What is it and what is it for?
There is an official and user version of what MSA is on Xiaomi. According to the first, this is a special service that supports the operation of “live wallpaper”, “Calendar” and “Weather”. The second, an unofficial version, says that using MSA, advertising is displayed in pre-installed applications. Among them are “Browser”, “Explorer”, “Notification curtain”, “Downloads” and others. Using this approach, Xiaomi makes money because it sells its smartphones at a minimal cost and, after deducting all taxes and mandatory payments, receives only about 5% of income.
The main problem for users caused by this program is increased bandwidth consumption. MSA always works in the background, regularly sending and receiving small files of 1-5 KB in size to Xiaomi servers and receiving from them. In principle, this is not critical. But since cellular operators round up the numbers to 50-150 KB, the allocated traffic within the tariff plan or option is consumed faster. If this happens under normal communication conditions, then you will not suffer large losses. But in the case of roaming, the situation is different.
Find out about the useful Xiaomi Mi Roaming feature.
Why are they trying to remove mab?
Xiaomi has not given an official answer as to why this application is needed and how it works. Since other Android devices do not have it, users have made their own assumptions, about which more details.
Built-in antivirus and AD block
The version turned out to be untenable for 2 reasons:
- third-party antiviruses mark the mab as malware, quarantine it or immediately delete it;
- similar to MSA, disabling mab removes advertising from the smartphone interface.
The software can be used to promote Chinese online stores like AliExpress and Alibaba. This partially confirms the emergence of targeted advertising of goods based on user search queries.
Spyware
The most popular option of all. This is confirmed by the fact that:
- the software gets access to all functions of the smartphone, including phone, SMS, internal storage and camera;
- when accessing the network, the information received is sent to remote servers, the addresses of which are constantly changing;
- attempts to remove software manually lead to its reinstallation without the user's knowledge;
- When the Internet is turned off and mab is active, the Google Assistant spontaneously activates to create a voice request.
If Xiaomi collects information about users in this way, then there is a possibility that it will be intercepted by hackers and information about the person will be leaked to the public.
Provides remote access
According to this theory, the program provides remote access to a smartphone with the ability to download unknown files to it and view the owner’s personal data.
Users find inconsistencies in the following:
- why the software is visible in the public domain and is easy to remove;
- There must be another remote access application that initiates the installation of the mab after it is uninstalled.
Can MSA be removed?
Many users are afraid to remove system applications pre-installed by the manufacturer. In principle, this is correct, since there is a risk of various errors occurring in the operation of the smartphone if you touch truly important services for the system. But this does not concern MSA. Numerous reviews from experienced users on the 4pda forum indicate that there are no changes in the operation of the mobile device.
As for the removal process itself, not everything is so simple and much depends on the specific model. The fact is that on some devices you need to obtain superuser rights and install any program from Google Play to uninstall system applications.
In turn, some users claim that they successfully got rid of MSA even without root rights. You can try this method. Open “Explorer”, then “Internal memory”, enter MSA in the search field and delete two files.
Methods to combat MSA
Let’s say right away that it is impossible to completely disable MSA without consequences for the smartphone; there are no ultimate solutions. The application is tied to cosmetic functions, which is why you will immediately notice problems with operation. And it’s simply very difficult to somehow interfere with the work of MSA, because MIUI is an extremely closed ecosystem. But options exist. They will require unofficial firmware, unlocking the smartphone and obtaining root access.
The easiest way to solve the essence of the problem (sending personal data) is to completely block the Mi account. This can be done from the smartphone menu by disabling all synchronization of the smartphone with the cloud. Now your basic information is stored on your smartphone and is not transferred to the Internet - however, MSA may well continue to work.
A difficult method is to manually block all addresses to which your information is sent. To do this, the user needs to get root rights and install the Titanium Backup application on their phone, which clearly shows where the traffic goes. In this case, you should go to /etc/hosts on your smartphone, open the “hosts” file and fill it with new addresses yourself. At the same time, you must clearly understand what are normal system applications and what are suspicious addresses. All this is very similar to Roskomnadzor’s fight against Telegram, and therefore this action is extremely ineffective, because new addresses are generated automatically.
How to disable MSA in MIUI?
For each user, the best way is to deactivate it in the settings of Xiaomi, Redmi or POCO. In this case, the service will stop using Internet access.
- In the Security app, go to the section called Data Transfer and select Network Connections.
- Call the “Background Connections” menu. To do this, click the “Three dots” button, which is located in the upper right corner.
- In the window that appears, find MSA and move the switch to the “Off” position.
Restart your smartphone.
Virtualization on SMB
Virtualization provides significant advantages not only in large data centers with hundreds of virtual machines, but also when several VMs are running on one server.
These include the benefits of server consolidation, ease of deployment, easy and convenient allocation of resources and standardization of equipment, getting rid of the “zoo” of systems. Ultimately, all this translates into reduced IT costs and a lower total cost of ownership (TCO). Meanwhile, when implementing virtualization, a critical issue is the choice of storage systems. Virtualization increases the load on storage systems, so before its implementation, planning and proper selection of a disk array are necessary. Storage should not become a bottleneck in a virtual environment with high I/O performance and latency requirements. For the successful deployment of server virtualization, this is even more important than the processor power and RAM capacity of the servers.
Small companies solving problems of server virtualization and data storage consolidation need reliable, but at the same time inexpensive and easy to maintain data storage systems. HP offers these customers entry-level MSA series disk arrays. They are designed for businesses on a budget who want to get the most out of their IT investment.
M.S.A.
– one of the most successful series of HP disk arrays.
More than 400 thousand arrays of the MSA family have already been sold worldwide, which are considered one of the best entry-level storage systems on Fiber Channel. These storage systems provide high performance, reliability and ease of management, and are well suited for companies representing small and medium-sized businesses (SMB). HP MSA 1040
and
MSA 2040
arrays can be managed from Windows Server 2012, which is an added benefit since the Windows platform is often used by smaller organizations.
The MSA system supports a large number of virtual environments, allows you to consolidate heterogeneous IT resources and, in combination with virtualization, increase the efficiency of their use. According to HP statistics, in 60% of installations MSA arrays are deployed in a virtual environment, which speaks for itself. MSA's four times faster performance than previous generation SAN disk arrays means the system can support more VMs and improve application response times. The MSA 1040 has 29,000 IOPS and the MSA 2040 has 82,000 random read IOPS, with throughput of 3.1 and 6.2 GB/s respectively.
The performance and functionality of the HP MSA 1040/2040 arrays makes it a solution worth considering when planning virtualization deployments, especially when paired with HP ProLiant servers. The 1040 is a good choice for a first-time virtualization project, and the 2040 can be used to deploy high-performance virtualization environments for companies that already have some experience with virtual servers. HP MSA offers features that make it easier to manage, deploy, support, and provide essential data services.
The MSA application has encountered an error again
On March 22-23, 2021, a large number of users were faced with the fact that a window notifying about a failure in MSA began to appear on the screens of smartphones from the manufacturer Xiaomi and the sub-brands Redmi and POCO. Moreover, this affected owners of phones with different versions of the MIUI shell. As it turned out, this problem arose as a result of an update to the Google Android System WebView system service, which is part of the Android OS. Google has released an update to its service, which resulted in error messages appearing on behalf of Xiaomi proprietary programs. Let us remind you that similar situations have already occurred before, for example, updating the Gboard keyboard with errors.
In this case, you can fix the “MSA application has crashed again” error in one of two ways, depending on the situation:
- If the developers already know about the problem, then they quickly solve it and release new updates with all the fixes. Launch Google Play, select the “My applications and games” section in the menu and then the “Installed” tab. Find and open the "Android System WebView" service, then click the "Update" button and wait a while for the update to install.
- If an update has not yet been released in which this error has already been fixed, then you need to roll back for a while to the previous functioning version of Android System WebView. In this case, the user needs to follow the path Google Play Store - “My applications and games” - the “Installed” tab - “Android System WebView”, as described above in the first method, only in the last step, instead of the “Update” button, the “Update” button will be available. Uninstall" or "Uninstall updates".
Also, until the time (usually several days) until the developers release a stable version of the program, you need to use the “Three dots” (in the upper right corner of the screen) to disable “Auto-update” of Android System WebView by unchecking it.
After this, it is recommended to restart your smartphone.
