• Norah (pup/it/she)
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      4 months ago

      This is how it’s supposed to look, wish Lemmy/Voyager did a better job here:

        • Norah (pup/it/she)
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          4 months ago

          While that’s a reasonable take, I think you could selectively render domains in non-latin scripts while blacklisting those greek/cyrillic letters that match latin ones, falling back to the “燋.com” formatting. Though I guess that would be a lot harder.

          • lennivelkant@discuss.tchncs.de
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            4 months ago

            Though I guess that would be a lot harder.

            From the devs’ perspective, the relevant question will be this: How hard is it to map out all the lookalikes, and just how important is it to render foreign domains properly?"

            • Norah (pup/it/she)
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              4 months ago

              …and just how important is it to render foreign domains properly?

              This is such a western-centric take, and it makes me quite sad…

              • lennivelkant@discuss.tchncs.de
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                4 months ago

                To clarify, I meant that from the devs’ perspective: The effort of individually vetting every single character for possible confusion is immense, and the end result would still be just as western-centric. Imagine having a domain name in Greek where some characters are replaced because they might be confused for Latin characters. Or, conversely, having a few characters replaced by similar Latin ones for an attack, which your solution wouldn’t catch.

                The result would also still be unreliable even for Westerners. If some other character set you didn’t vet also contains similar looking characters, there’s a new surface for attack.

                To properly close that security gap would be an immense arms race… or you could simply shut down the entire attack vector.

                So when you consider the importance of protecting gullible people from insidious attacks and the complexity of trying to allow non-Latin characters without creating openings, the question “How widespread are non-Latin URLs in my target audience and is it critical that they be rendered in their native script?” becomes a calculation of cost and benefit.

                It’s a shit compromise to deal with the shit fact that some people being assholes ruins good things for the rest of us who aren’t.

                • Norah (pup/it/she)
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                  4 months ago

                  All of your points are quite valid. Personally, I would go for a whitelist over a blacklist.

  • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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    4 months ago

    The first step toward meaningful change begins with us. We must abandon our craving for glossy (and therefore glassy) devices, and instead embrace hardware that may not be as immediately pleasing to the eye (as it is the case with e.g. Fairphones or the PinePhone), but is built to be slightly more durable, somewhat repairable, and capable of outlasting even today’s limited commitments to software updates.

    Fairphone and PinePhone being only mentioned anecdotally for being too pretty, and I guess not as sturdy as the author wants, is quite weird for an article about reducing fragility and improving repairability.

    • brap@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Kinda funny that they end up full of glass when for the most part everyone just bangs it in a case of some kind.

  • cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de
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    4 months ago

    The main issue is the lack of software support. They keep making each new Android version more bloated so you can’t update more than once or maybe twice. If it wasn’t for that, you could keep using the same 5G phone until they shut down the 5G network as long as the battery is replaceable.

    I wish Android was more like Debian where it’s lightweight, uses stable versions of software and runs well on old hardware.

    • Jiří Král@discuss.tchncs.de
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      4 months ago

      The newer Android versions aren’t that much more bloated. Sure. If you compare Android KitKat with Android 14 it is gonna be a bit more demanding probably especially on graphics, but overall there were a lot of improvements to the battery usage and memory management over the years and I have an experience of newer Android versions running better than the older ones. You can have a 6 years old phone that will run the newest Android version just fine because you flashed it with a custom ROM.

      When we get to the manufacturer’s custom Android skins… Well that’s a different story. Most of them are gonna be more or less bloated than stock Android, but this is a problem of manufacturers and the fact that mobile OS market and ecosystem is so much locked down compared to desktop, which makes it harder to remove manufacturer’s bloat from your OS, install different ROMs and tinker with it, rather than Android being bloated as an OS.

  • WanderingThoughts@europe.pub
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    4 months ago

    It’s why I buy budget phones. Expensive phones break easier so far. They have a nice design? I wouldn’t know, it doesn’t leave its case ever.

    • pyre@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      they’re not even selling thin products. you can’t call your phone thin when the camera is twice as thick as the rest of the body.

    • glibg@lemmy.ca
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      4 months ago

      Agreed. All of marketing is so imaginary and stupid. No one is asking for this.

  • MangoPenguin
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    4 months ago

    There are tons of rugged smartphones out there, also some brands that focus on easy to repair phones.

    The fact that they’re not well known kind of shows that the majority of the market doesn’t really care about those things.

    • squaresinger@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      One big problem is that pretty much all of these devices have major downsides. For example, I don’t know a single repairable or rugged phone with an actually really good camera or a flagship SOC.

      They also usually have a huge markup and are often produced by small boutique manufacturers with terrible support (like Fairphone) and/or really bad software (like Fairphone).

      So if you have the choice to e.g. pay €600 for a Fairphone with its terrible camera, battery life problems, inexistent support, huge amount of bugs and frequent issues with network providers (e.g. VoLTE not working), or you pay €300 for a comparable Samsung with similar software support duration (6 vs 10 years) and it just works without issues.

      If there was something like a Samsung A56 or even a Samsung S25 that’s nicely repairable and costs a maximum of €100 more than the regular version, that might be worth it.

      But the way it is now, it’s much better to buy a regular phone and spend the €300 you saved on 1-2 professional battery replacements down the line.

  • kratoz29@lemm.ee
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    4 months ago

    And there is me using a 2019 (dying) device which I heat up with a termux command to get it back in working state 😁

    For the curious the device is a Poco F2 Pro, known for IMEI and charging flex issues, the termux command I use to bring alive my IMEI, Wifi and USB data transfers is:

    for i in $(seq 1 32); do sh -c ‘while :; do a=$((a+1)); done’ & done; for i in $(seq 1 32); do yes > /dev/null & done

    This paired with fast charge will heat the SOC and make it work like the 1st day without an issue lol.

      • kratoz29@lemm.ee
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        4 months ago

        Yep, loops to heat up the CPU, in combination with fast charge to make it hot quicker.

        CPU loses contact with the board or something like that making it not able to read modem, efs, and whatever is the responsible to transmit data through the USB port (charging works normally, even fast charge), it needs a reflow or reballing to fix this for good, but technicians nearby are… Simply put, thieves lmao.

        So I’d rather keep doing this until the phone dies (the workaround makes it work for an undefined amount of time, which can be hours, days or almost a week) or change the motherboard myself.

        I got the idea along with ChatGPT when a user in telegram told me that he got USB data transfers working again (in order to escape from MIUI once again) by heating up the SOC with a hairdryer, yes, that worked for me too to fix all above, thus I decided to create a software solution in the meantime 😅

        • squaresinger@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          I hope you already got all your data off the device. While this might work in the short term, this will very likely fail very soon.

          • kratoz29@lemm.ee
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            4 months ago

            I have been like this for a month with this workaround, and yeah, I backup with Google backups and rooted Swiftbackup nightly 👍🏻

              • kratoz29@lemm.ee
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                4 months ago

                Me too, sometimes I feel it is a software issue, but if that was it wouldn’t happen in all the ROMs I tried, on top of that a restore of efs and modem partitions should be enough (at least for IMEI and Wifi), but sadly it isn’t.

                • squaresinger@lemmy.world
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                  4 months ago

                  On some devices pretty much all custom roms are built on the same kernel published by the device manufacturer. So if there’s a bug in that (e.g. with power saving options) that could actually lead to symptoms like yours.

    • scintilla
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      4 months ago

      Screen protectors need to be changed way more often than a good case and they are usually similar is prices so this makes sense to me.

    • kayazere@feddit.nl
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      4 months ago

      It’s stuck on iOS 16. Once iOS 26 releases, companies will quickly pivot to iOS 17 as the minimum supported version and slowly you will find important apps no longer work on the phone.

  • UltraBlack@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    I’m honestly quite happy with my Samsung XCover 6 pro:

    • physical headphone jack
    • notification LED
    • removable and replaceable battery
    • rugged and without a screen that bends around the edge of the phone
    • relatively recent and quite powerful imo
    • some samsung’s default apps are surprisingly good
    • two extra freely mappable physical buttons
    • gps and all the other stuff
    • dual sim
    • good battery life
    • it’s an enterprise device
    • you can get it new for 350€, if not less

    Only drawback: utterly dogshit camera. It looks to be interpolated. 50MP never looked that much like 8MP

    Can’t wait for this to get LOS/EOS support

    • KingRandomGuy@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Most “50 MP” cameras are actually quad Bayer sensors (effectively worse resolution) and are usually binned 2x to approx 12 MP.

      The lens on your phone likely isn’t sharp enough to capture 50 MP of detail on a small sensor anyway, so the megapixel number ends up being more of a gimmick than anything.

      • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip
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        4 months ago

        Now, if the camera isn’t the reason anymore, why would you still pay $1200 for a flagship if you get essentially the same for $300?

  • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip
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    4 months ago

    Software side too: Linux’s deliberate choice to not have a stable driver interface is detrimental to atomic distros with the usually shitty proprietary vendor drivers. Causing you to get no updates after a few years or get a new device.

    Which is why i think BSD would have been a better fit for Android.

  • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    The article is disappointing. It appears author of that article only has one narrow view and assumes the rest of the world has the same.

    They buy the most fragile and aesthetically pleasing phones, and complain they are fragile. They advocate for manufacturers to stop making fragile aesthetically pleasing phones, and only make rugged or repairable phones instead. They make an inference that phones should be repairable like cars with accessible parts and non-proprietary tools, but they appear to not know that today’s cars have difficulty getting replacement parts and absolutely contain mechanical and electronic proprietary tools to repair the cars.

    Mr/Ms author, if you want a phone that doesn’t break so easily when dropped, you can buy such a thing right now. Something like CAT phones:

    … or other ruggedized Android phones.

    I think the last time I dropped a phone an broke the screen on it was maybe 2007. I don’t even use phone cases. If your particular use case has you dropping your phone more, buy one that exists and is designed to take those kind of conditions. There’s no shame in that, but don’t advocate for an entire industry shift because of just your own use case.

    Smartphones/technology are still incredibly young in the grand scheme of things. Each of the new generation of devices that comes out adds more functionality for features that people want. Until that stops, it doesn’t make sense to try to switch everyone to a “buy it for life” approach. My Commodore 64 computer still works, and is very easy to service, however I wouldn’t have wanted technology to stop back then just because its a sturdy built machine. Today I have the paper thin laptops with 8 hours of battery and high speed CPUs are not as rugged or repairable as my venerable C64, but I’m quite glad to have the fragile laptop instead.

  • bieren@lemmy.zip
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    4 months ago

    Fucking lights bulbs are designed to fail and we are okay with it. Why would anything change with phones.

    • lennivelkant@discuss.tchncs.de
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      4 months ago

      As in, desgined to fail early? I highly doubt that.

      Even if it were true, lightbulbs still last longer and are way cheaper. Whether I have to replace them every six years or every five years doesn’t matter as much.

      • swelter_spark@reddthat.com
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        4 months ago

        Light bulbs originally lasted basically forever, is my understanding. The wires were thick enough to not break with use, and also made of a more durable metal. Then they were made thinner and the metal used changed, so they’d wear out eventually and users would have to buy more.

      • AlsaValderaan
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        4 months ago

        Modern LED bulbs tend to overdrive the LEDs to a point where they last about as long as incandescent bulbs in my experience. It also allows them to use fewer LEDs, driving cost down. They could last so much longer…

        I do like to buy high power ones (100W equivalent ones), open them, and lower the drive current by increasing the driver shunt’s resistance. I haven’t had a single one of those fail. (Don’t do this unless you’re a professional, mains power stuff can be fatal!)

  • amotio@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    I have had few phones over the years, few of them I damaged by using them in bad conditions, mainly on construction sites.

    As far I can remember I have never cracked the screen. Phones are and always were fragile, its a piece of condensed technology, with large glass screen. What do people expect from glass dropped from 1m? Just take care of your shit.

    It always amazes me how can people cary their phones in back pocket or just throw it in the bag with keys or other sharp objects.