[HN Gopher] Phantom Vibrations of a Lost Smartphone
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Phantom Vibrations of a Lost Smartphone
Author : HR01
Score : 36 points
Date : 2024-12-08 14:39 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sapiens.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sapiens.org)
| Liquix wrote:
| interesting work, but not sure how truthful it is - a cigarette
| habit does not make one an unstoppable NicotiNator, a smartphone
| addiction does not make one a cyborg.
| mouse_ wrote:
| > a cigarette habit does not make one an unstoppable
| NicotiNator
|
| I have to disagree with you there.
| Modified3019 wrote:
| Cigarette addiction is the only thing powerful enough to ensure
| my elderly housemates get exercise (up and down the stairs) and
| sunlight, all while they do that deep wheezing smokers cough
| proclaiming that they should quit one of these days.
|
| The are definitely some kind of human hybrid, with basic brain
| functions hijacked by something else. Though perhaps an analogy
| to an insect zombifying fungus would be more apt than to a
| cyborg.
| Vampiero wrote:
| Meanwhile, the Hackernews proceeds to spend the rest of his
| day taking amphetamines and mindlessly scrolling like the
| dopamine junkie he is, all while feeling smugly superior to
| the lowly nicotine addict, which he compares to an insect
| that was infested by a parasitic fungus and turned into a
| mindless zombie. The microplastics in both users' brains and
| testes breathe a sigh of relief.
| lexicality wrote:
| I do occasionally get twinges in the exact place on my leg that
| my phone vibrates against when it's in my pocket, even when my
| phone is in my hand. It's quite unsettling.
| devin wrote:
| I have stopped wearing my Apple watch other than for workouts and
| occasionally get phantom vibrations.
| INTPenis wrote:
| Observationally people are truly addicted to them. I sometimes
| forget to bring mine but I'm an older millennial so I still
| remember our rotary phone lol.
|
| A few days ago at the bakery I just walked in because the door
| was open and they were like "we don't open until 9" oh sorry I
| forgot both my phone and my watch.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| I used to get this with pagers. I think it was originally coined
| as "phantom paging", but that could just be how I remember it. I
| don't think I've ever had the sensation since I started using
| cellphones.
| Syonyk wrote:
| > _It's a widely acknowledged but often underappreciated fact
| that in less than two decades, smartphones have revolutionized
| most aspects of everyday human life._
|
| Not all revolutions are good... but, yes, this is an entirely
| fair statement.
|
| > _While many readers--and devoted smartphone users--may find
| this influence troubling, abandoning our devices isn't the
| solution._
|
| Yes. It really, _really_ is a perfectly good solution, that needs
| to be far more heavily used than it is. Don 't carry your
| smartphone. Power it off. Carry a flip phone if you must. Change
| the default expectation of everyone that you, _of course,_ have a
| little pocket tracker and will install whatever tracking Apps(TM)
| you 're asked to. It's utterly absurd that I'm now asked at a gas
| station, when paying cash, if I'm "using the App."
|
| We (the more-tech-aware sorts likely posting here) _know_ what
| sort of nasty things these devices are up to. Anything that has
| your location data is constantly streaming it through SDKs up to
| shady vendors who will package and resell it to anyone with a
| checkbook, to be able to retroactively root through people 's
| lives for some reason or another. We _know_ how the products are
| designed to be addictive ( "Engaging!") - I guarantee more than a
| few people around here have "A/B tested engagement
| modifications."
|
| Yes, in an ideal world, none of this would be a problem. But
| that's not the world we have right now, and I don't believe that
| minor modifications of this concept of device can improve the
| state of it. I've been trying for years to figure out how to make
| digital consumer tech less-toxic, and the only conclusions I've
| come to are, "You can't."
|
| So I'm happy to be one of those people who clacks a flip phone
| when someone asks me to install an app to do something inane -
| or, better, simply states "I don't have a phone on me." It
| reminds people that there was life before smartphones - and,
| experimentally, the reaction I get now, post-Covid, from a flip
| phone is almost universally, "Wow, I didn't know you could still
| get those!" - people are very much interested in them now.
| pelario wrote:
| > Power it off
|
| This has been the real game changer for me. As instant
| gratification is not so instant, I can go way larger stretches
| of time without checking the phone. Also, as nowadays most
| people message, and calls are not so common (at least in my
| circles), there is no "harm".
| lm28469 wrote:
| No notifications of any kind + airplane mode unless I actively
| need to use it is my way to go for the last few years.
|
| gmaps is the last useful thing that tech came up with so I'm
| not going to entirely give up smartphones, the rest can die I
| don't care much
| Syonyk wrote:
| That's quite reasonable. You might consider the Open Street
| Maps clients - OrganicMaps is one I've played with on tablet.
| That gets you navigational data, but works purely offline and
| isn't trying to stream your data out.
| XorNot wrote:
| OsmAnd is what I'm using now, since the quality of Google
| Maps navigation for me has fallen off a cliff.
| derefr wrote:
| > Yes, in an ideal world, none of this would be a problem. But
| that's not the world we have right now, and I don't believe
| that minor modifications of this concept of device can improve
| the state of it. I've been trying for years to figure out how
| to make digital consumer tech less-toxic, and the only
| conclusions I've come to are, "You can't."
|
| I don't see what's so hard about it. Root your (Android) phone;
| throw any app you want to use into Ghidra and strip out all but
| the desired functionality. Presuming you only need a few key
| apps, it would take maybe a few days every few months to keep
| it going against updates (or less if you can come up with
| dynamic-library-shim approaches to modding, instead of using
| binary patching.)
|
| In other words: rather than waiting for an open-source mobile
| ecosystem that'll never come, we should just be treating mobile
| devices like we do game consoles: seeing them as something to
| be jailbroken, modchipped, hacked, brute-forced, overridden,
| key-extracted, etc. Made to do what _you_ want, and _only_ what
| you want, _when_ you want -- source-availability be damned.
|
| It's not a solution for everybody, but it can be a solution for
| those who know how to do it. (And if there _were_ a thriving
| ecosystem of people doing this work, then the work itself could
| be repackaged for cargo-cult consumption by those who don 't
| really understand it, but are willing to follow a "modding
| guide" or pay to have it done by some guy on eBay.)
|
| ---
|
| I should note separately that if you're concerned about being
| tracked, a flip-phone is still a terrible thing to carry around
| (if you're carrying it with the battery + SIM card both in it,
| which I assume you are.) Cellular carriers are 10x as nosy (and
| state-actor-infested) as the average app company. Cellular
| baseband chips will still be passively pinging nearby radio
| towers with the phone's IMEI and the SIM card's ICCID, even
| while the phone is "off" -- as long as its battery isn't
| dead/removed.
|
| Smartphones can't prevent their baseband chipsets from pinging
| towers any more than flip-phones can, of course -- but at least
| if you're using a smartphone with only an eSIM, then (on a
| jailbroken device) you can at least install a background
| service that will have the application processor tell the eSIM
| chip to present itself as unpopulated whenever the phone is
| locked; and perhaps send a command to scramble the baseband's
| configured IMEI right before telling it to go to airplane mode,
| too. (I presume here that you would be willing to trade off
| being unreachable by calls except when "ready", for not having
| your location tracked by the carrier except when your phone is
| awake + unlocked + being interacted with. You'd still be
| reachable by text -- SMSes get buffered in the receiving SMSC
| until the subscriber comes back online!)
| dogman144 wrote:
| I think you have the right mindset about the most ideal
| approach, but how-to guides on how to do this *such that* it
| is only *a few days every few months* to maintain a setup
| like that are few and far between... as in there aren't any.
|
| Sure - same page, digital sovereignty isn't free, if you want
| it have to work for it.
|
| But, speaking as a technical securtiy user myself, and have
| worked with ghidra, I have zero context on how to take the
| approach you call for that _cleanly_ strips out the bad stuff
| without buying me, what would feel to be likely, hours upon
| hours of troubleshooting dependencies for core functionality
| that I inadvertantly broke due to the surgery... such that I
| 'm back to not carrying a smart device or being ok with a
| fliphone traingulating me.
|
| One approach I have thought through with effective (I think?
| still considering this) privacy outcomes is leveraging LLCs
| and related device plans as a "cloaking" mechanism. If my
| current phone stays at my house always, I travel locally with
| a fliphone, and travel with a network of smart phones under
| LLCs, that could be enough to throw off the tracking
| effectively while only (maybe?) exposing data that's already
| exposed in public records.
| Syonyk wrote:
| I don't get _nearly_ enough benefit from a smartphone to
| bother with any of that sort of deep aggressive reverse
| engineering and patching. It 's not worth the time. I don't
| have a spare "few days every few months" that I want to
| dedicate to reverse engineering apps that are purpose built
| to work against my will.
|
| > _In other words: rather than waiting for an open-source
| mobile ecosystem that 'll never come, we should just be
| treating mobile devices like we do game consoles: seeing them
| as something to be jailbroken, modchipped, hacked, brute-
| forced, overridden, key-extracted, etc. Made to do what you
| want, and only what you want, when you want -- source-
| availability be damned._
|
| Except there are far easier to use options that aren't nearly
| so locked down, should I want to do general purpose
| computing. I think the most recent game console I owned was a
| Wii, but I treated it largely as a fixed purpose device that
| did a few things well.
|
| I generally move around with my flip phone in airplane mode,
| then shut down (airplane mode saves state across power
| cycles, so I can power it on if I want to take a picture of a
| flyer for some event without having it ping out). But I'll
| ask for a citation on "Pinging towers while powered off." I'm
| aware of some attacks on devices that fake a poweroff, but
| based on "battery state of charge when powered down" analysis
| (which admittedly isn't very deep), I've seen no evidence of
| any sort of substantial power draw when shut down - and some
| of the places I go, there aren't any towers nearby, so it
| would have to try fairly hard to reach one.
|
| But I'm really not sure of how much of your high effort
| spitball here is actually things doable, or if you assume
| I've got the time to fully reverse engineer a modern device
| to, say, scramble the IMEI in the baseband (it seems like the
| sort of thing there wouldn't be a command to do, so that
| implies remote code exploits in the baseband to be able to
| add that capability).
|
| It's way, _way_ easier to just not carry a phone.
| neilv wrote:
| FWIW, people were reporting phantom cellphone-like vibration
| perceptions well before smartphones, and before using them
| heavily.
|
| I think I felt it at least a couple times when not carrying my
| circa 2000 Ericsson dumbphone (maybe
| "https://www.gsmarena.com/ericsson_t18s-116.php"), though I'd
| hardly used it, probably most days had zero received calls or
| SMS.
|
| I don't know how much that's like phantom limb.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_vibration_syndrome
| XorNot wrote:
| I remember thinking I heard the ICQ "uh oh" message sound.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| In a similar vein, I feel like a part of me is missing since
| google doesn't really work the way it used to anymore. Never in
| my adult life very often have I needed the answer to something
| trivial and been unable to find it very quickly. It's extremely
| unsettling.
| gkmcd wrote:
| Have you tried Kagi? It's not "peak Google", but at least I
| don't miss it so much anymore.
| throwaway657656 wrote:
| Before the days of Google, I used "Ask Jeeves" which
| recommended search queries be submitted in the form of a
| question. Even after switching to Google decades ago, I have
| kept that approach. But despite so many saying that Google
| isn't as good as search as it once was, that isn't my
| experience. Curious, do you enter your searches as a question ?
| Vampiero wrote:
| If you enter your searches as a question all you get are
| Quora and WikiHow links, which are two of the worst websites
| in existence when it comes to finding useful information.
|
| Besides that's not how search term indexing works.
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(page generated 2024-12-11 23:01 UTC)