[Nexus One General] defendthecommons:
On a Kaiser, but appreciate this thread: what about Malware

Thanks for threading this. I'm on a Kaiser, and read all of the debate here. My question boils down to how to identify whether there's malware downloaded that is starting apps to gather private data? I see many have the same phone behavior as me, and have debated the solutions, but no discussion of identifying if an App is just doing its typical, perhaps poorly coded business of on/off/sleep, or if it's actually a part of a hijack to gather data.

Basically, I'm downloading mostly Market apps, and some others. I'm not a gamer, or socialware junkie. I'm getting the most random starting of apps that I don't turn on and I can't tell what's causing it. (Autostarts app was good news to me.)

I keep App Killer off, because of the inability to add apps to the ignore list, such as the Phone app which got killed in the middle of a phone call! ha. That's was annoying and funny (setting it to 'crazy' will do this, I guess). I see an ignore list, but don't see how to add apps to it, only how to remove them...

Anyhoo, I use App Killer often, update it, manually turning it on and finding that "YouTube" "Music" "Email" "Bluetooth File Exchange" "Gmail" "Calendar" "New and Weather" "Clock" "Shop Saavy" have turned on themselves (sometimes many, sometimes just Youtube and Clock - no alarms set). When I boot up, AppKiller does not autostart by choice. When I start it, it shows like 5 apps have started proceses, which I kill including AppKiller. Clock is really annoying. Used to never do that until I set an alarm once. It then seems to want to fetch News and Weather, so that shows up in the OSMonitor processes. (another cool app).

I never ever "Email" app, only Gmail. Why is it launching?

"Music" came with VaniljEclair and I never use it, but "AudioBooks" seems to store the downloaded books in the media archive that "Music" uses, so I wonder if something's getting triggered there. "Music" autostarts, "AudioBooks" never does.

Should I be concerned about malware? I don't use 3G, just wifi, and EDGE. Is this behavior normal "call home" behavior programmed in to check for updates? One time, my kaiser kept prompting me, interrupting me, to open a browser to go to a webpage based on some app forcing me to an ad site. Is this a function of these free apps that have ads, programmed to launch a web browser to show an ad? BlueTooth File Sharing app seemed to be sort of suspicious. I uninstalled. Still have autostart problem, but no web browser prompting of ads.

I'd love an app like Little Snitch (mac) or Zone Alarm that let's me monitor every time any app wants to access the data network. That's worth $. Suggestions?

I can't get the Clock App to stop starting. I deleted the YouTube widget I had to see if that stops it from starting... no dice. Phone will sit chillin, and after a while 5 apps will have started.

AUTOSTARTS looks like a good investment, but I principally believe I shouldn't have to pay to manage this crap... with all the genius behind this stuff.

I dunno if this is a Vanilj thing, or Kaiser thing, or Android thing, or normal App behavior.

And if it's not malware, what's the key word to talk about Android starting recently used apps automatically? Am I missing some standard setting for this? I used OSMonitor to try to kill processes, and didn't really see an affect as superuser in that app. So I killed them su'd in Terminal, saw the memory free up in OSMonitor, but then they seemed to start again over time. My free mem is around 28M down to 20M when this crap happens.

So, I'm suspicious of the bootup and autostart of 5 apps that weren't running when I shut down, and don't have any autostart preferences.

Thanks for reading my .02 sense.

-D

Apps: Maps brut, Navigation brut, My tracks, SpillMap, Oil Report, Shop Saavy, Yelp, OperaMini, gStrings, WifiAnalyliser, WifiStatic, AudioBooks, StreamFurious, Advanced App Killer, xda, OSmonitor, Clock (standard OS app), Terminal Emulator, Coupons (never used), Goggles (never used), Open GPS Tracker (autostarted on boot), RadarNow, OSMonitor, News and Weather (standard app?), YouTube, Barcode Scanner, Antennas

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