Thread

1. gblargg · 1790856581 · focus · HN ↗

   Too bad phones aren't easy to do a full back up of, wipe, then restore after you are past the border agents. Or can keep all user data on a microSD card that you remove and secure before the search.

   1. duskdozer · 1790857701 · focus · HN ↗

      Explain how? I've yet to find something reliable like this. At best you can have a decent number of apps automatically reinstalled to the original state, but not all, and most settings don't transfer, etc. And that requires root access, which most people don't have afaik.

      1. ssl-3 · 1790859007 · focus · HN ↗

         I used to do this kind of thing with TiBackup when Android phones were easy to play with and experimentation was more common.

         I'd back up the phone to an SD card and/or send the backup offsite over the network.

         After that, I could nuke whatever I wanted -- or factory reset it, switch to a different OS (we often called them "ROMs" back then), play with that for a bit, switch back and forth, or whatever.

         When the time was right, I'd use TiBackup to restore the backup. It didn't even have to be the same phone. Apps and data were restored to where they had been. Home screens looked the same. Settings and preferences went back to how they were. The same web stuff remained in browser cache, alongside the same cookies.

         There were occasional outliers that didn't come back perfectly, of course, but broadly speaking: It worked very well. Those outliers were few and easy to deal with.

         This required root access. But for a time (years), that was easy.

         (I will never accept any defense of any proclamations that we must be restricted from doing whatever the fuck we want with the hardware that we own. If I can do things with a desktop PC, then I should also be able to do those same things with a pocket computer.)

         1. catlikesshrimp · 1790862108 · focus · HN ↗

            You can buy an android which can easily be rooted if you want They might start restricting what you can do in your PC. Let's keep both free to modify in any way we want without comparison.
         2. duskdozer · 1790862675 · focus · HN ↗

            Yes, I also used Ti[tanium?] Backup, and now use NeoBackup. Those still don't quite hit the spot for me of a full and reliable backup. It's close in many ways, but I've found system settings to be largely nontransferable, and many times apps would just seem to break or crash after restoring. So I have no idea how people do anything close to it without root, although I suppose it's possible at this point if you use a Google account and apps they probably have something.
         3. hckrme · 1790862887 · focus · HN ↗

            > If I can do things with a desktop PC, then I should also be able to do those same things with a pocket computer.

            I understand the sentiment behind this argument, but please stop making the argument for freedom to do computing on own devices by making a comparison between desktop PC and pocket computers (mobile devices).

            I believe that the bad-faith actors are just gonna force same state of things on desktop PCs as well moving forward, instead of enabling freedom of compute on mobile devices.

         4. LWIRVoltage · 1790862949 · focus · HN ↗

            Elsewhere in this very thread I talk about how we need a modern solution for full true image backup for phones; I'm also an example of somebody who could use it, as I have phones where if I was to back up and wipe them I would lose the ability to use some extremely expensive old thermal cameras that work by attaching to them, - if I wiped and reinstalled, even having the apps, they require reaching out to servers for initial authentication that no longer exists. A full image backup would solve this.

            Rooting is now far more difficult unfortunately, and isn't even available mostly; but I don't see a real method to do a full proper image backup of phones today.

            1. ssl-3 · 1790886710 · focus · HN ↗

               I'd like to think that the old TiBackup method would have worked for your cameras. It tried to save the applications along with their data -- including old, online auth data. Almost all of my stuff Just Worked after using it.

               At very least it was way, way better than the wink-and-a-smirk, blind, opaque, vague-handwaving "Your phone is backed up on Google servers!" process that we have these days, wherein: As a practical matter, if I can't touch the backup to examine it, or exercise it at my whim, then that backup doesn't meaningfully exist.

               But as I understand it: Your problem is deeper, and riskier. You can't goof around with these existing phones in any way. If you poke at one and the closed-source black-box app decides that it is unhappy, then that means that there is one fewer phone in the world that can do the things you need to do with your cameras.

               Maybe the best answer for you is to leave those phones alone, and get another phone you can hack on for the express purpose of trying to to get the camera working on it. This takes the risk out of the loop.

               Maybe that means something that passively monitors data over the USB connection and putting together a new app that operates the camera in the same way.

               Or perhaps beginning that process would allow recognition: Maybe it's already using a bog-standard protocol on the wire to talk to the camera and it's NBD to download another app that works with your cameras on any new, random phone.

               Maybe it instead involves a patch for your existing app's APK that bypasses the authentication step, and this can then be used on a different phone.

               Whatever form this liberation takes, it is the kind of thing that a person of adequate skill, or with the right kind of wit and a good LLM, or all of these together, can almost certainly solve. (It might even be easy.)

      2. __MatrixMan__ · 1790864751 · focus · HN ↗

         You can declaratively manage your phone with something like github.com/devindudeman/nix-android so you'd point at a decoy config file and rebuild before crossing the border and then point at the up-to-no-good config file once across.

         Of course you do have to be able to reference those files somehow, so they have to be online, but if there are no references to them on the device then the border folks would have to somehow know about them and be able to access them in order to link you and your device to the declared configs. There are a lot of ways to hide such a thing.

         Presumably the most sensitive thing here is your social graph and messages. I haven't verified if nix-android handles them in a way that would make sense here, but it's at least plausible that it might.

         1. vixen99 · 1790883464 · focus · HN ↗

            Exactly. Isn't this the most obvious thing to do?

            1. duskdozer · 1790921704 · focus · HN ↗

               It is really intriguing, though my small attempt at using nix with home manager on pc failed, so I'm not so confident on getting it working well on android. Especially considering that I do a decent number of apk mods
      3. nxc18 · 1790884264 · focus · HN ↗

         Extremely easy on iPhone with a Mac. Just plug it in. Supposedly same with iTunes on PC but I haven’t tried it.

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