on my nexus, i can disable any (firmware) app. note that you can't disable non-firmware apps, simply because you have the option of uninstalling them.

so, then why'd you buy a samsung product? people keep complaining about things like this, but then they go out and support products that implement such restrictions. lesson learned?

it's trivial to root most phones, and easier than trivial for Google's branded Nexus line.

Please post some references. Thanks.

It's since 4.0. You can't uninstall them completely without reflashing the firmware that doesn't contain them. They are part of the firmware image.

You can disable any app, even those in the firmware. When disabled, the app no longer shows in your launcher and cannot run, ever. Yes, the bits are still present in the firmware read-only partition.

completely misunderstanding the problem. the fear is that if iran gets nukes, they'll supply smaller groups that can't be retaliated against without massive collateral damage (not that you can ever avoid collateral damage with nukes).

e.g., a nuke is launch from the mountains around the pakistan / afghan border. what do you do? nuke pakistan?

i think it's well and truly clear that i didn't say anything about legality. i said it's a difficult technical challenge.

what way?

what feature?

why would i, as a developer, care if i could install a custom firmware? wouldn't i want to be testing my game on the firmware that's going to be run by 99.999% of users?

really, i'm asking.

it's a massive engineering effort, and they admit as much in the article. even if you 98% of the things working, the last 2% is going to cause unacceptable app crashes.

think about the engineering effort to take the entire iOS *and* Android SDK, plus the Google APIs, and make them all work with MSFT. that's not just string manipulations, it's all of the APIs that connect to cloud services, sensors, and so on.

because they are also providing MSFT implementations of the Google APIs which of course are not open source. should be easy enough. e.g., provide a maps implementation that works exactly like Google maps.

man what a terrible, awful ad.

how does seeing a scuzbag loser in his underwear barf all over the floor to the point that he fills up his room, then pull his tongue out in the process pulling his spine out and ending up in a puddle of boneless flesh floating in the puke leave me with a good feeling about this product?

okay, but that's not what happened here. Ouya was a mediocre Android device with a controller and very few games that took advantage of the controller. it's claims of openness, even if true, excited hackers but not consumers or game developers.

all of that crap you quoted about custom firmware and open recovery mode has zero to bearing on their financial status and problems. the employee is right, almost no one, relatively speaking, is going to base their decision to purchase an Ouya on whether it supports custom firmware.

the truth is that it was some amount of engineering and support to give customers the whole enchilada, and they were already struggling and didn't have the resources. don't start reading malice into the situation.

sounds like you purchased on ouya, so welcome to the world of broken promises that is kickstarter.

really? what message would paying him send?! if you find 3 vulnerabilities, go ahead and expose 2 of them. ruin our business. no problem. we'll pay you big bucks for the one you didn't release.

and IMHO, why would they? he did them wrong, very wrong. they shouldn't reward him for that. consider it this way. the potential harm of publicly exposing the issue is massive. you seem to be claiming it's a zero. it isn't. it's a negative -1,000,000,000. 30 - 1,000,000,000 is a negative number. he's far from being in the black in the good will department.

the bug bounty program isn't a formal agreement bound by law. it's completely at the discretion of the sponsor company. that means that if they don't like your actions, or just the cut of your jib, they don't *have* to pay you. maybe the CEO saw your dog poop on his lawn. yep, no payment. welcome to life.