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Comment Re:Thinning wouldn't be a full solution but (Score 1) 91

I have no idea what I'm talking about, but it would be climate irony if the mitigation to Canadian wild fires was to build roads through the forests as a sort of fire break (obviously you don't need to drive on the roads, but you'd cut the trees and clean up the ground as if you were making a road).

Typical roads are not effective firebreaks in dense, tall forests. The general rule is that you need 1.5X (minimum) to 3X the height of the surrounding vegetation. In a forest with 100-foot trees that means you need firebreaks 300 feet wide. In areas that are sloped or often windy, the width needs to be increased.

Comment Re:That's not the worst part (Score 1) 61

Not sure what exactly they convinced you of, but it apparently means you ended up on the wrong side in gweihir's mind, so tread carefully. Or just ignore the guy. Either way, been there, done that,...

My guess is he read the first half of the first sentence of my response and concluded that I was just repeating what Google says about the issue, that I mindlessly believed the company line.

Never mind that I personally designed and implemented the feature, so if there's any official Google PR on the issue, it's based on what I told "them", not what "they" told me.

Thank you for you explanations and the good work to make Android secure.

Thanks. There were good reasons to move on from Android, but it was pretty cool being able to work to improve the world's most-used operating system. Relatively small impacts get multiplied by a big number.

Comment Re:Good for him! (Score 1) 205

'...agents are "authorized to make such search or seizure"...'

How can they be authorized when they are not on US soil? Who authorizes them?

Atlanta, GA isn't US soil?

But even if this were one of the overseas CBP checkpoints (the ones that do pre-clearance, so you don't have to go through CBP after landing), I think those are considered US soil as well, under an agreement with the host nation.

Comment Re:"dismantle safety protections on Google Play" (Score 1) 69

Could you elaborate? What 24 hour delay?

Could you elaborate on exactly what you did at Google since you apparently have no idea what they are doing Re: sideloading and the security you claim they need to protect users from what google doesn't want them to do?

I was the TL for hardware-backed cryptography and associated bits. No, I didn't always follow every detail of what others on the large (hundreds of engineers by the time I left, though I was #13 on the team when I joined in 2014) team was doing. However, I do quite fully understand the context in which they were doing it. If you'd actually like to understand more about the thinking that likely underlay whatever you're talking about, please elaborate.

I do know about the planned requirement to require all app developers to identify themselves and pay a $25 fee if they want their apps to be installable via any route (sideload, third-party app store), indeed I even explained in my prior post why that benefits anti-malware efforts. I'm not aware of any 24-hour delay associated with it. If you weren't being such a pissy asshole about it, I might go google it, but you've burned pretty much all of my goodwill, so unless you care to actually explain what your problem is, I'm done here.

Comment Re:Plausible deniability is better (Score 1) 205

There should be an option for a password which unlocks the phone in a separate sandbox which is benign.

Of course, if the government has a warrant, even this will get you into trouble.

I think the most plausibly-deniable strategy is to put the phone into a state where it shows the OS setup wizard when powered on, making it look like you wiped it and powered it down just before going through the border checkpoint. Then to reactivate it you have to go through the "setup" process and when you get to the password configuration if you enter the correct password it unlocks and returns to normal. If not, it boots to an apparently freshly-setup state. I think this would be much easier to correctly simulate than an apparently in-use device.

Of course, the safest strategy is to actually wipe it and power it down before going through the border checkpoint, then restore from cloud backup after clearing the checkpoint.

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