> connect the device to the Internet before they are allowed to install the operating system they want Phoning home before undertaking such an activity takes away the ownership rights from the customers. They do not actually own these devices even after they have purchased them. The reason is that an important part of their ownership rights, i.e. the freedom to use the software of their choice, has been withheld from…
It's not rocket science that some carrier and manufacturer lock the goat out of their phone like Samsung and Verizon, but I think this thread is dealing with a much more different problem and everyone who bought carrier does not belong.
ELI5 - everything about a phone only works when the carrier allows it to connect to the network. So, the way this is done is to, well, connect to the network and allow the phone to be unlocked - which according to the article is what happened? So the real complaint is that the Pixel can't be loaded with a customized Android OS (or Linux, etc.) without being connected to the internet first and this is bad because the…
One issue for this process that I have seen when talking about the Pixel is: - ***You can't actually back up your Pixel*** It's enormously frustrating, because this is the typical advice before moving to a different OS. But apparently, actually mounting the device or seeing it via `lsblk` is from what I can tell impossible. I tried for a while to simply make a direct image with `dd` to try out other OSes etc but I co…
Yep. It was fun while it lasted, but I expect none of the manufacturers will support hacking or mods on these devices in the future because there's too few people doing that compared to the masses they want to sell to, and they have zero time or money to train technical support staff. They want to sell you an appliance that can't be repaired, has planned obsolescence and locks you into the platform by (effectively) keeping your data hostage.
Xiaomi does the same (or at least did until my latest phone change i.e. around 3 years ago). You must unlock the bootloader before being able to install a custom recovery image such as TWRP, which itself is used to install custom ROMs. This unlock involves: creating a user account in the Xiaomi services website, logging into that account from your phone's system, then having the phone logged in for at least 7 days ,…
Samsung does the same fwiw for their newest phones. Pretty annoying.
Samsung won't even let you unlock their US phones bootloaders.
This is incorrect. Have you considered that the delay between getting the device and getting it connected could be well outside of the return window or people could be purchasing them in countries without such consumer rights? Smartphones aren’t only for the developed world.
Who buys a brand new phone but also has no internet connection for weeks? Do they have all the apps they need pre-downloaded? I don't think that's a big group.
It usually takes about a month between the time I order something from the US and the time I have it in-hand. Last holiday season was about 2 months.
Never tried a return because I'd have to pay through the nose on shipping.
When you buy a new car they have the VIN of the car and log any recall repairs done. So not sure how you think the same wouldn't be legal on a phone? Having a device in their database as NEVER_UNLOCKED takes away any onus from having to look for this in the first place for a large % of users. Additionally this is kind of important for a company that's had a history of selling devices with hardware defects. It'd be ve…
Maybe make a phone that cannot be bricked by any software? A phone that can always be reset to a clear state with a factory reset? I'd argue that it's possible in 2023.
It's pretty common. Apple Silicon devices (at least) have a BootROM feature to pull a signed boot image over USB which can be used to provision the device from a blank flash.
Google has a console called panopticon where they can see every Chromebook in the world. This monitoring facility is used to measure bug / crash prevalence in e.g. 802.11 driver software and to determine how much of each fleet is running the latest ChromeOS security patches. They can do this because Unlike Microsoft Google ports ChromeOS onto new laptops and tests the crap out of them (including the verification that…
>They can do this because Unlike Microsoft
You'll be SHOCKED that Microsoft has been aggregating global crash data for more than a decade. Lmao. Google isn't breaking any new ground here. All Windows BSODs and even app crashes get uploaded to Microsoft as far back as XP. Microsoft has even written a blog post on them fixing a 0day before it even got deployed because it got errantly caught as a crash from an attacker's development machine.
Xiaomi does the same (or at least did until my latest phone change i.e. around 3 years ago). You must unlock the bootloader before being able to install a custom recovery image such as TWRP, which itself is used to install custom ROMs. This unlock involves: creating a user account in the Xiaomi services website, logging into that account from your phone's system, then having the phone logged in for at least 7 days ,…
Samsung does the same fwiw for their newest phones. Pretty annoying.
I was never able to get lineage working on my old s8
> connect the device to the Internet before they are allowed to install the operating system they want Phoning home before undertaking such an activity takes away the ownership rights from the customers. They do not actually own these devices even after they have purchased them. The reason is that an important part of their ownership rights, i.e. the freedom to use the software of their choice, has been withheld from…
The major innovation of Silicon Valley isn’t tech. It’s eroding out the concept of private property