Yep. The Guiness book is the Jackass of its time: as soon as it started reporting āfeatsā performed by people, other people tried to outdo them, however stupid the feats.
I had one of those books when I was a kid: the natural, factual facts were fun to read about (tallest, smallest, darkest-skinned, most red-haired, whateverā¦). But Iāve always felt things like most swords swallowed at any given time, most tattoos, most concrete slabs broken with a karake kick were an invitation for someone to do something stupid.
My favorite is the guy who put hundreds of clothes pegs on his faceā¦ I mean, where do such ideas come from?
And for bodymods, itās just pointless now - there is this guy who has 100% of his skin covered in tattoosā¦ might be hard to top that.
Yep, but it looks like this is the smallest part of it by now^^
Out of curiosity, has anyone here had experience with the PinePhone? I just ordered one (the Manjaro version with the convergence package, for more RAM), hoping itāll get here in a reasonable length of time. Iāve seen it mentioned here a few times. From a blog post last month, the developers are apparently working on an official NFC case, which is exciting. Would make a great platform for playing around with RFID on the go, especially since you can also just connect a proxmark over USB as well, and use the normal command line application (assuming that Iceman compiles fine on ARM). I do a ton of Linux development, so the idea of being able to run full command line programs on the go without Android fuckery sounds great. Iām taking a class rn that involves a ton of ARM assembly as well, so itāll be very handy to be able to run ARM assembly programs natively on-the-go.
I havenāt had any experience with any Linux phones but I have kinda been following the news for the Librem 5. If you get one let me know Iāve been on the fence for getting one quite a while.
Great to hear that youāve had a good experience with it. The Flipper Zero looks great indeed, but I missed the initial crowdfunding campaign Iām planning on swapping out the OS pretty constantly once I get my PinePhone, love the amount of distros that already exist for it. Iām checking out PostMarketOS for sure, already planning on running either that or Manjaro as my main. Love that it can boot off of the micro SD cards, should make distro-hopping pretty easy. How smooth has it been for you lately? I heard about the kernel fixes to allow for 60Hz, but itās been hard for me to find many videos of that in operation. Most reviews are from before that fix was published. Also, how long did it take for you to get yours? Iāve heard around a month generally, wondering if that was your experience as well.
Performance wise: itās not to be expected to perform as a flagship, but the lightweight OS makes it perform well enough.
Booting from SD cards: Just perfect. I can carry around a series of OS images, each tailored for itās own scenario (think black arch )
The main issue with it is that the Anbox integration is still in experimental stages and Iām not a fan of Snap (which also has itās own issues). So if you depend on Banking, 2FA or mainstream communication appsā¦ then you might have to tinker a lot with it, or wait a bit longer for the Anbox integration to become stable.
Although I canāt say that is an issue of the phone. Itās more a side effect of utilising an emerging technology.
It did improve the jump time between screensā¦ but I seldom use apps in it to experience the best performance gains from it. I mostly run stuff through command line.
There is some sort of poetry in using your phone through command lineā¦
You heard well.
Took me almost 2 months but Iām in UK and It came to me right when we had a big issue with the postal service delaysā¦ so Iād guess 1 month should be the default time.
They did included a fully programmable NFC + RFID module in it.
I do see your point, though, especially since they do have some crossed devs with this community.
Would be ideal to have both communities working together! ^^
But I can understand that first they got to serve their focus demographic of pentesters.
And honestly, if Iām using it on a serious pentest run, the last thing I want is to have my chips IDs in there. If you get caught all your electronics get labelled and cloned before they respect your contract and let you go.
I didnāt actually got to test it.
I got interested but it didnāt boot up on my weird android phonesā¦
And then I shifted my focus to Pine, which had far too many OS options already to keep me fairly busy, and is open source.
But SailFish seemed to be quite interesting as well!
Now that would make it even more interesting!
Nethunter is quite a brilliant toolset! Would love to see it in a modern phone!
I donāt use it myself, but thatās just because I grew tired of Desktop focused distros, like Kali. So Iām usually on Arch + Black AUR with i3. Even on my phone and ātabletā (repurposed Surface Pro 3).
Once I got used to the commodity and speed of plain window managers, Desktops just feel so sluggishā¦ and clunky.
Thankfully I plan on using it mainly as a secondary device, with my Pixel 4a as my main (I would like to be surprised though, would love to be able to use the PinePhone as my main). However, Iāve heard the Telegram app works quite well, and thatās the main communication app I use.
100% agreed, Iām very excited for that capability. Iāve tried before with rooted Android phones, but it never felt quite right, not being pure linux (plus running an entirely different userland). Iām an Arch user, so Iām excited for Arch Linux ARM and Manjaro. Being able to run pacman on a cell phone is a dream of mine. Thanks for your responses, by the way. Watching videos about the PinePhone is one thing, talking directly to someone who has one is infinitely more useful IMO.
It wouldnāt be very difficult, in fact the power requirements are low enough that you could probably use NFC energy harvesting for an even friendlier user experience.
Some reasons I suspect it hasnāt been done yet:
NFC uses magnetic fields which are not significantly affected by skin, but WiFi and Bluetooth use electric fields that are heavily affected by the dielectric properties of flesh. That coupled with the much higher frequency (2.4GHz instead of 13.56MHz) results in a lot of attenuation. You can probably get a connection through the skin, but it will be spotty (reduced range and lower data rate due to missed packets)
WiFi antennas are large. Thatās why these devices are usually only available as full size SD cards. Most people arenāt willing to impact a rectangular object that big.
What even is the use case of a data storage implant that you need to carry an external device to power? Iāve never understood the draw of this unless youāre regularly trying to smuggle information out of places with repressive governments.
The best way I could think of such kind of implant would be with a component which anchors to the bone and comes out through the skin. The piece could have a magnet and an antenna or open connector.
You could then utilise a patch on top with a battery and possibly a BLE or wifi module.
Although everything would need to be custom of course.
From a new piece (the guide is just a reference to method), to whatever it would connect to, to the method of implantationā¦
But you got yourself a neat little project there!
To be honest, Iāve never understood the attraction of carrying a WiFi hub with a mini webserver hosting a few pages with download links under oneās skin neither, like Lepht and one other dude whose name eludes me did. Like you said, maybe to distribute information to the masses in an oppressive regime. But itās more a case of not having something on your body, but rather in your body, for reasons that donāt have much to do with body augmentation.
In fairness, the same can be said of RFID implants (theyāre short-range wirelessly accessible data stores worn under the skin after all). But at least those are widely used for access control the world over, so they can reasonably be said to augment the wearer by letting them interface easily with a wide variety of pre-existing embedded systems, for a real functional result that benefits the wearer in their daily life.
I agree that weāre splitting hairs with the distinction between WiFi storage device and RFID implant, but as people who are operating in the space I feel itās fair to separate the two. Almost no users are using their RFID implants to store data, theyāre being used as an identifier and to point to where information is being stored on the internet. RFID is powered by the reader, while a data storage implant would be powered by a device separate from the reader. It just seems like a whole lot of rigamarole for basically no benefit.
To me it seems like a/the next level of personal data and incorporation into our persona
20 years ago, the idea of having convenient access to all or even most of your data, in your every day person was ludicrous
Then came laptops, allowing us to sort of have access to most or a good chunk of data, but not really on your everyday person
Then came smart phones which have exploded in capacity, always with you, but now we are seeing the first world problems of, did I save that to this phone or my old phoneā¦
Also itās still a physical object can is easily lost or stolen
I have a home cloud storage that I try to use as my main point of data storage, but there completely dependent on access to the internet
I donāt really care about the means of conveyance wifi/ble/rfid/nfc/direct electrical contacts
But I love the idea of local media becoming local in the most absolute definition
Obviously a 4tb drive isnāt going to be immediately within reach as an implant, but we also didnāt foresee the possibility of a 1tb SD card a decade ago
Thatās fair. I too want to be able to touch a data terminal and have it transfer terabytes of information to and from my physical person on a whim. Thatās some next level shit though. Sometimes experimenting when a technology is in its infancy is a productive means of advancing it to the point that you want it to be more rapidly.
Iām planning on swapping out the OS pretty constantly once I get my PinePhone, love the amount of distros that already exist for it. Iām checking out PostMarketOS for sure, already planning on running either that or Manjaro as my main. Love that it can boot off of the micro SD cards, should make distro-hopping pretty easy. How smooth has it been for you lately? I heard about the kernel fixes to allow for 60Hz, but itās been hard for me to find many videos of that in operation. Most reviews are from before that fix was published. Also, how long did it take for you to get yours? Iāve heard around a month generally, wondering if that was your experience as well.
