.

https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2023/05/09/india_messaging_apps_ban/

I'm nearly two months late to the news, but imagine any serious government saying that they banned an app built to work completely offline, and when using the online mode, working just over Tor. If anything, mentioning a Briar ban is an advertisement for Briar, as any sane (not iOS) mobile OS is able to share and sideload the binary, while any proxy that gets your packets out of the country will let you access Tor, assuming Tor entry nodes are even banned at all...

If you've slept under a rock... Completely reachable state of foldables on AOSP 😊

The Pixel 8 Pro does NOT support high resolution output for most third party apps. Only the apps reliant on RAW10 streams will be able to capture a 48MP+ photo on P8P. Such an app needs to either output a DNG file only or include built-in processing before being able to save a JPEG or HEIC.





(I won't be posting too often in coming months, don't worry, channel isn't dead)

SHIFTphone 8, the upcoming device from a quite renowned (for its dev-friendliness) German company, will ship with secure boot on. This is contrary to their previous devices. Despite the initiatives like U-Boot and mainlining, only the company itself and an unspecified amount of developers will have an access to secure boot off units. Even if qualifying as a dev may happen to be easy, it's an unnecessary step that seems dictated by the choice to ship GMS.

Buyers deserve a choice of GMS-less, secure boot off units available directly. Getting a Google stamp has a significant per-unit cost, and it's unfair to force the users who don't take advantage of it to lose both that money and a part of their hardware ownership.

Should've mentioned it earlier, but it turns out the company actually says that "customers wanted it" (or at least that's what they said in a mail). No wonder, as the customers they are targeting seem to be older Germans (and good luck talking about threat models with them). It looks like to Shift, openness is more about efficiency than a principle.

To be clear, it isn't in my style to not post the source material, but I wouldn't want to sabotage any future communication between the people the screenshots come from and Shift (if somehow this blows up a little). Shift is still better than average, and maybe their decision isn't completely set in stone. We'll see.

It seems Realme started to region lock Indian devices, just like Chinese.

One confirmed model is Realme 12 Pro+. Big chance it'll also affect all OPLUS (Oppo, OnePlus, Realme) devices, so whenever you plan to move out of India and pop another country's SIM, check *#*#3932433284#*#* to avoid an ugly surprise. A device free of region lock should either have an output exactly like in the image, or the value of state should be 2 (factory locked, but unlocked afterwards). Everything else means it's quite certainly region locked and few reboots with a foreign SIM inside will block your calls in all apps, as long as you're running unaltered stock ROM.

I'm gonna disable 😐 if I see it under presumably (if the responding person understood the question correctly) good news again 😩

Meanwhile Xiaomi:
https://fixupx.com/kacskrz/status/1814561811951210963

They're really trying to mess with every distribution where their pricing is sane...

For a comparison, this is Mi 13, using IMX800 in the expected way

https://zentalk.asus.com/t5/zenfone-9/asus-executive-rma-blackmails-me-for-200-to-keep-bootloader/td-p/438996

Asus supposedly started talking of paid bootloader unlock.

Currently, there's an attestation keybox that gets shared around since a week. It's something that makes me not understand Google. If passing MEETS_STRONG_INTEGRITY were meant to really stand for it, the logs from abnormal devices should easily suffice to spot that this keybox had been leaked and revoke it.

So if Google already knows, why not downgrade that device to MEETS_DEVICE_INTEGRITY alone? There's no way to be sure that the keybox isn't being "abused" in an automated process to cause a loss for gullible companies that trust a client device too much just because of strong integrity response from PIA, until the damage is done.

So assuming they know it leaked just like they should, they're either waiting for the OEM to fix the situation by remote provisioning a new keybox or they'll keep it unrevoked indefinitely. Why?