161–170 of 363 posts
Also known as "how to visit detention centers". The amount of bad advice here is staggering. You are not James Bond or some kind of ninja Seals secret agent. You are a nobody attempting to enter a country, and you will be pissing off the border police. Have some common sense.
One lesser-known tip for iPhones with FaceID or TouchID: press and hold the lock button and one of the volume buttons until prompted for power options/medical ID/emergency call. You'll then have to enter a passcode in order to use those auth methods again. Having to reveal a passcode can sometimes be considered a higher bar than biometric auth. You can do this even when in it's in your pocket without looking, quite q…
That's assuming border patrol operates within the law and constitution.
https://informationsecurity.princeton.edu/sites/g/files/toru...
I'm seeing a lot of discussion here about how to prepare your phone for a border crossing, which is fascinating. I was wondering about a different strategy: what about leaving your phone at home and then buying a new one after you've crossed the border? It seems like it wouldn't be any less work than 'clean wipe and full restore post-crossing' and has the advantage that border agents can't search what you don't have.…
> I'd be curious to hear what people think about something like this.
Because you asked. It's extremely wasteful and therefore a bad idea.
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> might as well assert your rights I wonder what could happen to citizens who weren’t born in the US Given what we’ve seen recently. Could it be possible they would refer these people to the state department to revoke their citizenships?
As things currently stand, this wouldn't qualify for denaturalization. Even the Trump proposals have been to do it for fraudulently obtaining citizenship (e.g. lying about a criminal record), not general crimes, and certainly not for non-crimes like annoying CBP. But next week it could all be different.
Not sure about CBP specifically, but many countries already use specialized tools to break into phones and silently install backdoors — Cellebrite comes to mind. As my favorite blogger puts it: "If the data is important, it's not stored in only one place. If there's no backup, it wasn't important." With that in mind, wiping the device and filling the gallery with high-resolution images of genitals covered in excremen…
> and that we've largely normalized this. This (along with healthcare) are examples for the "both parties are the same" refrain. Neither side wants or advocates for the status quo (for US citizens to lose their rights at the border) but neither side is doing anything about it. They could easily eliminate the "constitution-free zone" exemption at borders and airports, but from what I can see, no lawmakers are talking…
Ignoring the US political situation for a moment I want to point out how ridiculous modern phones and apps storage access given to their users is. You used to be able to mount a phone as a full hard drive and have access to all your files, do a real full backup without some encrypted databases that only facebook, google or apple hold the key for. The first tragedy is that we accepted that the US gives no rights to no…
I root my phone out of principle (and it does come on handy sometimes). Rooting a phone seems increasingly rare, unfortunately.
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If it’s built in they can request you to unlock both profiles.
Android 15 has a "Private Space" feature that can be somewhat hidden and used to sandbox apps/data. It will prompt for a secondary unlock if you know where to look.
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I used to do this but these days I’m petrified of the restore being imperfect in some way. I use the he.net app for TOTP. Will I get those back in working order? I have a billion photos I want to keep — were they properly backed up to iCloud? My mail settings are a pita to recreate. Will those come back? Are passwords stored in the Secure Enclave? Could I lose those? When I sign back into iCloud am I going to be able…
Your phone could become damaged and inoperable every day. From dropping it in the toilet, being stolen, a house fire, etc. If you're "petrified" of losing your data, it's worth the work to ensure your data backup procedures are adequate.
It's not like my backup of my ~/Photos directory where I can copy to a USB and md5sum the files on a separate computer and check the match.