EDL (Emergency DownLoad) mode on Qualcomm chips, I’m sure other chipsets have a similar mode. The chipset actually does it, the hardware manufacturer just has to support it.

It is a pretty cool fallback mode.

Yeah, amazingly dumb. I have a ThinkPad x201 tablet from 2010 that still works to this day. I upgraded it and added a cellular modem. It still has a dial-up modem. It has gigabit Ethernet. I upgraded the RAM to the eventual maximum 8GB. I replaced the hard drive several times and it now has a 1TB SSD. I replaced the battery once, and only once, because it is so old, I found a surplusser with old OEM batteries, that will eventually fail and I’ll probably have to crack it open and rebuild. It has a CardBus slot that had various things including PCMCIA camera readers, an ExpressCard/34 memory card that had an entire Linux OS on it at one time.

It has a dock with a slot for an optical drive I never ended up purchasing. It has tunnels designed in the keyboard tray so if you spill a drink, the liquid is routed through safe holes, and the dock even has secondary safe holes. You could pour a gallon of milk on the keyboard and it’d end up on your desk, bypassing all of the computer and dock circuits. Oh it also has a VGA port on it, DisplayPort on the dock, it basically has every computer interface spanning 30 years. It even has a USB port that has BIOS settings for iPhone or BlackBerry charging when the computer is off, (they both had different USB charging protocols back then) and it’s marked in yellow plastic in the port so you can charge your phone off your computer.

Oh, and it has a headphone jack, a microphone jack, a camera on the screen, stereo mics on the screen for video calls, trackpad, TouchPoint, I can’t even remember all the things it has. A similar-sized modern MacBook has 1/10 of what that old computer can do. It’s currently running Debian and still used on my workbench to this day.

I didn’t have to build it, I actually bought it on a “black friday” deal when the model was being discontinued.

Oh, and the tablet part, the display spins around and you can eject a stylus from the body of the computer. Wacom tablet surface overlayed on the screen. With eraser accessory on the other side. Screen lays flat on the keyboard backwards. Dedicated buttons in that mode. Whole thing can be services with Phillips screwdrivers, even field-stripping the hard drive or RAM.

Also has fingerprint scanner to boot with TPM. 15 years old, it still knows my fingerprint. Not even sure I have the software to reprogram the TPM anymore.

Wow, that’s an interesting one, thanks for that. That would be quite annoying to deal with.

In that case, since the 2FA is coming from the carrier, if you can disable 2G and 3G on your handset, the air link on LTE and above is AES-based encrypted at least, if the carrier configures it correctly, even though the channel itself often isn’t. Or if very paranoid you can use WiFi calling in airplane mode on a burner so the carrier sends the message over the wifi calling IMS-encapsulated-in-VPN-connection over the Internet.

The chance of someone being able to intercept that 2FA code in a way that could get into your bank account is pretty much absolutely scant.

Not trying to change how you do things either, though. Just knowing how terrible some banks can be at writing software, I’d be more apt to trust “weaker” methods versus apps. The future is quite exhausting.

They don’t need your permission to gather all sorts of data from most modern smartphones, nor can you really deny some of it. (Some you can, like camera, and microphone, allegedly.) Part of the whole banking<->handset manufacturer agreement also frequently allows “special access” outside of the traditional user-permission security model. For…“security” to “prevent fraud”.

This must be a European problem perhaps? I can’t understand why this is the deal breaker for so many.

Banks have web sites. I don’t know why anyone would ever allow their financial institutions access to their phone’s plethora of sensors and the available telemetry on what they are doing on their mobile device 24/7. That links confirmed ID + “trusted platform” + biometrics + transactions + location + all the metadata every other app hoovers up in one convenient place. The very same people across the pond are worried about having to verify ID to look at porn, but are cool with their bank knowing the position of their accelerometer while they’re taking a dump.

Probably only released it now to help ICE disappear people.

There are podcast aggregators out there that aren’t just Apple-ify, although now that I’m doing a cursory search, maybe a use for Google’s silly search engine to waste Google’s servers for good.

Search:

"podcast name" filetype:rss

"podcast name" filetype:xml

And yet, annoyingly, these podcast platforms hide the podcasts’ URLs as hard as they can, even though these providers don’t host the podcast or files, and a “podcast” is just an XML file pointing to mp3 or m4a file URLs. (Not disputing you, just that the increasing non-openness of something they don’t even have to pay storage or bandwidth for is pretty ridiculous. They are nothing but a man-in-the-middle attempting to extract profit.)

Yeah, I agree, but it also makes a weird kind of sense. Properly regulated stock markets exist to ground the crazy people. Without them, they’d be doing things like building slave cities on nuclear waste for profit.

Look at fancy pants Germany over here with more than one brand of banana in a store.

Samsung’s emoji/GIF injector is neat, but Futo Keyboard may be a viable alternative. It seems to be progressing little by little. As long as the vendor doesn’t go “evil” in a future release.

Also Samsung’s autocorrect is an abomination. So often it doesn’t correct a wrong word, or over-corrects a real word. There’s no appeasing that drunk algorithm. Sure, you can un-teach wrong words by hitting “…” next to the suggestions and deleting the suggestion, or periodically resetting the learning dictionary, but how is that keyboard such a needy little shit? Love the alt keys and number pad overlay.

Futo seems very promising once you change the UI settings enough to fit your fingers well.

I’m really surprised “shareholders” with any intelligence don’t start calling out their investments as liars during earnings calls. Tech companies have done this shit for years. Force features into the “on” position by default, force it back on frequently, force not having an off switch to disable the feature. Then they can tell shareholders that user adoption of new shiny widget F is so popular, millions of users are “using” it. Even though the tech company just has NewThing turned on by force and users are completely unaware it is even on, if they even ever use it.

Same crap is done with streaming services partnering with cell carriers and cable providers. Falsify user numbers even if the person just gets it for free and never uses it.

These companies only do this to falsify metrics to make their quarters look good… What if they actually made features users wanted and the user numbers became real?

Or, here’s crazy talk: what if it was illegal to use such tactics to falsify numbers? Gasp.

Not sure I completely understand the thought here, apologies. Are you considering just emulating Android for some specific apps that only exist as apps? Seems a probable approach. I suppose extending that, one could even just emulate the apps on a computer at home and remote desktop into the computer from their phone to run them, although that’d be possibly obtuse.

May I ask what country has apps that require government ID to run on their phone for certain things? That seems a bit dystopian.

I don’t get why banking apps are such a difficult deal-killer for people. Banks have web sites. But also, what are people doing? Running their bank app to daily transfer money back and forth from/to checking and savings?

Have you ever tried running Android apps on Graphene? Most run just fine without Play Services, many even have smaller degoogled versions. Some Play-only apps may have an error dialog here or there, but very few just flat don’t work at all. Graphene + Obtainium config to pull apps in from various sources and manage updating them. Maybe a few sideloads. About as zero Google as one can get on a modern smartphone.

They didn’t really specify what radio signals. Often satellite communications may be interrupted, HF ham radio bands. Less of an effect on Earth-based radio transmissions as the atmosphere is somewhat a shield.

If news is going to call out radio disruption in their headline, they should probably specify what, how widespread, etc.

Many apps have no reason to ever have network access. Block away until you start seeing feedback in the app logs.

Apps like Android Easter Egg do not need network access. Go from there and hit what needs to be blocked.

Antitrust Google. Fork YouTube as part of it. All existing content must be preserved. Remove YouTube’s ability to sell licensed content (cable TV channels, music, on demand). YouTube can then be purchased or spun off as a “YOU Tube” again - content made by people for people. Brand saved, community focused. Monetization heavily regulated (governance or internal governance, but just make it a requirement.)

Or just let it burn and replace it with something else. Video’s just super-expensive to host and provide, probably by design to keep others out of the market.