You say that like it hasn’t been happening already for two decades.

https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/fbi-taps-cell-phone-mic-as-eavesdropping-tool/

I can’t read French so I only have others’ translations and intepretations to rely on, but from what I understand, the differences here are that,

1. France lawmakers are being direct with their legislation, rather than relying on precedence or judges’ interpretations of anti-terrorism or national security bills; and

2. Privileged conversations (e.g. between client and attorney) can still be admissible when recorded surreptitiously this way.

Apparently it would still need to be pre-approved by a judge. That doesn’t inspire much confidence in it not being hand-wave allowed, though.

“Impede the replacement of” and “compatible battery” has a lot of room for interpretation. I hope they’re defined explicitly somewhere, or else we’re going to find implementations that effectively restrict non-OEM batteries while still adhering to the letter of the law.

For example, all batteries lacking a cryptographically-verified “certification” handshake could have safety restrictions such as:

• Limited maximum amperage draw, achieved by under-clocking the SoC and sleeping performance cores.

• Lower thermal limits while charging the device, meaning fast charging may be limited or preemptively disabled to ensure that the battery does not exceed an upper threshold of you-might-want-to-put-it-in-the-fridge degrees.

• Disabling wireless charging capabilities, just in case magnetic induction affects the uncertified battery full of unknown and officially-untested components.

• A pop-up warning the user every time the device is plugged into or unplugged from a charger.

All of that would technically meet the condition insofar that it’s neither impeding the physical replacement nor rendering the device inoperable, but it would still effectively make the phone useless unless you pay for a (possibly-overpriced) OEM part.

If they explicitly defined “Impede the replacement of” as “prevent replacement of or significantly alter user experience as a result of replacing,” and “compatible battery” as “electrically-compatible battery” all those cases would be covered.

Might be a bit of cynical take, but I don’t have too much faith in the spirit of the law being adhered to when profits are part of the equation.

Would absolutely love for Serif Labs to create a port for Affinity Photo and Designer. Of the programs I’ve tried, those two have the closest UX to Photoshop and Illustrator without the software-as-a-service model.

Hell, I’d even take it if all they did was support it working under WINE. While I would prefer a seamless UI that fits in with both GTK and Qt, it’s understandable that they might not consider it worth the effort.

Had to give up at rule 20 because I was using a phone.

Would love to see a speedrun leaderboard for this, though.

I bought an unlocked phone directly from the manufacturer and still didn’t get the choice.

Inserting a SIM card wiped the phone and provisioned it, installing all sorts of carrier-provided apps with system-level permissions.

As far as I’ve found, there’s a few possible solutions:

• Unlock the bootloader and install a custom ROM that doesn’t automatically install carrier-provided apps. (Warning: This will blow the E-fuse on Samsung devices, disabling biometrics and other features provided by their proprietary HSM).

• Manually disable the apps after they’re forcibly installed for you. Install adb on a computer and use pm disable-user --user 0 the.app.package on every app you don’t want. If your OEM ROM is particularly scummy, it might go out of its way to periodically re-enable some of them, though.

• Find a SIM card for a carrier that doesn’t install any apps, then insert that into a fresh phone and hope that the phone doesn’t adopt the new carrier’s apps (or wipe the phone) when you insert your actual SIM.

It’s a “feature,” in fact…

Under What to expect on this support page, it says:

• The phone branding, network configuration, carrier features, and system apps will be different based on the SIM card you insert or the carrier linked to the eSIM.

• The new carrier’s settings menus will be applied.

• The previous carrier’s apps will be disabled.

The correct approach from a UX perspective would have been to display an out-of-box experience wizard that gives the user an option to either use the recommended defaults, or customize what gets installed.

Unfortunately, many manufacturers don’t do that, and just install the apps unconditionally and with system-level permissions. And even if they did, it’s likely that many of the carrier apps will either have a manifest value that requires them to be installed, be unlabeled (e.g. com.example.carrier.msm.mdm.MDM), or misleadingly named to appear essential (e.g. “Mobile Services Manager”).

Oh cool, there’s a 200mp camera. Something that only pro photographers care about lol.

Oh this is a fun one! Trained, professional photographers generally don’t care either, since more megapixels aren’t guaranteed to make better photos.

Consider two sensors that take up the same physical space and capture light with the same efficiency/ability, but are 10 vs 40 megapixels. (Note: Realistically, a higher density would mean design trade-offs and more generous manufacturing tolerances.)

From a physics perspective, the higher megapixel sensor will collect the same amount of light spread over a more dense area. This means that the resolution of the captured light will be higher, but each single pixel will get less overall light.

So imagine we have 40 photons of light:

More Pixels    Less Pixels
-----------    -----------
1 2 1 5         
2 6 2 3         11  11
1 9 0 1         15  3
4 1 1 1         

When you zoom in to the individual pixels, the higher-resolution sensor will appear more noisy. This can be mitigated by pixel binning, which groups (or “bins”) those physical pixels into larger, virtual ones—essentially mimicking the lower-resolution sensor. Software can get crafty and try to use some more tricks to de-noise it without ruining the sharpness, though. Or if you could sit completely still for a few seconds, you could significantly lower the ISO and get a better average for each pixel.

Strictly from a physics perspective (and assuming the sensors are the same overall quality), higher megapixel sensors are better simply because you can capture more detail and end up with similar quality when you scale the picture down to whatever you’re comparing it against. More detail never hurts.

… Except when it does. Unless you save your photos as RAW (which take a massice amount of space), they’re going to be compressed into a lossy image format like JPEG. And the lovely thing about JPEG, is that it takes advantage of human vision to strip away visual information that we generally wouldn’t perceive, like slight color changes and high frequency details (like noise!)

And you can probably see where this is going: the way that the photo is encoded and stored destroys data that would have otherwise ensured you could eventually create a comparable (or better) photo. Luckily, though, the image is pre-processed by the camera software before encoding it as a JPEG, applying some of those quality-improving tricks before the data is lost. That leaves you at the mercy of the manufacturer’s software, however.

In summary: more megapixels is better in theory. In practice, bad software and image compression negate the advantages that a higher resolution provides, and higher-density sensors likely mean lower-quality data. Also, don’t expect more megapixels to mean better zoom. You would need an actual lense for that.

Did the formal education before the job ruin it for you, or did the job itself ruin it?

Anecdotally, I can confirm otherwise. I bought an unlocked Galaxy phone directly from Samsung, and putting in a SIM card provisioned it for my cell provider and installed their apps.

Thankfully, I’m not on a provider that pushes adware.

It’s possible that Google doesn’t, although that would be weird since the ability to push apps is probably standardized and baked into the stock Android OS source code.

Or maybe you just used MVNOs that don’t purposefully install anything that isn’t strictly necessary.

Android OS developers or software devs working for cell providers would probably know the answer, though.