Completely OT: Mobil electronics hacks

[Aryeh Friedman]

I am posting this here due to the level of tech creativity I have
found here not because this is related to FreeBSD (in any direct way).
I have two problems and want suggestions on how to solve them:

1. My new android (not new but recently upgraded) likes to turn itself
on while in my backpack and since the carrier has started streaming
ads even in "screen saver" mode this drains my battery fast (I went to
sleep with 95% and woke up with a dead/drained phone).

2. The MTA (aka MYC subway) has started using tap and go far payment
(OMNY Card) that looks onto the NFC "device" it can find and not
necessarily your OMNY Card for example it looked onto a credit card I
had never used in connection to the MTA and took my fare from that not
my OMNY card several times now. I have partially solved this by
putting a mini faraday cage (tin foil in paper towel) in my wallet
between the out side and the cards but still happens once in a while.

--
Aryeh M. Friedman, Lead Developer, http://www.PetiteCloud.org

[Sad Clouds]

On Mon, 27 Oct 2025 04:47:29 -0400
Aryeh Friedman <aryeh.f...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I am posting this here due to the level of tech creativity I have
> found here not because this is related to FreeBSD (in any direct way).
> I have two problems and want suggestions on how to solve them:

My preferred solution is a Nokia feature phone - small, cheap and
disposable if anything happens to it. I only need a basic phone that
can make phone calls and nothing else.

[Mathias Mader]

> 1. My new android (not new but recently upgraded) likes to turn itself
> on while in my backpack and since the carrier has started streaming
> ads even in "screen saver" mode this drains my battery fast (I went to
> sleep with 95% and woke up with a dead/drained phone).

I'd quit every relation to said carrier asap. I wouldn't tolerate something like this for one
minute. But alternatively you could set a code to unlock android, which is pretty much doing nothing
after booting, without it being unlocked.

> 2. The MTA (aka MYC subway) has started using tap and go far payment
> (OMNY Card) that looks onto the NFC "device" it can find and not
> necessarily your OMNY Card for example it looked onto a credit card I
> had never used in connection to the MTA and took my fare from that not
> my OMNY card several times now.   I have partially solved this by
> putting a mini faraday cage (tin foil in paper towel) in my wallet
> between the out side and the cards but still happens once in a while.

Recent Android versions have a quick button to turn NFC on/off.
I only turn mine on before consciously paying for something.

Regards,
Mathias
--
I'm enthralled by combine harvesters. In fact, I yearn to have one --
as a pet.
-- "The Day of the Jackal"

[Tomek CEDRO]

Depending on the phone model various companies put all sorts of
bloatware bundles. These can be disabled (not always uninstalled) in
the settings / applications / all. If you value choice it is important
to buy a phone from a vendor that provides system as close to Android
Open Source Project (AOSP) as possible. Google offers Pixel phones
where you can fully build and install your own firmware, but these
phones are quite expensive and kind of lag features behind 4x cheaper
ones.

Alternatively you may consider flashing your phone with LineageOS just
to get pure open source firmware.. but that also comes at price of
many issues that were not present in the stock firmware.

https://lineageos.org/

Even more extreme approach would be helping Ruslan Bukin in porting
FreeBSD to a mobile device that he creates from scratch.. maybe this
code can operate on other devices as well but that would require
dedicated hardware drivers I guess depending on where you want to run
it :-)

https://wiki.freebsd.org/RuslanBukin

--
CeDeROM, SQ7MHZ, http://www.tomek.cedro.info