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Comment by jFriedensreich | Hacker News Reader

Ignoring the US political situation for a moment I want to point out how ridiculous modern phones and apps storage access given to their users is. You used to be able to mount a phone as a full hard drive and have access to all your files, do a real full backup without some encrypted databases that only facebook, google or apple hold the key for. The first tragedy is that we accepted that the US gives no rights to non citizens the second tragedy that no one talks about is that we accepted giving away our own data sovereignty and using devices that make us more vulnerable and effectively digital slaves.

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> Dan would eventually find out about the free kernels, even entire free operating systems, that had existed around the turn of the century. But not only were they illegal, like debuggers—you could not install one if you had one, without knowing your computer's root password. And neither the FBI nor Microsoft Support would tell you that.

But Stallman is a kook.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

> do a real full backup without some encrypted databases that only facebook, google or apple hold the key for

Game developers pushed really really hard for this, to combat cheaters or those wishing to skip on in-app purchases and ads.

And Netflix was the driver behind the anti-rooting measures, who in turn were pressured by the MAFIAA and other "rightsholders" (aka, parasites).

It's for this reason I really just want a Linux that optimizes for a phone-factor touchscreen. No cell radio. The vast majority of my time I am never far from WiFi and I don't see why I need to give up the phone's form factor just to operate with digital hygiene independent of blackbox spyware.

> I really just want a Linux that optimizes for a phone-factor touchscreen

I'm writing this from a GNU/Linux phone, Librem 5, which offers the full freedom of a desktop (including a full desktop mode when you connect it to a keyboard and screen). My daily driver.

> No cell radio.

Librem 5 has a hardware kill switch for that.

This is an issue I face- I have a collection of thermal cameras that use apps to control them- after every install onto a phone, they then reach out t oa server to authenticate.

Here's the issue- though I have a few older phones- these apps are 32 bit ones, so no modern phone after Android 13 will run them. And they are all now not on the app store anymore,as they all came out about around 2016. i did use a APK extractor to pull the APKs to store them - but the native backup functionality wouldn't capture that authorization in the future, I might rob myself of my ability to use some extremely expensive, and long-term invested capable hardware, by backing up and restoring-

I suspect a full image would solve this problem, but I don't think one can do that outside of things like TWRP- but that requires unlocking the bootloader, and if you do that it wipes your device- AND is more vulnerable to Custom's usage of Cellebrite and etc, to my undertanding.

I don't have this issue with laptops ,as I can fully image them and wipe and restore ahavend have a perfect replica/ no issues. But my thermal cameras do not run off of PC and th eform factor wouldn't work if they did

Have you considered using an Android emulator to run these apps? It should be much easier to make full image backups that way.

I root my phone out of principle (and it does come on handy sometimes). Rooting a phone seems increasingly rare, unfortunately.

I did for years. Custom roms and all. Then over time there was just less and less of a need for me to do so, and more and more of a hassle if I did (banking apps breaking, etc).

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