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.

If only tech companies weren’t assholes and actually developed desired features instead of the shit they have wasted our time with…

They know they are the only choices, and so they shall work together to maximize that revenue stream.

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.

GrapheneOS, the privacy and security focused aftermarket operating system, has received an experimental build for the Pixel 10 series

Received? GrapheneOS are the authors of their software, they don’t receive. Curious how they got the binary blobs to get it to function.

That “article” is terrible, and doesn’t even touch on the crucial issue - the crux, as it were. Android is one thing, hardware support is the magic piece Google is trying to remove to close their borders and kill creativity forever.

Rooting for Pixel 10 native support over here, but was it an employee leak? Similar hardware driver copypasta with modifications? Did Google just finally share the necessary binaries legitimately?

This whole thing is so vague.

They’ve woven Android so deep into open-source projects, there are likely legal commitments they have to slowly back out of, similar to how Qualcomm once drove CodeAurora Forums (https://bye.codeaurora.org/). Don’t worry, they’ll get there. This time window has to be used for designing an escape hatch to something just Linux-based.

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”.

Something nobody ever asked for or wanted.

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.

Good summary right there. Clean up your own house before you start preaching under the guise of user safety, fools.

So far the only “cleanup” I’ve seen in the Play Store is removing old apps that haven’t been updated in a while but still run just fine, which means things like a physical Bluetooth air quality sensor I have needs the APK sideloaded now. Totally fighting scammers, Google. Totally.

Wouldn’t it be great if these tech companies just dropped the verbal diarrhea filter and just spoke plainly?

“We’re doing this to try and increase revenue by making ourselves a walled garden like Apple, because there isn’t really competition anymore, we’re greedy, and we lost the plot,” is what they should be saying.

The Senate folded, which forced a vote in the House because that bill changed in the Senate, which brought the House back into session, so she had to be finally sworn in.

It is all, oddly, related.

Extrapolating from there, the Senate Dems decided to gamble American citizens’ health insurance in exchange for some tabloid headline documents. Hoping for…mass sentiment against the Mango presumably? Strike while there is bipartisan support for something in the House. To then what, maybe oust Mango for Couchfucker? Sow distrust? Maybe they just pulled back because they realized the US was inches from doing a general strike? What better time.

Meanwhile, citizens were ready for the long-haul. Effect real change. Get actual attention to being pissed off at this sham of a government. Thrown away for some documents that will be buried in a few disaster news cycles.

They’ll just keep further stretching out releases until they stop completely. Google is trying to kill AOSP. What will end up remaining is a skeleton (if that) akin to how Apple only has a fragment of their OS open-source anymore. Google is the enemy and should be treated as such.

LLMs are basically read-only Mr. Meseeks, except rather than being present for the whole conversation like Mr. Meseeks, each new question in the conversation is a new Mr. Meseeks that has to context the previous convo and answer. It’s no surprise they hallucinate.

If apps didn’t suck, and app devs weren’t manipulative shits, updates would be rare anyway.

Awesome, so pointless manifest revisions to manipulate store reviews and falsify user engagement will update even faster? (Which are most “Bug fixes and quality improvements!” updates these days.)

Really can’t wait for this terrible “app” update concept to go away. The market manipulation aspect drove shipping shittier code out the gate and generalized FOMO.

Or better, apps can go away entirely, lets go back to everything lives in the browser, it’s generally safer, and most “apps” are just browser containers that only exist to harvest device telemetry.

Google could, and probably would become more malicious on deprecating and obsoleting old hardware, but that’d be a huge revenue loss for them. They tend to actively support the app layer on older Android OS versions (here’s an arbitrary breakdown from some web search: https://composables.com/android-distribution-chart ) for a very long time, as older Android is used in many embedded devices, inexpensive devices, purpose-built devices, and other places.

Keeping the Play Services and Play Store up to date on older phones means they can continue a metadata-gathering and app-sale revenue stream on older phones for many years after they “age out”.

Couple that with the fact that most “reasonable” vendors now try to support 3, 5, or more years on a piece of hardware, you should at least be able to get almost half a decade out of a phone before it no longer receives primary OS updates, and likely then another 5 or so years until they stop updating for that API level.

The ELI5-ish version of it is Android is composed of a few layers. The stuff that makes the hardware work, the stuff that makes the OS work (drawing on screen, install/remove programs, texting, calls), and the stuff that makes the software (apps, etc.) work. The part they stop updating is the stuff that makes the hardware work, and the stuff that makes the OS work. However, it’s already working, soo… Over the years, Google spent a lot of time migrating as much of Android as they could so that the apps, some bits of OS, and other things like app security could be updated even on very old versions of Android. You could turn on a phone from 2015 like the BlackBerry Priv right now, and install current apps and most things would run without issue.

Yes, there could be a slight risk that some malware comes out targeting older phones with older OSes and older hardware support, but that’s generally a smaller audience than targeting the latest and greatest phones that are way more “popular” - so not really worth it to malware peeps. The hack targets would most frequently be at the app layer to cast as wide a net as possible. Since Google continues updating Play Services and the Play Store software at the app layer, this would mostly keep people safe from the majority of attack vectors. The diversity of phone hardware really helps here.

Mostly though, mobile marketing just tries as hard as they can to create FOMO that you might be missing out on something by using an older phone.

As long as humans have to be the ones to drive their vehicles, down with this distractive nonsense.

Best thing to do is just stop buying new phones. Play Services and apps will still work and receive updates for years. Swap that old battery and keep chugging for a few years.

Starving all the tech brah corpos of money is the only message we plebs have the power to send. Bouncing to their competitor in a duopoly isn’t actually “showing them” anything.