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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • That actually isn’t a way to prove anything, unfortunately.

    A powered off or “powered off” phone wouldn’t need to transmit anything. It would be just waking one of the receivers periodically (or even the NFC could be hit by some radio energy as a trigger) to listen for the “secret” activation code. Listening for radio energy doesn’t generate any.

    If the phone was “powered off” - tracing power draw between battery/phone would probably show something, but likely, the phone’s power draw while off is always constant if this were the case and it isn’t a new state the phone goes into.

    Even if the phone was being used as an offline bug, the user would still not know because it can record audio/whatever and store it internally without ever transmitting. It’d likely be rigged up to just transmit the next time the user “turns it on” - so they’d be unaware, as the transmission would look like normal traffic.

    The only case where it would be traceable from a radio perspective is if it were being used as an online bug, which means it would already have to have been put in the online bug state, which means someone has a reason to monitor you.

    I mean shoot, if one really wants to go full tinfoil hat, recording audio to temporary storage at voice quality could go on for days with a phone “powered off” - periodically dumped to somewhere in flash. Hours of conversation could be fit in megabytes. The phone could just always be recording while turned off for every user, and when turned back on, that audio file is sent through the ML processor to convert to text, and then compress the text, further reducing the size. That data could be transmitted during normal usage as voice or compressed data, or just stored in the phone as compressed data for years.

    Every phone could be doing this right now, and could have been doing this for a decade, although on-device text transcription is a relatively new feature.

    Then, let us go next level: phone recycling/exchange processes also harvest IMEI+that compressed data before being shipped off for resale in the event it was never transmitted. Finally, we know why the NSA has the Utah data center.

    I keep asking them to send me copies of recordings of old phone calls, but they never humor me.

    DISCLAIMER: This is all non-serious but based on what is technically possible right now.





  • LineageOS, Graphene, etc. all require AOSP at their core. AOSP contains the necessary binary blobs to activate hardware features in proprietary chips like modems, graphics controllers, etc., and also the communications infra for proprietary blobs on devices to talk to the OS in the case where the blobs have to be extracted from a proprietary ROM and ported over.

    While those OS forks could continue to exist for some years, and probably will, they’ll be hitting an increasing uphill battle.

    Problems like:

    • Newer hardware will not have support.
    • Existing hardware may lose support when the OS<->RIL<->Modem have updates in some way that are out of sync with the old code.
    • More pieces of Android going forward will be closed-source, and it will become harder to maintain open versions of them without continual reverse-engineering of closed-source software, and the lawsuits to come.

    The third-party OSes (all of them) have always been dependent on current AOSP existing. Without it, they will be missing the OS core to keep things going.





  • Android also is designed to run on lots of different hardware unlike Apple.

    Apple’s OSes are also designed to run on lots of different hardware. Intel, PowerPC, ARM, nVidia, AMD, Apple GPUs. It is just all hardware Apple (mostly these days) designs. There’s no reason to talk about what hardware they run on. We’re talking about their parallel roadmaps to closing off the OS development from users/open-source, and how both are doing the exact same transition, Apple’s is just a quarter century in the making.

    Google has already been doing what is necessary to close Android for years. Example: The AOSP texting app they abandoned years ago. Google Messages is now the messaging app. Fully closed-source. No requirement to ever open it. They also used RCS as an excuse to close off the third-party messaging app arena. No third-party app can use RCS on Android now.

    Play Services, Assistant, Chrome, YouTube, YouTube Music, GBoard, all their applications are being separated and the “old” version phased out. Some things will remain open-source, likely, like the Chromium bits of Chrome, but even that they’ve already forked their secret Chrome sauce.

    With a hybridization of ChromeOS and Android, this will further accelerate Google not having a need to care about the existence of AOSP. Eventually, they’ll just abandon it entirely.

    If you use an AOSP-based OS like Graphene right now, you can see the remnants of the AOSP apps. Peeps on projects like Graphene do some massaging to keep them usable, but they’re basically apps frozen in time to aid companies in proof-of-concepts and not part of what one would call consumer-facing Android today.

    Vendors like Samsung and Lenovo pay to have early access to the Android source, so they’ll still get early access for device development, but it is a 100% pay-to-play model. Likely with NDAs. Which again, is exactly what Apple does.