Comment by gregwebs

18 hours ago

Is this the same Portal device that they disabled every feature on other than Messenger and WhatsApp calls that I can now only use as a bluetooth speaker?

4 comments

gregwebs

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itissid  18 hours ago

Yep and the speaker is not half bad! It has good hardware. Its a shame they could not spin it off to anyone else(not for lack of trying) before they were "forced" to kill it because, basically, meta's stock was at 90$ at the end of 2022 and everyone was just spewing a derivative of the statement: "Focus on extremely short term profitability else your(heavily) stock compensated employees will all leave."

Twirrim  14 hours ago

The same portal device that is running an EOL version of Android and isn't getting security updates so you probably want to keep it safely isolated from anything important (if you weren't suitably paranoid already)

  • jeroenhd  10 hours ago

    Aside from one or two very bad Bluetooth and WiFi bugs (the worst ones usually being device-specific driver bugs), Android's OS itself actually doesn't have a huge external attack surface. Even if you do break in, the SELinux security mechanisms are a major pain to break through, especially with many devices running model-specific configurations.

    The real risk of running old Android versions is that apps can escalate privileges or even get root access because of sandbox bypasses. As long as the pre-existing apps on there are updated against vulnerabilities, it's not easy to break into these things.

    If it were, enabling ADB access on these things wouldn't be such a big deal, after all!

    The mere concept of having Facebook install a camera into your home should be enough for anyone not to want these devices in their homes (with stock firmware). The hardware is very nice but the software cannot be trusted.