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throwaway7356 • today at 5:30 AM • 1 reply • view on HN

> Apps are not infected with NetNut. This is just Google abusing their monopoly position to hurt its competitors.

If apps ship with stealth backdoors to sell access to the user's internal residential network, that's malware. I doubt any users want app providers to sell access to their private file server and anything else on their local network.

It doesn't seem like monopoly abuse to exclude such malware from application stores, just like key loggers or apps intercepting other apps network traffic without the user being aware of it (say the banking app's network traffic and password entry).

Replies

charcircuit • today at 6:14 AM

>sell access to the user's internal residential network

That is not what the SDK was doing. The actual code in the SDK protects against this (simplified to take less space):

    if (addr.isSiteLocalAddress() || addr.isLoopbackAddress()) {
        LogUtils.e("PopaTunnelAsyncThread", "Hacking? The Host Resolved Ip is " + addr + " on tunnel id:" + tunnelId);
        throw new IllegalArgumentException("Hacking? The tunnel host resolved ip is internal");
    }
Local and loopback addresses like 10.0.0.0, 172.16.0.0, 192.168.0.0, and 127.0.0.0 do not work. It will not connect to people's private file servers on their network.
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