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45 minutes of unsupervised access to your phone? Even if it's a "travel" phone I wouldn't connect it to any other device after that.
by pearjuice 4y ago
45 minutes of unsupervised access to your phone? Even if it's a "travel" phone I wouldn't connect it to any other device after that.
- Havoc 4y agoWhat are you gonna do? Throw you new iphone in the bin?
- macrolime 4y agoSell it back to Apple with Apple Trade In and buy a new one
- N19PEDL2 4y agoBuy a 2nd-hand $40 scrap phone, erase it, save a few panorama pictures and a couple of selfies on it and put your SIM card in it every time you are about to cross a border. Then put the card back in your regular phone after that.
- clankyclanker 4y agoNope, get a new SIM. There’s some writable memory on them, iirc.
- Nifty3929 4y agoGood thing the trend is toward non-removable SIMs to stop that sort of shady business.
- ekianjo 4y agoNon removable sim? Who wants that?
- bool3max 4y agoGovernments and corporations.
- staringback 4y agoIt is less "sim card is tied to this phone and can't be moved" and more "sim card exists logically and doesn't require a physical presence in the phone it wants to be used in"
- ajsnigrutin 4y agoWhich really sucks for travellers. High roaming costs? Just go to a gasstation and buy a travel sim card, put it inside, use it, put it in the walled when you leave, and if you still have any data left, use it the next time you come there. eSIMs are a pain in the ass for that.
- staringback 4y agoJust go to a carrier website, buy an esim, download to the phone, use it, switch it off when you leave, use it next time you come there. It is literally the same except you don't even need to go to a gas station. My Pixel can hold as many esims as I want standing by until they are needed to be used.
- robocat 4y agoIf any company you depend on uses your phone number for 2FA, then SIMless is useful. A SIM can be removed and put into another phone to receive authentication txts. Mostly relevant if your phone is lost or stolen, or perhaps even if criminals are directly threatening you. For example, I worry about bank accounts when I travel to some countries because criminals would be highly motivated to steal from me - the only thing protecting me is their ignorance. In some countries a few thousand dollars is a lot of motivation. Unfortunately my primary bank does not provide secure 2FA but only provides phone auth, and I am locked into my bank because of my mortgage (I have a mortgage, and conditions have changed which prevent me from getting a different mortgage from another bank). I could cancel revolving credit (the main financial risk) but that has other opportunity costs for me. Also SIMless helps prevent unwanted telephone charges - important if roaming in other countries on account. Phone companies do not make it easy to limit your liability, so if you are unlucky you could end up owing many thousands.
- 00deadbeef 4y agoThis is why you should enable the PIN code feature for your SIM. It will be disabled after a few incorrect attempts. It protects you from the scenarios you describe.
- Havoc 4y agoCan’t wait to post my holiday pics taken with my $40 potato online! Ultimately the underlying privacy violation is what needs to change here cause all work arounds are problematic in some way
- JohnFen 4y agoWhy not use an actual camera?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- boring_twenties 4y agoThey took my laptop in the back for just 30 minutes or so, after which I refused to accept it back from them or even touch it, which took another 2 hours or so. Eventually they agreed to dispose of it themselves.
- bagels 4y agoWhy not just throw it away yourself?
- boring_twenties 4y agoIt was out of my sight for half an hour, I'm not so much as touching it again after that.
- bagels 4y agoWhat harm would happen if you touched it long enough to put it in a trash can? You were concerned they may have poisoned it or something? I completely understand not wanting to operate it since they could have backdoored it or put tracking devices in it, etc.
- rovr138 4y agoHe took possession. If anything is on that phone now, it's now a game to see who was the last one to have it and to put whatever is there in it.
- Wistar 4y agoWere they surprised at your refusal?
- boring_twenties 4y agoThey had no idea how to react, lol
- philliphaydon 4y ago
- Arrath 4y agoI like to share an anecdote that at a professional conference, some agents from the ATF came to give a presentation regarding updated regulations and found that their laptop couldn't connect to the projector. No biggie, I had just finished my presentation and offered to let them use my laptop. The moment they plugged in the thumb drive with their presentation, my virus scanner went apeshit about something on that drive. I kept that laptop disconnected for the rest of that trip, and nuked it once I was back home.
- mindslight 4y agoAnother reason right to repair is so damn important. If all of a device's memory were thoroughly documented, then this type of attack would require hardware modification, making it more expensive and easier to detect. And if hardware revisions were documented, the community could do things like document visual changes to circuit boards for automated visual comparison. Whereas with the current state of hostile code like ME/PSP, I can imagine a (larger) backdoor being created merely as a side effect of a "search".