cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/46425237

Rabat_ Social Media Exchange (SMEX)—a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing human rights in digital spaces across MENA [Middle East and North Africa] — is warning that Israeli-linked software secretly embedded in Samsung phones across the Middle East and North Africa region poses a serious surveillance threat.

According to SMEX, Samsung’s A and M series devices either come preloaded with the app “Aura” or install it automatically through system updates, without the user’s consent. The application reportedly collects a wide range of personal and device-specific data, including IP addresses, device fingerprints, hardware details, and network information.

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36 comments in c/privacy@lemmy.ml view that post
[–] 95 points 1 year ago

Once again: Fuck Samsung and fuck Israel.

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  • [–] 33 points 1 year ago

    Israel... aren't those the guys that put bombs in the pagers?

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  • [–] 31 points 1 year ago

    One more example why big corporations are not your friends

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  • [–] 97 points 1 year ago (13 children)

    Incredible. We have reached the point where it feels safer buying a random Chinese phone than Samsung or other "big brands".

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  • [–] 29 points 1 year ago (11 children)

    We have reached the point where it feels safer buying a random Chinese phone

    1. they got rid of that choice for you: the american carriers has pre-complied with trump by blacklisting all chinese phones based on their imea numbers; it no longer matters that it's technologically feasible for it to work in the united states. so now, if you want premium phone quality but 1/3rd the price; you must buy an american brand and the full price tag.

    2. you don't have anything the chinese gov't wants, so they don't care about keeping tabs on you. also buying into the propaganda that they're tryping to keep tabs on your carries with it the implicit acceptance that you're okay with the american gov't keeping tabs on you.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    Your first point seems made up and I couldn't quickly find a source for it; do you have one that I couldn't find?

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago* (6 children)

    go visit your local t-mobile or at&t store and ask them about puting an unlocked chinese branded phone on their network.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    I'm sending comment this from a T-Mobile plan using an unlocked OnePlus 9 pro my friend, hence my question.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    that's the one loophole in this effort to black list chinese branded phones; that non-chinese brands that use the same hardware are allowed on their networks and, until recently, i was looking for an oppo or oneplus that could leverage this loophole.

    you're fucked if you try to use a xiaomi or huawei or any other chinese brand that doesn't share hardware w non-chinese brands like i have been doing for the last few years.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    What hardware are you talking about? Xiaomi phones use Qualcomm chips just like Oneplus and most other brands.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago*

    the phone i used was a redmi note 13 pro.

    i had it on tmobile prepaid for a little bit over year or so and i had the account since 2009 w 2 other chinese phones in the past. i tried switching to at&t in january and it worked for the first day, but then i got a text from at&t saying that my phone is no longer compatible and i had no signal. the store told me that the imea number had to be whitelisted and that i had to put in a request at their website. the signal reception sucked anyways, so i tried switching back to my old t-mobile account by popping in the sim, but it didn't work either and the t-mobile store said that chinese phones aren't allowed on prepaid anymore for "public safety". (he literally used air quote fingers and rolled his eyes. lol)

    google recommended mvno's to get around the ban, but they're just as unaware as most that this is a thing in the united states; their websites still show that my redmi is compatible but i've literally tried them all and none have worked.

    chatgpt recommended getting around the ban by purchasing phones that share the same hardware like they do with oneplus, oppo, etc. and that was the approach i was going to take until i decided to get a fairphone and put eos on it instead.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    yeah, anything out there that i could put out now, it's already on stalker websites for like five bucks (since there's a bunch of other Mes with the same name. Apparently I play hockey. I keep forgetting to follow "my" career tho i should look up Hockey Other Me sometime.

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  • [–] 23 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Shame that Samsung is the top selling Android vendor. I wasn't aware of this when I went with Honor but I'm glad I did.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    goes to show anything tech coming out of US, EU and its client states are not ever trustworthy.. I would go as far as to e.g. not buy a Bosch fridge, never mind the other reasons not to.

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  • [–] 22 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    It's worth noting that as of 2022, Unity owns 73.5% of the company IronSource, which develops the spy/"intrusive bloatware" app

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago

    GrapheneOS with their real phone cant come soon enough. These big tech companies have ruined any sense of ownership.

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  • [–] 19 points 1 year ago

    Another reason to stop using Samsung smh. The Devil army of Israel keeps showing it is the ultimate evil

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  • [+] 18 points 1 year ago (3 children)
  • [–] 19 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Samsung is more of a dumpster fire than specifically Zionist.

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago

    Samsung phone might be dangerous to your health and life, even in a case of being near oen. Even if you aren't conspiring to send aid to Gaza, since they can probably also track people around you. Andd they do kill based on metadata. US and Israel, both.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    At times like these I really want to just buy a spare burner flip phones.. no additional use cases need. Dial/call in and out..

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    After everything that has happened in the past 2 years, that entire region should entirely boycott Samsung until they're clear all Israeli spyware is cleared out of phones. The Middle East is a fairly large Market and everything Samsung should be forbidden entry by leaders of those countries until this is fixed.

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  • 35 comments in c/technology@lemmy.world view that post
    [–] 82 points 1 year ago (18 children)

    Yet another reason why running GrapheneOS is a great idea. The surveillance state is now.

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  • [–] 32 points 1 year ago (17 children)
  • [–] 22 points 1 year ago (14 children)

    yes, and you have to get one that is from google and isn't from a carrier so you can unlock the bootloader. Carrier versions have locked bootloaders.

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  • [–] [S] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (8 children)

    I just bought a Pixel 10 from Spectrum with the repeated assurance that the phone would be fully unlocked after it was paid off and had several months of service. I intended to load Graphene OS, but apparently I was fucking lied to yet again by another business that will say anything to make a sale.

    I can't do anything about that now, but I can move to another carrier and make damn sure they don't ever make another dime off my mobile account.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    They thought you meant carrier-unlocked. That's what most people care about, being able to switch providers.

    I doubt they even knew what a bootloader is.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    Once it's carrier unlocked you should be able to unlock the bootloader though right?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Those are 2 entirely different things. There are phones that are carrier locked that can have the bootloader unlocked, also the other way around.

    I would look at the model number, and then search if it's bootloader unlock able in XDA developers or something like that.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    I believe GrapheneOS is not available for the 10 series yet. I've been keeping on top of that since I want to change my phone in December, but so far, the last version of Pixel that is known to work with GrapheneOS is the 9 series.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I have a Canadian carrier purchased phone. Brand new Pixel 9. 5$ a month. For 24 months.

    It has only ONCE booted to the Google version of Android.

    To flip the toggle to enable OEM unlock.

    I kept WiFi off and hadn't inserted a SIM so it couldn't update or do anything else that might have prevented flashing graphene.

    Not sure if that was necessary, but it worked.

    And now I live my life free of google software surveillance.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Rogers in Canada has pixels that allow unlocking the bootloader (just got a pixel 9, and once I have some time I'm going to try putting a custom build on it).

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Mine went fine. I kept the radios off before using it and fully flashing just in case.

    I read on the grapheme forums that some carrier software might flip a bit or something if it gets downloaded/provisioned.

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  • [–] 23 points 1 year ago

    I wonder what spyware they'd be willing to put in their phones in the US for the regime in charge.

    Also, if I bought a Samsung phone while a dictator is in charge and it gets the update and I get the spyware — hypothetically speaking here — and by the time a progressive is in office, they're pushing updates that remove it, but my phone is outside the update period, how would I go about removing it? Just buy a new one at cost? Seems like that's something they'd let you do for free, though.

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  • [–] 46 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Thank you Samsung for giving us, not one, but two reasons this week to not buy your overpriced shit.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    whats the 2nd? beside their push ads, spying and unremovable overbloated junk?

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    They recently announced that they were going to insert ads on their smart fridges. What soured me towards Samsung products was when they started to lock the bootloader on their phones where previously this wasn't a problem.

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  • [–] 59 points 1 year ago
    [–] 18 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Has anyone actually analysed this app to see what information it can actually access? The few articles I've found don't elaborate.

    Like, does it just track what games you play and websites you visit? Or can it log your keyboard, steal all your banking passwords and read all your private conversations?

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    "is this runoff full of poop or just pee???"

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago*

    Well, of course I don't want either poop or pee in my phone, but it matters which one I have, because I need to know what cleaning products to use.

    If it's poop, then maybe I need to change all my passwords and keep especially on guard for fraud attempts, but if it's only pee, then I just need to remove/disable the app and I can stop worrying about it.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    i have a samsung phone and im not surprised to hear this. my phone keeps installing these crappy mobile games without my consent and i had to manually uninstall them a few times. so yeah, not much of a stretch.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Could it be your carrier somehow doing that? I've literally never had that happen

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    it definitely is a carrier thing. my phone is carrier unlocked, but because it used to be a T-Mobile phone I still had their shitty T-Mobile app manager randomly installing shit. I was wise enough to disable it but many have no idea you can. same goes for this appcloud thing, it's been around for a long time and affects a lot of Japanese and Chinese phones too. I switched from iPhone and this bewildered me, no idea how it's even legal.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    You can flash the US Unlocked firmware. I use a US Unlocked S22 Ultra. Works on all carriers. No bloatware like what you described. I know what you're talking about -- it's called Carrier something. It's a system app. You can disable it but updates might re-enable it.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    That's why they say that free cheese exists only in traps.

    (Or sometimes cheese paid for, but less than needed to not look for other sources of financing. Think all of modern electronics and the Internet.)

    It's not about other schemes of profiting than paying forward not existing - it's about you the customer being interested in them not being used. They are always worse for you. The lesson of "free" stuff on the Internet.

    Including free and open source software, with no doubt - because when a FOSS project could go the direction that would badly hurt corporate business relying on traps, it doesn't - because its scheme of existence is based on said corporate businesses' funding and developer participation and embrace and testing. And there won't be a discussion inside that project, no matter how democratic, because money likes silence. Nobody will even think about a direction not supported by work, and work is done by people, and people are paid. All of big FOSS events cost a lot ; some of it is in volunteer resources, but most of it is people on their jobs.

    I'm honestly starting to think about going the Apple way - at least they only send hashes of the binaries you run to the daddy.

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  • 18 comments in c/technology@lemmy.world view that post
    [–] 33 points 1 year ago

    There are reports of people noticing it two years ago.

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  • [–] 47 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    Fuck you Samsung, and Fuck the IOF. sincerely MENA

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    At this point in the world, just fuck literally everyone and everything.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I have a friend who always used to call me a nihilist because of my attitude and to some extent that was true, lately I've been feeling more like an anarchist.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    I don’t think cell phone batteries can be wired to explode, but I am not an electrical engineer.

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  • [–] 19 points 1 year ago

    Wired? Certainly.

    Doing it without extra wiring is probably possible too. You'd have to override the battery charge controller, which is probably not available to an app, if to Android at all. But I'd be unsurprised if there was some exploit that made it possible.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago* (4 children)

    I'm not an electrical engineer but I did work with explosives a little in the army. You'd only need a small amount of high explosive to do some serious damage to someone if their phone was in their pocket and that explosive went off. Modern phones have plenty of empty spaces to stuff full of enough explosives to do lots of damage. It'd be a lot easier to detect then just making the Li-ion batteries ignite but who can say what the IDF can smuggle into the supply chain.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago* (3 children)

    They would likely be detected by modern airport security if they put in actual explosives.

    All battery powered devices go through the scanner separately.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    Samsungs Ai obsession seems way more aggressive than the pixels

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    Can we introduce them to Meshtastic?

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  • 4 comments in c/privacy@programming.dev view that post
    [–] 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Someone in another thread pointed out that reddit users spotted this two gears ago:

    https://www.reddit.com/r/samsung/comments/1505mzb/what_on_earth_is_ironsource/

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Please use a proxy service like redlib. dx

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  • 4 comments in c/android@lemdro.id view that post
    [–] 13 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    All that talk of Knox security and Bootloader locking just to install a system level spyware.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago

    And that's one more reason why hard- and software not fully under the users control is completely worthless.

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  • What did i expect?

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