By using it you can open the devtools on another computer and all the information is synchronized over WebSockets. I used it once to debug an issue on a customers machine.

https://github.com/liriliri/eruda#demo

1. Bookmark any page, making a dummy

2. Menu > Bookmarks > edit

3. Change URL of dummy bookmark to the js bookmarklet code.

4. Visit any site.

5. Menu > Bookmarks > tap on the bookmarklet

6. Widget appears on bottom right of page

It doesn't work on HN(?) But does work on other sites.

It helps with things like removing elements because you can see the DOM and it's fewer clicks away and easier to use than ublock, which doesn't show the DOM in the little box provided for element removal and only allows removing one item say a time (you can use multiple selectors, but every time you tap an element to get the selector it overwrites the existing content)

5. Tap on the URL bar

6. Type part of the name of the bookmark you chose until it appears in search (in my case eruda works)

7. Tap the bookmarlet

For this to work you need to have bookmark search enabled in settings: Settings -> Search -> Search bookmarks

Also, there seem to be many sites where the widget doesn't appear, but you can try it at google.com.

Until someone confirms that they are what the name and what the speculation is about.

Yes - it exposes an API to set device encryption keys to the websites that you visit with it- At least that's how I interpret the last section "The dangerous functions".

I can't find any information anywhere that either confirms or denies the possibility to bypass Google's restrictions with web views. I assume it's possible, because it's possible on most platforms, but I suppose it depends on the implementation.

I've seen parental controls that employ an (on-device) MitM proxy and DNS filtering to ensure safety, and those apps will prevent almost any app from displaying unwanted content.

(without even talking about this key management stuff, because at this point it's merely speculation as the author didn't test what they actually do: “you have two methods which I don’t know what they do, but they sound scary”)

And IIRC it's rather difficult to set up a webview that allows multiple domains or URLs (but I'm no android dev, and the last time I had to fiddle with this, was years ago)

Blocking external domains shouldn't be that hard, but I also don't think parental controls are of any interest or priority for most app developers.

IIRC whitelisting was the default in webviews; not sure if it still is, or if our expert Android dev configured it this way, but even getting a build that allowed to load content from our new domain required a new build. (Let alone that someone, even if we had links or such in our about.html, would be able to navigate there).

1. Just limit the webview browser location to the same list as allowed by the parental control.

2. By default limit the webview browser location to the domain first opened by the app i.e locked to a single domain by default.

3. Allow webview browser to be expanded via a regex/pattern list of domains.

4. Limit the number of webview browser location changes so even if you can access a search engine with a global domain allowlist, it would just return to the first page after N window.location changes.

There's plenty of introspection you can do via JS (which is already being used to set/inject that `mm` object), it could even check for certain DOM elements, HTTPS fingerprint, etc. to determine if the page is an "intended" destination for the particular integrated webview browser.

But finding an example where you can navigate elsewhere is not proof that all webviews are broken; maybe they have this "security issue" by default and allow a dev to tighten it (bad sec. practice IMO), and maybe android versions or SDK-versions differ in how they adhere, IDK. But the times that I encountered this and fiddled with it, it was a PIAS to even allow loading a page from another domain.

Obviously, parents using parental control will have questions what their kids are doing for hours in the Google Settings app every day, but every kid will probably get that day or week of free browsing until their parents get suspicious.

That assumes parents bother to check on the statistics made available by parental controls, of course; if nobody checks, then the kid will access the web unrestricted for years.

While I can see your hesitations, I think the solution is rather straight forward: block the Google Account settings behind parental controls. I don't think you'll want your kids logging out of their parental controlled accounts so they can create new ones anyway, so that's probably a good idea regardless of the we webview they can trick into opening Google.com.

You'll find webviews inside most apps because your average weather app developer isn't really interested in preventing kids from using their privacy policy webview to access porn.

I don't get it myself (why not just launch the default browser instead of adding a webview?) but I hope you'll see that these types of workarounds are not unique to Google's settings.

1) Kids WILL use this to bypass parental / school controls as soon as they learn about it

2) In some contexts (especially as high-stakes test settings, but also some military/prison/finance/medical/legal/etc. settings) this IS a direct security risk

3) Given the embedded browser is not secure, if a lot of kids do this, it WILL lead to someone exploiting this, and machines being compromised and escalations

At Google scale, if 0.001% accounts are impacted by a security vulnerability, that's still tens of thousands of people (you can do the math too). I don't think engineers at Google quite have a perspective on what it means when their decisions (not just security) ruin thousands of lives.

What's astounding is just how good Google's security team was, especially in comparison, maybe 15 years ago. Now, it increasingly reminds me of the path Yahoo took.

Critically, issues build on each other and escalate. Most remote root exploits require overcoming multiple layers of security. Defense-in-depth is important. Google used to address issues when a single layer was breached, before they could combine into someone remotely rooting your phone. Now, Google only fixes security bugs only after they've combined into a severe remote exploit (which often means many devices are compromised before an update goes out).

Also, you say the embedded browser is "not secure", yet the going rate for browser bugs on Android are in the multi-million dollar range, especially if it leads to root.

Good. Parental/school controls don't belong on the device. They belong on whatever the device connects to.

That would be parental/school networks.

If you don't want your kids to connect to things then don't let your kids have devices that connect to things.

> 2) In some contexts (especially as high-stakes test settings, but also some military/prison/finance/medical/legal/etc. settings) this IS a direct security risk

The direct security risk is using Google in the first place.

> 3) Given the embedded browser is not secure, if a lot of kids do this, it WILL lead to someone exploiting this, and machines being compromised and escalations

There's nothing in that statement that relates specifically to kids.

> There's nothing in that statement that relates specifically to kids.

Most adults probably don't have parental controls on their phone...

> > If you don't want your kids to connect to things then don't let your kids have devices that connect to things.

Yes not giving your kids access to a device is one option; parental controls are another.

I'm not sure either will work entirely, but that's another point.

One of the widely studied aspects of child psychology is how to instill guidelines that last even when they're elsewhere without any enforcement other than self-enforcement.

>I'm not sure either will work entirely, but that's another point

Aren't there other Internet-connected devices at friends' houses too?

This is not an option as school, at least in my region, requires devices directly since 4th grade and indirectly even earlier for homework.

Devices move between networks so having controls directly on the device is helpful.

Your argument seems like arguing that there should be no local access permissions on files and just let the network handle everything.

Quite the contrary. Your local files are given to you by your local device. It's up to your local device to ensure that those files are properly access controlled.

But things on your network are given to you by your network. It should be up to your network to ensure that those things are properly access controlled. It should be up to you to ensure that you don't connect to networks which don't have proper access control.

> school, at least in my region, requires devices directly since 4th grade

If school requires things then school should provide things.

> indirectly even earlier for homework

Homework should be done at home. Are you saying that you don't have control over which devices on your network are able to access which things online? You should fix that.

A lot of things should happen in life. That doesn't make it so.

They do. What’s your point?

My point is that parental controls are useful because kids must use devices. So protecting kids while using those devices is important.

Visiting malicious sites can't harm a properly working devices.

> [3 bullet points unrelated to security]

Security is a field related to protecting device-users from malicious actors. Your 3 examples all fall broadly under parental-controls, which are about controlling & monitoring a user's use & access of their device - a scenario within whichc the user is the adversary, not external actors. That may be an important or necessary measure in some contexts but classifying it as "security" is misleading.

You know - sometimes, just sometimes - it is also to do with protecting organisations from careless or malicious users. The three points are related to security, even it couched in terms of parents/children

So what? There can be multiple ways to compromise security and it’s not like we only solve the easiest ways and leave the rest.

While there are easier ways today, when those get patched this will one day be the easiest.

So there is nothing to solve or patch here. You could get ios if you want user to not have that power(even there it isn't very hard to install malicious accessibility app through sideloading).

There are two cases where this is true: a user intentionally sharing internal access with external malicious actors, or a user unintentionally sharing internal access with external malicious actors (e.g. social engineering / general incompetence). Neither apply to kiosk breakouts.

To expand on this, we can if we choose classify all parental controls under general access control, and within a principle of least privilege further classify the following as legitimate security risks: - access to the internet - access to a keyboard - read access to a disk

There are absolutely scenarios one can contoct where these are real concerns. The settings panel of a general-purpose consumer device doesn't fit that venn diagram for me. Is it a bug: yes. Is it a security bug: no.

Most security scenarios came about as a result of attackers being able to bring systems into absurd situations, and moving systems through unintended pathways.

"Reductio ad absurdum" could apply to most digital exploits before they've happened. "Why would the system get into that state?"

That's a key difference between physical security and digital security:

- In a physical situation, I need to worry about what a typical criminal trying to break into my home or business might do. That requires reasonable measures.

- In digital security, I need to worry about what the most absurdly creative attacker on the internet might do (and potentially bundle up as a script / worm / virus / etc.). I do need to worry about scenarios which might seem absurd for physical security.

If you engineer classifying only "reasonable" scenarios as security risks, your system WILL eventually be compromised, and there WILL be a data leak. That shift in mind set happened around two decades ago, when the internet went from a friendly neighborhood of academics to the wild, wild west, with increasingly creative criminals attacking systems from countries many people in America have never heard of, and certainly where cross-border law enforcement is impractical.

I've seen people like you design systems, and that HAS led to user harm and severe damages to the companies where they worked. At this point, this should be security 101 for anyone building software.

https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/collection/risk-management/introduci...

The odds of any individual crafting a special packet to crash my system are absurdly low.

However, "absurdly low" is good enough. All it took was one individual to come up with the ping-of-death and one more to write a script to automate it, and systems worldwide were being taken down by random teenagers in the late nineties.

As a result of these and other absurd attacks, any modern IP stack is hardened to extreme levels.

In contrast, my house lock is pretty easy to pick (much easier than crafting the ping-of-death), and I sometimes don't even remember to lock it. That's okay, since the threat profile isn't "anyone on the internet," but is rather limited (to people in my community who happen to be trying to break into my house).

I don't need to protect my home against the world's most elite criminals trying to break in, since they're not likely to be in that very limited set of people. I do any software I build.

That applies both to system threats and to component threats. Digital systems need to be incredibly hard.

Google used to know that too. I'm not sure when they unlearned that lesson.

1) Cost of compromise.

- For example, medical data, military secrets, and highly-personal data need a high level of security.

- Something like Sudoku high scores, perhaps not so much.

2) Benefit of compromise. Some compromises net $0, and some $1M.

- Something used by 4B users (like Google) has much higher potential upside than something used by 1 user. If someone can scam-at-scale, that's a lot of money.

- Something managing $4B of bitcoin or with designs for the F35 has much higher upside than something with Sudoku high scores.

3) Exposure.

- A script I wrote which I run on my local computer doesn't need any security. It's like my bedroom door.

- A one-off home, school, or business-internal system is only exposed to those communities, and doesn't need to be excessively hardened. It's more-or-less the same as physical security.

- Something on the public internet needs a lot more.

This, again, speaks to number of potential attackers (0, dozens/hundreds, or 7B).

#1 and #2 are obvious. #3 is the one where I see people screw up with arguments. Threats which seem absurdly unlikely are exploited all the time on the public internet, and intuition from the real world doesn't translate at all.

Having is having glass windows (at least at street level).

Whether it's a risk worth addressing depends on a lot of specifics.

For example, a CSRF attack on something like sharepoint.business.com could be externally exploited with automated exploits. That brings you to the 7B attacker scenario, and if the business has 100,000 employees, likely one of them will hit on an attack.

A CSRF attack on a custom application only five employees know about has decent security-by-obscurity. An attacker would need to know URLs and similar business-internal information, which only five people have access to. Those five people can just as easily walk into the CEOs office and physically compromise the machine.

What about protecting users from careless or malicious organisations?

Access control falls squarely under security. Also, the user should be considered the adversary, because they or programs that run on their behalf might be malicious, either knowingly or unknowingly. Not accounting for this is one of UNIX's biggest blunders.

The device owner (parent, school, etc.) set restrictions, which some other user bypasses.

First, this isn't correct, for instance, DRM and TPM.

Second, "the user" does not have direct access to the computer internals, which means all such access is mediated by programs that are supposed to act on the user's behalf. But because software is not formally verified, we have no guarantee that they do so, and so we must assume that any program purporting to run on the user's behalf is intentionally or unintentionally malicious. This is where the principle of least privilege comes from.

> First, this isn't correct, for instance, DRM and TPM.

You must have missed the word "legitimate". DRM and TPM are two of the best examples of illegitimate "security".

There are two kinds of relationships between an "user" and a computer.

The computer may belong to the employer of the "user" and the "user" receives temporary local access or remote access to it, in order to perform the job's tasks. Or the computer may belong to some company that provides some paid or free services, which involve the local or remote using of a computer.

In such a context, the main purpose of security is indeed to ensure that the "user" cannot use the computer for anything else than what is intended by the computer owner.

The second kind of relationship between a "user" and a computer is when the "user" is supposed to be the owner or the co-owner of the computer. In this case the security should be directed only towards external threats and any security feature which is hidden or which cannot be overridden by the "user" is not acceptable.

Except perhaps in special cases, parental controls should no longer be necessary after a much lower age than usually claimed, as they are useless anyway.

I have grown up in a society where everybody was subjected to parental controls, regardless of age, i.e. regardless whether they were 10 years old, 40 years old or 100 years old.

Among many other things that were taboo, there was no pornography, either in printed form, or in movie theaters or on TV.

Despite this, the young children, at least the young boys, were no more innocent than they would be today given unrestricted access to Internet. At school, after the age of 10 years, whenever there were no adults or girls around, a common pass-time was the telling of various sexual jokes. I have no idea which was the source of those jokes, but there was an enormous number of them and they included pretty much everything that can be seen in a porno movie today. The only difference between the children of that time and those who would be exposed to pornography today was that due to the lack of visual information both those who were telling and those who were listening did not understand many of the words or descriptions included in the jokes.

So even Draconian measures designed to "protect the innocence of the children" fail to achieve their purpose and AFAIK none of those boys who "lost their innocence" by being exposed to pornographic jokes at a low age were influenced in any way by this.

Take a easier example an atm machine. If a person touching it can access accounts/remove money, there is no question about it being a security problem.

* Is it the device owner providing the direction to do this?

* Will the input being consumed as a result of this direction result in actions that the device owner approves of?

etc.

A kind of blanket assumption that everyone and everything is the adversary is a good starting point. The system needs to protect itself, in order to be able to faithfully follow the owner's instructions in the future.

Your mind is blown because you're reading way too much into my hypothetical.

Playing a video directing the user to call a number would be enough to trick some people. Enabling social engineering is a security problem.

Security is minding the specifics, which requires not assuming things are ok. That's why red teams exist, and why the default assumption of "it's not ok" is the correct assumption. ;)

We'll find out if the specific case in the article is a problem or not, once people look at it very closely. We may not have this luxury with our hypothetical ATM, though.

With an existence proof, you only have to worry about the narrowest possible interpretation. The skill of considering what an exploit could lead to is very important, but it fits oddly into such a hypothetical. Finding a possible flaw doesn't invalidate an existence proof unless you also can't think of a way to mitigate it.

Also if the video is small and says youtube and tricks a user I'm not sure I would call that a security problem. You can trick users with a post-it note, and that doesn't mean there's anything wrong on a technical level.

Sure, but something present on the screen of a trusted system is very very different than a post it note. This claim is why I'm sticking strong by my assertion that this is why red teams exist. That's a really baffling view of security, to me.

Pretend it can only play a rickroll, no other videos. Or I could come up with something more reasonable like "it only does top trending and you need to hold keys down so if you don't have skimmer-level tech to shove in you can't persist the exploit" or whatever.

I'm saying there's some scenario where it's not a security issue.

You don't need to prove that there are scenarios that are security issues. That's obvious.

I can see the argument based on Free Software principles. But I don't see anything else. There are so many cases of devices that are facing a user but not owned by the user which very much do fall under 'security'. Public terminals are a big one, devices handed out to employees in certain cases are another, and esoterica cases like prisoners also exist. Those should very much count as security, if only because 'when something breaks dangerous things can happen'. Then excluding parental controls because 'censorship bad' doesn't make much sense, since parental controls and other device lockdowns are often implemented with the exact same methods.

There are plenty of eviler things like a locked-down secure-boot and TPM grounded DRM that definitely fall under security, that I don't think it makes sense to gatekeep the term.

Heck, security as a term is so often used oppresively, that it makes little sense to gatekeep it anyway.

There is a world of difference between considering users adversarially (social engineering is the most common threat vector bar none) and considering kiosk escape a serious threat.

===================

Security as a field

===================

You wrote: "Security is a field related to protecting device-users from malicious actors."

This is a very narrow and incorrect definition. Security as a field relates to many things, including for example protecting confidential information. If my medical information is handled by a hospital, I would like to know that information does not land on the dark web. In order to do this, the hospital needs to implement processes which protect my information from nurses being socially-engineered, doctors installing spyware, and countless other threats.

This is handled in-depth:

- Personnel handling my sensitive data should be screened.

- There should be technological restrictions on the devices preventing both malicious actors and errors

- There should be training in place

- There should be appropriate legal safeguards (NDAs, employment agreements, etc.)

- And so on.

Managing confidential information involves having managed devices. In many cases, these are also in physically-secure facilities and intentionally kept off-line. They don't belong to the person using them.

=========

Bullet #3

=========

One of the points in the original article is that the embedded browser has "a weird JavaScript object named mm" which appears to be used to handle things like security keys. This is a security issue in the narrow sense you've defined. If my child (and many other kids) uses this to bypass parental controls, their device is likely to be compromise by a malicious actor if they browse to a malicious web site.

========

Children

========

You described kids as "a scenario within which the user is the adversary"

I don't know if you've ever interacted with young kids before, but they're not so much the adversary as oblivious and clueless. Before they're teenagers, most are sweet, charming, and WANT to do the right thing. However:

- They have no idea what a "buffer overflow attack" is, let along phishing and other standard scams

- They're very easy to socially engineer. If you're a Random Adult, and ask them for a password, and give a stern look, they'll probably give it to you.

- They have no idea of the kinds of malicious actors on the internet. If someone tells them "To enable Angry Birds, go to this special dialogue," they might very well do it. There are online videos of malicious actors tricking little kids into e.g. washing their devices in a sink, or sticking them into a microwave purely for the LOLs. Mean people do these things to kids.

... and so on.

The reason to control and monitor what little kids do (not just digitally; the same applies to kitchen knives, fireplaces, and swimming pools) has very little to do with treating them as an adversary, and a lot to treating them as little kids who need an adult to help them learn.

You (and many many of the replies in thread) have taken the initial topic (kiosk escape -vs- parental controls) and are defending their definition as a serious security threat by likening them to social engineering attacks on medical staff. These are separate scenarios with separate threat models. If your child is sending confidential corporate data to malicious third parties through the Android settings app you may have a separate set of problems beyond software controls.

Overall, much of the finer details of yours & others' replies amount to an extreme level of theoretical pedantry around technical classification of threats, completely removed from any kind of real-world analysis of their severity.

Please do not ever build systems which ever touch any sort of critical data or which work on consumer devices outside of a sandbox until you've picked up basic clue about security.

Systems have firewalls, ulimits, pledge, acls, permissions, sometimes physical lock and keys to prevent users of the system from doing things that owners or operators of the system have decided should not be permitted. As others have mentioned, this might be for security, compliance, CYA, or just reducing the number of variables to consider in a system.

I agree but you've very appropriately used the word "could" here. The gp bemoaned Google not prioritising this issue as a serious security concern. Whether it could theoretically be classified under security if X, Y & Z were true, due to the to-the-letter definition of access control threat models, doesn't mean that in this specific case of a consumer device, that using a browser from settings is a high severity risk. Even if it were a bypass of something like Nessus/Crowdstrike/et al (and not just consumer parental controls), it still wouldn't represent a significant threat as a simple kiosk escape in isolation.

Any definition that classifies this as the gp is proposing is a theoretical nitpick, not an actual considered threat model.

Are you suggesting that privilege-escalation attacks are not security risks?

Nope. What I'm suggesting is that threat modelling is important. If attack vectors were classified equally based on technicalities we would have infinite surface area. Kiosk bypass might be vaguely categorisable alongside things like polkit exploits but they are not equivalent in any normal threat model.

it's true they could be a part of the things security needs to care about, but so is a phone catching on fire because of its battery. which in of itself is not directly a security risk.

OK, so we agree that, your original statement (which follows) is wrong, because it makes broad, tacit assumptions about the threat model that are not justified?

Security is a field related to protecting device-users from malicious actors.

Whereas a more conventional definition of information security would also involve protecting systems from unauthorized access, including privilege escalations (that's the E in STRIDE, right?) that bypass controls that were intended to apply to the user.

Honestly, it's baffling to me why you're arguing this point.

This is one of many aspects of security-- perhaps what Google considers most important on Android, but surely you can imagine some scenarios which we care about which aren't about an end-user getting attacked.

(Indeed, sometimes security is all about protecting infrastructure, assets, or information from device users).

Besides, the third point that you cavalierly dismiss above:

> > 3) Given the embedded browser is not secure, if a lot of kids do this, it WILL lead to someone exploiting this, and machines being compromised and escalations

directly relates to even your limited notion of security.

It creates better hackers.

Life, uh, finds a way.

Doesn't sound concerning, especially the latter.

It’s funny how I never thought it would be an issue but kids have real impulse control issues and devices are super easy to spend too much time on and contribute to negative mental health. Screen time controls don’t solve this, but they help a little bit as part of many other things to help people learn about how to self regulate.

Good times.

If that's all today's kids had access to, I wouldn't be worried about it either.

I work with "average" kids today that have access to far more developmentally-damaging media, and I want the few kids that have parents that care enough to set up controls, to have a fighting chance.

I didn't mean my silly recollections there to be a way to handwave the concerns of people with parental controls nowadays. Those are important.

I just miss those simpler times. The most risque thing we got our hands on back then were low resolution porn clips. Perhaps some odd hentai AVI with mangled translation.

People used to be up in arms about something silly as Carmageddon being damaging to kid's mental health while truly awful stuff such as social media was brewing on the horizon.

For 00's kids the new boogeyman is "social media". Likely will turn out false too.

Just sounds like a cop-out way to blame anything other than poor parenting.

My earlier comment is guy earning 300k shouldnt say that things are cheap.

My current comment is that Google does not hire the best anymore, but outsources to lowest cost bidders and results are visible -> quality suffers.

Their security teams are industry-leading and they have done a lot of important work over the past decade (Project Zero, a very well-done bug bounty program, Advanced Protection, FIDO/hardware security keys, large-scale fuzzing and AFL, tons of behind the scenes sandboxing work, Linux kernel hardening...). They have a fine track record keeping their users safe (...from anyone but themselves and the US government).

> Given the embedded browser is not secure

It's a standard web view, which uses the same engine and is sandboxed the same way the standalone Chrome browser is. There's a few extra APIs injected into it, but chances are that they require authentication or simply check the origin. What makes you think they didn't take this into account when triaging the report?

There's hundreds of these web views with plenty of opportunities to "escape".

> Now, Google only fixes security bugs only after they've combined into a severe remote exploit

[citation needed]

Things like Chrome entirely rely on multiple layers of protection and, like any sensible vendor, they will absolutely fix a bug in, say, the renderer process even if there's no full-chain exploit.

> In some contexts (especially as high-stakes test settings, but also some military/prison/finance/medical/legal/etc. settings) this IS a direct security risk

In a kiosk or proctoring environment, you wouldn't be able to browse Google account settings in the first place. It's a non-issue.

I have to agree. Google has O(200k) employees, and included among those, are some of the best security people in the world. Indeed, many are left over from historic Google.

However, there's a huge difference between having high-calibre employees and having those employees impact the security of the huge numbers of products Google develops. Most of those employees do fine research, but have no influence on the typical Google product.

> They have a fine track record keeping their users safe ... [citation needed]

Let me tell you a story. I use Google Workspace Free. My account was compromised, not through much fault of anyone involved (long story, involving being targeted by a criminal actor who gained physical access to a device).

I wanted to collect records, go to the police, and have the criminal arrested. Google had clear logs of what happened. I found out that security was a value-added product. I'd need to switch from my version to a paid version, and could never switch back. The cost was going to be $6/user/month for the rest of my life, times a dozen family members, times 12 months, times another 60 years of life, which is around 50 thousand dollars.

$50 grand.

To get audit logs.

You can guess what I decided.

There was no way to prevent this retrospectively, but it'd be very easy to prevent prospectively. It just wasn't worth doing for $50k. The criminal is still out there. They might be targeting your home or business!

Thanks Google!

Another good story -- impacting a significant fraction of low-income individuals in the world -- is withholding security updates for Android after a few years to keep people on the upgrade treadmill. New devices have frequent updates. Older ones have slower updates, until at some point, the updates stop. Phones get compromised, and attackers do ransomware, identity theft, and other sorts of nasty things.

Thanks Google!

Security should not be a paid value-add. Everyone deserves security.

I could tell many more stories too.

That's not really how it works. The police can subpoena Google for the records, they won't trust audit logs you provide. Just file a police report if this is a real issue.

Of course your attorney could file an action against google (or another party) and a court could subpoena google's records to resolve it, but that's starting to sound expensive...

Audit logs I provide won't be enough for criminal prosecution. They would be enough evidence to cause my local police to investigate, as well as adequate cause for a warrant to Google.

What's different about this issue? That it gives us an opportunity to bash Google? And to make broad inferences about the company's supposed demise from a single anecdotal data point? Essentially every other company that attempts these kinds of controls will sooner or later find it bypassed, usually many times over...

However, as far as my knowledge tells me Google is the best in the biz when it comes to security. While iPhones 0 click exploits cause the death of journalists and leak nudes of billionaires; The biggest 'Android' exploit Pegasus has requires going to some website, downloading an APK, going to settings, clicking allow install from web, then installing the malware. (Don't @me about Samsung hardware issues, if you cared about quality/did research, you wouldn't have bought a Samsung Android. Or heck, anything from Samsung.)

Google is a crap company that I barely use(at most degoogled services and the occasional search when DDG can't do it), but we should give companies credit when they do things well. It promotes competency over relentless marketing.

Similarly, consider how a sunken ferry that killed hundreds of migrants went largely unnoticed during the brouhaha surrounding the Titanic sub.

Zerodium pays more for Android zero click FCP(full chain with persistence) than on iOS zero click FCP. Most other categories Android and iOS exploits pay the same.

Can you link any sources that document this?

https://heartland.org/opinion/widespread-wiretapping-is-how-...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-google-privacy-l...

To post a few

> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

Tests conducted by Project Zero confirm that those four vulnerabilities allow an attacker to remotely compromise a phone at the baseband level with no user interaction, and require only that the attacker know the victim's phone number. [1]

[1] https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2023/03/multiple-inte...

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/4da1117e-756c-11e9-be7d-6d846537a...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagefright_(bug)

Doesn't that seem a little hyperbolic? "Ruin somebody's life" seems pretty dramatic.

Google's response since mid-2022 has consistently been "deny deny deny" and downplay, much like you are doing here. Meanwhile individuals and small businesses are targeted and crushed. It's hard to know when your identity is compromised, and by the time you know it, it's usually too late to easily triage. To the extent Google introduces products and services that contain large-scale vulnerabilities, it is very much their fault. Yet, nothing happens. Individuals pay the price of using Google products, and Google continues to make billions of dollars, unscathed. Microsoft and Amazon are also guilty of this.

Where are actual consumer protections? Nowhere to be found, in the US.

Maybe folks here have had good luck with other android roms

>1) Kids WILL use this to bypass parental / school controls as soon as they learn about it

What an utterly ridiculous take. It's 2023 and there are a myriad of options available for kids accessing content they want to see without using some convoluted and hamstrung procedure.

Sounds like a parenting issue, not a software issue.

I found out that (I'm sure this is a known exploit at this point, but at the time it felt awesome figuring it out) if I went into Microsoft Word (or maybe Works?), went to "help" on the menu bar, and clicked on "About Microsoft Works" it took you to an instance of Internet Explorer that you could then use to visit any website you like.

I had a really cool teacher for those classes though, and I'm pretty sure he was amused (and maybe even proud) when he saw high schoolers in 2001 or whatever, finding clever ways around restrictions set up by the school. We may not have been doing what he had explicitly asked us for, but clearly we were learning something.

Or you can hit cancel (Win98) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHgjN_RwH6g

Or can you simply close the password dialog and wait (Win98) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk_SKw9hOpQ

It is feature because the login window is there primarily as an single sign on mechanism for remote network services (which obviously would not work when you just dismiss it) and there is no security boundary between local user profiles.

Damn. I revealed my age!

https://www.nyx.net/

Allowed free shell accounts and the college board in GA offered free local dialup access to a Gopher server (Peachnet).

I had a terminal script that navigated through the Gopher menu until I could get to Nyx.

https://www.nyx.net/userhomes.html