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Comment by b112 | Hacker News Reader

I bought, and returned the Note Air.

The build quality is impressive. I had it for 2 weeks, used it for about an hour daily, and set it to only poweroff after a day of inactivity.

Its battery dropped from 100% to 48% over that time. Yes, I was quite positively impressed.

However, their theft of code (which is what you do, if you do not respect the code license, eg, gpl), the fact that even a brand new model tablet was 3+ monthly Android security updates behind, and the pcaps I took showing all the phoning home, including IPs in China...

Well...

As I said, returned. Quite sad, loved the hardware.

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Would it be a security threat to have that on one’s home network?

I’d mostly want it for reading articles online and email newsletters. I could make a burner email account for this purpose.

That seems a tolerable tradeoff, as I don’t consider what I read on HN to be super sensitive. (Though others may reasonable differ there)

The trouble is that it is behind your security perimeter once it is on your home network. It can start discovering other devices, monitoring traffic, enumerating ports and services, etc.

If you're set up for it, you can always set it up on a sandboxed SSID with access only to the internet (or even just to sites you choose, like an FTP server of your ebooks). This is probably a good idea with most sketchy gadgets that "need" access to the "internet" but will probably be off the table in coming years as it gets cheap enough for manufacturers to embed 5g connectivity if they want.

Sounds like a lot of work when the alternative is just using a device that doesn’t spy on you in the first place. For instance, Remarkable is a great e—ink tablet that literally gives you the keys to the kingdom: there’s a UI in the product that gives you the root PW (which is set randomly for each device).

Does remarkable have a web browser or email support? I don’t use chrome so it will be hard to add reader articles. Mostly I want to add them from twitter on ios.

Not as a 1st party feature, but there are several open source tools for doing that: https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable

Wow those look great! Thanks. No email newsletter though right?

Maybe I can make an rss feed out of them and use goosepaper or print them to pdf.

You can print to a pdf from your browser and upload that to the device as a simple workaround. It's pretty straightforward.

Oh that sounds pretty great. How is pdf legibility vs a formatted article? I have a kobo and remember finding some pdf articles small.

Also how do you upload from the phone, can you print to a dropbox folder or the Remarkable phone app or some source so it is automatic?

Does Eero let you do this? That’s my router.

Vote with your money. Don’t buy stuff from companies that are doing the wrong thing.

> Its battery dropped from 100% to 48% over that time

I have the same model with insane battery life. I think your unit might have been defective.

> and set it to only poweroff after a day of inactivity.

Might it have been this?

the poster is returning the device because of moral issues with the manufacturer, the anecdote regarding battery life was meant to indicate product quality (although rhetorically structured as a complaint and therefore confusing)

14h hours using up only 52% is impressive to me.

https://youtu.be/ObtjXO_hEPw

This was a pretty thorough traffic analysis of their Max Lumi device. I think it would be pretty similar with the Note Air. I bought a Max Lumi after this as there didn't seem to be much concern.

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