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A comment on Android overtakes Windows as the internet’s most used operating system. Parent comment

Re:Android overtakes Windows as the internet’s most used ope... by barrkel on Monday April 03, 2017 @12:41PM (#14024360)
Well, if you have control over which patches you accept, you've created an exponential explosion in the testing state space. That may be even worse for security, never mind reliability.
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Re:Android overtakes Windows as the internet’s most used ope... by marcosdumay on Monday April 03, 2017 @01:05PM (#14024668)
Still, somehow Linux distros are reasonably safe but Android is broken.
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Re:Android overtakes Windows as the internet’s most used ope... by pwnna on Monday April 03, 2017 @02:26PM (#14025595)
Not sure about the linux distro being safe part. Linux desktop distros are also riddled with vulnerabilities that no one bothered to look. This is along with the bad design of the desktop in the first place as there're no isolation between apps and so forth.

Example: https://arstechnica.com/security/2016/12/fedora-and-ubuntu-0...

Android on the other hand, has isolation mechanism built in as the central thesis of its apps system. Additionally, it also has some additional layers on top.

Unfortunately since nothing gets updated it maybe all moot, but I don't think somehow Linux distros are more secure.

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Re:Android overtakes Windows as the internet’s most used ope... by temac on Monday April 03, 2017 @03:26PM (#14026221)
Well, GNU/Linux distro are usually patched. Main ones for pretty much all known vulns. Tons of Android systems are not patched. I don't think any of those is secure against anybody motivated enough (and I'm not even thinking about a 3-letter agency, but any hacker competent enough!)

Arguably the security model of main desktop OSes is bad enough so that they are also easy to penetrate. That should not make us dismiss the problem of the way too many unmaintained Android systems!

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Re:Android overtakes Windows as the internet’s most used ope... by 72deluxe on Monday April 03, 2017 @04:53PM (#14027036)
The Dalvik system that runs on top does indeed put apps into their own named processes with restricted access etc, quite a good idea imho!

But the entire system as a whole doesn't get updates to lower parts. E.g. Updating your java app doesn't solve the problems in the underlying C libraries the system uses. We're at the mercy of vendors for that, if ever.

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Re:Android overtakes Windows as the internet’s most used ope... by flukus on Tuesday April 04, 2017 @02:37AM (#14030079)
That's a library vulnerability, nothing to do with bad design of the desktop.
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