Hacker News: sapiosenses

New comment by sapiosenses in "Users say Adobe Creative Cloud rewrote hosts file to detect installed app"

sapiosenses — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 13:57:57 +0000

I think allowing any software installer to install a persistent/background process with root/admin privs (which is apparently how this works) is a major security problem since it essentially provides full access and control over anything on the device, forever.

I have a feeling there are tons of app installers that do this.

New comment by sapiosenses in "Adobe wrote to my hosts file. I've never had an app do this before"

sapiosenses — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 13:46:52 +0000

Apparently it's using a rooted background process installed at software installation time.

This whole practice needs to be exposed since it essentially gives any piece of software complete control over the machine simply because the user was supposedly asked to "temporarily" provide admin/root access to the installer in order to install some app.

But in addition to that, it also installed a rooted background process that essentially grants them access to read/write anything on the machine, forever.

New comment by sapiosenses in "Mozilla will be retiring the Mozilla Location Service"

sapiosenses — Sat, 23 Mar 2024 22:55:02 +0000

SatStat is a handy free tool for understanding what is going on "under the hood".

On the map page, the red "pin" and "circle" represent data originating from GPS. Blue color is data originating from Network Location provider(s). And you may also see "Fused Location", this is used by 3rd-parties like microG as one way to provide network location data to the OS.

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.vonglasow.michael.satsta...

New comment by sapiosenses in "Mozilla will be retiring the Mozilla Location Service"

sapiosenses — Sat, 23 Mar 2024 22:42:53 +0000

Yep.

But it's academic at this point. The MLS data had been going stale for 2-3 years now, I stopped using it ~2 years ago because of how inaccurate it had become.

If you're using microG GMSCore prior to 0.2.28.xxxx, you can use various other UNLP backends that can still give good results.

But for 0.3.0.xxxx and newer, it relies solely on the MLS db as well as some more obscure methods that don't help most people. Many in the microG community are hoping that gets greatly improved going forward.

New comment by sapiosenses in "Mozilla will be retiring the Mozilla Location Service"

sapiosenses — Sat, 23 Mar 2024 22:27:05 +0000

I think it was for products too (eg Qualcomm is currently doing a heavy push of their IoT products where Skyhook is a central piece) but I'd also like to know if the legal landscape changed after the acquisition.

Especially considering Qualcomm's relationship with many device makers and the OS platforms.

New comment by sapiosenses in "Mozilla will be retiring the Mozilla Location Service"

sapiosenses — Sat, 23 Mar 2024 20:34:20 +0000

I struggle to understand how a company whose IP essentially amounts to using RF emitters as geolocation sources based on simultaneous correlation with GPS data and other known geolocated RF sources can amass apparently between 600 and 700 patents on this "innovation".

I know that they sued Google over their Android NLP implementation and Google lost on almost all of the enumerated complaints, Apple started using Skyhook beginning with early versions of iOS, and Microsoft apparently also uses them.

What they have seemingly done with the assistance of an absurd number of patents that they apparently keep getting granted by the USPTO (which is known for issuing boatloads of junk patents), is take a fairly obvious tactic which amounts to one of the earliest examples of crowdsourcing - the WiFi "wardriving" practice - and find ways to patent-encumber that technique that they did not invent until they have engineered what appears to be a complete monopoly on it.

I'm also curious how the legal landscape of that business may have changed after the Qualcomm acquisition. IIRC at one point in time Qualcomm was licensing Skyhook data.