Samsung and the other manufacturers shot themselves in the foot so hard on this one. When this news trickles down to the average Mexican (ie someone not in the tech industry), the message they will get won't be "don't buy grey market phones, buy official phones", it will be "don't by Samsung, ZTE, etc, they will lock your phone".
I see a lot of ZTE phones in the stores here in Cancún. I’ve not seen that brand before coming here.
Some of them are pretty cheap even.
I thought about buying one so that I could leave my iPhone in the hotel room some days and only carry a cheap phone when I am outside walking in some parts of the city.
We are leaving Cancún soon, so now there is not so much point in doing that anyways. But I was thinking that I could do so when we get to Panama in a few days, or the next time I come back to South America.
After your comment I am rethinking buying a ZTE phone ever. However, I didn’t hear ZTE mentioned in the video. Is ZTE somehow connected to Samsung?
ZTE is not connected to Samsung. There were some budget ZTE phones sold in the USA about 10 years ago. I believe ZTE was banned by the US government, along with Huawei for doing shady things.
> are beeing chinese owned and there is a trade war?
Lol it takes a lot more than being a Chinese owned company to get banned in the us the majority of the things that we buy is made in China. If it was that reason you wouldn't be able to buy anything in the store anymore
I get the impression that it's strategy to exclude competition that otherwise can't be beat.
You can't beat Huawei cell towers. You increasingly can't beat Huawei phones, which have become much better and cheaper than iPhones.
You can make up some story about it being spyware (while we have a mountain of proof that the US has spyware in Western devices...) and exclude them, also hoping that it will limit their advance. Of course, the opposite has happened, CHinese tech comapines have now rapidly gained the ability to sourse in-house (or in-country) what they used to import, leading to a tech jump through sanctions.
Another reason why those companies are banned is because the US gov hasn't successfully inserted back-doors in the chips so therefore there is no oversight/snooping so they don't get to do business in the US market.
unrealted to this thread, I know, but yes, thank you. I despise when the top results and the casual links to support something turn out to be videos. I don't want to stop everything I'm doing to dedicate 100% of my attention to something on a fixed take-up time schedule. Give me a text I can scan while my other audio keeps playing, thank you!
I'd love more technical details on how this was possible. What system in the OS/baseband is responsible? If you installed LineageOS could you protect yourself?
That was the first thing I wondered; how will they avoid this? Let's say I'm going there for an extended trip and decide to get a local SIM card. Will my phone just go poof?
Lineageos is still here, GrapheneOS and CalyxOS is more updated and presumably more secure and private, but Graphene only supports Pixels and Calyx supports Pixels plus some other models. Pixels should be your best bet in terms of ROM compatibility.
It sucks. There's basically no other choice except a Pixel phone. And even some of them are locked if you buy it through your carrier.
I would get some Linux phone even if they aren't perfect, but I have no cell reception, and rely on Wifi calling, which seems to be some proprietary thing that only Apple and Google are able to implement.
Use a Pixel phone running version of GrapheneOS built and signed by you with your own keys, or use stock GrapheneOS and don't lock the bootloader, and add root access if desired.
That's the only hardware/software system that guarantees both total freedom, support for mainstream apps, good security and a quality device.
Donate. Though so far the project is in good financial status.
Since my own finances got to be a bit stricter, I try to donate in packages of $50 ocasionaly as to the project having, from me, an a average of $2 a month.
I'm running Lineage OS on a Moto g100. Overall, I'm really happy with it. I have full control of my phone and it has the hardware features I wanted - headphone jack, micro sd, two-day battery, and a fast enough CPU that it never feels slow.
Motorola has an automated process to get the bootloader unlock code, and the whole process was fairly straightforward.
LineageOS even passes SafetyNet, however there's an additional CTS Profile check that some apps do, and passing that requires rooting the phone, which is turn requires a SafetyNet bypass and makes updates more tricky because LOS updates un-root the phone.
Nobody else (that I saw) mentioned it, but PostmarketOS [0] has a decent number of (community) supported devices, is Free and more than a de-Googled Android distro - it's actually based on Alpine Linux. I've previously run it on my Pinephone Pro, but images are available for multiple Samsung handsets as well [1]
No. This is just because phones in Mercadolibre, or other Fayuca places are cheaper and better models than the overpriced ones they sell in Samsung's own "official " store.
I'll replace my phone this year. And was looking to buy a samsung s23 ultra. But all my phones are multi sim. Samsung mexico doesn't sell multi sim. But the gray market ones so sell multisim and a 512gb original s23 is $250 USD cheaper than the one sold by Samsung with only single sim.
I can't tell about Mexico situation, but living in France, you can see offers for imported phones (often shipping directly from China or other countries, with large shipping delays) on all platforms like Amazon, Rakuten, Fnac etc. (apart from original ones from vendors/platform themselves).
Usually those imported versions are 10-20% cheaper.
I was always suspicious about those deals and wouldn't buy it myself, spending hundreds of bucks and not being sure if I'm getting the real deal, or some fake / limited version with worse networking etc. but given that they're up year after year, probably many people do buy it.
We need a law, and that"s coming from a libertarian.
If the owner of a hardware device is using it, that person has total control over the device. Nothing can be blocked. Nothing can be hidden. All data must be available in plain language. That owner/user should have the right to inspect and modify everything in the device in plain language.
With today's memory / storage capacities and with today's LLMs, that should be easily implemented by starting over and reprogramming everything.
Maybe I should fork a few FOSS products and build this in.
If you buy a product you should be able to use it as advertised even if you break all ties with the original vendor. Otherwise it's a service and not a product.
In US/EU there is a law which explicitly forbids complete access to the wifi part of any device. So that you can't modify it's maximum power/frequencies.
Any company giving you complete wifi access is criminally liable in US/EU.
I haven’t checked the laws in those jurisdictions, but having worked with a mobile radio network in the past, that doesn’t look entirely unreasonable. People don’t realise how much carnage a single rogue device (whether through failure or intentional hostile act) can cause and how hard it can be to track down the source of a rogue transmission. There is no physical barrier that prevents the normal laws of physics from applying to frequencies carrying control signalling and disrupting everyone else using them, so legal and technical barriers are all you have to try to maintain a working network for everyone as much as possible.
That is not my understanding as an American amateur radio operator. I can modify and posess any radio transmitter I wish. I can transmit within the limits of my FCC license(s.)
We need a law that protects transfer of rights in general. It must become illegal to stop people from selling things they have, from hardware to things like accounts on various platform. Ensuring transferability brings us closer to a free market, which should take care of the problem.
The secondary markets law. What a lot of people and a lot of libertarians don't realize the contract law can and is regularly used to undermine the private property rights
As a libertarian, I think keeping markets free is more important than contracts. Ownership, for consumers at least, should be ultimate. We also must ban the use of terms like "buy" or "get" for things you are not actually going to own, like access to walled garden services. They must say "license" instead.
> We need a law, and that"s coming from a libertarian.
> easily implemented by starting over and reprogramming everything.
Press X to doubt. Theoretically a free market would/should solve this. That's been the dream of Free Software and hardware. Today you can run GNU/Linux on a PinePhone, or GrapheneOS or similar de-Googled Androids on a Pixel.
Is this news specific to Samsung? Doesn't iPhone have same feature? I mean why would we assume all these devices stolen from California Apple stores should keep working like nothing happen??
Everything Samsung I ever owned was a piece of shit, going back to a 2002 era DVD player whose firmware failed a week after it went out of warranty, booting up to a frozen screen full of garbage pixels.
I decided some years ago never to get another Samsung anything.
I realize this makes me sound black-pilled, but mobile platforms (Apple included) are so user-hostile with regard to privacy I’m not even sure the battle is worth fighting.
IMO it’s better to just hold your nose, limit what you use your phone for as much as you can, and do everything important/sensitive on a computer that you have root access on.
People are always unconcerned until their data leaks, then it turns out that the stuff they considered uninteresting was actually something they'd rather have kept private.
At that point I think my challenge is to not have anything you’d rather be private on a platform you don’t actually have control over, or why have it on a phone in the first place.
One of the most private things your phone knows about you is where you are at any given time. It's completely possible to design phones and cellular networks in such a way that they don't reveal that information to third parties, but we haven't, and that's bad.
I suppose that’s the other side of this. There’s a kind of privacy-as-ideology black hole that I’ve seen people get sucked into, even if in actuality they have nothing and do nothing actually illegal/immoral/sensitive.
Taking the time to install a custom ROM, run only FOSS apps, or find workarounds for needed apps, etc only to spend 90% of your time watching YouTube just doesn’t seem like a gain.
> Taking the time to install a custom ROM, run only FOSS apps, or find workarounds for needed apps, etc only to spend 90% of your time watching YouTube just doesn’t seem like a gain.
Think of it as reserving the right. Rights not exercised are lost. Retaining the ability to do something is valuable whether you need it right now or not. You may need it later.
That’s something I haven’t considered, although for me I would choose the route of forgoing a smart phone altogether if the ability to exercise that right was lost.
For my purposes there’s nothing that I can do on a FOSS smartphone that I can’t do more comfortably on my FOSS desktop.
Portability and the capacity to take pictures aside, but I also don’t go anywhere and my wife takes plenty of pictures of our kids anyway (backed up to my self-hosted NextCloud :^) ).
I'm not buying after the client scanning debacle. That they would even come up with something like troubles me greatly, and I was tempted to ditch Android at that point.
You prefer totally non-transparent cloud scanning that allows for ad hoc, warrantless, untraceable, personally-targeted scans from anyone who can threaten a big company?
I saw client-side scanning as much more transparent and limited. Yes, there could be abuses, but there is not a single possible abuse worse than what is already happening every day with cloud-side scanning.
> You prefer totally non-transparent cloud scanning that allows for ad hoc, warrantless, untraceable, personally-targeted scans from anyone who can threaten a big company?
If the choice is between that and having my devices being used by others against me, then absolutely yes. The cloud is someone else's computer. Their machines, their rules. But it should also be "my machines, my rules".
I don't want any of my data scanned which is why I don't tend to store it in the cloud. If Apple rolled out client side scanning what's to prevent them from extending it to all data on the device, regardless of whether it's synced to iCloud?
Apple has made it clear that they won't move forward with client side scanning after feedback from researchers and customers. Instead, they added optional E2EE for iCloud. It's not perfect yet but significantly better than most other cloud providers.
Just proposing the idea is enough to dissuade them from using their products for anything personal. More importantly though, unlike Android it's much harder to use Apple without using cloud, and the cloud is just someone else's computer. Not your computer, not your data. There is also no freedom on iOS to install things you want without permission from Apple.
You forgot the other reason. I don't want an IPhone because I prefer to actually own my device (and because Android is overall more secure and I personally care about this).
$429 MSRP for the SE (3rd) vs $250 MSRP for a Moto G 5G 2023.
There's certainly arguments to be had about comparisons, and maybe better pricing with careful shopping and hoop jumping, but Apple simply doesn't address the wide global market of people with limited means, and it shows in their global market share.
Mostly people buy Android because it’s cheaper (for non-flagship devices). In so many areas of our world today we have two-tiered experiences, one for the moderately wealthy and a different one for the poors.
So, a hardware I've paid an arm and a leg for can be shutdown by the manufacturer. I think, we've give up too much power and become too tolerant of excessive overreach of these giants. I no longer look into future with optimism.
What’s worse is people defending said giants as if they were part of a cult. See apple, microsoft and google defenders. Crazy how people lacking a sense of belonging take refuge in defending corporations.
How would this be the dark age of tech? It's not like the actual Dark Ages, in which written records were few and far between, making it relatively difficult for historians to learn through historical texts.
No, instead we have hardware that will no longer work, and cannot be studied, because the auth servers have been shut down. We'll have software that cannot be downgraded and looked through, for our own safety. We'll have machines that will die, and cannot be repaired, because the replacement parts the OEM no longer manufactures or sells aren't matched to the device we want to revive.
> They come up with some slick thing with an uncanny valley feel (Bixby, Knox, One UI) only to reinvent the wheel with it within two or three releases.
> They rotated through three separate TV platforms between 2010 and 2015. The former of the two got shutdown ASAP after the transition.
> There is no sense of consistency other than their corporate schizophrenia with their products.
It's fun how I feel like you're quite literally describing Google/Android as well.
Google's TV platforms are Chromecast, Nexus Q and Android TV (and don't get me started on Google TV).
Android added widgets and then largely forgot about it. Nowadays looks like it came back (partly thanks to Apple supporting it?)
Android added blur in Android 2. Removed it in Android 3. Added it in Android 11. Removed it Android 12.
Android added dynamic backgrounds in Android 2. Then largely recommended to stop using it. Then added as a beautiful new feature in Pixels.
On a more purely technical note, I have even a better one: Does Android's boot.img contain an initramfs? In Android 6 yes, in Android 7/8 it depends, in Android 9 no, in Android 10 yes, in Android 14 no.
And Google also like to remove user's data without much recourse.
