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    Posted on 20-11-12, 00:24 (revision 3)
    Dinosaur

    Post: #818 of 1282
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 4 days
    Last view: 20 hours
    PSA: DO NOT BUY BLU PHONES. They're CCP's shitware!

    $AUNT comes to me with her latest buy, a $40 garbage-tier Blu Advance L4 (because his previous Advance L2 met its doom with water). Apparently Bleugh found a SoC maker that could make even crappier sub-basement junk than Mediatek, as the Advance L line features Spreadtrum chipsets. Combine a famelic ARM SoC that would be a better fit for dumbphones, a highly starved ration of RAM (512MB for Android, FFS!), and a supposedly "debloated" Android build (Android Go To Hell), and you've got a recipe for mobile diarrhea.

    This L4 specimen had been behaving unbearably slooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow in the last weeks, following a OEM update which shipped months ago. SLOW AS MOLASSES, if not worse. My 386SX with Win95 feels far faster than this vomit. Even routine acts like answering a call or reading a SMS became infuriatingly difficult, if not flat out impossible! The phone would feel too hot to touch, the tell-tale sign of an app gone amok, but which app? Rebooting the phone didn't helped. Clearing caches did nothing. This phone has nothing but the basics (Android Go suite of apps, WhatsFuckingApp, the customary mobile payment crapps, a "duplicate" Calculator app -more on this later-, and the sole non-Google Blu preload, Opera Mini), so there was nothing useful to uninstall. Anyway, once I got $AUNT to remember her Google credentials (protip: if you tell a normie "Google account", they would feel lost, panicked. You have to teach them that Gmail is more than just email if they own any Google-powered device!), we tried the nuclear option (factory reset), which DID helped... for a few days.

    Today, she comes back to me with her phone - she was visibly pissed off because every time she opened "the Google" (Chrome), several tabs would automatically open with a bogus website that she never visited in first place. Clearing Chrome cache/data didn't do squat - every Chrome startup came with the same two tabs loading the exact same site, "enflower.info", trying to eat her precious mobile data. I entered in "oh fuck, not another Sality" mode. Since I now have the luxury of having a working Internet connection at home, I quickly got this turd plugged into "adb logcat", but I found nothing useful. Next time I tried was to google the "enflower.info" domain, and that's where I hit gold the main sewer line:
    https://support.google.com/android/thread/52913024?hl=en
    https://forums.malwarebytes.com/topic/237033-androidtrojanfadebj-on-system-apps/

    My enemy was just in front of my eyes: turns out that the L4 was another victim of Blu's contaminated batch of system updates, where their complete lack of supervision over their production lines meant that something as sacred and delicate as a ROM upgrade got infected with the China Pest™. This affected more expensive phones (like the Blu Studio G), but there is nothing about the L4 since this is a CHEAP PoS where nobody gives a damn and they would just junk it and buy something else. Now you know.

    How to get rid of this shitware?
    Dunno if there is root for these turds (they're not Mediateks, and Spreadtrums have no love from the modding community since these are not the kind of "cheap" they're looking for). But remember that you can safely uninstall system preloads without the need to root. This is not only good for defusing the Zuckerborgs, it's also useful to neutering China Pests™ - in the upgraded L4 ROM, these are the virus-laden crapps you need to kill:

    => com.android.awsme
    => com.android.feplay.server
    => com.android.system.ups
    => com.anroid.calculators21

    The latter is not a typo - the package ID actually says "anroid" - that's a HUGE red flag, and this is the source of that "duplicate" calculator that I saw earlier... a calculator that requires Phone and Contacts permissions! What. The. FUCK!? Also remember that you will need to redo this every time you factory reset the phone since this is only a user-level uninstall!

    If you don't get rid of those little bastards, they may download and install more spyware behind your backs, but since this is a $10-in-parts (at best) phone, the result is a nearly bricked device instead. But then, I would not bother, and just bin the phone for your own safety!

    This is not the first time this Miami-based brand is caught with their pants down, emulating a Huawei. They pretend to care, but anyone that doesn't closely audit their firmware updates is to not be trusted at all. Unfortunately Blu is a very popular brand down here in Latam, yet their users are completely unaware that under the hood they're nothing more but more Chinese scammers!

    Welcome to the shitlist, BLU Products!

    Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
    Posted on 20-12-21, 06:51 (revision 1)
    Snapped
    Post: #8 of 48
    Since: 12-19-20

    Last post: 1177 days
    Last view: 1177 days
    They seem to be rebadged/rebranded products of a Chinese shitphone-manufacturing company that has been caught by the German media for injecting malware as far back as 2014, according to Wikipedia.

    Link

    Heh, talk about 'evading trade bans', simply by rebadging your products and working with other equally shit companies. Ugh.
    Posted on 20-12-25, 17:18 (revision 3)
    Dinosaur

    Post: #855 of 1282
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 4 days
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    So, it seems Let's Encrypt has its own SSL/CA shitfest going on right now, thanks to cellphones:

    https://letsencrypt.org/2020/12/21/extending-android-compatibility.html
    https://letsencrypt.org/2020/11/06/own-two-feet.html
    https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/12/lets-encrypt-comes-up-with-workaround-for-abandonware-android-devices/
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25515703

    The leading SSL cert issuer (because it's free AND well integrated with most servers out there) is now pivoting to be their own CA, instead of relying on 3rd-party CAs. Adding a root CA cert to popular OS/browsers is no small feat, as it involves all sorts of audits, politics, and other crazy protocols, but if you have unlimited money are important enough, it's doable. On Real Computers™, just install an update and you're done. But on cellphones... it's not that easy, and all thanks to Google.

    The "install a update" path for most phones simply doesn't exist, and instead it becomes "buy a new device". If you're extremely lucky and your device is VERY popular, someone might have already cooked a custom ROM for it with the required root CA updates. To be fair, Let's Encrypt managed to get their new shiny root cert included in Android 7.1.1, released in December 2016... 4 years ago*. But for device OEMs, they couldn't care less and instead they keep releasing new phones with outdated software out of the door. This includes, among others, my shitty AT&T-branded Alcatel OT-5044R which despite being assembled and sold sometime during 2018, still shipped with Android 7.0 (the security revision level says February 5, 2018). Even worse: unlike my now-gone ZTE, this phone has yet to get any OEM update at all, so starting in September 2021, anything using the OS cert storage for doing SSL with certs from Let's Encrypt will die a painful death when the DST Root X3 (Let's Encrypt now-former CA) cert expires.

    Or not.

    This is Android, where security is an afterthought after all. Apparently some manager / hipster cowboy on Android's security team decided to simply ignore expiration dates on root CAs (or "trust anchors" as they call them), and keep trusting any and all CA 'till the cold death of the universe, even if revoked upstream, and this is by design. How many facepalms are worth that!? And this is where Let's Encrypt folks are making their move. Since they can't just go and buy new phones for every Android user on Earth, they reached an agreement with IdenTrust (the CA behind DST Root X3) to cross-sign Let's Encrypt shiny new CA cert (ISRG Root X1) with the soon-to-expire DST Root X3 CA until 2024, completely defeating the purpose of having expiration dates on certificates in first place (thanks Google), in order to not break the Internet for people like me that are stuck with shitphones already abandoned by their OEMs/carriers because we can't afford buying a new iPhone yearly contributing to the e-waste crisis and the sure doom of our planet.

    * I'm aware that Android at least does let users install custom root certs from elsewhere** (I can see the option on my phone), so in theory, this is a non-issue with anyone still rocking OOOOOOOOOOOOLD Android phones. But expecting normal users to futz with .PEM files, deeply buried options, and alien language is the reason of why CACert died and Let's Encrypt strives. Also: this is a long shot, but some devices might have that option crippled/locked/surgically castrated by its OEM!

    ** Firefox thankfully ships with its own cert store and routinely ignores the OS-specific one. Except that Mozilla never bothered porting the cert manager UI to Android, which leaves us with no options to manage certs on our goddamned cellphones!


    ---

    Speaking about my shitty Alcatel, did I've mentioned that this thing is no fun?

    - No way to root: Apparently my long-lost Z835 was quite popular both in 'murica and here at Soviet Venezuela, so both root and experimental TWRP builds eventually surfaced, but for the 5044R I got absolutely nothing, except of the usual Chinaware™ one-click spyware loaders brick factories like Kingo.

    - No updates at all (the Z835 got at least 3 updates, including one in early 2019)

    - No leaked factory ROMs I can download for the day when this phone inevitably gets its firmware corrupted. For the Z835, all full firmwares are available, even the original ancient build from "launch day". All I could find for the 5044R is this seemingly legit ~800MiB file (it does have a file structure similar to other Qualcomm-powered Alcatel phones) hosted at a shady firmware repository who wants money (at least $3 for 3GiB, which is their cheapest package) since my ROM is a "featured" file (and free accounts can't download "featured" files, whatever that means) :/

    Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
    Posted on 20-12-25, 19:18
    Snapped
    Post: #29 of 48
    Since: 12-19-20

    Last post: 1177 days
    Last view: 1177 days
    How does iOS update its root certificates, out of curiosity? I wonder if Apple finally did something half decent for once here... Android in general always felt horribly unpolished in so many ways though, and Google making it convoluted as all hell for anyone but the manufacturers of low-end devices to maximise profits for ad collection seems so convenient.
    Posted on 20-12-26, 13:11
    Dinosaur

    Post: #856 of 1282
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 4 days
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    Posted by Mei Koyoki
    How does iOS update its root certificates, out of curiosity? I wonder if Apple finally did something half decent for once here...


    The same way they do it on every supported iProduct: through OS updates:
    https://support.apple.com/en-bh/HT209143
    And since the previous *OS release, every Apple OS shares the same root cert database, so your Apple-branded computerizer will trust the same roots as your cellphone, tablet, watch and set-top-box.

    Really, the only one that screwed it here are Google and their affiliates, but that's because their business model is not only spying on you while serving ads you don't want, but also (in the case of telcos and OEMs) to force you to buy a new cellphone every year, which clearly is not a model that works with sensible users, poor people, and most citizens from communist shitholes who can barely afford to be connected to the world (even if you're starving, a cellphone has became mandatory for existing in this society).

    Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
    Posted on 20-12-26, 19:35
    Snapped
    Post: #30 of 48
    Since: 12-19-20

    Last post: 1177 days
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    Posted by tomman
    cellphone has became mandatory for existing in this society).

    More like *smartdevice at this point, given some things that try to force you to use apps to sign in or whatever, or QR code scanners or whatever bullshit of the day.
    Posted on 20-12-27, 05:43
    Dinosaur

    Post: #858 of 1282
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 4 days
    Last view: 20 hours
    Posted by Mei Koyoki
    Posted by tomman
    cellphone has became mandatory for existing in this society).

    More like *smartdevice at this point, given some things that try to force you to use apps to sign in or whatever, or QR code scanners or whatever bullshit of the day.

    Commie shitholes are not there yet - we're currently at the "you must own a phone that can send and receive SMS" tier, fortunately for my sanity.

    Unfortunately, the whole "mobile payments" stuff is forcing everybody to move onto smartdevices (although banks have half-assed it over here, as expected: the largest, government-owned bank who caters to the "barely phone-ized plebs" currently don't offer cellphone apps for this specific feature, while another bank I know only offers a mobile website that, starting two weeks ago, only works in fucking Chrome and force-logouts you if you dare use Mozilla on either desktop or phone). But at the end of the day it's all moot, because when you try to pay, either the SMS fail to arrive, mobile data goes down, or your bank goes catatonic.

    Soviet Venezuela: the only country in the world where we have so many ways to pay... and to fail. And to lose your money while we're at there:

    - Cards? "Host not responsive", "Transaction failed", "Card issuer not available", "Connection failed", "Timeout expired", and my personal favorite: "System error".
    - Mobile payments? "Transaction failed", never-arriving SMS (on both ends), "Receiving bank unavailable", or the typical "can you hear me now" 3G/4G woes.
    - Bank transfers? Great, now we get to invoke the bank insecurity theatre at full throttle! And it only really works on Real Computers™, which you are not likely to carry around when shopping outside your home. Same-bank transfers are OK, while inter-bank transfers are a game of Russian Roulette. If you're lucky, funds will arrive 2 days late, but if not... Yay~.
    - Cash? Nope, not only you don't have enough banknotes for that, the seller most likely don't want them anyway because they're worthless and nobody wants to spend their time counting money.
    - Hard currency? Hope you don't want change - if you want to buy something that costs $2 but only have a $20 bill, your typical options are "buy nothing" or "buy 10x" because nobody has enough greenbacks to give change. Old/dirty/worn bills need not apply.
    - Buttcoins? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA--- too bad sureanem is still banned ---HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!


    Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
    Posted on 21-01-06, 03:26
    Dinosaur

    Post: #872 of 1282
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 4 days
    Last view: 20 hours
    You won, Valve.

    You forced me to install your fucking crapp because I'm a moron who can't remember his fucking Haus of DRM Steam password (which conveniently I had changed recently yet I forgot to memorize it because 1- I don't play videogames that much anymore and 2- I NEVER WRITE DOWN PASSWORDS, that's stupid!). My WinAuth setup was rendered useless due to that mistake, because if you can't logon on your authenticator, you can't get the "pleez change my password" confirmation, because doing it the sensible way (just ask me for my emergency codes or something) is DANGER MINES unsafe I guess?

    So yeah, that, and there will never be a GUI authenticator for non-Windows targets (WinAuth chokes to death on Mono). Not that I care as I can't even buy videogames anymore anywhere, much less play them. But I guess that my 3-cent trading cards are worth muuuuuuuch more than the real money on my five bank accounts (which considering the current exchange rates, I could almost buy food with my inventory!). Congratulations Valve, you've become a fucking bank.

    Yes, I'm royally pissed. I want to vomit.

    At least, on the flip side (if there is one), I was able to navigate the security theatre EASY MODO since I actually was logged inside their bloated Chrome-in-a-can abomination of client. Sharp bits of LCD crystals would be flying everywhere otherwise...

    Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
    Posted on 21-02-12, 04:47 (revision 1)
    Dinosaur

    Post: #903 of 1282
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 4 days
    Last view: 20 hours
    AAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH GOOGLE!!!

    So, I managed to save enough money to upgrade the storage on my shitty Alcatel - from the old 32GB card from my ol' RAZR to some $10 64GB noname (the actual brand says "TeamGroup") microSDXC card. After checking that indeed this cheap slowass card (the UHS-1 marking is a lie, just like every UHS-1 card I've ever owned, even SanDisks!) is not made of fake flash (the 6456GiB are legit, albeit SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW to fill), I decided to put that storage to good use. See, this shitty Alcatel by AT&Turds has 8GB of internal storage, but of course all of that AT&Turds preloaded bloatware takes over half of that, leaving like less than 3GB of actual user storage (and without custom ROMs or even a way to root this thing, that's what I have to work with and nothing else). After installing the few applications I use, I end with less than 500MB for pictures and other media.

    With my 32GB card that was no problem since the card was packed to the brim with music, but since I don't intend to fill this one too (yet!), I decided that it was time to do what I used to do with every dumbphone I've ever owned: save my photos and videos to the goddamned memory card instead of the already scarce internal memory. And of course, things other than files generated by the camera(s) of my handset, like maps (OsmAnd+ surprisingly has marginally better maps for my city than Google Maps, but they're offline only!), or PDFs. Of course, things are anything but simple with smartturds, because they're severely crippled computerizers at heart, and it doesn't help that starting with Android 5 (Marshmallow), Google considers that every and each application trying to WRITE to the SD card is malware, so they have to jump flaming hoops made of angry cocaine-soaked cobras if you expect them to be able to store your user-generated media there! Welcome to hell, here is your T-shirt.

    My card is too slow for being used as "internal storage" (under Google's makeshift "adoptable storage" or whatever bullshit) - it got stuck at 60% during formatting (but not without warning me that my $10 card is $10 junk because it tries to encrypt the entire 64GB of it... which I guess it would be an overnight operation which I'm not willing to afford because I have no need for it!), forcing me to power down the phone, pull the card, boot to Windows, clear the two partitions it created, create a new (dummy) unformatted partition, assign a drive letter, and only then SDFormatter would see the card and let me reformat it back to exFAT (because fuck M$ too), and start over. "Portable storage" it is.

    Anyway, here are my workarounds:

    - VLC: It doesn't care as it only consumes media! Protip: the 3.3.x series is BLOATED GARBAGE (the very latest version even completely fails to find my music!). Stick to the more orangey 3.2.x series instead.

    - Total Commander: After fooling the Google Cops, it never asks again to have total control over your SD card. Whew!

    - OpenCamera: The worst loser here. My favorite camera application (because the AlcatelTCL preloaded one is too barebones) is crippled by decree under the law of Google. There are some ways you can get it to actually save your photos and videos to the SD card:
    1) Use the Storage Access Framework. This lets you pick any folder on your SD card, but for whatever bizarro reason, this makes my photos (but not my videos) unreadable over MTP (which means I have to fall back to wireless whenever I want to backup my photos OH FUCK NO!)
    2) Don't use SAF, but it means the only possible place I could use for my photos is the completely unintuitive /sdcard/Android/data/net.sourceforge.opencamera/, which is hidden by default. Thankfully, Simple Gallery lets me add arbitrary directories to the gallery, including this nonsense (what the fuck is this, a BREW dumbphone?!), and that one folder is actually fully accessible over MTP, instead of yielding empty JPG files.
    3) Root your phone. Yeah, of course!

    - OsmAnd+: I had far better luck with this one: just tell it that I want to store my maps and stuff on the SD card, and it will ask nicely if I want to move the already downloaded maps to the card. Do it please, and thank you~!

    - Firefox: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAno. There is no official way to change the downloads directory, other than tampering with about:prefs. A more user-friendly way might be coming up Soon™... on Fenix, which means downgrading your UI. Yeah, not happening in this lifetime.

    - The few apps I have would have to remain living on the cramped internal storage for now, until I can afford better gear (in other words: not for the foreseeable future)


    So much insanity, because smartdevices are insane by design and I'm deviating from the One True Phone Path™®: "Memory cards!? Removable batteries!?!? HEADPHONE JACKS!? Butbutbut that's for dinosaurs, why that meteorite is taking too long to extinguish you!?"

    Bonus: This is also my first rodeo with exFAT on anything. If you're using kernel 5.4 or later, you already have a native exFAT driver in your kernel (made by Samsung, no less!), so do yourself a favor and purge the exfat-fuse driver if you value your time! This is of course the default on Debian Buster because it still ships with kernel 4.19 on stock installs, and you have to enable the backports repository to bring in some of the hotness (we're now stuck at 5.9 because The Freeze™ is near).

    UPDATE: Now copying my music over MTP. Surprisingly it's copying at a more decent rate (~7MB/s), instead of the sub-2MB/s rate I had when testing the card with F3, maybe because my Ricoh PCI SD card reader chipset was made before UHS or SDHC, and can only drive those cards at the worst possible rates.

    Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
    Posted on 21-03-02, 02:41
    Dinosaur

    Post: #910 of 1282
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 4 days
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    Following the ongoing Googlectomy on my shitphone, I got sick of Gboard, the keyboard formerly known as Google Keyboard.

    Sure, it's simple... and bloaty. And tries to push emojis at you if you're not careful enough to disable them. And sends all your keystrokes to the NSA/CIA/FBI/KGB/FSB/CCP/Jeff Bezos' secretary. And its autocorrect often tries to outsmart you. And it's BLOATY! So... off to F-Droid to find a suitable replacement, which I will hate for a few days until I get used to it.

    Enter AnySoftKeyboard (which for some screwy reason it's listed as "BB Codes for ASK" on my F-Droid store, and as "Classic PC Theme" on F-Droid's website - the correct app ID you want is "com.menny.android.anysoftkeyboard" in any case). At first it looks like a lame replacement keyboard... but HOLY SHIT, the customization options on this thing are like a nerd's fantasy come true! Or quite close to it, to be fair. A few minutes dicking through the many, MANY settings screen on the configuration app lets you configure the keyboard to suit your particular tastes. No emoji crap, please (switch to a different generic lower row). Haptic feedback length tunable (which you want to do, as it comes to a insanely low duration, which on my phone effectively equals to "no feedback"). Sure, the default styles are in the "ugh" category, but I didn't liked Gboard that much either (and you can download a few extra styles from either F-Droid or Play Store). Best of all, the install footprint is much lower than Gboard!

    Don't forget to pick the extra language APK for your locale if yours is not The One True English Language (in my case, the Spanish langpack adds another 1.5MB to the download).

    I'll be giving ASK a good try for the next few days, and if I get used to it, hasta la vista, Gboard~!

    Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
    Posted on 21-04-02, 01:59 (revision 1)
    Dinosaur

    Post: #928 of 1282
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 4 days
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    Did Aurora Store just became assholeware too?! Apparently it seems so:
    https://gitlab.com/AuroraOSS/AuroraStore/-/issues/556

    Ugh. New fancy redesign in whatever is the latest Android hipster fad. Of course, the guy killed half of the configurable settings "for your own good/your privacy" BS, and as a bonus, the "token dispensers" (the API key server stuff that takes all those throwaway Google accounts) for v3 are now deprecated (in fact, I tried downgrading: the older version can't logon anymore).

    The suggested workaround? Use your own throwaway Google account. Yes, I have one. I also forgot the password. And I don't want to use it anyway. In the meanwhile, don't use v4 if you can to update locale-specific split APK apps (split APKs are still a good idea badly executed!)

    GAAAAAAAAH!

    Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
    Posted on 21-04-03, 22:42
    Dinosaur

    Post: #929 of 1282
    Since: 10-30-18

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    A Hackernews suggested another music player that doesn't (apparently) suck: Musicolet
    https://krosbits.in/musicolet/
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26679009

    Proprietary software, but it proudly announces that it doesn't even have the Internet permission declared, so this is strictly a local media player (yes, not everybody is willing to embrace The Clown™ instead of, y'know, pirating owning your goddamned MP3s. That's a feature worth fighting for!). It has a equalizer that can even set different profiles depending on the output device (internal speaker, headphones), which is a rarity among music players for cellphones. The UI looks like it's quite customizable. It allows you to pick from where to scan for songs (like VLC), it doesn't seem to rely on Android's crappy media library stuff. At 14MB for the generic APK compatible with any device, it won't be a pain for storage-constrained devices.

    And more importantly: it correctly tells that a good deal of my music albums are from "Various Artists", instead of having 9 entries for Hardcore Syndrome 8. GOOD.

    I can't believe I'm following a recommendation from a place where most of the topics are around "how great are the latest Apple devices", buttcoins, hipster Javascript abominations, or "see my latest horrible VC-funded startup in action!", but even a broken clock is right twice a day.

    Nitpicks:
    - The color scheme is le suck, as expected from most recent cellphone apps: you only get light and dark mode (and "follow the system/clock"), and that's it. I miss skinnable players :/
    - Lacks visualizations. I guess nobody cares these days (and you definitely don't care when your phone is playing music inside your pocket/bag), but I miss them from my 2009-vintage RAZR VE20 :/
    - Not on Arkamys whitelist (and I haven't fully killed it yet), so audio quality might suffer under such devices (but then, you've got an equalizer so you can work around it!)
    - If you chose to download the APK from their official site rather than installing from Google Play, you may be punished with ReCaptcha hell. Not cool, man, not cool.

    I guess all this remains is to give the player the good ol' bus bank queue test, but I'm already lovin' it, and having an option to braindamaged VLC (or the myriad of broken/useless players on F-Droid) is always nice to have.

    Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
    Posted on 21-06-14, 23:23
    Dinosaur

    Post: #957 of 1282
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 4 days
    Last view: 20 hours
    BACKUP YO' SHIT, PEOPLE!

    Before I lose my cellphone again, it's time to backup stuff other than just photos and some applications. Yeah, time to backup my precious phonebook and years of text messages! In the dark ages of dumbphones, it often involved using bloaty OEM-specific "PC suites" (which naturally didn't worked on anything but Windows PCs), unobtanium data cables, and a couple of virgin sacrifices. Some goat blood also helped. Sometimes.

    But we're now on smartdevices, we can do better than that, right? RIGHT?! Not so much: see, since these are Internet-dependent devices (rather than just Internet-enabled), Google insists that you should really add your Google account to the device, so you can enjoy free and easy backups in The Clown™ (where they can share them freely with the NSA/FBI/CIA/CCP/KGB/FSB/Zuck/Jeff Bezos' secretary, but not with you!). Of course that's not happening in this house. Instead, that's what I had to do:

    - Contacts: Surprisingly easy - AlcatelTCL's default dialer/contacts app can import and export your contacts to bog standard .VCF files - it even supports exporting them to the SD card - a couple of taps and you're done.

    - SMS: UGH. Painful. But that's because F-Droid mostly failed on me:
    * SMS Backup+: It can only backup to The Clown™, that is, GMail... or a custom IMAP server, something I'm not in the mood to setup.
    * SMS Gate: Should be renamed to Hang Gate, because that's the only thing this app can do well: hanging. And even when you manage to get a backup started, it will insist into dumping each and every SMS to separate text files. Thousands of small text files. On your slow-as-molasses SD card. Nooooooooope.
    * Epistolaire: The only one that does something! It can dump your messages to a single JSON blob (in my case, ~1MB for ~2500 texts), and it even offers a companion Python script to convert that to human-readable HTML. Too bad it can't import them back should you get a new phone/factory reset your current device, and it offers absolutely zero configuration options (for example: where to locate the backup!).

    If we look outside F-Droid, a Google search turns out to be mostly useless too, but over half of those shitty Android blogs recommend using this bloaty adware crapp, which surprisingly does the job (it can also dump call logs too), and can even RESTORE your texts to a new device too. Unfortunately their XML backup viewer is online only (although it works entirely client-side, I checked).

    tl;dr: I ended using both Epistolaire and SMS Backup & Restore - both suck in their own ways, but at least I've got my precious texts saved, despite assholes like Moxie insisting that "message backups are a liability and not a feature".

    Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
    Posted on 21-10-16, 18:29
    Post: #405 of 426
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 261 days
    Last view: 1 day
    Here's something fun for you to read about Tomman: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/legal/canon-sued-for-disabling-scanner-when-printers-run-out-of-ink/

    AMD Ryzen 3700X | MSI Gamer Geforce 1070Ti 8GB | 16GB 3600MHz DDR4 RAM | ASUS Crosshair VIII Hero (WiFi) Motherboard | Windows 10 x64
    Posted on 21-10-16, 21:47 (revision 2)

    Post: #37 of 40
    Since: 10-29-18

    Last post: 473 days
    Last view: 473 days
    Posted by Nicholas Steel
    Here's something fun for you to read about Tomman: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/legal/canon-sued-for-disabling-scanner-when-printers-run-out-of-ink/

    My all-in-one HP D110 printer sort of has this exact same problem, even when missing just one cartridge (black or colored), the display and buttons on the physical device no longer responds to anything.

    I can definatelly bypass this through the software installed on PC and keep using all its functions as always, but I can imagine some people unaware of that. Particularly when the company pushes you to buy their garbage instead of providing true support for the device.
    Posted on 21-10-18, 21:37
    Dinosaur

    Post: #1006 of 1282
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 4 days
    Last view: 20 hours
    Why people do still buy HP!?

    Ah, wait, it is Canon!?!??!

    Well well well.... WELCOME TO THE SHITLIST, CANON!

    Being Japanese these days no longer means "total customer satisfaction", I guess... Oh, and my next printer will be a dot matrix printer - no leaky ink, no dusty toner, no moronic lockout chips, and print quality is acceptable for my yearly nastygrams to the bank. As a bonus, you don't really need drivers if all you need is text.

    Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
    Posted on 21-11-24, 16:25
    Dinosaur

    Post: #1014 of 1282
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 4 days
    Last view: 20 hours
    My trusty broken RAZR2 needs to rest in pieces peace (plus I need that USB port back, and can't stand running abandoned Sovietware on XP just for SMS, because due to the death of Wammu, there is no way to pull contacts and call logs from classic Motorola phones anymore).

    So, after carefully reviewing my options in the local market... I ended buying a KaiOS phone, more precisely, the Blu Zoey Smart (Z230L), for $35 (no matter if you buy in 'murica or in Soviet Venezuela, it costs $35 everywhere!). Fuck me now.

    The few reviews I could find basically say "DON'T BUY, this phone is the worst PoS ever, and 256MB is too little, even for KaiOS!!!". And until very recently, it wasn't hackable. But it is now, so expect more ranting because I'm a masochist.

    At least it has WiFi, FM radio, dual SIM slots, AND the correct 3G frequency bands for Movistar and Movilnet (fuck Digitel and its special snowflake Eurobands). And... preloaded Fuckbook Meth apps. That's the first target on my kill list.

    Thankfully, full firmware is available, and Spreadasstrum Unicrud phones are on the "hardly brickable" league.

    Damn, what I have just done!? I could have spent those $35 in food plenty of replacement banknotes for my collection...

    Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
    Posted on 21-11-24, 18:24
    Dinosaur

    Post: #1015 of 1282
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 4 days
    Last view: 20 hours
    Apparently the Meth crapps are the only ones uninstallable by default on the stock Zoey Smart ROM. Nice.

    Sadly you need to root for deGoogling, and also, the Twatter crapp :/

    Will test more stuff before letting this thing smell the WiFis (a dumbphone with WiFi?! Alien space tech!!!)

    Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
    Posted on 21-11-24, 19:29 (revision 1)
    Dinosaur

    Post: #1016 of 1282
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 4 days
    Last view: 20 hours
    OH FUCK I ALREADY HATE THIS PHONE MY BLOOD IS BOILING GAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!

    "SLOW" and "unpredictable" is the name of the game here. The web browser (aka embedded Gecko) often refuses to load pages without any explanation. Had to reboot the phone just to launch the Developer menu through the Bananahackers exploit. Also, had to toggle debugging mode a few times until ADB recognized the phone. Yay Mozilla Spreadasstrum Unicrud Blu.

    Also, who decided to bind CLR/BACK on this phone to END!?!?!?!?! This breaks YEARS of muscle memory, not to miss also that the right softkey is mostly useless on this phone, and going back to the home screen is a frustrating exercise of endless END clicking.

    Now with ADB recognizing my phone, I need a WebIDE-enabled browser or tool to start the path to jailbreak. My options:
    - Firefox <=59... eugh... (SeaMonkey 2.49.5 has WebIDE, but it isn't clear how broken is it, plus juggling with profiles is something I want to avoid at all costs)
    - Pale Moon <=28.6.1. Not happening, sorry.
    - This CLI tool that requires XULRunner... a nearly 400MB download from Mozilla. YUCK!
    - This other CLI tool that requires Node Dot Fucking JS. Do you want to get me REALLY pissed off?!?! No, you don't want.

    ...so XULRunner it is, then.

    Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
    Posted on 21-11-24, 20:12
    Dinosaur

    Post: #1017 of 1282
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 4 days
    Last view: 20 hours
    root@sp7731ef_18c20:/ # id
    uid=0(root) gid=0(root) context=kernel
    root@sp7731ef_18c20:/ # uname -a
    Linux localhost 4.4.83 #1 SMP PREEMPT Thu Dec 26 15:59:59 CST 2019 armv7l GNU/Linux


    Houston, we've got root~!

    Ended using old Firefox because my FF profiles are disposable.

    1) Download the Wallace Toolkit for Spreadtrum, then extract it somewhere
    2) adb forward tcp:6000 localfilesystem:/data/local/debugger-socket
    3) Open WebIDE. It will complain that it can't download ADB helper. You don't need it if you performed previous step - just select "Remote Runtime", and hit Enter.
    4) Open Packaged Application -> select the directory where you unpacked Wallace's application.zip
    5) PLAY! You should see "ROOT ME" on your phone display.
    6) Press Enter on your phone. You should see "WAIT", then... some scary face with a scarier Spreadasstrum logo.
    7) adb shell => you're root. Brick your phone~!

    Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
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