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Cake day: June 23rd, 2025

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  • Incredibly, and not at all subtle. It’s also of fairly limited effectiveness in most scenarios, wireless signals are generally a lot more complex than what a simple jammer will cover. On top of the difficulty in transmitting a reasonably large amount of radio power in any useful frequency, you have to also jam side frequencies to avoid fail over and certain noise mitigation techniques.

    Honestly it’s not even just that it’s massively illegal, it’s just so wildly impractical. Like, what would you accomplish? Radio waves fall off pretty quickly in strength, so your jammer is going to have a limited range, and if it doesn’t you just knock out flight communications and emergency response while cellular hops to one of the other hundreds of frequencies and like 10 modulation protocols until something works, and it’s going to be insanely difficult to jam all of those at once.

    Just jamming 700mhz would involve an antenna array that would be bigger than a person and using the old “moar power” approach sees wattage requirements shoot into megawatt ranges pretty quick.





  • No, because that’s not how the matching works. Stuff in your data partition, as well as app data, is signed with those keys and hashed to the device. All of those bits do that hash on their own, and they all have to match up. When you change the main system partition then it’s signature has to match with the one generated when you set up your phone initially in the data partition.

    Basically you have to have access to the data partition to disable the checks or change the signature, which needs your pin/passcode/fingerprint, and if you have that you don’t even need the phone, you dump the data partition and unlock it in an emulated android environment and exfiltrate data from there as if it was the original phone.

    I also want to reiterate: A locked bootloader does not stop anyone from dumping your phone, emulating it, and brute forcing it, completely bypassing any rate-limiting on password attempts. By the time a bootloader lock even comes into play you can consider your phone completely compromised.


  • People here are also missing one part of the android security model. Yes, you can overwrite the system partition arbitrarily while leaving the data partition intact with an unlocked bootloader, that’s how updates work.

    However, the moment you make any changes to that system partition it won’t match the developers signature and the apps on the system will throw an absolute fit. Look into building your own lineage ROM and flashing it over an official build, it’s an entire process that requires your data partition to be unlocked (ie. phone booted and pin entered) to keep your data, even without making changes.

    Realistically it isn’t insecure, if you set a passcode your data is encrypted and if someone mitm attacks your rom you will immediately notice stuff breaking all over the place.

    The whole bootloader locking is purely vendors trying to force you to buy new phones every few years instead of the user backporting security patches indefinitely, not any practical security for the end user.