Tommy Siegel | Bluesky

Transcript

Single panel comic

Illustration of a highway with 3 billboards for fast food chains. A bridge is visible in the background, as are power lines running along side of the service road.

Each billboard has a chain logo, with secondary text below.

Wendy’s

  • Your fifth favorite burger is now an app

McDonald’s

  • Will you give us your data for food?

Burger King

  • Guess what: No app? No food
  • diaphragmwp@discuss.tchncs.de
    1·
    5 hours ago

    Modem firmware is a bit more than a few hundred assembly instructions. It’s mostly owned by Qualcomm, implementing trade secret designs made up by the boards of all sorts of corporations. Yes, even on the Samsung SoC design ordered by Google. That’s the price of phone calls.

    • pankuleczkapl@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      2·
      2 hours ago

      Yeah, the mysterious Intel ME probably does similar things, but nonetheless these subsystems don’t have capabilities nearly as huge as the main OS, so they can’t store a lot of data, or do a lot of computation, or do stealth networking - (rant warning) such as embedding data in packets, that would require stealing the cryptographic keys from the main RAM, or even from other physical modules, basically so much convolution, that would be defeated by a simple update to the networking stack with changed offsets etc., I mean you would have to do crazy things to embed a universal rootkit you can never update yet is never detected doing shady stuff. This sounds more in the area of CIA capabilities, not really hardware manufacturers, but I really doubt they would risk revealing something so serious just to collect some meaningless data. TL;DR CIA backdoor probably exists, data collection backdoors are not feasible.