Hacker News Reader

Comment by mksybr | Hacker News Reader

It's incredible that bricking the phone and total, catastrophic data loss is only a medium level severity ticket and with no one assigned.

EDIT: appears a user was able to recover from bootlooping, so not hard bricking.

Quote from https://old.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/178jj3i/need_h... below:

They escalated me to someone on the hardware team that sounded like they have been around for a while XD. But here's what I was able to do: From the fastboot menu (using the power + vol down button to boot the phone) select "Recovery mode" then when the phone goes to the No Command screen, hold the power button for 1 second then press the vol up button and release both at the same time. This will give you a command prompt of sorts. Go to factory wipe/reset and vioala. You can reload your phone. Sure it sucks but if you were stuck like I was this is good enough.

EDIT2:

https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/305766503?pli=1

View on HN

Factory wipe/reset followed by 'Reload' sounds like you end up losing all of your data if it wasn't backed up elsewhere. Usually the value of the data outweighs the value of the device, especially with phones that are harder to backup than they should be.

Yes, I believe that is the case that you lose all the data.

> especially with phones that are harder to backup than they should be.

That's interesting, my experience with a physically destroyed Android is that I didn't lose any data without any backups other than the default settings, since apparently all the apps that I use sync to cloud by default, without me needing to configure any backups, and use local storage only for caching, so all the apps, settings and data could be automagically restored.

Handing your data over to Google's cloud is the sanctioned option, but I prefer an SD card and local backups to another device.

My fear is that your phone is also the primary MFA device, so losing that could mean you can't log into your account anymore (and therefore can't restore the cloud backup)…

Google offers to back up Authenticator, should you choose to do so.

Which defeats the purpose of MFA, since your Google account becomes your only factor.

Sorry, I should be clearer: to login to Google on a new device, you typically need to accept a prompt on an old device. But if your old device is dead, that's not possible. Authenticator does TOTP and things, which is typically not adequate for logging in (even though it _should_ be).

I'm not using Google Authenticator or anything like that but when my old phone dropped somewhere at the bottom of a river all my banking apps, which do 2FA, had a way to let me start again on my new phone. Services that don't assist their users in a disaster recover scenario are severely lacking.

Yes they are, and yet they exist.

The prompt on an old device is just one of the MFA options you can use. You can also use a security key (e.g. Yubikey, Solokey, etc.).

This was my worst fear but I had opted-in to backup Authenticator with Google. Opting in to backup your data with Google is seamless and it also restores stuff like SMS messages.

But I suppose this is one more thing the anti-trust case against Google should probably be looking into. Should Google be allowed this deep integration with their cloud services?

Locking down phones so much was really a mistake. If you have to do what basically amounts to voodoo just to restore it.

> Locking down phones so much was really a mistake.

On the contrary, I believe it was done quite on purpose.

It's all a part of the grand plan to take away general computing from the unwashed masses.

Relevant links:

• The Right to Read by Richard Stallman, 1997: <https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en>

• The Digital Imprimatur by John Walker, 2003: <https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/>

• The War on General Purpose Computing by Cory Doctorow, 2012: <https://memex.craphound.com/2012/01/10/lockdown-the-coming-w...>

Maybe cheaper than smashing the phone and buying a new one but isn't the outcome the same? Isn't all your data gone?

>is only a medium level severity ticket and with no one assigned

There are likely internal issues for the actual bugs.

Not much of a consolation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com