this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2024
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Privacy
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Everything about privacy (the confidentiality pillar of security) -- but not restricted to infosec. Offline privacy is also relevant here.
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@[email protected] Pixel 5 has been end-of-life since December 2023 after the last update in November 2023. It hasn't received driver and firmware updates since then. We provided what we could with very limited resources available for insecure devices via the Pixel 5a still being supported, but the Pixel 4a (5G) and Pixel 5 had significant regressions with each quarterly release we had to work around. A15 would cause enormous problems and we don't need to port it to 15 to keep it working for another year.
Damn, this phone looks and works as good as new. Sucks that it can't be updated any longer. I hate it so fucking much that they (google) managed to make the hardware closed source enough, so that we can't keep it running after the manufacturer dropped support. Anyway, i know that's not your fault.
Thanks for the reply and thanks for all the work to make android a little bit safer for all of us.
@[email protected] It has nothing to do with Pixels specifically and applies to all other hardware whether or not it runs Android. There are no devices where we wouldn't need ongoing support for firmware updates and development of the drivers and other device support code.
So then open source drivers and firmware should be mandatory. It's insane that this fully working phone isn't usable any longer just because the manufacturer wants to sell new stuff. They should at least open source the drivers or firmware if they stop supporting it. What a humongous waste of resources.
I know this is the same for all devices. Microsoft is killing old PCs without TPM to push Windows 11. You can still use linux on those devices though, android seems to be way more short lived.
@[email protected] It would still be end-of-life from lack of development or releases for the firmware and drivers even if it was fully open source. It wouldn't be possible for us to take over development of everything and we don't receive the security issue reports for it. Additionally, building firmware updates requires the signing keys for that and we don't have those so having the sources doesn't allow us to build firmware updates in general. The signing is important for security for a lot of firmware.