Re: the battery was dying anyway
What? Your phone isn't powered by plutonium?
1180 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Feb 2009
Quite right. If an employer wants employees to have a phone for company business, then they should provide one. If an employee wants a phone for personal business with no employer control, they should buy their own. If this means carrying two phones, so be it.
Great idea! I've used CyanogenMod/LineageOS and other custom ROMs since my first Android phone - the original Samsung Galaxy S. That was the phone that woke me up to so many problems such as long term support, e-waste, surveillance capitalism, etc. Since then I've ensured every new phone I bought could be immediately reflashed with CM/LOS as soon as it was out of the box. Unfortunately the vast majority of phones talked about in the article are not owned by Reg readers or those of a similar ilk. If I try and explain any of this to "normals" their eyes glaze over and they collapse as their bored brains take leave of their bodies. So sadly, most people won't even do what the article title says, let alone your suggestion, and the problems will continue.
Why would they bother trying to break it? That's just PR. They'll just make it illegal except for approved uses (e.g. banking) They'll just mandate that e.g. WhatsApp can no longer be used legally in e.g. Arizona unless the encryption is removed. Facebook will then either produce a crypto-free version for Arizona and other states which have gone the same route, or just drop it from the app altogether. They probably won't want to maintain two versions so most likely will do the latter. If the law only targets WhatsApp perhaps they'll do the former to remain competitive where encryption has not been banned. They could even keep the crypto and make it location aware. But once one of these apps has been targeted it's likely that others will follow leading to pressure to drop it from all of them. That's the problem (among many) with these centralised networks - one point at which to apply pressure breaks the whole thing.
Run encrypted comms on your own decentralised, federated servers, or peer to peer, using FLOSS software. That would go a long way towards mitigating any effects this legislation might have on the availability of backdoor-free encrypted comms. The biggest problem, as ever, is getting people to care.
I'm not surprised. I suspect the chief benefit will be that the products can now be marketed as containing graphene. Given that the amount of pseudoscience in cosmetics advertising seems to encourage the unthinking to buy more this can only be a win for the producers.