Doomed_Daniel,
@Doomed_Daniel@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Last year I made the mistake of replacing my Nokia dumb phone with a smartphone.
I chose a Samsung A33 because Samsung were the only Android vendor promising 5 years of (security) updates, at least in that price-range.

Unfortunately https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2023/03/multiple-internet-to-baseband-remote-rce.html has shown that these promises are worthless - critical vulnerabilities that can be remotely exploited if you just know the phone number, Samsung has known about them for 3 months and not patched them.
That's unacceptable!

Doomed_Daniel,
@Doomed_Daniel@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

To add insult to injury, the workaround is to "turn off Wi-Fi calling and Voice-over-LTE (VoLTE) in their device settings" - but the VoLTE setting has been removed (with the Android 13 update?) and the Wi-Fi calling setting is somewhere else now (in the settings of the voice call app).

As far as I understand, the only workaround to disable VoLTE is to disable 4G and newer completely, by choosing "3G/2G" net mode, even for data. 🤮

My next phone will not be from Samsung.

Doomed_Daniel,
@Doomed_Daniel@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Oh, and because 3G (UMTS) nets have been switched off in Germany in late 2021, I'm stuck with 2G (GSM/EDGE) now - up to 220kbit/s, that's even faster than dual-channel ISDN! 🤡

Doomed_Daniel,
@Doomed_Daniel@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

I finally got the "April Security Update" that supposedly fixes the vulnerabilities - according to news posts in late March that cited a post from the Samsung support forums or something.
Of course the changelog doesn't explicitly mention this, only vague "security improvements" - Samsungs communication on this was and is absolutely unacceptable, and so is the fact that it took about 5 months from them getting the reports from project zero to endusers like me (hopefully?!) getting fixes.

MrNuclearMonster,
@MrNuclearMonster@mastodon.social avatar
Doomed_Daniel,
@Doomed_Daniel@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@MrNuclearMonster
I mean, I have thought about replacing it with an iphone after this disaster, but..

  1. that's expensive
  2. I just bought this fucking phone less than a year ago
  3. AFAIK getting data on/off the phone when using Linux is more painful than with Android
  4. I don't like the extremely-walled-garden aspect of iOS devices

OTOH they provide updates for really long and the smaller form-factors (that don't seem to exist for Android anymore) are nice

MrNuclearMonster,
@MrNuclearMonster@mastodon.social avatar

@Doomed_Daniel I think you should stick with what you like, you are 100% correct about all of that, just goofin’ :)

Doomed_Daniel,
@Doomed_Daniel@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@MrNuclearMonster TBH, I don't think I like any smartphone

MrNuclearMonster,
@MrNuclearMonster@mastodon.social avatar

@Doomed_Daniel just saw an article saying “gen z are buying up flip phones” you might be on to something

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