Once again: Fuck Samsung and fuck Israel.
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Israel... aren't those the guys that put bombs in the pagers?
One more example why big corporations are not your friends
Incredible. We have reached the point where it feels safer buying a random Chinese phone than Samsung or other "big brands".
Shame that Samsung is the top selling Android vendor. I wasn't aware of this when I went with Honor but I'm glad I did.
goes to show anything tech coming out of US, EU and its client states are not ever trustworthy.. I would go as far as to e.g. not buy a Bosch fridge, never mind the other reasons not to.
It's worth noting that as of 2022, Unity owns 73.5% of the company IronSource, which develops the spy/"intrusive bloatware" app
GrapheneOS with their real phone cant come soon enough. These big tech companies have ruined any sense of ownership.
Another reason to stop using Samsung smh. The Devil army of Israel keeps showing it is the ultimate evil
Samsung is more of a dumpster fire than specifically Zionist.
Samsung phone might be dangerous to your health and life, even in a case of being near oen. Even if you aren't conspiring to send aid to Gaza, since they can probably also track people around you. Andd they do kill based on metadata. US and Israel, both.
At times like these I really want to just buy a spare burner flip phones.. no additional use cases need. Dial/call in and out..
After everything that has happened in the past 2 years, that entire region should entirely boycott Samsung until they're clear all Israeli spyware is cleared out of phones. The Middle East is a fairly large Market and everything Samsung should be forbidden entry by leaders of those countries until this is fixed.
Yet another reason why running GrapheneOS is a great idea. The surveillance state is now.
Pixel only?
yes, and you have to get one that is from google and isn't from a carrier so you can unlock the bootloader. Carrier versions have locked bootloaders.
I just bought a Pixel 10 from Spectrum with the repeated assurance that the phone would be fully unlocked after it was paid off and had several months of service. I intended to load Graphene OS, but apparently I was fucking lied to yet again by another business that will say anything to make a sale.
I can't do anything about that now, but I can move to another carrier and make damn sure they don't ever make another dime off my mobile account.
They thought you meant carrier-unlocked. That's what most people care about, being able to switch providers.
I doubt they even knew what a bootloader is.
They thought you meant carrier-unlocked.
Nope. I clearly told them I was going to install Graphene OS and I would not be changing carriers.
They didn't know the real answer so they just made something up.
Once it's carrier unlocked you should be able to unlock the bootloader though right?
Those are 2 entirely different things. There are phones that are carrier locked that can have the bootloader unlocked, also the other way around.
I would look at the model number, and then search if it's bootloader unlock able in XDA developers or something like that.
I believe GrapheneOS is not available for the 10 series yet. I've been keeping on top of that since I want to change my phone in December, but so far, the last version of Pixel that is known to work with GrapheneOS is the 9 series.
I have a Canadian carrier purchased phone. Brand new Pixel 9. 5$ a month. For 24 months.
It has only ONCE booted to the Google version of Android.
To flip the toggle to enable OEM unlock.
I kept WiFi off and hadn't inserted a SIM so it couldn't update or do anything else that might have prevented flashing graphene.
Not sure if that was necessary, but it worked.
And now I live my life free of google software surveillance.
Rogers in Canada has pixels that allow unlocking the bootloader (just got a pixel 9, and once I have some time I'm going to try putting a custom build on it).
In most markets, kind of. There are some others but most aren't sold in NA other than the Pixel.
I wonder what spyware they'd be willing to put in their phones in the US for the regime in charge.
Also, if I bought a Samsung phone while a dictator is in charge and it gets the update and I get the spyware — hypothetically speaking here — and by the time a progressive is in office, they're pushing updates that remove it, but my phone is outside the update period, how would I go about removing it? Just buy a new one at cost? Seems like that's something they'd let you do for free, though.
Thank you Samsung for giving us, not one, but two reasons this week to not buy your overpriced shit.
whats the 2nd? beside their push ads, spying and unremovable overbloated junk?
It's fine, they'll still be able to change the OS
https://sammyguru.com/breaking-samsung-removes-bootloader-unlocking-with-one-ui-8/
Oh...
Has anyone actually analysed this app to see what information it can actually access? The few articles I've found don't elaborate.
Like, does it just track what games you play and websites you visit? Or can it log your keyboard, steal all your banking passwords and read all your private conversations?
"is this runoff full of poop or just pee???"
Well, of course I don't want either poop or pee in my phone, but it matters which one I have, because I need to know what cleaning products to use.
If it's poop, then maybe I need to change all my passwords and keep especially on guard for fraud attempts, but if it's only pee, then I just need to remove/disable the app and I can stop worrying about it.
It's a rage bait article that's why they leave out all of the information. It's working too.
Seems like a popular Kuwait based e-commerce app in the region:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.alshaya.aura
That being said android apps are sandboxed and dont really have any capabilities unless launched. Still shouldn't be included by default but the impact here is definitely overexaggerated.
if anyone has one of these phones, please contact CitizenLab. they can reverse-engineer it.
i have a samsung phone and im not surprised to hear this. my phone keeps installing these crappy mobile games without my consent and i had to manually uninstall them a few times. so yeah, not much of a stretch.
Could it be your carrier somehow doing that? I've literally never had that happen
it definitely is a carrier thing. my phone is carrier unlocked, but because it used to be a T-Mobile phone I still had their shitty T-Mobile app manager randomly installing shit. I was wise enough to disable it but many have no idea you can. same goes for this appcloud thing, it's been around for a long time and affects a lot of Japanese and Chinese phones too. I switched from iPhone and this bewildered me, no idea how it's even legal.
You can flash the US Unlocked firmware. I use a US Unlocked S22 Ultra. Works on all carriers. No bloatware like what you described. I know what you're talking about -- it's called Carrier something. It's a system app. You can disable it but updates might re-enable it.
That's why they say that free cheese exists only in traps.
(Or sometimes cheese paid for, but less than needed to not look for other sources of financing. Think all of modern electronics and the Internet.)
It's not about other schemes of profiting than paying forward not existing - it's about you the customer being interested in them not being used. They are always worse for you. The lesson of "free" stuff on the Internet.
Including free and open source software, with no doubt - because when a FOSS project could go the direction that would badly hurt corporate business relying on traps, it doesn't - because its scheme of existence is based on said corporate businesses' funding and developer participation and embrace and testing. And there won't be a discussion inside that project, no matter how democratic, because money likes silence. Nobody will even think about a direction not supported by work, and work is done by people, and people are paid. All of big FOSS events cost a lot ; some of it is in volunteer resources, but most of it is people on their jobs.
I'm honestly starting to think about going the Apple way - at least they only send hashes of the binaries you run to the daddy.
There are reports of people noticing it two years ago.
Fuck you Samsung, and Fuck the IOF. sincerely MENA
At this point in the world, just fuck literally everyone and everything.
I have a friend who always used to call me a nihilist because of my attitude and to some extent that was true, lately I've been feeling more like an anarchist.
I don’t think cell phone batteries can be wired to explode, but I am not an electrical engineer.
Wired? Certainly.
Doing it without extra wiring is probably possible too. You'd have to override the battery charge controller, which is probably not available to an app, if to Android at all. But I'd be unsurprised if there was some exploit that made it possible.
I'm not an electrical engineer but I did work with explosives a little in the army. You'd only need a small amount of high explosive to do some serious damage to someone if their phone was in their pocket and that explosive went off. Modern phones have plenty of empty spaces to stuff full of enough explosives to do lots of damage. It'd be a lot easier to detect then just making the Li-ion batteries ignite but who can say what the IDF can smuggle into the supply chain.
They would likely be detected by modern airport security if they put in actual explosives.
All battery powered devices go through the scanner separately.
The israeli pager/walkie-talkie attack's tampered equipments (filled with explosives) completely bypassed airport security...
No but I bet they could be used do melt the device, imagine if all of a sudden nobody had phones, chaos.
Someone in another thread pointed out that reddit users spotted this two gears ago:
https://www.reddit.com/r/samsung/comments/1505mzb/what_on_earth_is_ironsource/
Please use a proxy service like redlib. dx
Not op but i prefer it when people link the original so libredirect redirects me to the instance I want to use.
All that talk of Knox security and Bootloader locking just to install a system level spyware.
And that's one more reason why hard- and software not fully under the users control is completely worthless.
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