Samsung disables customer phones remotely, holds data hostage [video] | Hacker News Reader

Samsung disables customer phones remotely, holds data hostage [video]

youtube.com

199 pointspaulcarroty112 comments

Samsung and the other manufacturers shot themselves in the foot so hard on this one. When this news trickles down to the average Mexican (ie someone not in the tech industry), the message they will get won't be "don't buy grey market phones, buy official phones", it will be "don't by Samsung, ZTE, etc, they will lock your phone".

> "don't by Samsung, ZTE, etc, they will lock your phone"

I may be in the tech industry in the US, but this is absolutely the message I got as well.

I see a lot of ZTE phones in the stores here in Cancún. I’ve not seen that brand before coming here.

Some of them are pretty cheap even.

I thought about buying one so that I could leave my iPhone in the hotel room some days and only carry a cheap phone when I am outside walking in some parts of the city.

We are leaving Cancún soon, so now there is not so much point in doing that anyways. But I was thinking that I could do so when we get to Panama in a few days, or the next time I come back to South America.

After your comment I am rethinking buying a ZTE phone ever. However, I didn’t hear ZTE mentioned in the video. Is ZTE somehow connected to Samsung?

ZTE is not connected to Samsung. There were some budget ZTE phones sold in the USA about 10 years ago. I believe ZTE was banned by the US government, along with Huawei for doing shady things.

"I believe ZTE was banned by the US government, along with Huawei for doing shady things."

The shady things are beeing chinese owned and there is a trade war? Otherwise I heard lots of accusations, but saw no proof of anything.

> are beeing chinese owned and there is a trade war?

Lol it takes a lot more than being a Chinese owned company to get banned in the us the majority of the things that we buy is made in China. If it was that reason you wouldn't be able to buy anything in the store anymore

So .. where is the proof for anything?

Otherwise the difference is in strategy. A toaster is geopolitical not so important, like communication infrastructure.

I get the impression that it's strategy to exclude competition that otherwise can't be beat.

You can't beat Huawei cell towers. You increasingly can't beat Huawei phones, which have become much better and cheaper than iPhones.

You can make up some story about it being spyware (while we have a mountain of proof that the US has spyware in Western devices...) and exclude them, also hoping that it will limit their advance. Of course, the opposite has happened, CHinese tech comapines have now rapidly gained the ability to sourse in-house (or in-country) what they used to import, leading to a tech jump through sanctions.

The company that just pushed an update that marks Google play services as malware and tries to break android is “better than iPhone”?

Get out of here.

It’s a very easy search

To find something concrete against Huawei? Sources please, I was not able to find anything like that.

Another reason why those companies are banned is because the US gov hasn't successfully inserted back-doors in the chips so therefore there is no oversight/snooping so they don't get to do business in the US market.

Related: "Samsung and other manufacturers disable phones bought on gray markets" (10/23/2023, 164 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37990528

As a text-not-video consumer, I appreciate being pointed to a source I can read.

unrealted to this thread, I know, but yes, thank you. I despise when the top results and the casual links to support something turn out to be videos. I don't want to stop everything I'm doing to dedicate 100% of my attention to something on a fixed take-up time schedule. Give me a text I can scan while my other audio keeps playing, thank you!

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Samsung and other manufacturers disable phones bought on gray markets - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37990528 - Oct 2023 (166 comments)

167 comments now :p

I'd love more technical details on how this was possible. What system in the OS/baseband is responsible? If you installed LineageOS could you protect yourself?

Well that's horrifying, can't wait for Samsung to disable my phone because I went on vacation to Cancun...

That was the first thing I wondered; how will they avoid this? Let's say I'm going there for an extended trip and decide to get a local SIM card. Will my phone just go poof?

I think they avoid it by only targeting phones bought in one market but with first account setup and first SIM from another.

So your exposure would be if you decided to factory reset the phone, use a new Samsung/Google account, and get a local SIM.

Samsung's "reason" was that the phone was not certified for that region - which is exactly what happens when you travel from one region to another.

So you can avoid it by not setting up Samsung/Google account?

That's messed up. I have generally preferred Samsung products,too.

10-15 years ago, when I had a lot more free time, I used to put CyanogenMod on my phones and play around with that.

Are there any good open source mobile OS around these days?

Lineageos is still here, GrapheneOS and CalyxOS is more updated and presumably more secure and private, but Graphene only supports Pixels and Calyx supports Pixels plus some other models. Pixels should be your best bet in terms of ROM compatibility.

It sucks. There's basically no other choice except a Pixel phone. And even some of them are locked if you buy it through your carrier.

I would get some Linux phone even if they aren't perfect, but I have no cell reception, and rely on Wifi calling, which seems to be some proprietary thing that only Apple and Google are able to implement.

Use a Pixel phone running version of GrapheneOS built and signed by you with your own keys, or use stock GrapheneOS and don't lock the bootloader, and add root access if desired.

That's the only hardware/software system that guarantees both total freedom, support for mainstream apps, good security and a quality device.

Agreed but on the lazy side, bootloader locked with normal GOS.

GrapheneOS on a Pixel is really the only phone setup I'm vaguely comfortable running these days. If this project ends, I'm a bit screwed.

Donate. Though so far the project is in good financial status.

Since my own finances got to be a bit stricter, I try to donate in packages of $50 ocasionaly as to the project having, from me, an a average of $2 a month.

GrapheneOS, but it only supports recent Pixel devices: https://grapheneos.org/faq#supported-devices

CalyxOs is also an alternative.

LineageOS replaced CyanogenMod. And don't buy a phone from Aliexpress in Mexico....

I'm running Lineage OS on a Moto g100. Overall, I'm really happy with it. I have full control of my phone and it has the hardware features I wanted - headphone jack, micro sd, two-day battery, and a fast enough CPU that it never feels slow.

Motorola has an automated process to get the bootloader unlock code, and the whole process was fairly straightforward.

LineageOS even passes SafetyNet, however there's an additional CTS Profile check that some apps do, and passing that requires rooting the phone, which is turn requires a SafetyNet bypass and makes updates more tricky because LOS updates un-root the phone.

Nobody else (that I saw) mentioned it, but PostmarketOS [0] has a decent number of (community) supported devices, is Free and more than a de-Googled Android distro - it's actually based on Alpine Linux. I've previously run it on my Pinephone Pro, but images are available for multiple Samsung handsets as well [1]

[0] https://postmarketos.org/

[1] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices

I'm currently running GrapheneOS on a Pixel. Been using for a few months and no complaints.

How about PureOS?

Is this an attempt at some anti-theft tech?

Ie. prevent phones that have been stolen, either from the supply chain, or from end consumers, from being used.

If so - apple and most other manufacturers do the same. But they normally do so only very soon after the theft.

No. This is just because phones in Mercadolibre, or other Fayuca places are cheaper and better models than the overpriced ones they sell in Samsung's own "official " store.

I'll replace my phone this year. And was looking to buy a samsung s23 ultra. But all my phones are multi sim. Samsung mexico doesn't sell multi sim. But the gray market ones so sell multisim and a 512gb original s23 is $250 USD cheaper than the one sold by Samsung with only single sim.

Is the pricing difference stem from market discrimination on the part of Samsung or tax avoidance on the part of Mercadolibre?

I can't tell about Mexico situation, but living in France, you can see offers for imported phones (often shipping directly from China or other countries, with large shipping delays) on all platforms like Amazon, Rakuten, Fnac etc. (apart from original ones from vendors/platform themselves).

Usually those imported versions are 10-20% cheaper.

I was always suspicious about those deals and wouldn't buy it myself, spending hundreds of bucks and not being sure if I'm getting the real deal, or some fake / limited version with worse networking etc. but given that they're up year after year, probably many people do buy it.

A little of both

Tip; Syncthing is available for Android and is really really good to keep your data distributed.

Thought it would kill my battery when I installed it, but it's very well optimized. Even Google Play services drains more battery.

I use Syncthing-Fork just for the ability to set it up so that it doesn't try to sync all the time to save battery and mobile data.

We need a law, and that"s coming from a libertarian.

If the owner of a hardware device is using it, that person has total control over the device. Nothing can be blocked. Nothing can be hidden. All data must be available in plain language. That owner/user should have the right to inspect and modify everything in the device in plain language.

With today's memory / storage capacities and with today's LLMs, that should be easily implemented by starting over and reprogramming everything.

Maybe I should fork a few FOSS products and build this in.

We need a no-tether law.

If you buy a product you should be able to use it as advertised even if you break all ties with the original vendor. Otherwise it's a service and not a product.

> Nothing can be blocked. Nothing can be hidden.

In US/EU there is a law which explicitly forbids complete access to the wifi part of any device. So that you can't modify it's maximum power/frequencies.

Any company giving you complete wifi access is criminally liable in US/EU.

I haven’t checked the laws in those jurisdictions, but having worked with a mobile radio network in the past, that doesn’t look entirely unreasonable. People don’t realise how much carnage a single rogue device (whether through failure or intentional hostile act) can cause and how hard it can be to track down the source of a rogue transmission. There is no physical barrier that prevents the normal laws of physics from applying to frequencies carrying control signalling and disrupting everyone else using them, so legal and technical barriers are all you have to try to maintain a working network for everyone as much as possible.

That is not my understanding as an American amateur radio operator. I can modify and posess any radio transmitter I wish. I can transmit within the limits of my FCC license(s.)

I admit my answer is cheating. Throwing in my ham radio license was not on topic.

We need a law that protects transfer of rights in general. It must become illegal to stop people from selling things they have, from hardware to things like accounts on various platform. Ensuring transferability brings us closer to a free market, which should take care of the problem.

Yes. And this law should apply to tickets for flights and venues.

The secondary markets law. What a lot of people and a lot of libertarians don't realize the contract law can and is regularly used to undermine the private property rights

As a libertarian, I think keeping markets free is more important than contracts. Ownership, for consumers at least, should be ultimate. We also must ban the use of terms like "buy" or "get" for things you are not actually going to own, like access to walled garden services. They must say "license" instead.

> We need a law, and that"s coming from a libertarian.

> easily implemented by starting over and reprogramming everything.

Press X to doubt. Theoretically a free market would/should solve this. That's been the dream of Free Software and hardware. Today you can run GNU/Linux on a PinePhone, or GrapheneOS or similar de-Googled Androids on a Pixel.

How would a free market prevent Samsung from doing this?

In his mind a free market enables customers to boycott phones with such shenanigans.

Problem is, this assumes all people are properly educated, aware and motivated which is never the case. The market can never be 100% free.

I truly free market ends in monopoly and total loss of choice. Current regulations seem to end with duopoly which is not much better.

In a free market, people choosing not to buy Samsung phones would prevent them from doing this.

But they pulled this after the phones were bought.

This is called reputation.

People will stop buying from you.

> Today you can run GNU/Linux on a PinePhone

and on a Librem 5 phone.

Is this news specific to Samsung? Doesn't iPhone have same feature? I mean why would we assume all these devices stolen from California Apple stores should keep working like nothing happen??

because this isn't about stolen devices.

Everything Samsung I ever owned was a piece of shit, going back to a 2002 era DVD player whose firmware failed a week after it went out of warranty, booting up to a frozen screen full of garbage pixels.

I decided some years ago never to get another Samsung anything.

Frankly, I can't imagine a reason not to buy an iPhone instead of whatever Android device happens to be around besides ideological differences.

The customer experience is so vastly superior to these bloatware filled, borderline spyware Samsung/Xiamoi/OnePlus devices.

I realize this makes me sound black-pilled, but mobile platforms (Apple included) are so user-hostile with regard to privacy I’m not even sure the battle is worth fighting.

IMO it’s better to just hold your nose, limit what you use your phone for as much as you can, and do everything important/sensitive on a computer that you have root access on.

can you expand on "user-hostile with regard to privacy"? I genuinely thought Apple is a lot more private than Samsung

In some ways yes, in others, no.

I enjoyed this discussion on Apple’s less-than-stellar privacy situation. Sources are in the video description.

https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=nQ9LR8homt4

God I wish I did anything interesting enough to merit that level of concern.

People are always unconcerned until their data leaks, then it turns out that the stuff they considered uninteresting was actually something they'd rather have kept private.

At that point I think my challenge is to not have anything you’d rather be private on a platform you don’t actually have control over, or why have it on a phone in the first place.

One of the most private things your phone knows about you is where you are at any given time. It's completely possible to design phones and cellular networks in such a way that they don't reveal that information to third parties, but we haven't, and that's bad.

I suppose that’s the other side of this. There’s a kind of privacy-as-ideology black hole that I’ve seen people get sucked into, even if in actuality they have nothing and do nothing actually illegal/immoral/sensitive.

Taking the time to install a custom ROM, run only FOSS apps, or find workarounds for needed apps, etc only to spend 90% of your time watching YouTube just doesn’t seem like a gain.

> Taking the time to install a custom ROM, run only FOSS apps, or find workarounds for needed apps, etc only to spend 90% of your time watching YouTube just doesn’t seem like a gain.

Think of it as reserving the right. Rights not exercised are lost. Retaining the ability to do something is valuable whether you need it right now or not. You may need it later.

That’s something I haven’t considered, although for me I would choose the route of forgoing a smart phone altogether if the ability to exercise that right was lost.

Why would that be less inconvenient than having a smartphone with open source software on it?

For my purposes there’s nothing that I can do on a FOSS smartphone that I can’t do more comfortably on my FOSS desktop.

Portability and the capacity to take pictures aside, but I also don’t go anywhere and my wife takes plenty of pictures of our kids anyway (backed up to my self-hosted NextCloud :^) ).

I'm not buying after the client scanning debacle. That they would even come up with something like troubles me greatly, and I was tempted to ditch Android at that point.

You prefer totally non-transparent cloud scanning that allows for ad hoc, warrantless, untraceable, personally-targeted scans from anyone who can threaten a big company?

I saw client-side scanning as much more transparent and limited. Yes, there could be abuses, but there is not a single possible abuse worse than what is already happening every day with cloud-side scanning.

> You prefer totally non-transparent cloud scanning that allows for ad hoc, warrantless, untraceable, personally-targeted scans from anyone who can threaten a big company?

If the choice is between that and having my devices being used by others against me, then absolutely yes. The cloud is someone else's computer. Their machines, their rules. But it should also be "my machines, my rules".

I don't want any of my data scanned which is why I don't tend to store it in the cloud. If Apple rolled out client side scanning what's to prevent them from extending it to all data on the device, regardless of whether it's synced to iCloud?

Apple has made it clear that they won't move forward with client side scanning after feedback from researchers and customers. Instead, they added optional E2EE for iCloud. It's not perfect yet but significantly better than most other cloud providers.

Just proposing the idea is enough to dissuade them from using their products for anything personal. More importantly though, unlike Android it's much harder to use Apple without using cloud, and the cloud is just someone else's computer. Not your computer, not your data. There is also no freedom on iOS to install things you want without permission from Apple.

Google does cloud side scanning and owns Android. What’s to stop them from scanning your local files?

Hint: nothing technical

What Samsung did is actually more of an Apple move.

Total control, even the source shop of your phone.

And yet it is Samsung that we are talking about and that did the "move". Not Apple.

“No true Samsung”

Parent isn’t talking about control.

Their comment is off-topic, but correct.

Parent says his prison is prettier, I say they his prison was the first of its kind and others start to copy it.

In his prison only warden snoops in your stuff, in Samsung other inmates too.

Most of the world simply can't afford an iPhone.

Apple has new iPhones for sale at various price points all the way down to the very affordable iPhone SE.

The iPhone SE still starts at 3x the price of a low-tier Samsung smartphone.

Example from Poland:

https://mediamarkt.pl/telefony-i-smartfony/smartfon-apple-ip...

https://mediamarkt.pl/telefony-i-smartfony/smartfon-samsung-...

And unlike said Samsung, it will last for 2-3 more years.

You get what you pay for.

If Apple releases mid-tier phone after this, they will win the market for sure.

You forgot the other reason. I don't want an IPhone because I prefer to actually own my device (and because Android is overall more secure and I personally care about this).

> I prefer to actually own my device

What do you mean by that? Its an odd take in an article about Android users learning they don't own their device.

> and because Android is overall more secure and I personally care about this

citation?

You can flash android phone with another OS that won't spy on you. And you cannot do this with iPhone.

The security of Android vs Apple keep ping-ponging back and forth for which is considered more secure against programmatic exploits.

Isn't an iPhone SE pretty mid-tier?

$429 MSRP for the SE (3rd) vs $250 MSRP for a Moto G 5G 2023.

There's certainly arguments to be had about comparisons, and maybe better pricing with careful shopping and hoop jumping, but Apple simply doesn't address the wide global market of people with limited means, and it shows in their global market share.

More practically, supply chains are finite. No single company, even as big as Apple, can make enough units for everyone.

Mostly people buy Android because it’s cheaper (for non-flagship devices). In so many areas of our world today we have two-tiered experiences, one for the moderately wealthy and a different one for the poors.

So, a hardware I've paid an arm and a leg for can be shutdown by the manufacturer. I think, we've give up too much power and become too tolerant of excessive overreach of these giants. I no longer look into future with optimism.

What’s worse is people defending said giants as if they were part of a cult. See apple, microsoft and google defenders. Crazy how people lacking a sense of belonging take refuge in defending corporations.

Dark age of tech

Sad sarcasm incoming:

How would this be the dark age of tech? It's not like the actual Dark Ages, in which written records were few and far between, making it relatively difficult for historians to learn through historical texts.

No, instead we have hardware that will no longer work, and cannot be studied, because the auth servers have been shut down. We'll have software that cannot be downgraded and looked through, for our own safety. We'll have machines that will die, and cannot be repaired, because the replacement parts the OEM no longer manufactures or sells aren't matched to the device we want to revive.

Completely different! /s

You could see this from a mile away with Samsung.

They come up with some slick thing with an uncanny valley feel (Bixby, Knox, One UI) only to reinvent the wheel with it within two or three releases.

They rotated through three separate TV platforms between 2010 and 2015. The former of the two got shutdown ASAP after the transition.

There is no sense of consistency other than their corporate schizophrenia with their products.

Yup. Samsung has no business being a customer-facing company. It's embarrassing.

Their home appliances are trash too

> They come up with some slick thing with an uncanny valley feel (Bixby, Knox, One UI) only to reinvent the wheel with it within two or three releases.

> They rotated through three separate TV platforms between 2010 and 2015. The former of the two got shutdown ASAP after the transition.

> There is no sense of consistency other than their corporate schizophrenia with their products.

It's fun how I feel like you're quite literally describing Google/Android as well.

Google's TV platforms are Chromecast, Nexus Q and Android TV (and don't get me started on Google TV).

Android added widgets and then largely forgot about it. Nowadays looks like it came back (partly thanks to Apple supporting it?)

Android added blur in Android 2. Removed it in Android 3. Added it in Android 11. Removed it Android 12.

Android added dynamic backgrounds in Android 2. Then largely recommended to stop using it. Then added as a beautiful new feature in Pixels.

On a more purely technical note, I have even a better one: Does Android's boot.img contain an initramfs? In Android 6 yes, in Android 7/8 it depends, in Android 9 no, in Android 10 yes, in Android 14 no.

And Google also like to remove user's data without much recourse.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com