Android kill switch activated & some links of the week
July 26th, 2010 | by elisabeth | Published in Future of the Internet | 1 Comment
Control over tethered appliances basically comes in two forms: pre-approval of apps and kill switches. As this blog has documented, Apple has had a very heavy hand in screening apps, but — as far as we know — they haven’t ever used the iPhone kill switch. I was a little surprised to find that out, and I wonder why they haven’t used it. Maybe the screening process is keeping out malicious apps, and they’re content to let users keep apps that are merely in bad taste (although they remove them from the app store). Maybe the bad publicity from past kill switch uses — see Amazon and 1984 — has stayed their hand. Or maybe they have removed apps and it just hasn’t been publicized.
Google has taken a different tack with Android: they’ve largely surrendered the power to pre-approve apps, because Android users can always download apps from third-party sources. But they too have a kill switch, and according to the Android developers’ blog post, they decided to use it a few weeks ago. (It’s not totally clear from the blog post, but it sounds like they’ve also used it before on clearly malicious apps.) An app that claimed to offer Twilight photos turned out to be a demonstration, done by researchers, of how easy it would be to create an app that would turn phones into a botnet. The app didn’t actually create the botnet (and it didn’t show Twilight photos, either, so most disappointed downloaders deleted it), and the researchers presented their work at the conference. Nonetheless, after they heard about it, the Android team decided to remotely delete remaining copies of the app as part of a “cleanup” process. Affected users received notifications.
I can see why they wanted to do that. A report documenting Android vulnerabilities was recently released, and it’s caused some hand-wringing over Android’s security. There’s also no sense in leaving a loaded weapon laying around. And I’m glad they told both customers and everyone else that they’d deleted the apps. Still, I do worry about the removal of an app that isn’t actually harming any machines. More generally, I think that if Android is going to stick to the plan to not pre-screen apps and have an open system, they and we are going to have to think seriously — more seriously than Apple has had to — about the ethics of the kill switch. Questions like whether there should there ever be an opt-out, whether users should get refunds, and whether it should be used in cases other than damaging viruses are all still wide open.
And a few quick links:
Leaked MS Presentation Shows App Store Plans For Windows 8. Why all this thinking about app stores and kill switches matters: there are already plans to transfer the app store model from phones to PCs, where the arguments about the virtues and harms of contingent generativity have even more salience.
Google’s mismanagement of the Android Market. Jon Lech Johansen thinks the lack of pre-screening is hurting Google and Android.
Did Apple Flip the iOS Kill Switch on NDrive? Wait, has Apple already used the kill switch?
New zombie code in effect by December. Here’s a totally different option for improving security: let users keep open PCs, but if they become infected, have their ISPs quarantine them or reduce their internet speed to a crawl. That way, users will have to get their computers fixed and can’t keep infecting others. Internet Industry Association CEO Peter Coroneos said of the plan: “I’m sure there are people around that resent having to put new tyres on their car when they’re unroadworthy, or have their breaks done . . . But the reality is that we have argued that internet users have a responsibility not only to themselves, but also to other users on the internet.” The code will be made available to Australian ISPs soon.
One Brown Package: From Seattle to Norway. Why we love the internet in the first place: unexpected avenues for fun, creativity and kindness (here, in the form of people working to get a package from Seattle to Norway). They claim inspiration from JZ’s TED talk on the web on random acts of kindness. The package is currently reported as missing.
—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer
July 26th, 2010 at 9:48 am (#)
i suspect that apple takes the long view with apps that are not aggressive vs the users or the apple ecosystem. Basically, rather then deploy the kill switch, they can produce a update that will make the app unable to run. This as they will inform any other affected app of the change via the usual channels, but as the offending app will be unable to push updates, they are quietly killed by incompatibility rather then a unilateral kill switch.