131–140 of 299 posts
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> It's only gotten worse as phones have gotten more capable I wish my cellphone would not have all those sensors for this reason...
The camera and mic are pretty easy to destroy if you want to get rid of them!
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Just because another country has a law does not mean my phone should disregard what I told it to do. This absolutely is a user setting. How far we've fallen from sharing the DeCSS flag, to arguing that users shouldn't have control over their devices, and governments and carriers should.
People keep failing to understand that if you can't make your device do something that is illegal, it's not /your/ device. It's that simple. Politically crafted laws are not physical laws of the universe, they not only can be violated, they often /should/ be violated. Laws are not a moral imperative. This particular law (emergency alerts) might not be an issue, but the fact that your device will follow the government…
Smartphones are already locked down in a million other ways compared to eg a desktop Linux install. Why is this different?
> I must say I strongly dislike losing control over my own device. It feels dystopian to me. Even with a rooted device where perhaps you personally coded up the ROM you are still missing a piece which is the binary blob that runs the baseband radio. That firmware is, afaik, not something which exists in any sort of open-source or rootable manner. It's a closed blob running proprietary software on your phone, and it r…
Edit typo
I can totally understand why Americans would want to silence these. I'm from the UK and I was in Central Park with my wife and kids when we got an 'Amber Alert' which said something like 'Black Ford SUV reg XYZ123' or something equally cryptic. It was not long after the terrorist attack in Nice where a guy drove a truck thorough a crowd of people walking beside the beach. Everyone's phones started going at the same t…
Ex boyfriend disappearing with a child is totally worth an Amber Alert, and a couple hundred miles is only a couple hours drive by the time they put the alert out...its easy enough to just keep an eye out for a license plate. Nobody is going to know for sure if its a false alarm, or if we'll wind up with a murdered child until after the fact, so why wait or ignore it?
The idea doesn't scale unless the events are actually quite selective, and a missing person that isn't even necessarily missing yet probably shouldn't qualify.
Even if you are sympathetic and care about that kid, it doesn't matter because it doesn't work anyway. Everyone just ignores the alert. It's just not a reasonable balance between how much some bad thing matters and how many people's attention are commandeered for it. Every single death even from peaceful old age after a rich full life is a tragedy, but the rest of the world can not care about it. Literally can not, because it doesn't scale. Those tragedies are happening at a constant rate of many new ones every second of every day at all times. Instead there are a much smaller set of people who care about or who's job is to care about each one, and that set is smaller than "everyone in a 400 mile circle". The fact that a person can drive 200 miles in any direction in a few hours doesn't change that.
It's probably a good thing for the system to exist, but if it's used the wrong way, it's entire utility and reason for existing is sabotaged and nullified.
However the real point not about the alert system but about a carrier's ability to control your device more than yourself, even if you own your device outright, that I do not say is a good thing that it exists. I accept that there's not much to do about it. I do have a rooted phone running LineageOS, which gives me a bit more control, but I don't kid myself that that really means much. But I don't think it's good or right.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People keep failing to understand that if you can't make your device do something that is illegal, it's not /your/ device. It's that simple. Politically crafted laws are not physical laws of the universe, they not only can be violated, they often /should/ be violated. Laws are not a moral imperative. This particular law (emergency alerts) might not be an issue, but the fact that your device will follow the government…
Just root the device, then you can disable it. And don't give me any of this "it should be possible to do this without rooting the phone" Smartphones are already locked down in a million other ways compared to eg a desktop Linux install. Why is this different?
It's not, but it's bad that smartphones are locked down like that, so we should be pushing back on it at every opportunity.
If you are using the Android OS originally installed on the phone, you can deactivate many of these at the OS level (not baseband) using ADB. This does not require rooting. An easy way to find and deactivate these codes is to use the UAD (Universal Android Debloater) found on Github.
Wait until your learn what a country or local government/police can do remotely to the baseband firmware of your phone with a court order... 10-20 years ago the FBI was regularly remotely programming firmware to listen in and record cell phone microphones to capture conversations of suspects. IIRC a mafia case hinged on data gathered in this way so it is not some abstract theoretical or crackpot theory ( https://www.…
Specifically can your whatsapp/signal audio calls be recorded by FBI remotely in this manner?
I can totally understand why Americans would want to silence these. I'm from the UK and I was in Central Park with my wife and kids when we got an 'Amber Alert' which said something like 'Black Ford SUV reg XYZ123' or something equally cryptic. It was not long after the terrorist attack in Nice where a guy drove a truck thorough a crowd of people walking beside the beach. Everyone's phones started going at the same t…
Ex boyfriend disappearing with a child is totally worth an Amber Alert, and a couple hundred miles is only a couple hours drive by the time they put the alert out...its easy enough to just keep an eye out for a license plate. Nobody is going to know for sure if its a false alarm, or if we'll wind up with a murdered child until after the fact, so why wait or ignore it?
If you don't, we'll end up with a murdered child, so why not?
Wait until your learn what a country or local government/police can do remotely to the baseband firmware of your phone with a court order... 10-20 years ago the FBI was regularly remotely programming firmware to listen in and record cell phone microphones to capture conversations of suspects. IIRC a mafia case hinged on data gathered in this way so it is not some abstract theoretical or crackpot theory ( https://www.…
So drug lords throwing mobile phones out of the car window after each call is just a movie trope?
In one of those conversations, I was asked to not publish details about the extensive cellular tracking data that had helped to make the case. According to the detective, despite the ubiquitousness of cellular tracking data in prosecutions, your everyday criminal is not doing anything remotely like ‘throwing mobile phones out of the car window after each call.’ Quite the opposite, they are posting pictures of themselves with contraband to Instagram, and using their phones to facilitate crime as if they were untouchable.
Perhaps drug lords are more careful than lower-level dealers, but I’m not so sure. Total conjecture here, but I suspect the money gets to their heads, which leads to a feeling of invincibility — with consequent opsec failures.
If you keep an eye on major arrests, criminals routinely get taken down in essentially the same ways as the criminals who were caught before them. Despite their belief that they had been taking precautions against those failure modes.
I can totally understand why Americans would want to silence these. I'm from the UK and I was in Central Park with my wife and kids when we got an 'Amber Alert' which said something like 'Black Ford SUV reg XYZ123' or something equally cryptic. It was not long after the terrorist attack in Nice where a guy drove a truck thorough a crowd of people walking beside the beach. Everyone's phones started going at the same t…
They shouldn't be sending out Amber Alerts for something a couple hundred miles away, because as you said, that causes people to ignore them. In my area, we only get very localized Amber Alerts, which makes them pretty rare... 1-2 per year.