Edit: Other commenters report that Android will silently re-enable cell data under various conditions, so this isn't a surefire solution, either.
The Grugq created a tool for this a decade ago (sadly unmaintained): https://github.com/grugq/portal as part of a presentation about operational security for hackers. It's a great watch if you're interested in how various (in)famous hackers thought they were secure and got busted anyway. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XaYdCdwiWU
It's expected. The people who own the phones aren't in control of the OS and the wireless chipsets are closed/proprietary. Cellphones really shouldn't be trusted by anyone.
Correct, the baseband usually has binary blobs. Although I am curious why Google/Apple decided not to make their own baseband, given their new silicon manufacturing expertise.
IIRC Apple has tried/is trying, but it is ridiculously complex to the point that they had to go back to Qualcomm as there really is no other option. Read: The biggest tech co on the planet stumbles with this, it should be considered a magic box as this point.
Google is sort of trying by using a Samsung modem (instead of Qualcomm) with an IOMMU in between, so at least the modem doesn't have access to the whole address space like on other phones. But they get a lot of flack for it.
Right now we have no alternatives, but it's not technologically impossible to create mobile devices that give us root access to a mobile OS, or to create open wireless chipsets with open firmware.
Both Android and iOS will do that when you receive a MMS.
Even if the MMS is supposedly on an intranet, it wouldn't surprise be that a poor implementation might expose the rest of the system to internet for a brief moment.
i'm almost certain i've had it happen on iOS, too. only reason i can't definitively say—is because i can't rule myself out always having to manually toggle cell data on/off, both radio-level and per-app, when i'm coming/going from my own networks to my mobile VPN.
People have been anecdotally reporting and investigating similar problems since at least last year[0], and it's entirely possible that changes to improve one aspect of a model could make it much worse at other aspects without careful regression testing and gradual rollout. I think models intended to solve every problem make it very hard to guarantee they can solve any particular problem reliably over time.
Imagine if a million developers simultaneously got much worse at their jobs!
I encourage people to look for a variety of opinions on this bill -- and its various parts -- so you can better figure out which parts you actually want to keep, change, or remove, and give your legislators that specific feedback.
Alliance for the Future is a lobby group of effective accelerationists who endorse some of Marc Andreesen and Peter Thiel's views in their manifesto, and based on that plus this article, they seem to oppose the bill entirely.
A place to start for a breakdown of what's in the bill is the Context Fund analysis that AFTF links to. That analysis cites similar critiques from EFF, the Software & Information Industry Association, and others. All of these are from the perspective of voting against or substantially changing the bill.
I haven't found "pro bill" opinions as easily, but I haven't been plugged into the conversations around this, so I'm missing anything that doesn't appear on the first few pages of Google or DDG.
I'm surprised that wind is such a small part of the US's projected future energy mix. Does anyone know why? Wind power works overnight, it leaves a lot more usable land than solar does, and there's a lot more capacity to be exploited. It's strange even considering the political backlash against wind power in some areas.
The US is a bit behind in catching up with the rest of the world on this front. There are some positive exceptions like Texas where they figured out quite early that it's cheaper to power refineries with renewables than with fossil fuel. So, Texas has a lot of solar and wind at this point. And why not, it's a sparsely populated state that is very suitable for tapping into both.
The complacency in the rest of the US of course has a lot to do with the fact that there's a very loud and active pro fossil fuel lobby that kept insisting coal was the future even while a lot of coal plants were going out of business. A lot of states invested in gas plants instead of wind generation because of that too. And now that renewables are clearly cheaper, a lot of those investments are starting to look pretty bad.
My knee jerk thought is that you have to work significantly harder to secure land for windmills. They have to be distributed such that you require huge tracts of land and/or to secure rights to install a tower on someone else's property. Each of those towers then need additional transmission lines.
While solar might generate less energy per unit area, it is at least condensed so that you could get away with buying a plot and fully exploit the area. You can add additional (unconnected) plots as cheap land becomes available.
I could also see the advantage that solar has quite limited opex after installation. A fleet of windmills may require significantly more resources to keep operating after years of service.
Looking through LCOE+[^1] and references to old reports[^2], it looks like solar used to be significantly cheaper, and wind a surprising dip in cost last 12-18 months. It's now on par if not less for onshore wind across the board. [^1]
It's always a bad time to be an actor, between long hours, low pay, and a culture of abuse, but this will definitely make it worse. My writer and artist friends are already despondent from genAI -- it was rare to be able to make art full-time, and even the full-timers were barely making enough money to live. Even people writing and drawing for marketing were not exactly getting rich.
I think this will lead to a further hollowing-out of who can afford to be an actor or artist, and we will miss their creativity and perspective in ways we won't even realize. Similarly, so much art benefits from being a group endeavor instead of someone's solo project -- imagine if George Lucas had created Star Wars entirely on his own.
Even the newly empowered creators will have to fight to be noticed amid a deluge of carelessly generated spam and sludge. It will be like those weird YouTube Kids videos, but everywhere (or at least like indie and mobile games are now). I think the effect will be that many people turn to big brands known for quality, many people don't care that much, and there will be a massive doughnut hole in between.
> Even the newly empowered creators will have to fight to be noticed amid a deluge of carelessly generated spam and sludge. It will be like those weird YouTube Kids videos, but everywhere (or at least like indie and mobile games are now).
Reminds me of Syndrome's quote in the Incredibles.
I dunno. Thanks to big corpo shenanigans (and, er, racism?) a lot of people have turned away from big brands (or, at least obviously brand-y brands) towards "trusted individuals" (though you might classify them as brands themselves). Who goes to PCMag anymore? It's all LTT and Marques Brownlee and any number of small creators. Or, the people on the right who abandoned broadcast and even cable news and get everything they "know" from Twitter randos. Even on this site, asks for a Google Search alternative are not rare, and you'll get about a dozen different answers each time, each with a fraction of the market share of the big guy (but growing).
If you or another reader has a Lobste.rs account, would you mind sending me an invite? I've been curious to join for a long time. My email is in my bio.
People and governments really need to start asking if the results of the current generation of FAANG-size LLMs are worth the costs, in additional chips, power, and cooling water -- especially in locations that are constrained for any of those resources. Are we getting ten times better Google results for ten times more energy? I don't think so.
The Grugq created a tool for this a decade ago (sadly unmaintained): https://github.com/grugq/portal as part of a presentation about operational security for hackers. It's a great watch if you're interested in how various (in)famous hackers thought they were secure and got busted anyway. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XaYdCdwiWU