On Saturday, November 3, 2018, 11:40:28 p.m. EDT, Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler@chello.at> wrote:
You are confirming exactly what I wrote:
Leslie S Satenstein wrote:
> We have a 3 inch by 3 inch android box for our TV. I have 2000
> channels, and many options for email setup, youtube, movies, etc.It can
> accept a keyboard as a remote wireless device. It is an excellent IOT.
>
> That box has no hard disk, just some ram for cache and buffering and a SOC
> (software on a chip) Cost in Canada --$100.00
When you have a security hole on that device, you have no way to fix it.
> Amazon and Google sell andoid devices that take speech and provide
> results.
All the commands you give to those devices are sent to Amazon's or Google's
servers for processing. They can be given to a human (that happens more
often than you realize, the automatic voice recognition is nowhere near as
good as they claim, so they have many dictation typers), automatically used
to control advertising, etc. And the device can even mishear the trigger
("Alexa" or "Hey Google") when you haven't even said it and then start
recording and sending everything you say to the company. There are
documented cases of that happening.
> With those devices, you can see a whole range of new applications, such as
> refrigerator alarms, etc.
But also a whole range of security holes and privacy invasions.
> There is no worry if the IOT is locked source. The android app is in JS,
> and can be reprogrammed for use under Linux.
Can you even access that JavaScript as a user and is it legal to modify it?
If it were so easy to make it work under GNU/Linux, why do you need Android
at all?
> They also use the cloud for hard disk storage.
That means they are sending all their private data to some external provider
who can read everything! (Even if they claim to encrypt the data, can you
verify that, and also that the encryption is sound and not backdoored, if
the client supposedly doing the encryption is proprietary and obfuscated?
The encryption might even be done on the server side, leaving open an
obvious backdoor to get at the unencrypted data, while still technically
satisfying the claim that your data is encrypted.)
> I am looking forward to live video and video conferencing with KDE, as we
> do on my cellphone with facebook.
There are already Free as in speech video conferencing applications. The
issue is that both sides need to use them and that hardly anybody does. The
Free Software applications are typically interoperable with each other,
using one of a handful open standards to communicate, but that does not help
if everybody is using some proprietary walled garden with vendor lock-in
such as Skype or WhatsApp.
> I expect that many cellphone functions will arrive onto Linux and be
> functioning with KDE or (gasp) Gnome.
It would be nice to have some of that functionality, but only if it is
implemented in a way that does not destroy our freedom, security, and
privacy.
Kevin Kofler
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