iPhones Seized by Cops Are Rebooting, and No One’s Sure Why
iPhones Seized by Cops Are Rebooting, and No One’s Sure Why
gizmodo.com
iPhones Seized by Cops Are Rebooting, and No One’s Sure Why
87 comments
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Anything to make their job harder is perfectly okay by me. The only thing that would be needed would be for this to be a feature and to have a cool down period of like 48 hours where the phone would reboot twice in that time so that if it was held it would still reboot itself.
Edit: Even better idea. Turning off the feature requires a reboot.
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Note to those wishing for such a function, it’s possible by creating an iOS Shortcut - New Shortcut > Shutdown > Change it to ‘Restart’.
From there, you create an automation in Shortcuts to run based on time, location, etc.
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Alas, it asks if you want to restart.
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You could always take 10 seconds and invoke the operating system's hard shutdown command if you have the 10 seconds to spare. On Android at least, that's pressing and holding power and volume up for 10 seconds. But I do not know what it would be on the iPhone.
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It would be best if the function was like if the phone has not been unlocked for at least 16 hours then reboot automatically. A time thing would be a problem though because then it would just reboot every day and that would be no fun.
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I saw elsewhere this is a new feature in iOS 18.1, so it will probably pretty solid I’d think. But for shortcut wise, at minimum I suppose one could put automations that trigger when it detected within certain geofences or something… but then whenever you drive by your local police station it will kindly reboot your phone every time lol
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this is the police we're talking about, they probably just forgot to charge them and are trying to shift the blame
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Whatever it is, incompetence, bug, or feature, I love it.
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Hot take: this is actually a bug not a feature.
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Which is the saddest part, honestly. If it was a feature, that would be fantastic news. And especially if it had a cooldown feature of like 48 hours, where it would reboot twice in that timeframe, so that if a cop turned off the setting, while it was in their possession, it wouldn't matter because it would reboot anyway.
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Someone said it in another thread yesterday, baseband memory leak. The firmware for that shit is terrible, I've had to deal with it in the past.
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Apparently, there's at least a chance that it is an intentional feature instead of a bug. There's a comment link below somewhere in this thread that mentions it.
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That seems at odds with release notes someone else found.
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"new security feature" "warning"
🙂
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I guess if you have the 10 seconds to do so, you could invoke the operating system hard reboot function, which at least on Android is pressing and holding power and volume up for 10 seconds. I don't know what it is on the iPhone.
Edit: Too bad there's not some sort of haptic to let you know that it accepted the command before it shuts down though.
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Speculation is that ios 18 is communicating with other phones while locked to determine security. This can more likely be a NSA/US empire backdoor than a user protection feature. Lowly police systems are just not on the "hacker list". One way the backdoor could work is that if a "NSA/Mossad list phone" is present, protect the other phones, unless the phones are in an NSA/Mossad secure facility.
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The police could just ask Apple, it isn't like they are going to have some secret reboot process that they would hide from the police.
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And what would Apple be able to do about it? They don’t have your password*, so they’ll be just as unable to decrypt the device as the police.
*you can give them your password via iCloud I believe but you don’t have to
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I'm not saying apple will do anything about it, just that they will let the cops know what is causing the reboots if asked.
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Phones that are repeatedly attempted to be unlocked auto hard reset. Been a feature for years.
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This is not for devices where the pin has been entered incorrectly too many times. This is for devices that the police have seized and are awaiting forensics to pull data from.
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87 comments
If this is indeed a security feature I'm about to buy my first iPhone.
Wouldn't this make your phone reboot all night while you're sleeping?
Two hours seems extremely low.
What is the good thing about a phone rebooting?
Don't switch to a privacy-violating platform just for a feature found in open source operating systems.
https://grapheneos.org/features#auto-reboot
Oh yeah, see they've done it perfectly by having it based on the last time you unlocked your screen.
This makes me even more interested in getting a newer pixel with graphene on it. I had the Pixel 3a back in the day, but have been using other devices since then with lineage. But this right here may very well bring me back. The only thing they need to do is have it on by default and set it to like a long time frame like 24 or 36 hours.
Android has it as well. It's customizable, too.
It should be, but it appears to be a bug.
Which is really sad quite frankly and if they did add it as a feature it should have a cooldown period of like 48 hours where it reboots twice in that time frame just so that if a cop turned the setting off it would still not help them
https://lemmy.world/comment/13350847
Bug has been promoted to feature
It is a feature on grapheneos :)
Just use a pattern to lock your phone. Police can't do shit if you have that set up.
It's not the lock, it's the fact that phones are usually encrypted after a reboot (to oversimplify). As the article says you have extra security measures to protect a freshly booted phone.