I can’t see a wristwatch defying physics. It likely has to calculate your position fewer times per unit time, thus gets an updated fix less frequently than a phone. Which may be good enough when on foot. Otherwise it would suck the battery dry if it works too hard for a frequent high res fix. (edit: see item 4 on this page Looks like you get one calculation per second which is possibly a bit too infrequent for cycling unless the app is good at using other sensors to estimate intermediate positions)

When I said CPU load, I should have spoke more generically because indeed a dedicated chip is used. But that chip still needs energy. A dedicated GPS device would indeed help my situation, whether it’s a phone or otherwise. Getting an old dedicated satnav device isn’t a bad idea. The maps on those are far from useable but I recall some Garmins and Tomtoms had bluetooth and I think sending NMEA info is common. That might actually be a good way to repurpose an old obsolete dedicated satnav device – or phone that can be configured as such. There is an opentom project to put FOSS on a Tomtom.

what DO you want it to do?

Essential: navigation (and update maps over Tor), VOIP over VPN, render locally stored PDFs (pushed over adb).

Non-essential: XMPP (snikket), notes, calculator, take photos, scan QR codes, play from local music library

GPS navigation is heavy because calculating a fix from GPS satellites is always CPU intensive. This means (on old phones) the always-on screen coupled with CPU load while navigating drains the battery quick, which is a compounding problem because old devices are less efficient. On top of that, the CPU heat degrades the battery and charging performance when it is most needed. I would rather not strap a power bank to my arm. In principle I should navigate with two devices:

• a phone dedicated to receiving GPS, calculating the fix, and transmitting over bluetooth while screen is off (this could be stashed in a backpack)
• a phone with screen on and mapping software running, GPS disabled, bluetooth receiving the fix from the other phone

That would also mean when I stop for food or something I could charge both devices at the same time and they would each drain slower when used. Bluetooth uses much less energy than GPS. This approach is inspired by my PalmOS days, when a palm pilot had no GPS and there were dedicated separate tiny GPS→bluetooth devices. The tech exists but I think the GPS server app is either absent from f-droid or it requires a newer device (I forgot which).

I had some immediate objection to Organic Maps when I first heard of them. Was their website Cloudflared previously? ATM I don’t see what my issue with them was. Superficially they look like a decent 2nd option (which I say having not tried their software yet).

The other demand that makes BIFL phones and even laptops difficult is web browsing,

Web browsing is such a shit-show even with the latest Debian on a PC that I have almost entirely rejected the idea of browsing from a smartphone. I simply will not invest 1 penny of money or 1 minute of my time chasing garbage services with a garbage device. There have been rare moments where “Privacy Browser” on my old AOS5 phone manages to reach and render a webpage but I have mostly given up on that idea. Even captive portals are a shit-show so I usually cannot connect to public wifi. Fuck it… it wasn’t meant to be.

Added: video codecs (if you want to watch youtube) are another area where old cpu’s can’t keep up,

I’m on the edge of scrapping Youtube altogether because of Google’s hostile treatment toward Tor users and simultaneous relentless attacks on Invideous nodes. But up until a couple months ago I could usually fetch a video via Invidious and store locally. My 2008 Thinkpad has been able to handle every video fine so far. I have the Newpipe app on the phone but I’m not really driven to use the phone for YT videos.

Looks like a quite useful service. Thanks for mentioning it. But $5/month is a bit much for that. I would love to SMS people from an XMPP app but it would have to be cheaper, or pay per msg.

Early flash memory had a severe bitwear/bitrot issue, but at some point (2015?) they made some strides on that. The best resilience is in the SSDs for some reason. I’m not sure how much SD cards improved, but I suppose a phone’s internal storage would be an embedded SD card.

It’s a good point, so it would be useful to know if there is a year where bitwear is less notable on phones.

It’s a shame Fairphone even has internal storage, which seems to go against their vision. But apparently Fairphone users can at least use the external storage as internal (if you neglect the apparent bug mentioned in that thread). I wonder if the internal storage is still needed for the boot loader in that case.

Firstly, Rooting/ flashing non-manufacturer firmware voids your warranty. A phone without manufacturer support is going to struggle to be BIFL.

I just bought an all-metal sewing machine from like the 1960s. Of course the warranty is toast (though it was generous… like 25yrs or something). I would not say it’s not BifL on the basis of warranty expiry. It will likely last the rest of my life which could amount to another 50 yrs.

Most of what I buy outlasts the warranty. Then I push it far beyond what’s expected. But indeed smartphones are such an obsolescence shit-show out of the gate they will be the hardest product to push the lifetime on.

I’m with you there. I have defunded phones for sure and minimized the role of phones. I don’t even use smartphones as phones (no SIM chip). I think the only absolutely essential use case for me is to run OSMand (navigation) because it’s far too impractical to get a paper map for every city I set foot in.

OSMand is a resource hog. Crashes chronically when overworked. So maintaining OSMand seems to require keeping pace to some extent. Certainly the FOSS platforms will at least enable a phone to stay in play as long as possible – or so I hope.

You can always make a bridge/hotspot that will do what you need. You are only limited if you are fussy about pocket/backpack space.

It doesn’t and can’t exist, because the networks keep changing. You could have a 2005 phone that still is perfectly solid, but it’s a 2g phone and the networks now are all 4g and 5g.

Indeed the amount of lifetime you get out of a phone depends on what you need. I don’t actually use a smartphone as a phone. My phone has no SIM chip inserted. Wi-Fi is not getting outpaced as quickly. If you have sufficient control over your device, you can reverse tether as well.

This is how my old AOS 5 device connects (2 ways):

① AOS 5 → Wi-Fi → router w/usb port → USB mobile broadband stick → LTE(4g)
② AOS 5 → USB 2 reverse tethered → 16 year old laptop → router w/usb port → USB mobile broadband stick → LTE(4g)

My AOS 2 phone (from ~2009ish?) can also still connect via method ① but I have no use for putting it online.

What I care about is the phone-laptop connection so I can side-load f-droid apps, OSMand in particular. I will always be able to hack together a hotspot to update the OSMand maps.

and the networks now are all 4g and 5g.

You may have just helped solve a mystery for me. I was using an HSDPA stick to connect 2 yrs ago. Then one day I suddenly had no internet. Had to scramble to get another mobile broadband stick, which happened to be LTE – which worked. I bitched to the carrier. I thought maybe they pushed a faulty baseband update to my hardware and broke it. They claimed my modem just died. I thought no fucking way does a simple solid state USB device like that just croak. Maybe they pulled the plug on 3g and didn’t inform anyone.

(update) Nope… Just checked and it was this year that they pulled the plug on 3g… just last month for one carrier. So my mystery is still unsolved. Though I don’t suppose it matters… what good is a 3g modem now? I wonder if there are any hacks to get a 3g modem talking to a self-hosted fake tower.

For some strange reason Tor users are able to reach this otherwise paywalled article, so I will post the text below for all those who are unable to reach it. It’s long, so using a spoiler:

I don’t get how plastics can reach the food. Didn’t yours have a stainless steel innerpot with a metal cover on the food side?

Worked for no problem, over Tor in fact. Usually Tor gets the most hostile treatment.

I saw plenty of opportunities for enshitification and designed obsolescence.

There was an APP! So of course the natural order of things is to move more and more functionality from the physical control panel to the app. Then periodically let the app die by obsolescence. Force people to buy new phones to keep up, but then one day the new app no longer talks to old pressure cookers. Make the next version connect to the cloud for programs, and share with the IP maker everything you do. Sell that data to Amazon and Google who want to know what food you’re buying.

Then make the programs subscription based, so users have to pay a monthly fee to operate their cooker. Justify it by adding more and more programs. If someone does not pay their subscription, shut them down. Make the IP the biggest brick in the house.

I was actually disturbed that there was a Google Playstore app. Sure, it was optional, but I did not like the fact that my purchase in part financed the creation of an exclusive closed-source app exclusively available to Google and Apple patrons. It should have been an f-droid app.

What disgusts me about this is the digital markets act names all the tech giants except Cloudflare as gatekeepers. The single most harmful bully on the block is Cloudflare. I can (and am) boycotting Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Amazon. It’s difficult for most civilians but possible.

But if you want to be free from Cloudflare, it’s impossible because Cloudflare has even MitMd public services. You cannot get public information from government sources operating on public money without Cloudflare. Because I choose to boycott Cloudflare, I have had to give up my voting rights. I cannot vote in elections because of Cloudflare. So indeed it’s disgusting that Cloudflare is not even on the radar when it should be at the top.

BTV can cause abortion, in animals? WTF? I guess they must mean miscarriages. AFAIK non-human animals don’t do abortions.

Again, I would say that should depend on statistics.

Certainly that is a recipe for marginalizing minorities. In the US there is a principle that people are innocent until proven guilty. We could flip that and say guilty until proven innocent, but we don’t because we rightfully prioritize the well being of non-criminals above prosecution of criminals. It is unacceptible to say we can harm some non-criminals in pursuit of making it more convenient for cops to do their job. It’s better to overlook 10 criminals than to harm 1 innocent person. It’s not okay to sacrifice non-criminals for the sake of law enforcement.

Isn’t that the case for many preventive security measures? I mean the baggage checks at the airport are time consuming and restrict everyone on bringing liquids, large batteries, forks, knives etc. into the plane.

Passengers are rightfully allowed to bring knives and guns onto a plane, so long as it is in their checked luggage. This does not materially hinder people’s options. You don’t need a weapon when all potential attackers are also disarmed. But you still have a right to take your weapon to your destination, and rightfully so.

To equate a FedEx cash search with shipping batteries in a dangerous way with a precious payload (human lives) is an absurdity. If someone wants to commit suicide there are many better ways to do so than to carry a battery 10,000 feet up and then have it set fire on your vessel. You are not really materially hindering someone’s personal way of life by taking away the option kill themselves and others during a flight.

The passengers who share the plane with someone who wants to transport dangerous materials that compromise their safety directly mutually benefit from safety checks.

At the same time, if the person flying next to me carries a bit of cocaine, then no I do not benefit from a cocaine search and oppose it because it’s a violation of 4th amendment rights (if carried out by TSA). Such a search is looking for a crime against the state, not a crime against the person who sits next to a cocaine user. It’s extra perverse when non-criminals lives are hindered in an effort to enforce crimes against the state and victimless crimes.

Same with routine controls at a border or on the highway. It’s annoying for many people due to delays just to catch some few smugglers, overloaded trucks etc.

This is a good example of harm coming to non-criminals in the hunt for criminals. They violate everyone’s 4th amendment rights to go on a fishing expedition because the cops are too lazy to get a warrant and properly do a targeted search of suspects.

A security camera in a bank will film thousands of regular customers before it ever (if at all) gets to see a robbery.

That’s private sector. I give less of a shit about that because a bank has a right to secure their premises however they see appropriate in their business model, and as a consumer I have a choice whether or not to use a bank. If I don’t like the way they operate, I can opt-out, (unlike Europe where you now have forced banking).

Law enforcement by definition deals with suspects not convicted criminals.

No we are not dealing with suspects. Indiana is performing a general search without a suspect and without a warrant. If Indiana were to say to FedEx “we have a warrant to search pkgs to and from Bill Harvey at address X, please set aside those packages for us to search”, and then the sniffer dogs were used only on Bill Harvey’s payloads, that would be dealing with suspects and I would not object to seizing those pkgs. But still likely dubious for the police to simply pocket the money, rather than tag it and put it in the evidence room.

But wouldn’t the alternative be even worse for you from a privacy perspective? They keep the practice of scanning packages but rather than seizing the money, they send investigators after the intended recipient. That wouldn’t only dramatically increase the costs of law enforcement but also lead to innocents being supervised.

First of all, whether or not to inform the customer that their pkg was flagged is not obviated by the decision to not confiscate. Some TSA workers will search a bag and insert a tag. When you arrive at your destination you might open up your luggage and see a tag that essentially says “TSA was here”. Apart from whether the search was appropriate in the first place, the transparency is proper when the target is vindicated. They found nothing, but they owe it to the subject to be transparent.

Non-criminals rightfully have an expectation of privacy under the 4th amendment. Criminals do not, as it is 4th amendment compliant to search when there is just cause to do so. They should not be searching pkgs of non-suspects in the first place, but if they do and they find no actionable evidence of crime they absolutely should be doing what TSA does and they should do so without keeping the person’s possessions. If it’s a business transaction that includes indications of taxability, and they can also see no history of tax declarations that exceed electronic revenue (or whatever clues are justifiable as cause for action such as past offenses), then the police should be competent in their trade, which is to get convictions, which implies not tipping off the criminal suspect.

Under the status quo, the police are both tipping off criminals and also creating victims out of non-criminals.

Not all money transfers are taxable income. So if police knows that you received 10,000 in a box last year but didn’t declare it that doesn’t automatically mean you invaded taxes.

Of course. If the metadata (sender & recipient + their criminal records) and other items in the package do not suggest that it’s a taxable transaction, they have no cause to treat the pkg as suspect. In this case, they should not have searched it in the first place but on top of that there is no cause for further action either.

Furthermore, the recipient on the label may not be real person.

This would be cause for suspicion of a crime. But Indiana is not limiting their action to pkgs that give cause for suspicion.

In a drug case, indeed you cannot assume the parties on the pkg are accurate. Someone once received a package of mj. Police staked out the house, saw him accept the pkg, waited breifly, then stormed into the house. The pkg was left inside the door, unopened. The recipient argued that he was not expecting the pkg and did not know what was in it. He rightfully won that case. The mistake the cops made was to raid before he opened it. He needed time to open it and then react by calling the police.

Confiscating the evidence before the pkg even reaches the destination is terrible police work. That is not how you enforce crime. It only creates victims from non-criminals.

Regarding all the companies you’ve critized: isn’t that unfortunately the case for many if not most bigger companies?

Yes but not equally so. As an ethical consumer I choose the lesser of evils. Also, this isn’t about me. Consumers have a right to make their own choices. Most do not give a shit about ethics and the masses tend to choose the best financial deal. Some are lazy but ethical. That is, they heard a negative blurb about one supplier and they boycott that one supplier not knowing that it leads them to support a higher detriment.

Cash shipments are officially forbidden as per the FedEx ToS, no matter if the package is insured or not. If money is shipped anyhow it is not covered by the insurance.

Either way, it’s the sender’s choice whether to take the risk as they understand it. And they may not understand the risk. A wise sender would insure the package regardless of the contents. Even if the insurance would not pay out, the mere flag that a pkg has insurance has the effect of deterrance. Staff mostly only steal packages that are uninsured because those do not lead to investigation.

However, after a quick research many of the issues apply to FedEx as well.

I have been boycotting FedEx over a decade for those reasons (but note that I see nothing tying FedEx to the Better than Cash Alliance). But this isn’t about me. A republican would happily support FedEx.

Regarding acceptance of cryptocurrency or other forms of payments, I think that’s similar for sending cash in a box.

Cryptocurrency is as close as you can get in a digital mechanism that respects privacy like cash, but there is still a big difference. CC is a public ledger. Everyone sees every transaction and identities can be discovered and doxxed.

in Germany you’d be having a hard time to find a jeweler or other professional entity that accepts such a form of payment.

Luckily it’s the jeweler’s choice.

First, they won’t want to have discussions if packages are lost or valuables are partly stolen from the package.

Not sure what the point is here. Of course when a package is lost the parties involved both have a mutual interest in a claim being filed. A supplier who does not do their part in filing a claim does not get off the hook for the missing package. They still owe the recipient a package, so it is in their interest to file a claim.

Second, they don’t want to be associated with dubious businesses.

That is exactly the harm that perpetuates when you tie a tool to a stigma. It’s not okay to take away useful tools and options from non-criminals on the basis that criminals use them. We do not ban cars on the basis that they are a tool for drive-by shootings.

Furthermore, there’s a legal limit for cash payments of 10,000€ to avoid money laundering.

That’s shitty indeed because it oppresses non-criminals with a policy of forced banking.

I think to get back to the original topic, it’d be interesting to see some statistics on what percentage of the cases where police seized cash from packages were legal (although against FedEx ToS) and how many were related to criminal activities.

Not really. Marginalizing and oppressing non-criminals is not justified by a hunt for criminals. If your approach to hunting criminals harms non-criminals, you’re doing it wrong.

The case at hand is even more perverse, as the civil forfeiture practice actually hinders enforcement of law. They do the money grab for the money. When you seize cash, you send a clear signal to criminals that they are being investigated. It tips them off with intelligence that helps them adjust their operations. When you seize money from a tax evader a year before they evade tax by filing their fraudulent tax return, you actually sabotage the opportunity to catch them (it’s crime-prevention prevention). You can only catch them by recording the cash and letting it go, then auditing their tax using that information a year or two later.

Indeed. That was my paraphrasing (note the lack of quotes).

your bank has regulatory requirements

Are you talking about 31 C.F.R. § 103.121, which states:

“(i) Customer information required—(A) In general. The CIP must contain procedures for opening an account that specify the identifying information that will be obtained from each customer. Except as permitted by paragraphs (b)(2)(i)(B) and © of this section, the bank must obtain, at a minimum,the following information from the customer prior to opening an account:

1. Name;
2. Date of birth, for an individual;
3. Address, which shall be:
   (i) For an individual, a residential or business street address;
   (ii) For an individual who does not have a residential or business street address, an Army Post Office (APO) or Fleet Post Office (FPO) box number, or the residential or business street address of next of kin or of another contact individual; or …
4. Identification number,…

?

I can somehow understand why it’s often a percentage.

But luckily under the capitalist paradigm every consumer can decide for themselves what prices are reasonable and decide whether a transaction is in their interest. I don’t care how they justify their price. If they are charging me 1% to move 5 figures, I’m not okay with paying upwards of $100 to move money. If there really is $100 worth of risk in moving money electronically, then I don’t want a piece of that action.

PayPal, Credit Card, Crypto Currency etc. should typically all process within seconds.

PayPal shares your personal info with over 600 corporations:

https://git.disroot.org/cyberMonk/liberethos_paradigm/src/branch/master/rap_sheets/paypal.md

Credit card: there are only 3 to choose from in most regions.

• visa: member of the Better than Cash Alliance; pays merchants $10k to reject cash, thus whenever you pay for something with Visa you help an entity who is trying to impose forced banking on us. Visa also blocked payments to Wikileaks, thus taking away our autonomy.
• mastercard: member of the Better than Cash Alliance. Blocked payments to Wikileaks, thus taking away our autonomy. Sells offline transaction data to Google (and Google does business with the Israeli military).
• american express: ALEC member, thus supports Trump and US republicans, opposes labor rights, fights women’s rights, fights environmental protection and supports climate denial propaganda, fights gun control, fights immigration, etc. Also blocked payments to Wikileaks.
• credit card does not work in the other direction. A jeweler cannot expect customers who sell their scrap gold to accept credit card. An individual is not going to setup a squareup or whatever it is just to do a one-off transaction.

Cryptocurrency requires both people to use, which kills it as an option in most cases.

All of those options, including cryptocurrency, expose more data than cash and bring in risks with that exposure.

my intuitive feeling was, whoever is willing to take that risk, has a lot of money to transfer and is willing to lose some in favor to stay invisible.

Most people don’t have the insight that my fellow jewelers do. Most people think the risk of an uninsured pkg getting lost is the same as an insured pkg. They decide to save money and take the risk without understanding the heightened risk.

My reason for bringing up insurance was that insurance provides a way to secure valuables like cash. The best security is a good insurance policy. It gives a good option for the legit shipping of cash. The jeweler in the article most likely insured the $47k+ value. But if they didn’t, then it was most likely a young jeweler who has not learned that lesson. Either way, insurance does not likely protect victims from government actions, which is likely why the victims had to directly sue the state.

If you use a courier service that’s specialized on valuables which offers also insurance etc.

Something like that might exist in major cities but probably over 95% of the US is rural where some people are lucky if FedEx is within reasonable reach, much less anything special purpose. DHL abandoned the US, IIRC because they could not spread enough with enough reach to be sustainable. FedEx and UPS have a near duopoly.