biktor_gj's comments

First things first: I never implied (or wanted to imply) that you were introducing malware in that patchset, just that you could introduce it and I wouldn't be able to find that in a PR so big. Sorry if that came out wrong.

Still, that 3.18.140 kernel is ancient, it's not worth doing anything with it unless we find a bug that prevents something from working. Especially since there _is_ a mainline effort, and there's a 6.0 based tree that has most of the things working already except for some bugs with the nand and audio.

And that's the reason why there hasn't been a new release lately, because I hadn't had a lot of time, and because I'm spending all my little remaining energy on trying to get the userspace working with mainline.

For those who may not know, the userspace acts as a sort of bridge between the baseband and the Pinephone, by proxying stuff between them (that's how you can hijack some things and implement voice calls and SMS). When moving to mainline, there's certain devices that cease to exist, some others needs adapting, and I'm taking the time to try and get openqti to be more flexible and out of the box support different audio settings for different models, different flash configurations (for those modems which don't have a dedicated user data partition etc)

It has had different phone numbers before, but we always ended up having some issue with some app where the it (correctly) thought the number was invalid, wouldn't allow you to reply etc.

So I settled with two easy to remember numbers: +22 33 44 55 66 77 for normal user<-->modem communication and +22 33 44 55 66 78 for Cell Broadcast message relays

Probably on every connect, there are ways to randomize your IMEI on every boot on certain phones though (that might be not very legal in some countries)

I did the mod with a Pinecil and some tweezers in my kitchen table in 15 minutes. Might look hard but if you have steady hands and a $25 soldering iron you can do it without issues

On the other hand, I have a XPS 15 9500 I use with Linux all day and never had an issue with anything. Always suspends, never wakes up by itself, no hardware issues... My work 16" MBP on the other hand killed the battery after one week in "suspend" when I was on vacation, probably due to the Power Nap functionality, which sounds pretty much like the Modern Standby being talked on.

I'm no expert, but if you ask me, I would completely erase the phone, upgrade it via DFU, and start fresh. After setting it up again, run another backup and rerun the tool to doublecheck. That or ditch the phone

Given there's an electronic lock on the other side with a keypad, it makes me think that thing has its own actuator and didn't want to mess with it. Otherwise it would just be a matter of adding an "Electric strike?" (https://www.tesa.es/en/site/tesa/products/electromechanical-...), feed it 12/24v through a relay connected to the pi zero, and add another api endpoint

There was no option to bypass cloud login when it got to my hands, apparently that has been "fixed" with some update, but if you buy a device and it comes with an outdated firmware, as it tends to be the case with their cameras and APs, your only choice is activate on cloud, setup, update, factory reset, setup on local.

About 2... I guess when you got access to all their source and infra is just a matter of pushing an update to enable ssh and they don't even need to even push a key. My problem with the keys is that they come bundled with it and you don't know it. There's no reason for them to install a key in there without your consent. Imagine Microsoft presetting an Administrator account on every Windows Server without telling anyone... It's just a security problem, even more in a firewall

After the Unifi Video fiasco, I bought a UDM Pro to test Unifi Protect.

Once I saw it required cloud login I got scared. After I saw an ubiquiti ssh key preinstalled in a device with unfeteted internet access I shut it down to never bring it up again

You can connect multiple accounts from the desktop client if that's what you mean... If you mean nextcloud to nextcloud there's also federation, but haven't really tried that as I've never needed it.

That count is only of quectel and qualcomm binaries and libraries, busybox, sysvinit, scripts, config files etc. where not in that pack.

True though, most of them don't do anything interesting, or only one interesting thing for the thousand that could do in a typical scenario

Not parent, and I'm not going to say it sucks, the project takes a lot of work from a lot of people and I ain't the one pissing on other people's work, it definitely could use some improvements syntax wise though, What was it, brew install? Brew cask? Oh , now is brew cask install... or was it brew install --cask?

I get the analogy, but being a package manager, but was it really that bad to use 'brew install', 'brew update', and 'brew upgrade' for everything?

And it's true that it is a little frustrating at times when you don't use it for a while, you 'brew install xx' and wait 4 minutes until "Updating homebrew" finished with its dozens loops between shells, ruby etc doing its stuff (which I assume is refetching repos, but couldn't know it from the output)

I use it because it's the most common thing for mac, but I miss APT and DNF everytime I use it, not going to lie

Right now, on Mobian, you will get more or less 2-3 hours of screen on time, with everything enabled (modem, wifi, bluetooth, max screen brightness and doing stuff with it

If you just let it sleep (modem on registered to the network, allowing for voice calls, all the rest of the phone suspended), you'll get about 24 hours of runtime.

I think there's still more power management fixes that can be done, mostly in BT/Wifi, but it's not bad at all for a phone that's still tagged as "dev"

It depends a lot on cable quality, what you have on either side and the connectors in between.

At work we had to repurpose a pair 170ish meter cat 6 cables for some cameras and it has worked nicely for three years (with PoE even). We tried again with a 100m cable rated for exterior (plus female + patch cords) and it wouldn't even link at 100mbps

That is not true since Mojave. It will always tell you you have a pending update, it will dump a notification to update to Big Sur (already happened to me this morning), and it'll do it's best to confuse you to update.

Case in point: if you have catalina and you go to system preferences, system updates, you will have the big sur update in big, then some text on the bottom of the window saying something like "there are some other updates..." and then you'll see the security updates for your current OS

More because the Inetrnet came and allowed every vendor to sell directly from their webpage instead of going through the distribution channel, making retail software stores obsolete

There are two platforms that drive 100% of the mobile phone industry. One (Android) allows other distributors in the platform (even if they have to go through loops like sideloading an app and then allowing that app to install other apps). The other will kick and try to destroy you if you try to do something like that. Is that legal or anti-competitive in the US & Europe? We'll find out...

The biggest announcement here seems to be the "Security updates from Google Play"

I don't know if that means Samsung doesn't get to decide when you get updates or if it means "we're delaying security updates from being pushed to AOSP so you better have Google Services installed if you want your vulnerabilities patched in a timely fashion"

Casio solved that problem 40 years ago with 4 screws and a rubberband. It is what it is, the same with soldered ram in laptops. Cheaper manufacturing + worse repairability == bigger earnings per quarter

Two screws on each side of the battery so it doesn’t move and a back cover with screws would get you the same waterproofing as glue. Instead a broken glass back will get you 600€ of repair in an Apple Service Center

Crust runs in a RISC cpu inside the Allwinner chip, and it only works in that. I don't know if the NXP chip has a 'dedicated' core to manage the actual ARM cores, but all the work done in Crust won't be portable to the Librem, if it can be done, it'll have to be done from scratch

Well, probably this was the result of some corruption in a parameter in the flash. On the early days of the Samsung Galaxy phones if you broke part of the efs partition the modem couldn't read the IMEI and would fall back to a generic one. This looks quite the same

Though with 13000 devices affected either it was a problem in manufacturing or someone in the Service Center was not doing the job too well...