Just saw the mentaloutlaw video. Graphene OS has a “duress pin” that wipes the phone when given a certain pin.
For awareness you can achieve the same on CalyxOS by setting it to automatically wipe the phone after either 5 or 10 failed unlock attempts. Though this does mean a child (or childish friend) could do it accidentally. I’d prefer a duress PIN, but then I’d probably forget it if I ever really needed it.
There’s also a less nuclear ‘panic trigger’, that allows you to hide apps or choose to uninstall any apps you like. No PIN needed, simply hold the power button and select ‘Panic Trigger’, there’s then a fullscreen 5 second countdown before your select private/sensitive data is obliterated… unless you hit cancel. The user can set up in advance what the panic trigger does - eg which apps to uninstall (deleting their data and auth keys), all cloud provider apps with sensitive data such as email apps or cloud storage provider apps are recommended.
For the duress PIN, an easy way to remember it would be to reverse your regular PIN
1111
You’re right, that is easy to remember!
fun fact, in the UK the offence is “failing to decrypt the device when required to do so” making these measures quite dangerous.
That said, unless you are being charged under a national security crime, the maximum sentence for “failing to decrypt the device when required to do so” is up to two years, so the game’s the game.
Wow the UK is a turd too.
Yeah, go to the UK and say “I support Palestine Action” and see what happens. They’re having a rough time of it right now.
I always thought that they were a worse police state than the US. Cameras everywhere, jail time for letter openers and keychain swords let alone fucking knives. Absolutely a lack of free speech. US has the camps now do we’re definitely worse atm but the UK hates being free.
BBC: “As demonstrators held up placards reading, “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action”, some 522 of them were arrested on suspicion of breaking terrorism laws - more than double the total such arrests in 2024. Their average age was 54, said the police. Some 112 of them were over 70 years old.”
It’s bloody ridiculous. Like me getting arrested for demanding Maggie (Thatcher) out of Parliament back in my CND days. Didn’t happen, but imagine the chilling effect on the wider populace if this existed then.
You know about brexit right? Turd move right before the US went full turd on Trump a few months later.
Russian troll farms paid off big at that point.
Would this be difficult to actually put together? Asking as a mostly casual user of technology and of course for purely academic purposes.
Depends if the phone is supposed to still work.
If you just take an empty shell it shouldn’t be hard at all to put an USB killer inside.
If you want to keep a functional phone, that’s very difficult. You’d likely have to reduce the size of the battery by half to free some space and then design a custom USB killer to fit into that space. And then you need some kind of switch to switch between regular USB usage and USB killer mode. Or you just hard-wire it to USB killer only and charge your phone exclusively with wireless charging.
Electrifying idea
Intriguingly so.
