Smartphones

Quote from: Arnold J. Rimmer on Yesterday at 22:27:58
Quote from: Stil on 2016-01-22, 15:47:56
Don't do it Calach! Don't switch to Apple. You fight, the fight and remain free.

People like Old34 and myself who have gone into that Mac world are stuck with our boring machines. We have nothing to talk about. There's no conflict, no excitement at all. The goddamn things just update on their own. I don't even know what OS I'm using anymore. I don't get to spend time searching for fixes and making friends online with like-minded people now.

It's so lonely.

Computers and phones used be thrilling. Any time you turned them on (or tried to) you never knew what you were going to get. Now like a Tv or microwave it's just mundane and I have no choice but to use it for what I bought it for instead of the thrill of the blue screen, and countless hours of delving into technical information online. I've lost contact with some of my best friends because I have no excuse to talk to them anymore for their computer expertise.

I'm a pampered, well-fed pet, now trapped in a beautiful walled garden, yearning to be free, to join the dog-eat-dog world outside but paralysed by my own fear of not being able to succeed out there and though the gate is open, I dare not venture into that vast wilderness I once proudly roamed.

Save yourself from my fate Calach.

Stay away from Apple.

That's right. Apple stuff is rubbish.

Note to Stil:

Not everyone here stil understands you (pun intended). You stil (pun) meed to use the [sarcasm] [/sarcasm] block quotes for the Windites.

Quote

Quote from: Arnold J. Rimmer on Yesterday at 22:27:58
Quote from: Stil on 2016-01-22, 15:47:56
Don't do it Calach! Don't switch to Apple. You fight, the fight and remain free.

People like Old34 and myself who have gone into that Mac world are stuck with our boring machines. We have nothing to talk about. There's no conflict, no excitement at all. The goddamn things just update on their own. I don't even know what OS I'm using anymore. I don't get to spend time searching for fixes and making friends online with like-minded people now.

It's so lonely.

Computers and phones used be thrilling. Any time you turned them on (or tried to) you never knew what you were going to get. Now like a Tv or microwave it's just mundane and I have no choice but to use it for what I bought it for instead of the thrill of the blue screen, and countless hours of delving into technical information online. I've lost contact with some of my best friends because I have no excuse to talk to them anymore for their computer expertise.

I'm a pampered, well-fed pet, now trapped in a beautiful walled garden, yearning to be free, to join the dog-eat-dog world outside but paralysed by my own fear of not being able to succeed out there and though the gate is open, I dare not venture into that vast wilderness I once proudly roamed.

Save yourself from my fate Calach.

Stay away from Apple.

That's right. Apple stuff is rubbish.

Note to Stil:

Not everyone here stil understands you (pun intended). You stil (pun) meed to use the [sarcasm] [/sarcasm] block quotes for the Windites.

Nah I know what he's done there. I just think Apple stuff is rubbish for the price.

Cheap is the new cool in smartphones, but Apple users don't buy their products to *save* money. Surveys show Apple users tend to be richer, and to spend more online, than Android users. The surveys, one assumes, don't take into accout China, but then nothing "online" ever does. My impression is Chinese smartphoners are ahead of the rest of the world in general in using phones for connectivity and consumption. Actually, their iPhoners might be as well. Personally, I'm not rich enough, nor consumer enough, to justify owning an iPhone.

For those eager to know, I still like my Nexus 5, it's presently running Android 6.0.1, and my battery consumption has dropped back to Android 5 levels so I'm not complaining anymore.


On an unrelated noted, I used Skype on my phone a few weeks ago to make an international phone call. This blows my mind. Of course, Skype has been around for donkey's years, but I have a prejudice against tethering myself to a computer by headphones. I can do it to listen to music, but it doesn't work for me for talking. Doesn't feel right. So the fact that Skype exists on phones now is, in my humble estimation, fantastic. A one hour phone conversation over wifi used about 300Mb of data, which I suppose is a lot, and would be a lot if I were paying mobile data rates, but on home wifi it kinda seems small

Cheap is the new cool in smartphones, but Apple users don't buy their products to *save* money. Surveys show Apple users tend to be richer, and to spend more online, than Android users. The surveys, one assumes, don't take into accout China, but then nothing "online" ever does. My impression is Chinese smartphoners are ahead of the rest of the world in general in using phones for connectivity and consumption. Actually, their iPhoners might be as well. Personally, I'm not rich enough, nor consumer enough, to justify owning an iPhone.

For those eager to know, I still like my Nexus 5, it's presently running Android 6.0.1, and my battery consumption has dropped back to Android 5 levels so I'm not complaining anymore.


On an unrelated noted, I used Skype on my phone a few weeks ago to make an international phone call. This blows my mind. Of course, Skype has been around for donkey's years, but I have a prejudice against tethering myself to a computer by headphones. I can do it to listen to music, but it doesn't work for me for talking. Doesn't feel right. So the fact that Skype exists on phones now is, in my humble estimation, fantastic. A one hour phone conversation over wifi used about 300Mb of data, which I suppose is a lot, and would be a lot if I were paying mobile data rates, but on home wifi it kinda seems small

You monitor how much data you use on your WiFi? Wow.

Why?

You monitor how much data you use on your WiFi? Wow.

Why?

So I know what would happen if I used it on mobile data.


/thrifty

Powerful backdoor/rootkit found preinstalled on 3 million Android phones

Almost three million Android phones, many of them used by people in the US, are vulnerable to code-execution attacks that remotely seize full control of the devices, researchers said Thursday.

Until recently, the flaw could have been exploited by anyone who took the time to obtain two Internet domains that remained unregistered despite being hardwired into the firmware that introduced the vulnerability. After discovering the vulnerability, researchers from security ratings firm BitSight Technologies registered the addresses and control them to this day. Even now, the failure of the buggy firmware to encrypt communications sent to a server located in China makes code-execution attacks possible when phones don't use virtual private networking software when connecting to public hotspots and other unsecured networks.

Since BitSight and its subsidiary company Anubis Networks took possession of the two preconfigured domains, more than 2.8 million devices have attempted to connect in search of software that can be executed with unfettered "root" privileges, the researchers said. Had malicious parties obtained the addresses before BitSight did, the actors could have installed keyloggers, bugging software, and other malware that completely bypassed security protections built into the Android operating system. The almost three million devices remain vulnerable to so-called man-in-the-middle attacks because the firmware—which was developed by a Chinese company called Ragentek Group—doesn't encrypt the communications sent and received to phones and doesn't rely on code-signing to authenticate legitimate apps. Based on the IP addresses of the connecting devices, vulnerable phones hail from locations all over the world, with the US being the No. 1 affected country....


Thanks, China

Well shitfuck and a merry xmas too. Get your CM nightlies while you still can.

https://www.cyanogenmod.org/blog/a-fork-in-the-road

After this year, the infrastructure supporting the building and distribution of Cyanogenmod aftermarket Android ROMs will no longer function. Community builds will exist and likely will be made available piecemeal, and there's this Lineage OS stuff from Cyanogen himself, but there's going to be a gap in production and, I'm betting, a decline in function as time goes by.

http://www.androidpolice.com/2016/12/24/cyanogen-shutting-service-nightly-builds-december-31-2016/

Looks like Cyngn (the company) pulled the plug early. Some websites and servers are already offline or too difficult to reach. If you didn't get the last and/or latest download, someone made a (wildly incomplete, but helpful) archive:

https://archive.org/download/cmarchive_nighlies

You can breathe that sigh of relief now: Lineage OS officially exists.

https://download.lineageos.org/

The usage stats are interesting. They're compiled from devices reporting in semi-anonymously (see: Settings > Privacy > LineageOS statistics) and since Lineage only went official this last weekend, they're based on unofficial and pre-official builds

https://stats.lineageos.org/

China leads installs, just ahead of India, with the US in third place followed by Russia and Germany. And by far the favoured device is the Oneplus One (aka "bacon").

You can breathe that sigh of relief now: Lineage OS officially exists.

https://download.lineageos.org/

The usage stats are interesting. They're compiled from devices reporting in semi-anonymously (see: Settings > Privacy > LineageOS statistics) and since Lineage only went official this last weekend, they're based on unofficial and pre-official builds

https://stats.lineageos.org/

China leads installs, just ahead of India, with the US in third place followed by Russia and Germany. And by far the favoured device is the Oneplus One (aka "bacon").

 

Lineage OS

In Lollipop, they were exclamation marks. They'd crouch beside your wifi and mobile data icons, and they'd be ugly. But you could remove them....

(1) Open, or install and open, a Terminal emulator.
(2) Type: su
(3) Type: settings put global captive_portal_detection_enabled 0

Then reboot.

Well, they're back. And they're a cross.

As of Android 7.1.1, what I like to call Android Nuggets, the captive portal detection (and detection flags) have changed.

Captive portal detection is, um... it's when your phone looks for internet connections that require web logins? A captive portal is a landing page for, like, when you login on a public wifi network. And ffs I don't know but whenever you connect to wifi or data, Android goes looking for Google servers and when it can't find them it says you're not online, and it marks the connection icon with a cross. Also it screws around with whether or not automatic reconnection will take place. If your home wifi is regarded as "Connected, no internet" for instance, your phone won't automatically reconnect next time you toggle your wifi, and you'll have to manually initiate a connection.

In other words, in China, Android will always say you have no internet access even though you're right there surfing your little fingers off.

But, captive portals and this check for connectivity are related... somehow... and screwing with the flags will stop this connectivity check, and coincidentally make a mess of your captive portal detection. (Might want to think about that next time you're in the airport and don't know why you can't find the login page for the free wifi.)

All righty, well here's what you have to do now. (And note: none of this will work if you do not have root access. )

Open a Terminal Emulator. Type in the following commands:

su
settings put global captive_portal_https_url https://www.google.cn/generate_204
reboot
You may have to repeat this procedure for these two as well:

captive_portal_http_url
captive_portal_fallback_url


In the real world? The captive portal server in Android 7.1.1 is

connectivitycheck.gstatic.com/generate_204

What the above terminal commands do is change that server to the only google server accessible in China.

So, I think this is right: that "captive portal" stuff is a basic connectivity type check. Cribbed from somewhere in Stackoverflow (here), I got basically this:

generate_204 is used to determine if the wlan is open (response 204 is received) closed (no response at all) or blocked (redirect to captive portal is present). In the event of "blocked" (as opposed to closed) a notification is shown that a log-in to WiFi is required...

Now, because Android refers by default to google servers (and in fact to different ones for different Android flavours), whenever you turn on data or wifi in China, the "captive portal" check comes back as closed, ie no internet, and your connection gets rated "Connected, no internet" (even though in fact the internet is connected just fine).

So previously, one could turn off captive portal detection, which, duh, made you no longer detect the captive portals, but also meant you no longer fail the connectivity check. All good, more or less. But, as of seemingly Android 7.1.2, while you can set captive_portal_detection_enabled to 0 (aka "off"), it doesn't have the required effect because.... reasons. So instead, you use the better solution, assuming you have root access to your phone: change the captive portal connection server to one that works in China, namely:

https://www.google.cn/generate_204
Result: captive portal detection works as it should.

Boom

Old phone, LG Nexus 5, still going strong. But I've started thinking replacement, and what an onerous task that is. Since I want a device to be quite a lot more than minimally customizable, I don't know how many good choices there are any more. Preliminary research suggests:

htc 10
lg g6
oneplus 5
nexus 6p

So... issues. The nexus 6p apparently has a design flaw that produces *in some small number of devices* an effectively endless bootloop that renders the device useless (unless you take one of its cores offline). The Oneplus 5, which apparently has the jelly scrolling, which is a cosmetic issue, but not nice. The LG G6 has a strange aspect ratio. The HTC 10 has.... nothing wrong with it as far as I know, except for the HTC curse, whatever it is about the HTC brand that makes good phones much less popular than their specs should suggest.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

One does not know anymore.

Anyone know where you can buy a Oneplus 5T?

If reports weren't coming thick and fast on the many production flaws Google has managed to give the Pixel 2 XL, I'd get one of those. But looking at reviews of specifically the 5T from Oneplus, slick rear casing notwithstanding, it looks like just about the only phone these days that can replace an aging Nexus 5 that starting to feel "small".