They can kill custom roms and force the latest vendor firmware. If they push a shitty update that slows down the phone or something, users have no choice other than buying a new device.

The article suggests custom roms can just be updated to be 'newer' than this.

At the moment they're 'older' and would class as a rollback, which this fuse prevents.

Samsung uses this for their Knox security feature. The fuse gets broken in initial bootloader unlock, and all features related to Knox (Samsung Pay, Secure Folder, etc) gets disabled permanently even after reverting to stock firmware.

iPhones already cannot be downgraded, they can only install OS versions signed by apple during the install time. (search SHSH blobs) They also can't run unsigned IPA files (apps). Not sure if they have a physical fuse, but it's not much different.

The significant difference is that if it were placed into DFU mode and connected to an appropriate device that had access to appropriately signed things, it could be "unbricked" without replacing the mainboard.

true, but I believe these bricked oneplus devices can also be revived from 9008 (EDL) if they can find the qualcomm firehorse loader file.

i still use it.. how has it gone bad?

For me it started as simple way to play music on your phone. It had very direct intuitive navigation and control. Now if I look at it, it's complex over-designed and I remember struggling with doing simple things like navigation. Sorry for not being too specific, I haven't used it much over past years and haven't got it installed anymore. When I need to play stuff on my phone directly, I just use VLC.

Probably the profile of user just changed and I'm not falling into one anymore.

> Its soaring popularity highlights how decentralised technology can offer a vital communication lifeline during natural disasters. Its soaring popularity demonstrates how decentralised tools can provide a critical communication lifeline when natural disasters knock out traditional infrastructure.

seems like the second article is written by AI

vxkex works really well, give it a try

you can kill the ota nagging very easily without any side effects, try searching for tvos profile

Wasn't aware of this, thanks!

Also found out that the profiles also expire, so you need to update those in order to skip the update nagging. Apple's lolling all the way.

lol, this Urban VPN addon was available for Firefox too but got removed at some point. https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1jb4ura/what_happe...

Thanks, the last fetched page on archive.org is from 2025-01-26 [1], removed after this date and before 2025-02-13. 155,477 users at the moment, 1 star reviews were mostly about not working. It's interesting that the developers didn't care to remove the button directing to the ff add-on page at least several months after the removal. Maybe was some kind of PR compromise, they probably thought that listing it with linking to a broken page was better than not listing at all.

A review page [2] mentions that this add-on is a peer-to-peer vpn, not having its own dedicated servers that already makes it suspicious.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20250126133131/https://addons.mo...

[2] https://www.vpnmentor.com/reviews/urban-vpn/

weird, the addon (for firefox) still works btw. can connect to china and get datacenter IPs..

I seem to be able to access it just fine via ProtonVPN's Japan region tho.

I was also able to load it from Japan for the first time.

In weeks before, when the topic came up elsewhere, I had to use one of my tailscale exit nodes elsewhere.

It wouldn't work from Japan. Not from home, not from office, not from phone network either.