#is android hacked

[astirysk2electricboogaloo]

hey y'all if you're running android os and google's crashing chill out you're not hacked. there was an error they had to fix on their side there's nothing you can do to fix it. you just have to wait until the repair rolls out where you are. this is happening to everyone on android right now.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Installing Android phones in Blackberry chassis

Hey, German-speakers! Through a very weird set of circumstances, I ended up owning the rights to the German audiobook of my bestselling 2022 cryptocurrency heist technothriller Red Team Blues and now I'm selling DRM-free audio and ebooks, along with the paperback (all in German and English) on a Kickstarter that runs until August 11.

As much as I admire the techlash, I have some serious reservations. I worry that there's some pretty useful tech babies that we are at risk of throwing away with the bathwater.

For starters, there's the idea of "intermediary liability," which is the degree to which online services are held liable for the harms their users inflict on each other. Lots of people want to make Meta, Google and other tech giants liable for their users' actions, such as harassment and disinformation. These people are doubtless well-intentioned, but boy have they failed to pay attention to what happens when we create these liability rules.

Historically, the most important intermediary liability law is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Despite the fact that this law is only 27 words long, it is among the most badly understood aspects of tech policy, worldwide:

https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act/

CDA 230 says that platforms aren't required to police their users' speech. If a user libels another user, or harasses them, or threatens them, that's between the users, who can sue each other, but not the platform (CDA 230 only relates to civil liability; it has no bearing on the ability of platforms to be held criminally liable for their users' actions).

Importantly, CDA 230 also says that if a platform does intervene to prevent one user from harming another, that doesn't mean they have to intervene in every such case. There's a good historical reason for this: back in the paleolithic era, Prodigy, a commercial online service, was sued after they stepped in to protect some users from other users' bad actions. The suit argued that once they'd set the precedent that they were going to police user conduct, they acquired an obligation to police every instance of bad user conduct. In response, Prodigy – and its competitors – stopped moderating altogether:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratton_Oakmont,_Inc._v._Prodigy_Services_Co.

No one who's used big online services would say that the CDA 230 world is a great one – but it's provably a vastly better world than the world we get when we take away 230's protections.

Yes, provably.

In 2018, Donald Trump signed SESTA/FOSTA into law. This is a (supposedly) narrow exception to CDA 230 that makes platforms civilly liable when they are used in connection with sex trafficking:

https://decriminalizesex.work/advocacy/sesta-fosta/what-is-sesta-fosta/

Obviously, sex trafficking is a terrible crime (and again, CDA 230 has never affected a platform's criminal liability for sex trafficking, only civil liability). None of the people who spoke out against SESTA/FOSTA did so because they wanted to protect sex traffickers.

Rather, the opposition to SESTA/FOSTA was motivated by concern over the collateral damage that would ensue, and those concerns have been entirely borne out. Opponents of SESTA/FOSTA predicted that platforms would be unable or unwilling to distinguish between consensual sex work and trafficking, and that they would simply sweep all consensual sex work off of their platforms.

That's exactly what happened. Not only did the spaces where sex workers advertised and booked their work disappear, but so did the private "bad date" forums where sex workers helped one another steer clear of dangerous clients. Sex work moved back into the streets, and with it came a revival of pimping – a scourge that had been all but killed off by the use of online platforms by sex workers to find work and stay safe:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/fosta-sesta-sex-work-and-trafficking/

To the extent that sex work survives online, it has been relegated to a few fringe services that have no competitors and exploit their captive audience of sex workers to rake in massive fees for sub-par services. Meanwhile, the forcible relocation of sex work from searchable, visible online spaces to the streets has made it significantly harder for law enforcement to detect and interdict actual sex trafficking:

https://instituteforsheltercare.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/After-SESTA-FOSTA.pdf

That's the evidence for what happens when you make intermediaries liable for their users' conduct. Far from being a gift to Big Tech, protections from intermediary liability primarily benefit smaller online spaces, which can't afford the high compliance costs of spying on and controlling their users, unlike, say, Facebook, which is why Mark Zuckerberg wants to get rid of CDA 230:

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/zuckerberg-calls-changes-techs-section-230-protections-rcna486

Every Fediverse host depends on limitation on intermediary liability. So does anyone who hosts one of the new, federated Bluesky relays:

https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lo7a2a4qxg2l

SESTA/FOSTA isn't the only experimental evidence we have for what happens when we kill CDA 230-like protections. In the UK, the Online Safety Act imposes a duty on people who provide online speech forums to monitor and police their users' words. The immediate effect of this was to kill off many small business and hobbyist forums. Now, even large, multinational corporations are killing off their forums and relocating them to Facebook, where there's the budget and resources to conduct the surveillance and control required by the Act:

https://mastodon.sdf.org/@monkeyben/114902255326864878

Moving every independent speech forum to Facebook is a funny way of punishing Big Tech. Fundamentally, the lesson here is that we can't fix Big Tech by making it use its power more wisely – the only way to fix Big Tech is to get rid of it, to make it smaller, to take away its power.

That's a lesson we keep missing. Take age verification laws: these require all online forums to exercise total control over their users, because they require platforms to know who a user is, to associate that user with every interaction, and, finally, to verify the user's age. But you can't verify a user's age unless you know which user is at the other end of an online connection. This affects every user, not just kids, because the only way to prove you're an adult is to prove that you're not a kid.

Age verification and intermediary liability are measures that are diametrically opposed to the mission of making Big Tech weaker. These measures only work if Big Tech stays all-powerful, and they devastate independent online alternatives to Big Tech. What's more, they cut directly against efforts to make it easier for users to leave Big Tech, through interoperable gateways that make it possible for users who depart an online platform to stay in touch with the people who stay behind:

https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook

These interoperability mandates figure heavily in modern anti-Big Tech laws like the EU's DMA and DSA, but they cannot peacefully coexist with stricter liabilty and age verification rules. A platform simply cannot identify, monitor and control users and allow users to leave their platform while maintaining contact with their friends who stay.

These efforts to force Big Tech to behave don't just undermine interoperability mandates, they also kill off "adversarial interoperability," the principle that a user of a technology should be allowed to reverse-engineer and modify it, for example, to block ads or tracking, to sideload apps or extract their data or to monitor a platform's moderation failures:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

When Big Tech does adversarial interoperability, they call it "move fast and break things," and that's another baby the techlash stands ready to throw out with the bathwater. There's nothing wrong per se with a technologist changing how a device or service works without permission from its maker. Every ad-blocker does that. So do accountability tools that scrape Facebook to document its failures to police paid political disinformation:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/05/comprehensive-sex-ed/#quis-custodiet-ipsos-zuck

Moving fast and breaking things is fine, depending on whose things you're breaking. For example, I want every Tesla owner to be able to walk into any mechanic's shop and unlock all the subscription features and software upgrades, without paying a dime to Elon Musk:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/08/turnabout/#is-fair-play

And I want every person who uses a powered wheelchair to be able to alter its handling characteristics and other digital features without waiting months and paying through the nose to one of two private-equity backed duopolists:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/disability-rights-are-technology-rights

I want gig workers to be able to mod the apps that hand out their jobs so that they don't get ripped off by their bosses:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#gojek

Adversarial interoperability means that you and I don't need to convince tech bros to give us what we want: we can just take it – from them.

That's important, because if there's one thing that tech companies keep proving, over and over again, it's that they don't give a shit what we want. Think of how they're force-feeding us AI (and how nice it would be to subscribe to a service run by adversarial interoperators who would automatically block every accursed AI popup in every app and service and device you use):

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/how-big-tech-is-force-feeding-us

Or, more prosaically, how much mobile phone design has congealed around a monolithic design that has no room for a clicky little keyboard – something I first saw demoed 23 years ago:

https://memex.craphound.com/2002/03/25/the-danger-hiptop-kicks-azz/

Or even how they stole our 3mm headphone jacks:

https://www.fastcompany.com/90270691/i-still-miss-my-headphone-jack-and-i-want-it-back

It turns out that we don't have to take that shit lying down. Like Prometheus, we can steal our clicky keyboards and 3mm headphone jacks back from the tech gods. That's exactly what the Q25 Pro does: it's a mobile phone that is built inside the housing of a Research in Motion Blackberry Classic Q20, with a modern processor and camera, and a recent version of Android:

https://linkapus.com/products/q25-pro-full-device

It's a project from Zinwa Technologies, led by a young Chinese hacker named Zinwa who explained the gadget's design in detail on a recent installment of Returning Retro:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOrKsVKAbGA

Zinwa explains how he grew up with Blackberries (and also Chinese clones of Blackberries) and never learned to enjoy a modern distraction rectangle. So, as all good hackers do when they get an itch, he scratched it. He realized that there was an essentially infinite supply of old Blackberry housings sitting around in drawers or making their slow, inexorable way to an e-waste dump, where they would leach out poisonous ooze forever, and that, rather than spending $200K+ to design a chassis for a new phone, he could just create a motherboard around a modern processor with a recent-model screen, all sized to occupy exactly the same space that the original Q20 board fit in.

The new device supports 4G/LTE networks and Android 13. It has an SD card slot, USB C, and NFC on-board, as well as the classic Blackberry keyboard and yes, a 3mm headphone jack. Zinwa is launching with a small batch of conversion kits for hardware hackers who want to try their hand at a retro-restoration, with fully assembled units to follow.

Now, this isn't for everyone, but there's a huge community of people who are very excited about it indeed:

https://www.techradar.com/pro/the-return-of-the-og-chinese-firm-wants-to-androidify-the-blackberry-classic-and-sell-it-for-usd400-with-passport-and-keyone-to-follow

Mostafa, who sent me a tip about this project, writes:

After using [a Blackberry-like phone] for 3 years now, the form-factor is perfect for healthy phone usage habits. I’ve found the physical keyboard/small screen combo to be an optimal solution to the problem having a simultaneously infinitely useful tool/infinitely novel toy in your pocket at all times – maximize the tool factor, minimize the toy. This concept has spawned a rich community around it.

If you want to be a part of that community, you can hang out on their Discord:

https://discord.com/invite/D2P7UqFdXz

The point here isn't merely that Zinwa is doing something very cool that meets the needs of a group of people who Big Tech doesn't give a shit about (though he is doing that): it's that anyone should be able to do this to any technology. That includes Zinwa's Q25: in his interview with Returning Retro, Zinwa waffles a little about whether the Q25 will have an open bootloader, which would allow other hackers to replace the OS with one that's been modded to their heart's delight. Whether or not you get to modify the tech you use to suit you better has nothing to do with whether it came from someone with good or bad intentions – you should have that right, no matter what, because it's your technology and you should be in charge of it.

This is the spirit of small tech: tech that communities bend to suit their needs. Just as CDA 230 primarily benefits small groups who are underserved or abused by Big Tech, the right to change your tech primarily helps marginalized groups. Marginalized groups have always relied on adapting their tech, because their needs rarely get taken into consideration by design teams at tech companies:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/19/the-weakest-link/#moms-are-ninjas

The world is full of "outdated" technology that has been replaced with enshittified versions. A robust right to tinker means that we can divert this superior, well-built technology from landfills, by retrofitting it with modern guts that keep it up to date with the good things that have emerged since it was built, while discarding all the garbage that came along with it.

Take the Thinkpad X220, one of the greatest computers ever made:

https://btxx.org/posts/x220/

As Brad at btxx wrote in 2023, the X220 is built like a tank, had every port under the sun, supported compact lightweight batteries and massive external ones, sported one of the greatest keyboards ever to grace a laptop, and had an open bootloader, making it a dream to run Linux on. It was incredibly easy to repair and maintain, too (I once swapped a keyboard on one of these one-handed while holding my infant daughter in my other hand).

I would love to have an X220 with a modern processor, a shit-ton of RAM, and and updated screen. There's no way I'm ever going to build it, but there's probably a couple thousand people like me who would pay, say, $2500 each for these retrofits. For some enterprising hardware hacker, that's a pretty good year's wages, and a project that could launch a reputation and future projects.

Thinkpads went steeply downhill after the X220, so much so that I abandoned them altogether, after more than a decade of annual hardware purchases, switching to the wonderful, repairable Framework:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/21/monica-byrne/#think-different

The fact that Lenovo – the current owner of the Thinkpad line – just sucks at making computers is no reason for those X220s to go to the landfill. Someone could – and should – move fast and break Lenovo.

For more than 20 years, we have tried to make tech better by "holding tech to account," trying to make giant tech companies wield their power more responsibly. This has been a total failure, which has done nothing but strengthen tech companies, making them both too big to jail and too big to care. A better tech future isn't one in which today's tech companies behave better, it's one in which their bad behavior doesn't matter because they no longer have any power over us.

To bring that future into being, we have to take away tech power, not try and direct it in positive ways. We need to design our policy around evacuating tech platforms, not fixing them. We need to encourage moving fast and breaking (Big Tech's) things. The problem with the world isn't that the wrong tech bosses weild vast power over the lives of billions of people – it's that anyone has that power.

Support me this summer in the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop! This summer, I'm writing The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI, a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux that explains how to be an effective AI critic.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/23/resto-modding/#itch-scratchers-r-us

[dewpoint001]

Very smooth Kate Bishop

[lorenzonuti]

Field of vision compromised.

[jammed-out]

Open Ports

You were walking down the street minding your own business, when suddenly you felt it. There was a buzzing at the back of your skull. Your sensors tried to pick up the sound but you really couldn’t make it out. It wasn’t even annoying or unpleasant, actually the opposite, it felt kind of good.

You squeezed your groceries tighter in your hands, metallic joints clenched tightly together. You shuffled onward trying to get home. You only had one day off a week from the factory and this was your one chance to get everything you needed.

The buzzing intensified, growing stronger. You could almost feel it, vibrating inside of your chassis. You blushed and lowered your head hoping nobody looked at you. Whatever it was that was interfering with your sensors was getting stronger. It felt so good too.

You gasped as you felt something press inside of you, into a cavity you didn’t have. You quickly turned and slipped down the nearest alleyway, moving deeper into the shadows. Back in the light you could see people continuing on without paying you any attention. You looked down at the tent forming under your skirt and blushed. You could feel the invasive signal thrusting in where your dick was but there wasn’t anything there, and yet, it felt so good. A wave of static rolled through your vision as you pressed your back against the wall quickly dialing down your vocal speaker strength, a soft whimper escaping your lips.

You felt the pace quicken, the vibrations growing stronger inside of you. Your bags hit the floor in a crinkled mess as you gripped at your chest. Your breasts felt so tight all of a sudden, what was this sensation? Your sensors went into overdrive trying to find and block out the invasive signal.

“H-Hello. Hey. Anyone there?”

The voice flooded your head, shocking you. Your systems were supposed to be uncompromisable, you couldn’t possibly be hacked. They were designed for peak efficiency.

“Hey. Can you like respond or something so I know I’m not crazy?”

The voice was kinda soft, it was definitely female, human based on the cadence and tone. There was no hint of metallic nature to it. It was also spoken, so whoever this was must be the person behind the intrusion. You suddenly became aware of the feeling of emptiness inside of you. They must have removed the toy.

“How have you compromised my systems? Remove yourself at once.” You thought, the words forming were sent back to the person.

“Hey don’t get all mad at me. I was just enjoying myself and you stumbled onto my connection. Not that I mind the public audience, but you should really keep your connections more private.”

You quickly checked your outbound signals and realized you had left one open. How could you be so foolish. “Thank you for alerting me. I will close it-”

“Hey hold on a second. I mean if you’re here and I’m here, and if you wanted to. My sensors were definitely reading an arousal spike from you just before we started talking. I’d be happy to release your gears a bit.”

You blushed. She couldn’t possibly be implying what you thought, here in public.

You felt the toy slowly start to press back into yourself. It felt so good. You knew that the pleasure was coming from her and being fed directly into your inputs, but it felt incredible. You closed your eyes and moaned softly, letting her hear you. It was invasive, sure, but why did it feel so good.

“Don’t keep me waiting. I want to feel your pleasure too.”

You could feel her toying with your systems, actually hacking you. Her fingers danced along your internal inputs sending soft sparks of pleasure with each thrust. They danced over, dialing up your pleasure centers, increasing your arousal, flooding you with lustful desires. Your mouth opened into soft gasps as she continued to fuck herself, letting you feel every sensation.

Your hand gripped your tights, tearing them open so your cock could hang freely in the air. Your metal fingers wrapped around it, the internal warming sensors already heating up the cold metal. Even in the warmth, you could feel the chill of the air blow over your cold shell. You stroked slowly, gently, over it, lubricant already leaking from the opening on the tip.

“Now that’s more like it.” She moaned and you could feel her pleasure surge back into you before making the trip back to her.

Everything turned into a blur. You could feel her lips wrap around something, pushing it deeper into your throat. The toy inside of her sped up, the vibrations roaring through your body causing soft metallic ringing to echo through the alley. Your cock leaked all over your hand, hers slickly tracing every length of your twitching member. Your bodies moved in complete sync. As she fucked the toys into herself, you cock pounded into her already full hole. You could practically see flashes of her room and wondered what it would feel like to actually be inside of her, the hacker who was tying your brain into knots.

You came, lubricant shooting out all over the floor. The juices from her pussy coated your legs as you suddenly realized how public this all was. The shame and embarrassment washed over your face.

“Don’t you dare move a muscle cutie.” You felt all of your systems lock up, your motor functions switching into remote mode. The realization of the situation dawning on you. The hacker had been digging through your entire code while you were pleasuring each other. She had removed your administration privileges and locked you out of your own body. 

You frantically tried every back door, every single way in only to be met with big red obstacles blocking your privileges. She had taken control of your body and there was nothing you could do.

“Don’t worry so much. I just didn’t want you running off before we could meet. After all, a cute little bot like you would be a perfect addition to my collection.”

You felt your legs begin to move, forcing you to walk back out onto the street. The directions to home began to rewrite in your head, sending you to an address on the other side of town. You realized your groceries were left behind, back in the alley. Your cock twitched, already hardening under your skirt. This time, people looked, staring at you as you continued to walk through the streets. You wanted to hide your face in shame but instead you remained standing tall, walking straight ahead.

“Don’t worry. I’ll take good care of you once you get home.”

You felt the toy start to vibrate inside of you again. It was going to be a long walk home to your new life.

[fyeahsonicthehedgehog]

[mikunology]

so i read your most recent post and you talked about an episode where Len gets a virus can we know more about that episode or have you not thought that far yet?

there's really not THAT much to it as of now - but the basic idea was that Len overworks and shuts down from lack of energy, and Dialtone takes the opportunity to implant him with a trojan that makes him act increasingly twitchy and ooc

[adulthumanproblem]

Sometimes you can really tell who has never experienced any form of poverty, and seem to live on a completely different planet

My coworker told me that he can afford the trip he's planning because he's frugal and doesn't need much. Okay.

As an example of that, he tells me that he bought last year's iPhone on ebay for 800€, and implied that that's cheap. Then he says he bought his Apple Watch used (well, unboxed once) for 200€. He was convinced that those are low prices

I can't fathom this. Last time I bought a phone, it was 200€, as that was the most I could afford. I bought a no name smart watch for 30€

Also he said one guy asked him if he wanted to scam AppleCare by reporting the phone as stolen, and split the money. And while I understand not doing that so you don't get involved into anything shady, his objection was "It would scam AppleCare". Like scamming a billion dollar company out of a couple hundred Euros was the bad thing for him

People are. So complacent

[kamalkafir-blog]

Generative AI Solutions Architect

Job title: Generative AI Solutions Architect Company: EXL Service Job description: to be essential for the role: Programming & Libraries: Deep proficiency in Python and extensive experience with relevant AI/ML/NLP… experience in technology consulting or a client-facing technical specialist role within a technology provider is highly… Expected salary: Location: United Kingdom Job date: Wed, 28 May…

[falling-down-the-scroll-hole]

@voxdotcom

"is nothing sacred?!"

"VENGENCE IS MINE"

[raxcl]

ROBOT GIRLS STORY

(and malfunctions)

To be living life as you were programmed only to end up being hacked by an idiot with nothing better to do.

It all happened one night, I was watching a couple of uncomfortable programs, and one of my classmates was telling me things that left me in an embarrassing state, but also a bit disconcerted.

Well, after her unfunny talk, I had to follow my scheduled routine and go to recharge my batteries, but on the way to do so, I felt my movements became slow and robotic, I felt my processor running at a slower processing speed and my sensors began to fail.

I didn't understand what was happening, until my system detected an unauthorized access to my system.

I didn't know what to do, whether to get the stranger out or shut down to avoid problems, but it was too late, the hacker started to modify my system and delete my system files.

I felt that everything around me started to fail, my body did not move, everything felt slower and monotonous and I started to overheat due to lack of coolant in my cooling radiator.

After a while of failures and errors, I finally shut down, only to wake up in my recharging station, with a severe headache and a constant failure of my temperature sensor.

It was a disaster, but at least I survived.

[fashion-foxy]

The tech bro inside me that makes fun of people who don't know how Ai works and the 2000s teen movie popular girl in me who passive aggressively makes fun of everyone balance out perfectly into someone who cannot watch most movies

[madmanwonder]

Prompt

Crossover Crack Ship

9s x Sombra

Hack and Scan

Sombra/Olivia Colomar

X

Yorha 9S:

[exuberantandroid]

MORE MARIOMON. we kinda fucked up and are restarting our nuzlocke!!! again

[iidsch]

isnt it crazy that someone can make a completely legal app for ios but if apple doesn't want it in its app store because of lol lmao reasons you have to then go through a gazillion loops just to get this one app and also millions of people buy apple's products because they don't see the problem with an operating system that fully controls what you can or can't have on your device and also has several other major problems. insane

[nx42]

iloveyouiloveyouiloveyou

📎 Love Letter.doc For Cassidy-the-concubus

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