Firefox SECRETLY storing your login credentials?

On Tue, 11 Dec 2018 10:22:25 -0500, nospam
wrote:

In article , default
wrote:

Just because the phone appears to be turned off, doesn't mean it is.

yes it does.

Anyone can download an app that can turn it into a surveillance
device.

they could, but they'd have to launch it for it to take effect.

Once it is on the phone the phone can be remotely monitored it doesn't
require that the app be launched.

yes it does.

You don't understand how microprocessors work.

oh yes i do.

The android operating system (any/every OS) is programmed into a chip.
It is not carved in silicon, it is in a "protected" area of memory,
but it can be accessed and modified.

not easily, it can't.

It's very easy if you know how, but there's one hell of a learning
curve.

The processor chip has to (it is a requirement) to allow for something
called interrupts where it is told to break the routine it is running
and go off and do something else. That is done on a "machine level"
(totally ones and zeros in registers - memory locations- that makes
little sense to humans)

including you.

That is true. I do very little with machine language, I know enough
to peek and poke - look at a register or jamb a value into one, if I
know where in hell it is.

I don't consider myself able to use assembly language most days.
That's just a little better than machine language.

That's what all the talk is about wanting the source code- nobody can
read one's and zeros and make sense out of it. If you have the actual
high-level program you have a long arduous task to figure out what it
is doing - unless you have the program with the notations that tell
what it is doing.

The first few programs I wrote I didn't do any notations because it
seemed easy enough to tell what was going on. A few months later I
had no clue as to how the program I wrote actually worked.

It would be child's play for someone (with the knowledge) to integrate
a few snippets of code that runs in the background and never alerts
the operator (malicious code does it all the time - the processor
doesn't know the difference)

nope. it's definitely not child's play and requires *much* more than a
few snippets of code to run in the background.

Nope. That's where the operating system comes in. All you want to do
is use functions that someone else has programmed into the system.
Your code is just a line or two to tell the other code to run.

An operating system is a pretty difficult thing to design, but that
doesn't stop people from using computers. It is just another step
deeper into the workings to get it to do the things you dream up.

I don't consider myself a programmer, there are guys way way better
than I. I program controllers (little computers with limited
abilities or dedicated purposes) with a high level computer language.


The phone doesn't have an on-off switch, it has a pushbutton that
sends a request to the processor to send it into a hibernate state.
(that is what "off" is to you) The battery is still connected and
still feeding a trickle of power to the processor. The uP can wake
itself periodically to check some variable (like sound, light,
movement, etc.) It can go to sleep and wake up for a few microseconds
every second or less with minimal change in battery drain.

nope.

the on/off switch is managed by a separate power management chip,
completely separate from the main cpu.

It used to be done that way. These days the processor has that and
more built into it.

the main cpu is *off*. it's far too power hungry to be on all the time
waiting for a button press.

Yeah that seems logical if you are thinking of a processor burning up
6 watts doing millions of operations per second. That isn't how it is
done today. The processor sleeps in between periodic waking to see if
it is wanted. My controllers, for instance, can output a steady pulse
width modulated signal to keep a motor turning at a fixed speed even
if the main part of the processor is sleeping.. it can't make
decisions or change the speed of the motor, but it can output just
what it needs to run at one speed, and that doesn't eat a lot of
power.

The chips designed for phones, and tablets are designed differently
than those for desktops. I suspect they will eventually replace all
desktop processors too. I've got at least one Windows computer with
no fan in it that can run anything from WinXP and up.

As long as the battery is connected and charged, the phone is not off,
it is just hibernating and waiting for a button push.

only the power management chip is on. the rest of the device is off,
including the radios, which means *it* cannot be remotely accessed.

Yeah the radios are power hogs. (right up there with the leds that
light the screen) That doesn't mean it can't just switch on and off
long enough to send out what it has recorded. It is the radio
transmitters that use a lot of energy the receivers use little.

An hour of fairly high fidelity audio can be compressed into 50
megabytes and that can be dumped in about three seconds at 150 Mbps.

The company you bought your phone from, programs them wirelessly using
wireless capability already built into wireless phones.

no they definitely don't. not even close to correct.

You are ignorant of the way cell phones work.

They don't
open them up and tinker with the guts - they are sales people and
wouldn't know how, but they do know how to access your phone and
activate it even if they don't know what activation entails.

also wrong.

I program controllers that use all the same things a cell phone does.

cell phones don't use the same controllers you use.

They don't, but they work the same and have the same capabilities. The
uP in a cell phone can do more and faster is the only real difference.
(well, that and the cost)

I needed a device to behave differently (refuse to come on when it was
dark out). I just had it wake itself every 15 minutes and check the
light and when it sensed enough light it would allow the operator to
turn it on and become active. The operator didn't know what the
processor was doing only that it didn't do anything when it was dark.

That could just as easily been a sound and I could program it to check
for noise every second and it would still get plenty of sleep time and
not drain the battery...

not relevant to a cellphone.

Relevant to how the processor in a cell phone can be made to work to
conserve battery capacity.

A cell phone can do the same things and you would never have to know
about it. It could, for instance, record every conversation nearby
and store it digitally in a compressed format, time stamp it, stamp
the GPS coordinates, etc.. I could have it wait until it was by a
wifi, or cell phone tower, and dump the recorded conversations in one
fast burst transmission. Even if the phone was in a faraday shield it
could still be recording and only phone home when it was let out.
Minimal battery drain too....

only if an app was running and definitely not minimal battery drain.

That may have been the case in 1990, but with cmos and all the
advances in depletion and enhancement mode mos devices that no longer
holds true.

I know you'd like to think that apps need permission and all, and IF
the people vetting the apps are doing their jobs that is true. But
you can't check the app yourself to see if it is doing what it claims.

false.

it's very easy to determine which apps are running and how much data
they're using.

also, the phone would be warmer than normal if it was transmitting back
to some outside entity and the battery would be dead in hours.

They say ignorance is bliss.

That's where the spy apps you can buy operate. Most of them need
physical access to a cell phone to put the app on them, but once it is
on there, it can hide it's operation from the OS and the operator.

exactly what i said, that physical access is required to modify the
phone.

The applications sold for consumer use that is true. You either have
to have the phone long enough to install the app or have the target
open a file that can exploit a vulnerability in the operating system.
You don't need the phone if you can trick it into installing the app
by opening some file that seems unrelated.

Spyware doesn't advertise it's presence, that would be
counter-productive.

And when was the last time you read the boiler plate legal statements
laughingly referred to as "privacy statements?" You can often find
the legalese written in such a way as to allow, just what they seem to
be telling you they would never do. A team of Philadelphia lawyers
might understand privacy statements but they are often written to
obfuscate, not enlighten.

the legal statements do not give free access to monitor and record user
actions.

You base this opinion on your many years of service to the bar? In
what state?

The feds can do pretty much the same things, without even having the
phone anywhere nearby; as long as it is communicating with cell towers
or wifi. They are using the same technology that the cell phone
company uses to program your phone.

no they can't, and the cell phone company doesn't program anything.

you have no clue about this stuff.

The guppy that doesn't realize exactly how tiny it really is.

Most folks get their phone and look at the pretty screen and think,
"how nice it has the weather." That weather app knows your GPS
location and it can just as easily tell someone where that phone is,
if it is part of it's program. Nearly all apps have the ability to
"update." Every time you turn the phone on, or periodically, it may
be checking for dozens of app updates and sending your location back
to someone else.

checking the weather is not the same as secretly recording audio or
video.

Data mining companies are big business, there's money in it.

quite a bit, however, that has nothing to do with hacking people's
phones.

You, my friend, are a guppy swimming in shark infested waters and are
blissfully unaware of it.

ad hominem.

unlike you i'm *very* aware of what can and cannot be done.

Someday you may learn how wrong you are.

I take the paranoid viewpoint and only discover that things are worse
than I thought they were. When money is involved veracity is elusive.

Stumbled upon this:
https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-tha...y-is-installed

All depends on your understanding what it means that a phone is turned
off.

As far as my testing has shown, a turned off iphone has really
disconnected from the cellular and wifi networks. The ip addresses is
liberated and can be re-used by other devices. As such, it would not
be possible to initiate a remote wake-up through a “wake-on-lan”
packet in order to send location data.

But, since most phone firmware’s are closed source - it could
theoretically be possible that a phone could be instructed to go into
a deep sleep, and power up at regular intervals to do some hidden
communication. This certainly is not used widely as people on prepay
systems would have noticed mobile data usage. If this is indeed used,
it would involve government ordered snooping, infiltration in many
organisations (telco and IT), which I’m certain is actually happening.

ps: I worked for a telecom operator as integration specialist part of
Legal Interception department.

On Tue, 11 Dec 2018 12:12:33 -0500, nospam
wrote:

In article , default
wrote:

I know my Tracphone is off when I turn it
off because the charge will last for months and
it can't get calls. It could certainly have some
kind of beacon in it, but that seems very unlikely.
It only cost $10.

exactly.

if your phone was transmitting to some outside entity, the battery
would be dead within hours.

That's only true if the phone is fully functioning.

which it would have to be to spy on someone.

It could still
record audio with just a tiny smidgen of the power it takes to receive
and transmit. Compress the audio and transmit in a burst and you'd
never know it by the battery capacity.

nope. recording audio would require an app to be running, and that
means the phone is powered on and fully operational.

you would definitely notice a dead battery when you turned it on, or
tried to.

if it received a call or text while 'off', you'd definitely know
something unusual was going on.

You wouldn't know if a background program was running.

nonsense. of course someone would.

The uP is
always on. In a well designed secure system it is only supposed to be
checking the power button every few milliseconds.

the cpu isn't what's checking the power button.

But off and
hibernate are not the same thing.

that's the point.

The little controllers I like to
use have: sleep, nap, rest, and hibernate. They all save the battery
life, but there is no such thing as off. The different sleep states
are just there because some functions can be programmed to run while
the thing is sleeping...

those little controllers you supposedly like to use have nothing to do
with how cellphones work.

It only shuts down when the battery drops below a certain level,
that's an automatic function designed to prolong battery life, but I
can tell it to ignore that feature and let it run until it hasn't got
enough energy to function. Not a good practice with rechargeable
batteries but acceptable for disposable batteries or super capacitors
- the chip only does what it was programmed to do.

actually, you can't, since the battery has its own microcontroller,
which will shut down when the charge is too low.

and there's still the question how a phone that's off can be remotely
turned on by some magical signal that is received by a radio that's
off.

I don't know about Android and iPhone, but I'm
guessing that people think off means the screen
is black because few people actually turn them
off.

you guess wrong.

people are well aware of the difference between sleep versus fully off.

people don't turn off their phones because if they did, they would not
be able to receive calls, texts and push notifications. it would also
take a minute or two to boot if they wanted to use an app or call/text
someone.

It can be on and still act as if it is off. You have no way of
telling without some pretty sophisticated test equipment, and even
then, if I thought it may be monitored I'd find a way for it to hide
all activity until the threat passed.

nonsense. it's very easy to tell if a phone is truly off or only
pretending to be off.

they also might be listening to music, podcasts or internet radio with
the phone in their pocket, screen off.

The condition of the screen doesn't indicate what the phone is doing,
it is just there so the operator can tell what it wants you to know or
allow you to do.

you're still not getting it.

Well, I can't help you there.

It has been my experience that people tend to believe what makes them
feel most secure. That's what they want to believe, and the majority
do it that way. I figure it has something to do with an evolutionary
factor that made them better at surviving.

From a tribal perspective you want cooperation not competition if the
species is as weak (physically) as humanity is. The majority will
function better if they are not overly anxious about their survival
prospects and just go along with the leaders (who are determined by
strength and competitive edge)

But that's just a theory, not my field of study, and I digress...

Believe what you want to believe, that's your right. Try to remember
one thing: Anyone can teach me something, no one has the same
experience that I do or the same perspective that I do. I have to
able to learn - teaching is passive, learning is active.

On Tue, 11 Dec 2018 12:12:36 -0500, nospam
wrote:

In article , default
wrote:


Not even off is off. The processor just sits there and periodically
wakes up and checks the condition of the push button to see if someone
is trying to turn it on.

nope. it's the power management chip checks that. the processor is far
too power hungry to be checking for a button press and only powers on
if the pmu tells it to.

The move of large scale integration is to have more and more done by a
single part. It lowers manufacturing costs. Cell phones are nearly
ubiquitous and they cram as much specialized function on the single
die as they can.

From a design point of view, if the processor uses just a few micro
amps of current in the off state I'll let it decide when the button is
pressed. The battery capacity is on the order of thousands of
milliamp hours for the sake of argument say your cell phone is one
amp/hour, and you need 1 micro amp to monitor the condition of the
on-off switch it will take a million hours to discharge the battery.
Check my math, but that's about 114 years! The battery would self
discharge sooner, the cell phone would be obsolete sooner, and the
original owner would be pushing up daisies.

you're ignoring self-discharge and other factors.

No. I specifically mentioned self discharge, four lines up from your
comment.

Up that to 25 micro amps while in a surveillance mode (not
unreasonable) and the battery life is cut to ~5 years.

still wrong.

Now, if you want Video, pictures, gps, and second by second real time
surveillance it should be noticeable to most people.

that's the point.

What's the point? You want that stuff real time? If the phone is
turned off and you want to hide battery drain, you can't have it.
Can't be done. (can't be done in real time)

If the phone is on (and the data needs to be current) you'd never know
it was under surveillance by the battery life.

But a lot has to
do with the way you do it and how current and complete the data you
are collecting has to be. A clever software designer will find ways
to maximize the battery life with various tricks in hardware and
software. If the person uses the phone or keeps it on for incoming
calls, you'd never notice the difference surveillance adds.

false.
ignorant

If your phone is a 3G tablet computer, your battery is probably going
to be in the 3,000 milliamp/hour range. The hand held phones are in
the 500-1000 range last time I checked.

check again.

Older iphones are 1400 mah; but you are correct, the newer XS models
are pushing 3K to keep their 5.8" screen alive

smartphone batteries are typically in the 3000 mah range, with tablets
in the 5000-10k mah range.

My old 10" tablet is 7K, this year's model is 10K.

On Tue, 11 Dec 2018 12:12:34 -0500, nospam
wrote:

In article , Paul
wrote:

and there's still the question how a phone that's off can be remotely
turned on by some magical signal that is received by a radio that's
off.

RFID-like schemes transmit enough power to run
circuitry. You could do it that way.

no you couldn't. the range of rfid is *very* short and it requires the
device to be powered on

It is indeed very short, a few feet as a rule. But RFID does not
require self-power it rectifies energy inductively coupled into it via
a loop antenna then uses that energy to transmit its data.

To do that city wide, would just take a powerful
transmitter, operating on some frequency other
than the cellphone frequency. The addressed
responding device, only has to operate its
transmitter and regular receiver, long enough
to ping back. That wouldn't run the battery
down too much, since the regular circuitry
goes back to sleep until the passive RFID
chunk receives another burst of energy
during the next ping.

no.

It wouldn't be feasible city wide maybe. You'd have tens of thousands
of tags trying to squawk their data to receivers that would have to be
nearby because their transmit power is too low.

On 11/12/2018 18:41, default wrote, amonst other things, ...

Someday you may learn how wrong you are.

I take the paranoid viewpoint and only discover that things are worse
than I thought they were. When money is involved veracity is elusive.

I've really enjoyed your post! :-)

It's rather satisfying to see the bull****ter called 'nospam' put firmly
in his place! Thank you!

--
Regards,
David B.

On Tue, 11 Dec 2018 17:50:59 -0500, nospam
wrote:

In article , default
wrote:

Just because the phone appears to be turned off, doesn't mean it is.

yes it does.

Anyone can download an app that can turn it into a surveillance
device.

they could, but they'd have to launch it for it to take effect.

Once it is on the phone the phone can be remotely monitored it doesn't
require that the app be launched.

yes it does.

You don't understand how microprocessors work.

oh yes i do.

The android operating system (any/every OS) is programmed into a chip.
It is not carved in silicon, it is in a "protected" area of memory,
but it can be accessed and modified.

not easily, it can't.

It's very easy if you know how, but there's one hell of a learning
curve.

even if someone knows how, it's still incredibly difficult. there needs
to be multiple exploits *and* a payload that works across many
different devices without causing any other problem.


An ordinary computer virus might work across many devices, but here we
are only talking about a specific targeted device with a known OS.

and then there's the problem of getting it installed, which *requires*
*physical* *access* to the device.

That is 100% wrong. For some consumer level spy programs it may be
true, but not government level hacking especially when they can bring
pressure to bear on the cell provider.

even assuming all of that happens, if the user decides to update the
os, the hack will be overwritten with a system that has one or more of
the exploits, likely all of them, patched, making it not possible to
reinstall it (plus the hacker would need physical access again).

You think the whole OS is rewritten when you do an update? I don't
know for a fact but I suspect the phone's memory limitations, might
make that unwieldy enough to make it impractical. My wife has one of
the win 10 net books and it has yet to complete a single update
successfully - the 32 gigs of system storage is not enough from the
looks of it.

if the user thinks something's not quite right, which is likely if it's
spying on them, and they do a reinstall of the existing os, the hack is
gone.

Do you know anyone that has installed an OS from scratch on a cell
phone? If it can be done, something I'm skeptical about, how many
people could do it? I think you'd have bricked phones as a result. I
managed to do it to an android TV box, but that's not something I will
attempt again, since it took me a week to get back to square one.

The processor chip has to (it is a requirement) to allow for something
called interrupts where it is told to break the routine it is running
and go off and do something else. That is done on a "machine level"
(totally ones and zeros in registers - memory locations- that makes
little sense to humans)

including you.

That is true. I do very little with machine language, I know enough
to peek and poke - look at a register or jamb a value into one, if I
know where in hell it is.

I don't consider myself able to use assembly language most days.
That's just a little better than machine language.

then why did you bring up machine language and interrupts as a method
to hack a phone?

Because all processor chips allow peek, poke and debug, and with tools
like that you can do pretty much whatever you like - I, on the other
hand am not it that class of programmer but I can and do get help when
I need it.

That's what all the talk is about wanting the source code- nobody can
read one's and zeros and make sense out of it. If you have the actual
high-level program you have a long arduous task to figure out what it
is doing - unless you have the program with the notations that tell
what it is doing.

the source code is not always available, and that doesn't get you past
the code signing.

The first few programs I wrote I didn't do any notations because it
seemed easy enough to tell what was going on. A few months later I
had no clue as to how the program I wrote actually worked.

then it wasn't written particularly well.

It was written OK, but with no notation I couldn't remember how it all
fit together.

It would be child's play for someone (with the knowledge) to integrate
a few snippets of code that runs in the background and never alerts
the operator (malicious code does it all the time - the processor
doesn't know the difference)

nope. it's definitely not child's play and requires *much* more than a
few snippets of code to run in the background.

Nope. That's where the operating system comes in. All you want to do
is use functions that someone else has programmed into the system.
Your code is just a line or two to tell the other code to run.

it doesn't work that way.

Your ignorance is showing again.

operating systems don't come with a built in 'spy' function that's
waiting for a line or two in some rogue app to call it.

Who said anything about a spy function. They already have the
equivalent of tape recorders, cameras, audio recorders and
transmitters - or in other words everything you might want in a
surveillance device.

An operating system is a pretty difficult thing to design, but that
doesn't stop people from using computers. It is just another step
deeper into the workings to get it to do the things you dream up.

it's more than 'another step' to hack a phone, especially when the os
is designed to be secure.

Ah, yess... the legendary security of operating systems. I've got
this bridge over in Brooklyn that I want to sell, are you interested?

I don't consider myself a programmer, there are guys way way better
than I. I program controllers (little computers with limited
abilities or dedicated purposes) with a high level computer language.

programming a microcontroller has absolutely nothing to do with hacking
a cellphone. two wildly different scenarios.

You are becoming tiresome. Honest ignorance is one thing, stubborn
stupidity is more than I wish to deal with. You have earned your
place in the bozo bin. Congrats!

In article , default
wrote:

Just because the phone appears to be turned off, doesn't mean it is.

yes it does.

Anyone can download an app that can turn it into a surveillance
device.

they could, but they'd have to launch it for it to take effect.

Once it is on the phone the phone can be remotely monitored it doesn't
require that the app be launched.

yes it does.

You don't understand how microprocessors work.

oh yes i do.

The android operating system (any/every OS) is programmed into a chip.
It is not carved in silicon, it is in a "protected" area of memory,
but it can be accessed and modified.

not easily, it can't.

It's very easy if you know how, but there's one hell of a learning
curve.

even if someone knows how, it's still incredibly difficult. there needs
to be multiple exploits *and* a payload that works across many
different devices without causing any other problem.

and then there's the problem of getting it installed, which *requires*
*physical* *access* to the device.

even assuming all of that happens, if the user decides to update the
os, the hack will be overwritten with a system that has one or more of
the exploits, likely all of them, patched, making it not possible to
reinstall it (plus the hacker would need physical access again).

if the user thinks something's not quite right, which is likely if it's
spying on them, and they do a reinstall of the existing os, the hack is
gone.

The processor chip has to (it is a requirement) to allow for something
called interrupts where it is told to break the routine it is running
and go off and do something else. That is done on a "machine level"
(totally ones and zeros in registers - memory locations- that makes
little sense to humans)

including you.

That is true. I do very little with machine language, I know enough
to peek and poke - look at a register or jamb a value into one, if I
know where in hell it is.

I don't consider myself able to use assembly language most days.
That's just a little better than machine language.

then why did you bring up machine language and interrupts as a method
to hack a phone?

That's what all the talk is about wanting the source code- nobody can
read one's and zeros and make sense out of it. If you have the actual
high-level program you have a long arduous task to figure out what it
is doing - unless you have the program with the notations that tell
what it is doing.

the source code is not always available, and that doesn't get you past
the code signing.

The first few programs I wrote I didn't do any notations because it
seemed easy enough to tell what was going on. A few months later I
had no clue as to how the program I wrote actually worked.

then it wasn't written particularly well.

It would be child's play for someone (with the knowledge) to integrate
a few snippets of code that runs in the background and never alerts
the operator (malicious code does it all the time - the processor
doesn't know the difference)

nope. it's definitely not child's play and requires *much* more than a
few snippets of code to run in the background.

Nope. That's where the operating system comes in. All you want to do
is use functions that someone else has programmed into the system.
Your code is just a line or two to tell the other code to run.

it doesn't work that way.

operating systems don't come with a built in 'spy' function that's
waiting for a line or two in some rogue app to call it.

An operating system is a pretty difficult thing to design, but that
doesn't stop people from using computers. It is just another step
deeper into the workings to get it to do the things you dream up.

it's more than 'another step' to hack a phone, especially when the os
is designed to be secure.

I don't consider myself a programmer, there are guys way way better
than I. I program controllers (little computers with limited
abilities or dedicated purposes) with a high level computer language.

programming a microcontroller has absolutely nothing to do with hacking
a cellphone. two wildly different scenarios.

The phone doesn't have an on-off switch, it has a pushbutton that
sends a request to the processor to send it into a hibernate state.
(that is what "off" is to you) The battery is still connected and
still feeding a trickle of power to the processor. The uP can wake
itself periodically to check some variable (like sound, light,
movement, etc.) It can go to sleep and wake up for a few microseconds
every second or less with minimal change in battery drain.

nope.

the on/off switch is managed by a separate power management chip,
completely separate from the main cpu.

It used to be done that way. These days the processor has that and
more built into it.

other way around.

it used to be done with the main processor, but now there are dedicated
chips for various other functions.

the main cpu is *off*. it's far too power hungry to be on all the time
waiting for a button press.

Yeah that seems logical if you are thinking of a processor burning up
6 watts doing millions of operations per second. That isn't how it is
done today.

for smartphones, it definitely is done that way. 3-5 watts tdp is
typical.

The processor sleeps in between periodic waking to see if
it is wanted.

not entirely, it doesn't. it throttles up and down based on what it's
doing. a lot of background processes are running at all times.

My controllers, for instance, can output a steady pulse
width modulated signal to keep a motor turning at a fixed speed even
if the main part of the processor is sleeping.. it can't make
decisions or change the speed of the motor, but it can output just
what it needs to run at one speed, and that doesn't eat a lot of
power.

a motor controller is *very* different than a cellphone.

The chips designed for phones, and tablets are designed differently
than those for desktops.

no they aren't.

other than the instruction set (arm versus x86) and lower tdp, there's
very little difference. both have multi-core cpus and gpus, sometimes
with other functionality as well (e.g., npu).

there are now windows laptops with arm chips, which means the
instruction set difference no longer applies.

in other words, the chips in modern phones are desktop class.

I suspect they will eventually replace all
desktop processors too.

they already have. see above. intel is in a bad spot and amd is not
much better.

I've got at least one Windows computer with
no fan in it that can run anything from WinXP and up.

the lack of a fan has absolutely *nothing* to do with chip design.

As long as the battery is connected and charged, the phone is not off,
it is just hibernating and waiting for a button push.

only the power management chip is on. the rest of the device is off,
including the radios, which means *it* cannot be remotely accessed.

Yeah the radios are power hogs. (right up there with the leds that
light the screen) That doesn't mean it can't just switch on and off
long enough to send out what it has recorded. It is the radio
transmitters that use a lot of energy the receivers use little.

An hour of fairly high fidelity audio can be compressed into 50
megabytes and that can be dumped in about three seconds at 150 Mbps.

compressing it would require an app running in the background, in
addition to capturing the audio, and you're assuming 150mbps data link.

and then there's the problem where the user wants to use the microphone
for some other purpose when the spy app has it in use.

The company you bought your phone from, programs them wirelessly using
wireless capability already built into wireless phones.

no they definitely don't. not even close to correct.

You are ignorant of the way cell phones work.

it's not me who is ignorant. i know quite well how cellphones work,
going back to amps days.

the only 'programming' that a phone seller would do is activating it,
which is little more than scanning the imei and iccid, which can be
done by the user on their own.

none of that has anything to do with installing a malicious app on the
phone to spy on the user.

They don't
open them up and tinker with the guts - they are sales people and
wouldn't know how, but they do know how to access your phone and
activate it even if they don't know what activation entails.

also wrong.

I program controllers that use all the same things a cell phone does.

cell phones don't use the same controllers you use.

They don't, but they work the same and have the same capabilities. The
uP in a cell phone can do more and faster is the only real difference.
(well, that and the cost)

false.

the processors in modern phones are desktop class processors with
multi-core cpus, gpus and other functionality.

a microcontroller doesn't need any of that.

I needed a device to behave differently (refuse to come on when it was
dark out). I just had it wake itself every 15 minutes and check the
light and when it sensed enough light it would allow the operator to
turn it on and become active. The operator didn't know what the
processor was doing only that it didn't do anything when it was dark.

That could just as easily been a sound and I could program it to check
for noise every second and it would still get plenty of sleep time and
not drain the battery...

not relevant to a cellphone.

Relevant to how the processor in a cell phone can be made to work to
conserve battery capacity.

nope.

A cell phone can do the same things and you would never have to know
about it. It could, for instance, record every conversation nearby
and store it digitally in a compressed format, time stamp it, stamp
the GPS coordinates, etc.. I could have it wait until it was by a
wifi, or cell phone tower, and dump the recorded conversations in one
fast burst transmission. Even if the phone was in a faraday shield it
could still be recording and only phone home when it was let out.
Minimal battery drain too....

only if an app was running and definitely not minimal battery drain.

That may have been the case in 1990, but with cmos and all the
advances in depletion and enhancement mode mos devices that no longer
holds true.

you definitely have no idea what you're talking about.

I know you'd like to think that apps need permission and all, and IF
the people vetting the apps are doing their jobs that is true. But
you can't check the app yourself to see if it is doing what it claims.

false.

it's very easy to determine which apps are running and how much data
they're using.

also, the phone would be warmer than normal if it was transmitting back
to some outside entity and the battery would be dead in hours.

They say ignorance is bliss.

then you must be super-happy.

That's where the spy apps you can buy operate. Most of them need
physical access to a cell phone to put the app on them, but once it is
on there, it can hide it's operation from the OS and the operator.

exactly what i said, that physical access is required to modify the
phone.

The applications sold for consumer use that is true. You either have
to have the phone long enough to install the app or have the target
open a file that can exploit a vulnerability in the operating system.
You don't need the phone if you can trick it into installing the app
by opening some file that seems unrelated.

that's what i said originally.

Spyware doesn't advertise it's presence, that would be
counter-productive.

however, it existence can be detected, if by no other reason that
battery life will be noticeably worse. another way would be seeing the
device active on a router.

And when was the last time you read the boiler plate legal statements
laughingly referred to as "privacy statements?" You can often find
the legalese written in such a way as to allow, just what they seem to
be telling you they would never do. A team of Philadelphia lawyers
might understand privacy statements but they are often written to
obfuscate, not enlighten.

the legal statements do not give free access to monitor and record user
actions.

You base this opinion on your many years of service to the bar? In
what state?

i base it on the fact that if there was *anything* remotely close to
that, lawyers and privacy advocates would be all over it.

that's actually happened before, and the the companies claimed they
weren't actually spying and quickly modified the agreements.

in any event, feel free to find a license agreement that says what you
claim it does and then link it here.




Someday you may learn how wrong you are.

someday you might learn that it's you who is *very* wrong, although i
doubt that will be any time soon, if ever.

I take the paranoid viewpoint and only discover that things are worse
than I thought they were. When money is involved veracity is elusive.

Stumbled upon this:

https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-tha...mobile-phones-
can-still-be-tracked-if-the-battery-is-installed

you might want to, you know, *read* it first.

As such, it would not be possible to initiate a remote wake-up
through a ³wake-on-lan² packet in order to send location data.
....
But tracking a turned off phone is considered impossible, and rightly
so. When you turn off your phone, it will stop communicating with
nearby cell towers and can be traced only to the location it was in
when it was powered down.
....
It is not possible to track a phone when it is switched off.

thereby confirming exactly what i've been saying.

this part is the most amusing:
³The best way to track an Œoff¹ phone is to ‹ secretly ‹ install a
chip, connected to the phone¹s battery supply"

first of all, that would require physical access of the phone and
second, there isn't any free space in a modern phone for this secret
spy chip to fit.

third, many phones have an internal battery, so some disassembly and
reassembly would be required, all without breaking anything in the
process.

lastly, there's the problem where if there is some sort of problem
requiring service and the user is told that the warranty is void
because it's been modified...

so, no.

In article , default
wrote:


Not even off is off. The processor just sits there and periodically
wakes up and checks the condition of the push button to see if someone
is trying to turn it on.

nope. it's the power management chip checks that. the processor is far
too power hungry to be checking for a button press and only powers on
if the pmu tells it to.

The move of large scale integration is to have more and more done by a
single part. It lowers manufacturing costs.

a single part doesn't preclude multiple components on one chip, and a
pmu isn't very big anyway.

Cell phones are nearly
ubiquitous and they cram as much specialized function on the single
die as they can.

actually, they can't.

they'd *love* to cram quite a bit more than they already do, but
there's a limit to everything.

From a design point of view, if the processor uses just a few micro
amps of current in the off state I'll let it decide when the button is
pressed. The battery capacity is on the order of thousands of
milliamp hours for the sake of argument say your cell phone is one
amp/hour, and you need 1 micro amp to monitor the condition of the
on-off switch it will take a million hours to discharge the battery.
Check my math, but that's about 114 years! The battery would self
discharge sooner, the cell phone would be obsolete sooner, and the
original owner would be pushing up daisies.

you're ignoring self-discharge and other factors.

No. I specifically mentioned self discharge, four lines up from your
comment.

you did mention it, however you are still ignoring it.

Up that to 25 micro amps while in a surveillance mode (not
unreasonable) and the battery life is cut to ~5 years.

still wrong.

Now, if you want Video, pictures, gps, and second by second real time
surveillance it should be noticeable to most people.

that's the point.

What's the point? You want that stuff real time? If the phone is
turned off and you want to hide battery drain, you can't have it.
Can't be done. (can't be done in real time)

it can't be done when the phone is turned off. period.

If the phone is on (and the data needs to be current) you'd never know
it was under surveillance by the battery life.

the reduced battery life would be one of several indicators that
something unusual is going on.

But a lot has to
do with the way you do it and how current and complete the data you
are collecting has to be. A clever software designer will find ways
to maximize the battery life with various tricks in hardware and
software. If the person uses the phone or keeps it on for incoming
calls, you'd never notice the difference surveillance adds.

false.
ignorant

there are many ways to tell, some of which are trivial.

If your phone is a 3G tablet computer, your battery is probably going
to be in the 3,000 milliamp/hour range. The hand held phones are in
the 500-1000 range last time I checked.

check again.

Older iphones are 1400 mah; but you are correct, the newer XS models
are pushing 3K to keep their 5.8" screen alive

smartphone batteries are typically in the 3000 mah range, with tablets
in the 5000-10k mah range.

My old 10" tablet is 7K, this year's model is 10K.

in other words, your initial claim was wrong.

In article , default
wrote:

and there's still the question how a phone that's off can be remotely
turned on by some magical signal that is received by a radio that's
off.

RFID-like schemes transmit enough power to run
circuitry. You could do it that way.

no you couldn't. the range of rfid is *very* short and it requires the
device to be powered on

It is indeed very short, a few feet as a rule.

nope. more like an inch or two.

But RFID does not
require self-power it rectifies energy inductively coupled into it via
a loop antenna then uses that energy to transmit its data.

except that's not going to do much with a phone that's off.

In article , David B.
wrote:

On 11/12/2018 18:41, default wrote, amonst other things, ...
Someday you may learn how wrong you are.

I take the paranoid viewpoint and only discover that things are worse
than I thought they were. When money is involved veracity is elusive.

I've really enjoyed your post! :-)

It's rather satisfying to see the bull****ter called 'nospam' put firmly
in his place! Thank you!

if you understood even a tiny fraction of was being discussed, you
would realize he has not done that at all.

On 11/12/2018 22:51, nospam wrote:
In article , David B.
wrote:

On 11/12/2018 18:41, default wrote, amonst other things, ...
Someday you may learn how wrong you are.

I take the paranoid viewpoint and only discover that things are worse
than I thought they were. When money is involved veracity is elusive.

I've really enjoyed your post! :-)

It's rather satisfying to see the bull****ter called 'nospam' put firmly
in his place! Thank you!

if you understood even a tiny fraction of was being discussed, you
would realize he has not done that at all.

You seem to have no comprehension that spyware/malware may actually be
'built in' to these devices during the manufacturing process, not
afterwards by hacking.

--
Regards,
David B.

In article , David B.
wrote:

You seem to have no comprehension that spyware/malware may actually be
'built in' to these devices during the manufacturing process, not
afterwards by hacking.

they aren't.

nospam wrote:
In article , default
wrote:

and there's still the question how a phone that's off can be remotely
turned on by some magical signal that is received by a radio that's
off.
RFID-like schemes transmit enough power to run
circuitry. You could do it that way.
no you couldn't. the range of rfid is *very* short and it requires the
device to be powered on
It is indeed very short, a few feet as a rule.

nope. more like an inch or two.

But RFID does not
require self-power it rectifies energy inductively coupled into it via
a loop antenna then uses that energy to transmit its data.

except that's not going to do much with a phone that's off.

https://blog.atlasrfidstore.com/acti...s-passive-rfid

Active RFID

Transponders

That's the operating mode of my digital water meter on the house.

The pickup truck driving down the street at 20MPH triggers
the transponder on the side of the house.

Only enough energy from the "reader" is required, to create
an electrical signal to wake the transponder. It doesn't *power*
the transponder radio transmissions, It only *wakes* the
transponder. And there is orders of magnitude difference
in how much "ping" is required.

The "ping" part doesn't have to work at the same frequency
as the transponder uses. It fact, it's better if
they're widely spaced (that pinger might run pretty well
continuously on the pickup truck).

https://www.mouser.com/applications/...gy_harvesting/

"... tens of microwatts at around 40 feet"

As long as the resonant element has sufficient amplitude
on output, it can trigger the logic input of the transponder.
It's the voltage level that counts, rather than the power.
2uA at 3V or 6uW is sufficient to run my digital wrist
watch, The quartz crystal on there seems to be happy
with a fraction of the total device power. In fact, with
quartz crystals, you have to be careful not to drive them
too hard.

I would expect though, that there wouldn't be as good
resonators available for, say, 433MHz. For quartz, it
would be an overtone. There are SAW filters, but
(not being a SAW filter person) I bet those use power
that we don't got. Maybe an LC wouldn't be sharp enough
or have a high enough Q.

Paul

In article , Paul
wrote:

But RFID does not
require self-power it rectifies energy inductively coupled into it via
a loop antenna then uses that energy to transmit its data.

except that's not going to do much with a phone that's off.

https://blog.atlasrfidstore.com/acti...s-passive-rfid

Active RFID

commonly used for toll booth transponders, not cellphones.

a smartphone can *read* a passive tag, but it must be held close to the
tag (inches), powered on and configured to do something for that
specific tag.

it's not a viable method to install malware.

In article , default
wrote:

The android operating system (any/every OS) is programmed into a chip.
It is not carved in silicon, it is in a "protected" area of memory,
but it can be accessed and modified.

not easily, it can't.

It's very easy if you know how, but there's one hell of a learning
curve.

even if someone knows how, it's still incredibly difficult. there needs
to be multiple exploits *and* a payload that works across many
different devices without causing any other problem.

An ordinary computer virus might work across many devices, but here we
are only talking about a specific targeted device with a known OS.

except that you'd need to have multiple versions ready to go ahead of
time for every phone and os since you have no way to know what a yet
unidentified suspect might be using.

there's no time to request and develop a custom version, and you might
not even know what it is anyway.

and then there's the problem of getting it installed, which *requires*
*physical* *access* to the device.

That is 100% wrong.

it isn't, which *your* link confirmed.

do try to keep your story straight.

For some consumer level spy programs it may be
true, but not government level hacking especially when they can bring
pressure to bear on the cell provider.

nope.

the cell provider could turn over call records, text messages, data
usage and location information, but that's about it.

that's *very* different than spying on the user.

the carrier *can't* remotely install apps nor can they activate the
microphone or camera.

if the device owner used an encrypted voice and/or messaging app, there
won't be any call records or text messages to turn over, and if they
used a vpn for data connections, the data usage info is going to be
completely worthless.

even assuming all of that happens, if the user decides to update the
os, the hack will be overwritten with a system that has one or more of
the exploits, likely all of them, patched, making it not possible to
reinstall it (plus the hacker would need physical access again).

You think the whole OS is rewritten when you do an update?

that depends on the update and how it's installed.

except that it doesn't need to rewrite the entire os. all it needs to
do is patch at least one exploit the hack is using, at which point, it
no longer works and might even crash, at which point, a full reinstall
might be done.

I don't
know for a fact but I suspect the phone's memory limitations, might
make that unwieldy enough to make it impractical.

it's not impractical in the least.

My wife has one of
the win 10 net books and it has yet to complete a single update
successfully - the 32 gigs of system storage is not enough from the
looks of it.

that's not a phone. do try to stay on topic.

if the user thinks something's not quite right, which is likely if it's
spying on them, and they do a reinstall of the existing os, the hack is
gone.

Do you know anyone that has installed an OS from scratch on a cell
phone?

oh yes. many, many people.

If it can be done, something I'm skeptical about, how many
people could do it?

most people can, but if not, they can have someone else do it. no big
deal.

I think you'd have bricked phones as a result.

nothing is perfect so that's always possible, however, it's highly
unlikely, but if it does happen, it can usually be debricked.

worst case, take it to a phone store. if it really is bricked, they'll
replace it, in which case whatever hack was supposedly there will be
long gone.

I managed to do it to an android TV box, but that's not something I will
attempt again, since it took me a week to get back to square one.

that's not a phone. do try to stay on topic.

The processor chip has to (it is a requirement) to allow for something
called interrupts where it is told to break the routine it is running
and go off and do something else. That is done on a "machine level"
(totally ones and zeros in registers - memory locations- that makes
little sense to humans)

including you.

That is true. I do very little with machine language, I know enough
to peek and poke - look at a register or jamb a value into one, if I
know where in hell it is.

I don't consider myself able to use assembly language most days.
That's just a little better than machine language.

then why did you bring up machine language and interrupts as a method
to hack a phone?

Because all processor chips allow peek, poke and debug, and with tools
like that you can do pretty much whatever you like -

no they don't. processor chips don't know anything about peek, poke and
debug. that's where the os and development tools comes in.

I, on the other
hand am not it that class of programmer

clearly.

but I can and do get help when
I need it.

which you definitely do.

That's what all the talk is about wanting the source code- nobody can
read one's and zeros and make sense out of it. If you have the actual
high-level program you have a long arduous task to figure out what it
is doing - unless you have the program with the notations that tell
what it is doing.

the source code is not always available, and that doesn't get you past
the code signing.

The first few programs I wrote I didn't do any notations because it
seemed easy enough to tell what was going on. A few months later I
had no clue as to how the program I wrote actually worked.

then it wasn't written particularly well.

It was written OK, but with no notation I couldn't remember how it all
fit together.

therefore not written ok.

It would be child's play for someone (with the knowledge) to integrate
a few snippets of code that runs in the background and never alerts
the operator (malicious code does it all the time - the processor
doesn't know the difference)

nope. it's definitely not child's play and requires *much* more than a
few snippets of code to run in the background.

Nope. That's where the operating system comes in. All you want to do
is use functions that someone else has programmed into the system.
Your code is just a line or two to tell the other code to run.

it doesn't work that way.

Your ignorance is showing again.

nope.

unlike you, i have written numerous mobile apps and ****loads of
desktop apps and know quite well how it all works internally.

what you've said is simply wrong.

operating systems don't come with a built in 'spy' function that's
waiting for a line or two in some rogue app to call it.

Who said anything about a spy function.

you did.

They already have the
equivalent of tape recorders, cameras, audio recorders and
transmitters - or in other words everything you might want in a
surveillance device.

once again, there must be an app running to capture that data, which is
going to need a *lot* more than "a few snippets of code to run in the
background".

without such an app, there won't be any surveillance.

An operating system is a pretty difficult thing to design, but that
doesn't stop people from using computers. It is just another step
deeper into the workings to get it to do the things you dream up.

it's more than 'another step' to hack a phone, especially when the os
is designed to be secure.

Ah, yess... the legendary security of operating systems. I've got
this bridge over in Brooklyn that I want to sell, are you interested?

more of your ignorance.

hacking an ios device is *extremely* difficult, to the point where it's
effectively impossible to hack even with physical access. android is
easier (some devices more so than others), but it still requires more
than "a few snippets of code to run in the background".

I don't consider myself a programmer, there are guys way way better
than I. I program controllers (little computers with limited
abilities or dedicated purposes) with a high level computer language.

programming a microcontroller has absolutely nothing to do with hacking
a cellphone. two wildly different scenarios.

You are becoming tiresome.

i was about to say the same, but your ludicrous conspiracy theories and
sheer ignorance needs to be nipped in the bud.

Honest ignorance is one thing, stubborn
stupidity is more than I wish to deal with.

given that you have both, how do manage to get through the day?

You have earned your
place in the bozo bin. Congrats!

in other words, you can't back up what you said. no surprise there.