141–150 of 177 posts
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Firmware blobs for…what? It doesn’t matter if the camera or fingerprint sensor is working if you’ve harvested the motherboard.
Please re-read my comment, I already gave specific examples.
Is there anything that typically _requires_ vendor blobs to let a phone run as a usb ethernet connected linux-ish node? So no camera, screen/touchscreen, wifi/bt/cellular radios, gps, nfc/rfid, or stuff like that?
I know RasPi relies or (or perhaps used to rely on?) some Broadcomm blog to boot - from memory something to do with getting the GPU to boot/configure before booting the cpu(s). I could easily see Samsung or Huawei intentionally building something like that - or ending up like that because the rushed and half assed the design and engineering.
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The article seems to be fairly clear about this: it is Google focusing on Google phones (so unlocking the bootloader should not be an issue) and they did mention that the kernel would have to be replaced (albeit for other reasons). I would think the main factor against such clusters is cost. Even if the four year old phones are free, they have to be dismantled, tested, and supporting hardware/software has to be devel…
I pretty much agree with everything you said. But I think there is a chance for this to be commercially viable if it is offered in a different way. I,e not just raw cloud computing maybe you can run games on these clusters and jack the price a little. This is highly dependant on the virtual age of these clusters if they survive 10 of continuos work maybe there is a chance
I wonder if someone's trying to work out if they can keep GCP alive when there's no ram or cpu to be bought at any price because the AI companies (including the AI division in Google) and Nvidea have completely broken commodity compute hardware supply chains?
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Please re-read my comment, I already gave specific examples.
Baseband, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth seem like things that should not work in this context (either as a cluster in a data center, or for an old device I want to repurpose in my home lab). Is there anything that typically _requires_ vendor blobs to let a phone run as a usb ethernet connected linux-ish node? So no camera, screen/touchscreen, wifi/bt/cellular radios, gps, nfc/rfid, or stuff like that? I know RasPi relies or (…
> But... if Google can do so if handed a random pile of old phones, then why would a consumer not be given the same option for their phones?
In this instance, Baseband/WiFi/Bluetooth is very much relevant.
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Please re-read my comment, I already gave specific examples.
None of those matter for compute
> But... if Google can do so if handed a random pile of old phones, then why would a consumer not be given the same option for their phones?
My response was to this, not the cluster-use case as mentioned in TFA.
This is ignoring the fact that the main reason retired phones are e-waste is proprietary firmware blobs and locked-down systems preventing users from maintaining their phone with security updates, and very limited support length from OEM's leads to VERY insecure devices after they drop out of support. You should not be connecting these old devices to an internet accessible network. Google notably does well here with…
>This is ignoring the fact that the main reason retired phones are e-waste is proprietary firmware blobs and locked-down systems preventing users from maintaining their phone with security updates, and very limited support length from OEM's leads to VERY insecure devices after they drop out of support. Approximately nobody is throwing away phones because the OEM stopped providing security patches. They're doing it fo…
But even if people could trade in their phones for a small deposit, how many actually do (and not because they would use it- typically storing it in their drawer is safer than and less time consuming than figuring out how to run a factory reset before giving it to a datacenter.
I've thought about a program where people could drop it off in their mailbox and have a delivery service pick it up (possibly the USPS, but I think they wouldn't want to be burdened with handling lots of lithium batteries).
20 years from now phones will be powerful enough that they can run on capacitors, thinner than a credit card, and deconverged from the multimedia omnibus systems that they are today. Sure it is convenient, but I think the feature adds will plateau.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please re-read my comment, I already gave specific examples.
Baseband, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth seem like things that should not work in this context (either as a cluster in a data center, or for an old device I want to repurpose in my home lab). Is there anything that typically _requires_ vendor blobs to let a phone run as a usb ethernet connected linux-ish node? So no camera, screen/touchscreen, wifi/bt/cellular radios, gps, nfc/rfid, or stuff like that? I know RasPi relies or (…
IMO it's possible that the bigger issue is no one knows what's going on inside these devices. Maybe some of blobs aren't needed, or they can be readily replaced, etc., but no one has time to deal with it. This is probably a field that cheap brain-hours that LLMs just created could actually revolutionize.
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Code escrow. You factor in the expense of having your code releases escrowed by a third party (where part of the escrow contract itself is: "must be buildable from sources as provided"), and have a post-release pipeline that automatically uploads the new version. At the end of the term, the escrow holder releases all the versions. This is a fairly common arrangement in high finance. If you want to supply services to…
So if I have software on my website and you pay for it and you’re in some European country that has this law then you (who?) can sue me for not uploading all my builds to what? some s3 endpoint?
There are a few such services around, usually owned by a giant global consulting house.
The idea is that if you as a vendor go out of business or otherwise become unable to maintain the software, the finance institution gets access to the software via the escrow. Importantly, they also gain the contractual and legal rights to further maintain (read: modify) the software.
Under such contract the vendor has an obligation to upload periodic code releases to the escrow service, and the escrow service validates that the release builds. (And passes the bnudled test suite.) Rather surprisingly these services don't even cost that much... at least in the grand scheme of things. The requirement usually comes up only when the underlying supplier deal is at least six figures annually.
ß: well, contract law is still law but not in the sense the parent appears to be thinking
This is ignoring the fact that the main reason retired phones are e-waste is proprietary firmware blobs and locked-down systems preventing users from maintaining their phone with security updates, and very limited support length from OEM's leads to VERY insecure devices after they drop out of support. You should not be connecting these old devices to an internet accessible network. Google notably does well here with…
The OS must be user replaceable so we can run what we like. If this is not possible, we should at least be allowed to a run a VM on the phone (we can assume Silicon lives matter. We must make sure our device has many afterlives until its eventual death (5 decades later).