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Android phones will soon reboot themselves after sitting unused for three days

arstechnica.com

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Re: Android phones will soon reboot themselves after sitting unused for three days

#291

Post by andylynch »

Braxton1980 wrote: post #287
londons_explore wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> imprisoned for failing to provide encryption keys This scares me, because I have plenty of old devices I no longer know the passwords for. I don't think I'm alone - plenty of people forget passwords they don't use in years. If the police came and searched my house, they could probably find some ancient laptop or phone from a decade ago, demand I unlock it, and then put me in prison forever when I cannot do do so.

Wouldn't you be able to argue this in court for this rare case? With a phone that can be shown to be in use constantly it would be more difficult to prove you forgot

Yeah. We dealt with a case where a guy claimed to have forgotten his mobile phone pin. But we voted to convict after I pointed out it was the phone he’d been using every day, for years, and was quite implausible, and convenient, to forget something like that right after being arrested and asked for it.

Possibly could have gone differently if they had said they changed their 15 letter password every two weeks, but really?

Re: Android phones will soon reboot themselves after sitting unused for three days

#292

Post by andylynch »

greatgib wrote: post #34

It's good to have an option like that, even being a default, but there definitively need a switch to disable that if it is your own will. It's not even necessarily that good enough against cops, because in a lot of shitty countries, even some pretending to be democratics, not disclosing or at least inputting your password might be a crime severely punished. If I'm not wrong, there was a guy that had to stay years in…

This isn’t unusual, the USA is a an exception; commonly the view is that electronically unlocking a phone or laptop is much like any other legal search, e.g. opening a garage or a locked room.

Re: Android phones will soon reboot themselves after sitting unused for three days

#293

Post by rvba »

Another shitty idea that makes life harder:

If you are in a hospital- your phone will reboot to pin level. So you need to unlcok it few times and wait 3 minutes before it becomes reactive.

Then all your alarms will not work.

They add crap like this, yet the stock calendar app needs a separate appto play music to warn you. This of course breaksafter a reboot..

My grandma has a second phone as backup - it will constantly reboot and will never be ready to be used the time it is needed - as a backup. Since it will keep rebooting and requiring a pin.

Who comes up with those anti user ideas?

That we will probably be unable to turn off (or the option to turn off will disappear after few months). Also old people will not know how to turn it off

Re: Android phones will soon reboot themselves after sitting unused for three days

#294

Post by rvba »

lysace wrote: post #62
udev4096 wrote: post #7

They stole the idea from GrapheneOS and shipped a barely half-baked version with hardcoded time. GrapheneOS has configurable time for it since years

I'd claim that Microsoft pioneered this time limit security concept with Windows 95 almost 30 years ago. They went with 2^32-1 milliseconds or about 49.7 days. We don't talk enough about Microsoft's strong legacy of security innovations, IMHO.

More like "innovation" that makes all those machines in factories break every 49 days.

Re: Android phones will soon reboot themselves after sitting unused for three days

#295

Post by rvba »

vishnuharidas wrote: post #135

I found that this saves a lot of battery. My old Motorola G5G is now sitting idle, and I had to charge it every 4-5 days. I found that if the phone is restarted and NOT unlocked , it will stay charged for more than 10 days. My best guess is that a screen unlock is required to start many of the OS-level services, which takes up all the battery. If this is true, then the new update will save a lot of battery for those…

Witout the pin u lock of simcard... nobody can call you?

Re: Android phones will soon reboot themselves after sitting unused for three days

#297

Post by MiddleEndian »

simonh wrote: post #225
MiddleEndian wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally like XKCD but dislike the message in this comic. If that's that guy's workflow, they don't have to actively support it, but he should be given the option to disable updates so he can continue to use his tools in the way he sees fit.

The comic doesn’t say anything about mandatory updates, and it’s EMACS. The user can install whatever version they like.

Yeah that's fair lol. But I guess in the context of this discussion, Google can push stuff onto your phone with Google Play whether you want it or not.

Re: Android phones will soon reboot themselves after sitting unused for three days

#300

Post by 867-5309 »

"unused"

firstly how about fixing software which forces 'inactive hours' yet reboots even when cpu is at 100% utilisation, and software which dims or locks a mobile screen during video playback, and soft/hardware which doesn't respect user-supplied suspend/standby timeouts in their power plans, and ....

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