The mobile companies are slowly hiding all radio controls to guarantee the user is too inconvenienced to keep turning them off. Guarantees more enriched telemetry gathering.

Happens at the app level too, although it may be less malicious and more crappy coding. Watch Duty on Android, for example, is really a pain of an app in that regard. You can disable android’s WiFi/Bluetooth scanning, but their app uses that Google service specifically instead of raw GPS, so you lose the ability to get location-based wildfire alerts. If you don’t consent to Google stalking.

What a trade-off, if you don’t give away your location Metadata, you can’t be kept safe from fires?

They used to run on a model of “we know best” which is arrogant, but passable in a developing industry like earlier mobile where things needed work. Unfortunately, they still think they know best, and that closed-minded approach only works so long until you lose sync with the tolerance of the general public. Honestly surprised it took them this long. iOS and MacOS have both rotted terribly.

Take the UI aspects alone. Samsung “leaked” hints about a glass UI, saw user feedback, and pivoted. Apple released a glass UI because they would have never checked what users actually wanted, nor even bothered to see the user feedback from Samsung users and realize it’d apply to them as well.

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.

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.

My favorite part is claiming such horse shit on the heels of dragging every general on planet Earth to Washington DC just so he can masturbate in front of them.

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”.

The magic of the rich!

Plenty of other soups to buy, many of which even taste like food, unlike Campbells.

Everything said by this admin is always a declaration of guilt. So, in this context, the 1984-translated version is: “people use my Autopen all the time without my knowledge.” Which also explains how when he attended that wrestling event back in the spring, he was also somehow signing and authorizing (whatever terrible thing it was at the time, it’s hard to keep track of) at the White House that Stephen Miller I think angrily announced while touching dolls.

Something nobody ever asked for or wanted.

May I introduce you to Colorado?

https://coloradosun.com/2025/04/14/miles-harford-funeral-home-owner-pleads-guilty/

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/colorado-funeral-home-owners-accused-storing-190-decaying-bodies-are-c-rcna148016

Colorado finally has laws and inspections, but those are still turning up issues like:

https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/22/us/colorado-funeral-home-decomposing-bodies

There are also issues with pet cemeteries as well:

https://www.9news.com/article/life/pets/colorado-pet-crematory-lawsuit/73-446c6b3a-100a-4807-bb22-e98cd289d814

https://www.kktv.com/2025/09/06/those-pets-are-their-lives-colorado-springs-veterinarian-former-crematory-owner-shed-light-owner-storage-unit-where-dead-pets-were-found/

Neither list is exhaustive.

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.

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.