But most? Removable flipping batteries. Having a bomb in your pocket computer that you can’t remove, and shortens it’s effective life without often complex surgery is absolutely criminal.
Removable D batteries have existed since 1898. It was a staples feature of machines. Nobody wanted, needed, or desired the tech brah “disruption” of gluing lithium bombs into phones.
I miss just being able to take it out and have no phone for however long I want. Didn’t drain the battery, didn’t worry about the phone.
It does compromise the waterproofing to open and close phones, even cases. But fuck you, let me make my own mistakes, your job is to engineer things to be better and fit my needs, not just give up and charge more and strip features and invade my privacy and spy on me with psyops and try to control my life. I’m a customer, not a user.
I miss just being able to take it out and have no phone for however long I want.
That’s the most telling thing about phones today, right? I have some older flip phones from 15 or so years ago. Removable battery, but even with the battery inserted for 8 years, I could turn one on right now and it would have whatever current state of charge is in the battery, only losing power from physics.
It’s because the U.S. Government can make it seem as if your phone is powered down, but it’s actually still on and spying on you, sending data to whatever alphabet agency wants it. Removing the battery is the only defense against that attack, so they ‘encouraged’ manufacturers to stop allowing it.
Sounds like a dumb conspiracy. Especially since Fairphone sells in the US.
More likely is that manufacturers want to make more money so they make their phones more difficult to repair so customers have to pay them to get a battery replaced.
You can believe what you want. I didn’t hear it from a conspiracy theorist, I heard it from Edward Snowden, and this was actually old news when he mentioned it, but his revelation on national TV made it even more widely known.
“Coincidentally” it was right around the time Snowden blew the whistle that Android manufacturers started switching over to non-replaceable batteries.
Yes Apple are greedy fucks and it’s obvious that forcing iPhone users to get their phones repaired by a ‘genius’ was a part of their strategy from the beginning. But Android manufacturers who didn’t have a repair store they could force their users to use and wouldn’t benefit from that were happy to continue letting users replace their own batteries, because it was a legitimate benefit for the consumer and way to differentiate themselves from Apple.
I’m sure that phone manufactures save a few pennies by forcing users to either buy a new phone or pay an expensive repair bill, but I’m pretty sure that isn’t the only reason it’s done.
Edit: Even if you ignore their ability to wiretap you when your phone is ‘powered off’, the fact remains that the government can and does track you by you cell phone and removing the battery is a great way to stop that.
Of course, it’s not the only way- If you feel like you don’t want to be tracked for any reason a Faraday bag is a decent option. It makes your phone less useful, but so would removing the battery.
Non replaceable batteries benefit android manufacturers as it simplifies manufacturing. And they dont care about repairs post warranty… thats just incentive to buy another one. You dont need a grand conspiracy to explain that.
Non replaceable batteries benefit android manufacturers as it simplifies manufacturing. And they dont care about repairs post warranty… thats just incentive to buy another one.
That was true from 2006-2016 as well, but most Android manufacturers still offered user replaceable batteries. If you believe that there is no correlation- that’s fine. I don’t buy it though, the timing is just too perfect for it to be a coincidence.
You know its a really easy to prove against, right? Just have some basic radio spectrograph to detect any signals coming from a turned off phone.
In reality, the correlation is phones continue to get thinner, making it near impossible to create a battery and battery connector small enough and still be resistant to a 200lb ape handling it.
That actually isn’t a way to prove anything, unfortunately.
A powered off or “powered off” phone wouldn’t need to transmit anything. It would be just waking one of the receivers periodically (or even the NFC could be hit by some radio energy as a trigger) to listen for the “secret” activation code. Listening for radio energy doesn’t generate any.
If the phone was “powered off” - tracing power draw between battery/phone would probably show something, but likely, the phone’s power draw while off is always constant if this were the case and it isn’t a new state the phone goes into.
Even if the phone was being used as an offline bug, the user would still not know because it can record audio/whatever and store it internally without ever transmitting. It’d likely be rigged up to just transmit the next time the user “turns it on” - so they’d be unaware, as the transmission would look like normal traffic.
The only case where it would be traceable from a radio perspective is if it were being used as an online bug, which means it would already have to have been put in the online bug state, which means someone has a reason to monitor you.
I mean shoot, if one really wants to go full tinfoil hat, recording audio to temporary storage at voice quality could go on for days with a phone “powered off” - periodically dumped to somewhere in flash. Hours of conversation could be fit in megabytes. The phone could just always be recording while turned off for every user, and when turned back on, that audio file is sent through the ML processor to convert to text, and then compress the text, further reducing the size. That data could be transmitted during normal usage as voice or compressed data, or just stored in the phone as compressed data for years.
Every phone could be doing this right now, and could have been doing this for a decade, although on-device text transcription is a relatively new feature.
Then, let us go next level: phone recycling/exchange processes also harvest IMEI+that compressed data before being shipped off for resale in the event it was never transmitted. Finally, we know why the NSA has the Utah data center.
I keep asking them to send me copies of recordings of old phone calls, but they never humor me.
DISCLAIMER: This is all non-serious but based on what is technically possible right now.
Just have some basic radio spectrograph to detect any signals coming from a turned off phone.
The claim isn’t that the FBI/NSA/CIA/ICE whoever is doing this constantly to everybody, it’s that they have the capability to do this to anybody, which again isn’t even a question. I’m not really worried about being spied on personally (yet) and even if I were I’d just leave my phone at home or put it in a Faraday bag, I’m not going to carry around a ‘basic radio spectrograph’ and whip it out every time I want to have a private conversation.
In reality, the correlation is phones continue to get thinner
Lol, that’s like saying I lost weight because I bought smaller pants. Yeah, designers are able to make phones thinner when they are able to design around non-replaceable batteries. Was anyone asking for thinner phones? They had the ability to make thinner phones by disallowing replaceable batteries for a decade and did not.
Were consumers demanding that phone manufactures make phones worse by removing useful features like replaceable batteries or headphone jacks- or was these anti-features foisted upon us?
If it had been just some manufactures that switched, or if those manufacturers that did switch had offered the option of different models, some with replaceable batteries and some without, and then consumers chose the worse phones- I might not be as convinced.
As it is now with 99.9% of all phones you can buy not even giving you the option, I’m not buying it.
It’s not like this is some crazy off the wall theory. I’m not saying the Earth is flat or we didn’t land on the moon. We know that the government is using our cell phones to track us, we know they have the capabilities to do so. The only question is did governments (I guarantee it’s not just the U.S) make deals with/ask/or put pressure on manufactures to incentivize the switch. That’s not really far fetched at all.
Every damn feature.
But most? Removable flipping batteries. Having a bomb in your pocket computer that you can’t remove, and shortens it’s effective life without often complex surgery is absolutely criminal.
Removable D batteries have existed since 1898. It was a staples feature of machines. Nobody wanted, needed, or desired the tech brah “disruption” of gluing lithium bombs into phones.
I miss just being able to take it out and have no phone for however long I want. Didn’t drain the battery, didn’t worry about the phone.
It does compromise the waterproofing to open and close phones, even cases. But fuck you, let me make my own mistakes, your job is to engineer things to be better and fit my needs, not just give up and charge more and strip features and invade my privacy and spy on me with psyops and try to control my life. I’m a customer, not a user.
There were several waterproof phones with removable batteries back in the S5 era
That’s the most telling thing about phones today, right? I have some older flip phones from 15 or so years ago. Removable battery, but even with the battery inserted for 8 years, I could turn one on right now and it would have whatever current state of charge is in the battery, only losing power from physics.
It’s obviously possible, as Samsung keeps making these XCover phones with a removable battery and a waterproof rating of IPX8 (SCUBA): https://www.phonescoop.com/phones/phone.php?p=7301
It’s because the U.S. Government can make it seem as if your phone is powered down, but it’s actually still on and spying on you, sending data to whatever alphabet agency wants it. Removing the battery is the only defense against that attack, so they ‘encouraged’ manufacturers to stop allowing it.
Sounds like a dumb conspiracy. Especially since Fairphone sells in the US.
More likely is that manufacturers want to make more money so they make their phones more difficult to repair so customers have to pay them to get a battery replaced.
I blame Apple
You can believe what you want. I didn’t hear it from a conspiracy theorist, I heard it from Edward Snowden, and this was actually old news when he mentioned it, but his revelation on national TV made it even more widely known. “Coincidentally” it was right around the time Snowden blew the whistle that Android manufacturers started switching over to non-replaceable batteries.
Yes Apple are greedy fucks and it’s obvious that forcing iPhone users to get their phones repaired by a ‘genius’ was a part of their strategy from the beginning. But Android manufacturers who didn’t have a repair store they could force their users to use and wouldn’t benefit from that were happy to continue letting users replace their own batteries, because it was a legitimate benefit for the consumer and way to differentiate themselves from Apple.
I’m sure that phone manufactures save a few pennies by forcing users to either buy a new phone or pay an expensive repair bill, but I’m pretty sure that isn’t the only reason it’s done.
Edit: Even if you ignore their ability to wiretap you when your phone is ‘powered off’, the fact remains that the government can and does track you by you cell phone and removing the battery is a great way to stop that.
Of course, it’s not the only way- If you feel like you don’t want to be tracked for any reason a Faraday bag is a decent option. It makes your phone less useful, but so would removing the battery.
Non replaceable batteries benefit android manufacturers as it simplifies manufacturing. And they dont care about repairs post warranty… thats just incentive to buy another one. You dont need a grand conspiracy to explain that.
That was true from 2006-2016 as well, but most Android manufacturers still offered user replaceable batteries. If you believe that there is no correlation- that’s fine. I don’t buy it though, the timing is just too perfect for it to be a coincidence.
You know its a really easy to prove against, right? Just have some basic radio spectrograph to detect any signals coming from a turned off phone.
In reality, the correlation is phones continue to get thinner, making it near impossible to create a battery and battery connector small enough and still be resistant to a 200lb ape handling it.
That actually isn’t a way to prove anything, unfortunately.
A powered off or “powered off” phone wouldn’t need to transmit anything. It would be just waking one of the receivers periodically (or even the NFC could be hit by some radio energy as a trigger) to listen for the “secret” activation code. Listening for radio energy doesn’t generate any.
If the phone was “powered off” - tracing power draw between battery/phone would probably show something, but likely, the phone’s power draw while off is always constant if this were the case and it isn’t a new state the phone goes into.
Even if the phone was being used as an offline bug, the user would still not know because it can record audio/whatever and store it internally without ever transmitting. It’d likely be rigged up to just transmit the next time the user “turns it on” - so they’d be unaware, as the transmission would look like normal traffic.
The only case where it would be traceable from a radio perspective is if it were being used as an online bug, which means it would already have to have been put in the online bug state, which means someone has a reason to monitor you.
I mean shoot, if one really wants to go full tinfoil hat, recording audio to temporary storage at voice quality could go on for days with a phone “powered off” - periodically dumped to somewhere in flash. Hours of conversation could be fit in megabytes. The phone could just always be recording while turned off for every user, and when turned back on, that audio file is sent through the ML processor to convert to text, and then compress the text, further reducing the size. That data could be transmitted during normal usage as voice or compressed data, or just stored in the phone as compressed data for years.
Every phone could be doing this right now, and could have been doing this for a decade, although on-device text transcription is a relatively new feature.
Then, let us go next level: phone recycling/exchange processes also harvest IMEI+that compressed data before being shipped off for resale in the event it was never transmitted. Finally, we know why the NSA has the Utah data center.
I keep asking them to send me copies of recordings of old phone calls, but they never humor me.
DISCLAIMER: This is all non-serious but based on what is technically possible right now.
Why would I need to prove it? You didn’t read any of the articles I linked to did you? The fact that they have the ability to do this is not even a question. The government admitted that it was able to do this all the way back in 2006.
The claim isn’t that the FBI/NSA/CIA/ICE whoever is doing this constantly to everybody, it’s that they have the capability to do this to anybody, which again isn’t even a question. I’m not really worried about being spied on personally (yet) and even if I were I’d just leave my phone at home or put it in a Faraday bag, I’m not going to carry around a ‘basic radio spectrograph’ and whip it out every time I want to have a private conversation.
Lol, that’s like saying I lost weight because I bought smaller pants. Yeah, designers are able to make phones thinner when they are able to design around non-replaceable batteries. Was anyone asking for thinner phones? They had the ability to make thinner phones by disallowing replaceable batteries for a decade and did not.
Were consumers demanding that phone manufactures make phones worse by removing useful features like replaceable batteries or headphone jacks- or was these anti-features foisted upon us?
If it had been just some manufactures that switched, or if those manufacturers that did switch had offered the option of different models, some with replaceable batteries and some without, and then consumers chose the worse phones- I might not be as convinced.
As it is now with 99.9% of all phones you can buy not even giving you the option, I’m not buying it.
It’s not like this is some crazy off the wall theory. I’m not saying the Earth is flat or we didn’t land on the moon. We know that the government is using our cell phones to track us, we know they have the capabilities to do so. The only question is did governments (I guarantee it’s not just the U.S) make deals with/ask/or put pressure on manufactures to incentivize the switch. That’s not really far fetched at all.
A. They did not have the ability because doing so would reduced battery capacity because the tech is battery still maturing.
B. Apparently people are asking because people are still buying. Just because me and you arent asking doesnt mean the greater market isnt.
A. That would mean the entire world is in on the conspiracy.
B. I cant buy a small truck in america. Does that mean there is a grand conspiracy?