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Using a dummy network interface »

My little girl decided the old OnePlus One of my wife had to take a swim in the toilets. So we had to buy a new phone. Since I know how bad standard ROMs are, I looked-up in the LineageOS list of compatible OS, and found out that the Xiaomi’s Mi 5s plus was not too bad, and we bought one. The phone itself looks quite nice: a 64 bits fast processor, a huge amount of RAM, nice screen, etc. Then I tried the procedure for unlocking… because I care about privacy, and I knew the Chinese Xiaomi ROM is full of spyware (the phone was purchased in China). Though what I didn’t know is that the unlock procedure (needed before changing the ROM) is itself is full of privacy breaches. Let me give you the details.

First, you got to register on Xiaomi’s website, and request for the permission to unlock the device. That’s already bad enough: why should I ask for the permission to use the device I own as I am pleased to? Anyway, I did that. The procedure includes receiving an SMS. Again, more bad: why should I give-up such a privacy thing as my phone number? Anyway, I did it, and received the code to activate my website account. Then I started the unlock program in a virtualbox Windows XP VM (yeah right… I wasn’t expecting something better anyway…), and then, the program tells me that I need to add my Xiaomi’s account in the phone. Of course, it then sends a web request to Xiaomi’s server (it refused to work unless I connected the phone to WiFi). I’m already not happy with all of this, but that’s not it. After all of these privacy breaches, the unlock APP tells me that I need to wait 72 hours to get my phone to account association to be activated. Since I wont be available in the middle of the week, for me, that means waiting until next week-end to do that. Silly…

Let’s recap. During this unlock procedure, I had to give-up:

• My phone number (due to the SMS).
• My phone ID (probably the EMEI was sent).
• My email address (truth is: I could have given them a temporary email address).
• Hours of my time understanding and run the stupid procedure, and I can’t even finish it in a single day.
• My policy of not using Windows. I also consider that using Windows is a privacy breach, though here I have a way to roll-back the Virtualbox image, and I only use it for this kind of bad software, so privacy wise, it’s kind of fine, because I’m used of this trick. The real issue here is that, to unlock freedom on that phone, one must use a proprietary OS.

So my advice: if you want an unlocked Android device, do not choose Xiaomi, unless you’re ok to give up the above. It’s probably fine to pay a little bit more and reward the maker of a phone if the unlock experience isn’t that bad.

This entry was written by Goirand Thomas , posted on March 24, 2018 at 6:31 pm, filed under Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

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Using a dummy network interface »