the world's knowledge in your hands. Plus, go visit a Media Markt sometime - the phones there are actually not that different from what the rest of Europe has.
Serious answer, it's not a phone, it's a multi tool. Some of the things I use it for or have used it for. Computer (and all that that entails) Calculator Flashlight Map Alarm Clock Phone MP3 Player News Paper Remote Control for my TV Camera Watch Book (dictionary anywhere, encyclopedia anywhere) Compass Level Ruler It's worse at some of these things than a dedicated device would be but it's better at others. If you "honestly" can't see an appeal than you don't have much imagination. I was late to the cell phone game but once you've replaced a few of the needs above with a single device it's hard to go back. I wish it had a pocket knife on it.
I don't think it's a mistake. You are free to have your own preferences but to pretend that there is no perceivable utility or appeal to smart phone when compared to a classic cell phone doesn't seem like a realistic stance in my opinion. Not valuing the greater utility of a smart phone in light of the downsides can be a rational exercise of personal preference.
Lol, I can see the utility of having a car but I don't own one, same for cable TV. I could name a bunch of other things others can't live without which I eschew but I don't deny that they give pleasure and utility to those who possess them I really don't question tour decision but to say you can't see why someone would have a smartphone is silly. Edit And sorry that I'm at work and can't read whatever's being said on other parts of the post.
Let's run the numbers: 1) Quote "toxic hellstew of vulnerabilities" taken from April 2014 2) Report referenced isn't this year's, it's 2015's 3) Statistics referenced aren't this year's, they're 2014's here's the actual report: (PHAs), or applications that may harm a device, harm the device’s user, or do something unintended with user data. On average, less than 0.5% of devices had a PHA installed during 2015 and devices that only installed applications from Google Play averaged less than 0.15%. "Unpatchable" means "users can't have the problem automatically fixed by having an over-the-air update" it doesn't mean "unfixable" - With that in mind, I would recommend vulnerable users activate the NoScript extension on their mobile browsers. This add-on disables all JavaScript by default in a browser, giving users the option to activate JavaScript on websites they trust and to leave it deactivated on sites that they don't. Meanwhile... __________________ There's some real apples'n'oranges shit going on here. For one thing, Apple gets rid of those "unpatchable" phones that are out there by saying they 'are no longer supported.' As the manufacturer and the software provider, they can do that. If you're running Android, it's pretty well up to the manufacturer to keep you updated and since they're mostly tied into carriers, it's a shitshow. For another thing, the reporter bent over backwards to make that "29%" number relevant when there is zero current data to support it. Not saying there aren't some seriously bad aspects to Android - that quote from the report literally says that more than one apps in a thousand in Google's own Play store are malware. But there will be consequences from carrying a computer around in your pocket. Far better to be aware of them than in fear of them.The largest threat was installation of Potentially Harmful Applications
JavaScript appears to be an integral part of this exploit.
Both Google Nexus and Motorola phones have a good track record for security upgrades. I'm on my 2nd Motorola phone and I think it's a great device. Don't buy a phone from your carrier, it will be saddled with bloatwear and you will receive many updates on the carrier's slower update schecual. With over 14 billion Android devices, it's pretty easy to be one of the 70% or 10 billion that can and do recive security upgrades. Every device is insecure to some extent, the only way to avoid it is to compleatly unplug. I almost never buy anything with my phone and I don't use it for banking. I don't make purchases over open wifi either. Might not matter but it makes me less paranoid.
Uhhhhhh.... who cares? This is one of my pet peeves about security vulnerabilities. It seems that nobody actually has a formal way of describing what devices get impacted and how they get impacted by certain vulnerabilities, just the severity level which for Heartbleed was obviously critical. Did/do Android devices use OpenSSL? Yes. Do they have the code that is responsible for Heartbleed on them? Yes. Does Android ever call those lines of code? NO, unless you are doing something really weird with your phone (and it would likely require you to root it to do that weird thing). Heartbleed exploits the SSL Heartbeat command and requires you to have an open port to exploit. Heartbleed only affects SSL servers, not clients. If your Android phone is unpatched for Heartbleed it doesn't matter, because you are only using your phone as an SSL client. Most vendors probably thought, "Who cares? Let's patch our datacenters which are actually vulnerable to attack." The only way I can imagine you getting affected by Heartbleed is if you were running your Android phone as a security camera connected to the open internet with a port forwarded through your router. The port forwarded through your router part is crucial, because most people use the various Android apps to do home security cameras which sends your camera footage through the internet as an SSL client, since port forwarding on routers is such a PITA for the average person. Yes there are problems with unpatched phones and especially Android ones, but you can't treat every vulnerability equally, even critical ones. Heartbleed didn't affect 99.9% of Android phones, so who cares. Think of it like having IE5 installed on your computer. Is it vulnerable? Yes. Are you using it? If you're running Firefox or Chrome, the vulnerable code is on your computer but not running or exploitable, much like the code behind Heartbleed on phones.You might recall that ZDNet’s Adrian Kingsley-Hughes bestowed this memorable and burbly description on Google’s mobile operating system two years ago, when Android device vendors were lagging in patching vulnerabilities such as Heartbleed on their devices.