[zozbot234]

This answer is dangerously naïve. Phone basebands and radios are full of vulnerabilities, if you don't want your phone to be a potential surveillance device given any minimally sophisticated adversary you should either turn off the radio or preferably shut it off entirely and remove the battery.

[anonym29]

Hypothesis B: it's not dangerously naïve, it's deliberate misinformation designed to coax technical but unskeptical people into lowering their guard against this class of threat.

[zozbot234]

Of course, but see Hanlon's razor.

[anonym29]

Sounds like the perfect cover for malice, lol

If ((Assume it's stupidity) == (discount/ignore the risk)), then assuming it's stupidity is never the safer assumption, even if it's empirically more likely to be the correct assumption, no?

All boils down to an individual's threat model at the end of the day anyway, though.

[rgrieselhuber]

I’m always amazed at how many people don’t understand this. Hanlon’s Razor is just a way to sound smart while indulging in self-soothing biases.

[mdp2021]

The practice of assessing whether a tempting evaluation of "malice" can instead cover evidence of structural faults is part of the effort towards seeing things as they are. And keeps you away from paranoia.

[rgrieselhuber]

The notion that paranoia is the default emergent state of not assuming incompetence when potential malicious incentives can be easily articulated is just yet another ideological presupposition.

[anonym29]

Spoken like someone being paid to stigmatize rational skepticism.

[zopa]

Malice is not falsifiable: anything could always just be another trick. So unless you want to end up believing everything is malice, it’s best to start with the benign explanations, until you’re sure they don’t fit.

[mdp2021]

"Stupidity" (term picked after Cipolla) is not a benign explanation. The entity stuck in the ice of Cocitus, at the bottom of hell, in Dante Alighieri's Commedia, is an apex of impotence.

But yes, it is an interesting proposal (perspective) to "resist from tempting explanation and picking the less attractive first" - just like the grit in delayed gratification.

[rgrieselhuber]

The context here is government spying on its own citizens. Not sure how that warrants starting with benign explanations.

[DANmode]

Shutting it off, if actually done, is the only way to stop future upload of payload.

Say, a transcribed text of a conversation, for example's sake.