Personas & Phones
Doing a bit of device housecleaning.
I’m in a new location, meeting new people, and someone has noticed my phone collection. Rather than dodging the questioning look, I’ll just explain such that it benefits all of you. Top to bottom there is 1) a dying iPhone 8 2) NAFO fella phone 3) Calypso3 that still has a persona living on it 4) moto that used to be my daily driver and 5) Calypso4 that has most of the persona moved to it.
The only ones I truly need are the pair with plans and stuff that can’t be replicated in a VirtualBox VM.
And this just makes me sad. Having the new iPhone XR and Pinky & Brain I was envisioning splitting this up into Air/XR for me being mobile and Pro/iPhone 8 as a separate compartment, since there are a LOT of Apple things I’ve never previously encountered.
The old iPhone has some sort of sensor problem, it goes dark very quickly, so much so that I can’t get through to change the settings so I have some hope of accessing it. It’s alive, functional other than this problem, but it’s just a weird paperweight.
Culling The Herd:
I previously talked a bit about this stuff in Burner Shuffle, which followed New Mission, New Burner.
I’m going to try one more thing with the iPhone 8 and if I don’t end up with a workable config it’s getting recycled. The moto gets recovered via a firmware reload and when that’s done the fella migrates to the more capable device and I can let that ancient thing in the brown leather wallet go to someone in much greater need than me.
A historic note - this sort of thing used to get done with Genymotion, but the ever tightening anti-fraud policies eliminated this path years ago. This annoys and pleases me in equal measure - it thins out the competition, but adds a small capital and operations cost to any duties that require an alternative perch in the world.
Conclusion:
Being so open about this is a bit of a security faux pas - the sides of those devices are a census of equipment in my possession. If one disappears, it’s reasonable to stop and wonder if that’s cause for an obstruction charge, which I most recently addressed in Avoiding Keyword Warrants. I don’t think it is, since the contents of the devices are rolling forward, I know with specificity how they were used, and I’m a fantastic record keeper/retainer. The sorts of cases brought against Andrew Auernheimer and Barrett Brown are just not going to happen for me.
The worst case outcome would be some civil thing I did getting mentioned in a motion. I’d have to break out some records, maybe a former client would even get deposed. And the other party would be made to look a fool before the judge. That is not the end of the world, probably not even the end of any important business relationship, as the weird cyberstalker investigations I catch never generate repeat business.
And on that note, I’m going to get my super bright LED light/magnifying old man desk lamp out and see if I can coax this iPhone 8 back into a vaguely usable condition …
Coda:
After a couple minutes under the magnifying light so it wouldn’t gray out during setup, not only do I have a workable iPhone 8, it appears to be perfectly functional(!) I’m going to leave it on the windowsill tomorrow, we’ll see how it does when it’s good and toasty. If it isn’t going to be a constant nuisance, I will do the split I described above, pairing this phone with Brain and trying some of the more invasive security settings Apple offers.