Fighting the man

So, due to money problems like many of you out there, I was forced to get a phone. This was mainly due to do what I swore I would never do again, consulting. Being one of the few skills I have left that I can physically do is coding, sure I write, but savings have run out so work it is. I swear, I am living in that weird prison prophecy written by Yehoshua‘s youngest disciple, John.

Seriously, why are these things so popular and what is up with the Indians?

I chose my android phone not because of newly hyped bullshit. I chose this piece of crap android for two reasons. Power and the ability to root it, then ROM it as far away from ‘do evil’ as possible: [google]. It turns out that Indians have completely gotten around geolocation and their phones come up in all searches. So, it appears like the phone is able to be unlocked, because the fucking worthless eastern Indians can unlock theirs. Seriously, I have been to India I know what I am talking about.

It has been a month now, and I have discovered a source of so much frustration, hate, and rage it is unimaginable. I got my first smartphone something like 12 years ago, and It was quite the fun experience. I ripped do evil’s claws out of it by romming it to cyogen and went to town. In that phone, I had encrypted file systems, su and sudo, I had literally annihilated all tracking and advertising, and it was great.

Back then, there were plenty of actual free apps, ones that didn’t have over the top stupid adverts. Now, just where and how they are placed tells someone with common sense that that is why the app exists. Ads and not the app itself.

Now days, good luck finding apps that don’t have some form of payment. Be it you’re suffering the ads, or outright paying for subscriptions and or simply paying for the app itself where you might actually still see ads due to pricing tiers. The android culture has become a cesspool of avarice.

Still, this isn’t an issue. I can still code my own software in either java or python right?

Years past, and I had decided not to get another phone. But I got one to convert into a mobile computer, which they are anyway. Honestly, what I do and who I do it with is no one’s business but my own. I have a right to that through the law of the land, and even if I didn’t, I would still make all attempts to keep my business my own. Not because I am a criminal, and not because I have something else to hide. I don’t like the idea of people that I don’t know holding so much information on me that is staggering. I swear, our government can not spy on us like that, but private people who incorporate can? Doesn’t that seem a bit wrong to you?

This goes on and on with my war to secure my computers. It has become a struggle beyond what is ridiculous. So, I knew that android phones would be even worse. However, now that the python community has kivy, as well as other android libs, I was up for the challenge. Happily, I could code my way into security. I got the phone, downloaded my rom, set up twrp, got all my tools together. This was going to be easy, I mean I purposely bought a phone that was factory unlocked and everything from google to independent websites said it was not only possible but easy.

…

A week later: No OEM unlocking in the menu.

Firstly, it took forever to find the real issue. My Samsung phone has a locked bootloader in my country and the rest of the models in the world do not. Only one page had this information and it was a pain to find. Any hit on Bing, Google, Duckduckgo, or startpage would only reveal rooting for dummies pages over and over, page after page. Finally, after racking my brain for days I found the necessary information by using metacrawler, which I rarely use unless I am desperate.

Only to find after spend a great deal of money that indeed my device was completely unrootable. However, due to the seven day waiting flag in Samsung devices for OEM unlocking to unlock, I had used up all the time I could have had to return the fucking thing.

NOW… I have all but a paper weight. With all the bloat I can not remove or even shut down, it is worthless.

Also what I discovered is that the play store has very few applications left that are not pay in one way or another masquerading a free. Because as you know, when liberty and freedom are gradually taken from people the meaning of words are the first to change.

IOS is no better and we have yet to have a good independent phone manufacturer. Like what the hell linux, get off your asses? I would happily join the community for an opensource phone and develop for it. As long as these tyrants have uncomfortable alliances and monopolies our entire world is going to get far worse.

Do evil has made it very clear that they don’t want their users to be secure. Just this year alone, they have announced that they are removing vpn access from phones. That is just icing on the cake of their lobbying for removing the ability of adblocker plugins.