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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

#341

Post by Marsymars »

dataflow wrote: post #248
dheera wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should really implement a dual user / dual password system to combat those countries. If you enter password 1 it goes into your normal account, if you enter password 2 it goes into another user account with a burner environment where you can install a few token commonly used apps for plausible deniability. The existence of password 2 should be optional and you should not be able to tell if the system has one or…

> install a few token commonly used apps for plausible deniability It's gonna be seen as pretty implausible when you don't have constant & recent messages with your loved ones in there.

I dunno, my elderly and non-tech-savvy in-laws travelled to the US (from Canada) last week and wiped their phones of social media apps and stored messages before crossing the border based on media reports around the US CBP’s handling of border crossers’ devices, so I’d say an empty phone is pretty plausible for anyone in that situation.

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

#342

Post by Marsymars »

7bit wrote: post #266
matheusmoreira wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buy a travel phone specifically meant to be opened by them.

There's enough places in the world where this isn't necessary, so no, thank you.

Is there any country in the world that has an explicit policy saying that non-citizens don’t need to provide phone passwords on entry? I’d consider a burner phone necessary to visit any country that doesn’t have such a policy.

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

#344

Post by epolanski »

izacus wrote: post #271
epolanski wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've visited 45 countries in my life and I've never ever been even asked once to even show the contents of my bag, let alone access to my phone.

That doesn't change the fact that once you will be asked about that, your refusal will mean a flight back home at best.

Not if it's against the local laws.

It's extremely dangerous to condone and think that police officers are entitled to write the rules.

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

#345

Post by arghwhat »

Krssst wrote: post #238
arghwhat wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is default on iOS and on many Android versions. It's often configurable, but e.g. carrier policy or local vendors can enforce it. To have updates automatically install overnight is the maximally desirable scenario - waiting for user approval usually result in open vulnerabilities, and if you interact with a prompt you are by definition using your device and it is therefore a much worse time than while you're asl…

> maximally desirable On Android, my experience has been that new major versions are often unstable / involve some risk of bricking / include feature regressions (dumbing down of multi-task in Android 13 if I remember well). Waiting for a few month before installing a major update, while not optimal for security, is necessary to make sure that the most critical bugs are fixed beforehand. Regarding applications, today…

> Major upgrades

Major version upgrades are a different type of upgrade altogether. They are optional while the previous major is still maintained.

Minor upgrades is what should always be automatic.

> Flash wear

No, it doesn't matter.

Total write endurance (i.e., the number of bytes written the device is designed to handle under some standard load) is usually a large multiple of the chip size itself - say, 200x-400x, so e.g. 100TB of writes for a 256GB setup. A particular workload is only really meaningful to flash wear if it is in the scale of several full storage rewrites during the lifetime of the device.

The exact write endurance depends on the exact configuration (specific chip selection, allocated reserve), but even microSD cards have wear levelling these days.

Your device is going to die or be retired with a certain flash write wear, but I find it extremely unlikely that your device will die of a flash write wear. The wear endurance is dependent on the specific flash setup.

A much larger cause of wear is app caches (e.g., streaming video continously overwriting a disk cache, browsing social media). If you take pictures, those might end up written multiple times as first the original is written, then the automatically processed version, then any edits you make, then if storage saving measures is enabled maybe its deleted and a compressed version is written, if you later open the app the original is downloaded and written again, ...

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

#346

Post by 542354234235 »

glenstein wrote: post #285
sneak wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Biometrics aren’t testimony. You don’t have to do anything for someone to hold a phone to your fingertip, or a camera to your face.

You have to be actively physically cooperative for both of those things. An argument against being compelled to provide biometrics does not necessarily hinge on it being analogous to testimony.

But it has already been argued successfully that giving biometrics is analogous to giving blood, hair, fingerprints, standing in a lineup, providing a writing sample, or wearing certain clothes, all of which you can be compelled to do. To argue against being compelled to do or provide biometrics without using testimonial arguments would be going against a lot of case law and precedent.

There is a specific precedent where you being compelled into providing biometrics can be inadmissible, and that is where you are compelled to unlock the phone, since doing so, even with biometrics is akin to providing testimony that the phone is yours, you know how to unlock it, which finger to use, etc. (see United States v. Brown, No. 17-30191 [1]). But that doesn’t actually prevent them using your biometrics to unlock the phone, so its pretty niche.

[1] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/17...

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

#347

Post by Braxton1980 »

oarsinsync wrote: post #321
andylynch wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rea…

What if they changed their password right after being arrested, and then forgot? Immediately after changing your password does tend to be the time most people forget their passwords.

Possible but how would you prove that?

If there's an excuse for something that is difficult to disprove because it's based on the word of the person it would undermine the justice system.

Imagine if ignorance of the law was an excuse.

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

#348

Post by glenstein »

542354234235 wrote: post #346
glenstein wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to be actively physically cooperative for both of those things. An argument against being compelled to provide biometrics does not necessarily hinge on it being analogous to testimony.

But it has already been argued successfully that giving biometrics is analogous to giving blood, hair, fingerprints, standing in a lineup, providing a writing sample, or wearing certain clothes, all of which you can be compelled to do. To argue against being compelled to do or provide biometrics without using testimonial arguments would be going against a lot of case law and precedent. There is a specific precedent w…

This is a bizarre response. My comment was not a denial of legal history on biology-as-testimony, it was instead opening space for other legal or philosophical objections: autonomy, bodily integrity, possibly Fourth Amendment concerns about unreasonable searches.

But you're replying as if my comment was claiming courts haven’t treated biometrics like physical evidence. That's not what I was doing.

The reference to Brown here appears to be massively misleading: far from being niche, it complicates the biology != testimony in a way that cuts to the heart of the most common real-world application of biometric compulsion which is smartphone access; from chatgpt'ing about it it appears that it's not the only court to rule on this and it probably awaits a SCOTUS decision to resolve an existing split.

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

#349

Post by 542354234235 »

glenstein wrote: post #348
542354234235 wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it has already been argued successfully that giving biometrics is analogous to giving blood, hair, fingerprints, standing in a lineup, providing a writing sample, or wearing certain clothes, all of which you can be compelled to do. To argue against being compelled to do or provide biometrics without using testimonial arguments would be going against a lot of case law and precedent. There is a specific precedent w…

This is a bizarre response. My comment was not a denial of legal history on biology-as-testimony, it was instead opening space for other legal or philosophical objections: autonomy, bodily integrity, possibly Fourth Amendment concerns about unreasonable searches. But you're replying as if my comment was claiming courts haven’t treated biometrics like physical evidence. That's not what I was doing. The reference to Br…

You didn't elucidate any of that, or actually make any argument, so I had no way of knowing what you were thinking. You said “being compelled to provide biometrics does not necessarily hinge on it being analogous to testimony” so I stated that there was a lot of established case law already on compelling individuals to provide analogous physical information/samples, which covers bodily autonomy, bodily integrity, and the 4th Amendment. The only contention as far as I know, is around the 5th Amendment, but if you had other information, I’d be interested to hear it.

The Supreme Court has declined multiple times to hear cases that would help settle the legal ambiguity. I don’t think United States v. Brown complicates things because the specifics on the case were not whether or not you can be compelled to provide biometrics, but whether being compelled to “unlock a device” and manipulating the device yourself constitutes protected testimony. [0] They even cited United States v. Payne [1] where the court upheld that forcibly taking your finger to unlock a phone did not violate the defendant’s Fifth Amendment rights, and at issue was only the wording of the order.

From my understanding, the current split about being compelled to provide passcodes, and to a much lesser extent biometrics, is the foregone conclusion exception stemming from the Fisher v. United States [2] case, where, as Justice White said “the existence and locations of the papers[were] a foregone conclusion and the [defendant’s physical act] adds little or nothing to the sum total of the Government’s information by conceding that he in fact has the papers… [And so] no constitutional rights [were] touched. The question [was] not of testimony but of surrender.”

This has been used in relation to court cases on biometrics and passcodes [3]. It appears that courts that rule that you can be compelled seem to look narrowly at the passcode itself i.e. the government knows you own the phone and knows you know how to unlock it, so it is a foregone conclusion to provide it. Courts that rule you cannot be compelled seem to look at the phones contents i.e. the government does not know what is on the phone so decrypting the data would be providing protected testimony, or a stricter interpretation that you cannot be compelled to disclose the contents of the mind.

[0] Somehow I linked to the wrong case originally https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/cadc/2...

[1] https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2024/04/17/2...

[2] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/425/391/

[3] https://www.barclaydamon.com/webfiles/Publications/Unlock-De...

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

#350

Post by izacus »

epolanski wrote: post #344
izacus wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't change the fact that once you will be asked about that, your refusal will mean a flight back home at best.

Not if it's against the local laws. It's extremely dangerous to condone and think that police officers are entitled to write the rules.

The border officials have wide discretion to deny non-citizen entry in most countries for whatever reason they choose.
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