CTIA reminds users about reasons for DMCA restrictions

by Dustin Karnes
tagged congress, ctia, dmca, jailbreak, legal, Root

You may have heard that yesterday, the Library of Congress made a few exceptions concerning the legality of jailbreaking or rooting your handest. CTIA, however, would like to send you a friendly reminder about why there was so much controversy over the subject in the first place. According to CTIA:

Wireless carriers and handset makers go to great lengths to protect their customer’s privacy by blocking spam, filtering for viruses, and testing software that is sold through their portals. Unfortunately, ‘jailbreaking,’ or other modifications to a wireless phone’s operating system, increases a consumer’s risk for malware, spyware and other vulnerabilities.

In other words, before you go all root-happy, make sure you know what you’re doing. Opening up the filesystem of your handset, while extremely beneficial, does have it’s risks. We’re not discouraging, we’re simply saying that you should be sure to do your research before you go on an adventure out of userland.

[via IntoMobile]

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Categorized as Android Development, Android News, Android Software

Comments

http://willfe.com/ willfe

I’d respectfully counter that argument by suggesting that *not* being able to root a phone and have full control of the software on it makes a user *more* vulnerable to virus/malware infections than a properly rooted device.

Gaining root access on Android, for instance, doesn’t significantly increase the risk of malware or rootkit infection on a rooted phone — userland apps still operate in the walled garden (the Dalvik/JIT runtime), with the ability to gain root access by prompting the user for permission (an app cannot bypass this restriction unless the user explicitly disables it).

By having full access to the platform’s source, bugs get fixed more quickly, and exploits are patched more quickly.

This argument from the CTIA is a variation on the old FUD trickery Microsoft used to pull when it first realized Linux (and other open-source software) was a threat to its bottom line. More eyeballs and more direct hardware access make things safer, not riskier.