The people at Android have reached out to the security community and asked them for help in finding bugs and security issues in the platform. They say they have found and fixed many of their own bugs but are asking security experts to take a look and report any bugs they find directly to the Android security team.
I can see why they need to think about this, with so many applications and devices hopefully being lined up to use the platform the potential for bugs and malicious software creating security issues is high.
The difference between the openness of Android and the iPhone are quite a contrast. Apple have been particularly closed when it comes to disclosing anything about the iPhone, but Google are quite the opposite.
The risk of creating an open source platform is of course the potential for it to be exploited, Google is getting a head start now by asking for help and it is surely the right thing to do. We would have criticised them if they hadn’t done this because we as the customers would have been affected by it.
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