I’ve always assumed that behaviour like this is so unusual is would motivate a closer look by security services.
Criminals the security services are looking for are not that smart. If they were, they wouldn't have been criminals in the first place.
> If they were, they wouldn't have been criminals in the first place.
What does intelligence have to do with whether someone is a criminal? There are dumb criminals and smart criminals; I'm not sure what the correlation here is.
Criminals the security services are looking for are not that smart. If they were, they wouldn't have been criminals in the first place.
> If they were, they wouldn't have been criminals in the first place. What does intelligence have to do with whether someone is a criminal? There are dumb criminals and smart criminals; I'm not sure what the correlation here is.
I think most criminals are dumb. Quick google search shows average IQ of a criminal is 85.
Reductio ad absurdum, why not make all communication illegal without the explicit written consent of the recipient? Then you'll never have to be bothered by anyone ever again.
Is that supposed to be an absurd proposition? Because that is something I want. Stuff like advertising should be straight up banned, and it should be considered abuse to get a phone call from someone you have not explicitly whitelisted, especially corporations and governments. No one should presume they have an IRQ line to your brain and attention. They don't get to interrupt you with bullshit you couldn't care less…
Ok, what about an air raid siren? Someone speaking to you on the subway? A letter from the government about an upcoming election? A road sign warning of closures? Someone with a megaphone directing traffic?
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?
So one child which might have died is the same as nuking NYC? (and 99% it’s custody dispute, no harm done)
> 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…
I don't believe this is entirely true anymore. Yes, years ago, the baseband processor (and firmware) had full DMA capabilities to the RAM ostensibly managed by the OS, and could do nefarious things if it wanted to. But I believe nowadays the baseband is a bit more isolated, and communication with it is mediated by the CPU and OS. Some manufacturers likely still implement the "old" architecture, though.
How can I find out what peripherals my smartphone's baseband processor has access to?
Back in the day my phone carrier in Argentina would send me ultra-high-priority alerts with ads several times a day. A lot of people in this thread are understandably okay with good carriers doing this for good reasons, but it's very easy to abuse if there aren't strong enough communication laws. From the amount of spam I got when I lived there, I'm surprised this is not happening in America.
Wow, that's obnoxious. I'm sorry you had to suffer that. I live in Brazil and I get constant advertising and phisshing SMS messages, it got to the point I had to kill SMS notifications and forget it even exists. I still get robots trying to call me at random times during the day, there seems to be no way to turn off telephony but it's less disruptive. If my phone had unblockable advertising disguised as high priority disaster alerts I think I'd throw it off a bridge.
From https://grapheneos.org/faq : "Connecting to your carrier's network inherently depends on you identifying yourself to it and anyone able to obtain administrative access. Activating airplane mode will fully disable the cellular radio transmit and receive capabilities, which will prevent your phone from being reached from the cellular network and stop your carrier (and anyone impersonating them to you) from trackin…
BTW habitually switching at the same time and place is terrible opsec. It leaks a ton of information.
Yeah I'm not sure what information this really protects assuming you're only communicating over encrypted channels (https) already.
In theory it could protect location data from the carrier for locating you with a wild amount of opsec practice but I highly doubt you could pull that off for a daily driver.
Having wifi/bluetooth off in public isn't a terrible idea though as those are generally much easier attack surfaces and are leakier.
Just want to go against the grain and say that I agree with you and disagree with fellow commenters comparing their phone buzzing once in a while to unwarranted police raids or government-sponsored mass murder.
The phone "buzzing once in a while" teaches everyone to ignore this buzzing and makes this massively counter productive - people will ignore it when serious disaster happens.
I guess I just don't believe you, and it will take more than people complaining to convince me. In the situation described in this thread, I cannot imagine everyone in Central Park dismissing this notification without anyone saying "hang on everyone, it says missile instead of amber this time". I have lived in several big cities in the US and have gotten these alerts less than once a month, sometimes with years in between. It is not a scourge on society. I do think you should be able to disable them, but I think that even if explicitly given the option, most people would leave them on.