09-07-2021, 06:39 AM
Im not entirely educated on the matter however I personally can see a benefit for this info being available. Having many old bricked android smart phones at my disposal (I collect them for experiments) I would have a decent collection of legitimate IMEI's that should not interfere or cause trouble with pinephone since they dont boot anymore. Additionally, I have most of the sim cards and phone numbers of these phones so I could easily contact the carriers and reactivate the sim card avoiding aforementioned issue involving multiple phones with differing numbers ETC. Why would I want to do this? Many carriers as we know do not officially support pinephone and we have to go through some roundabout methods to get our pine phones activated. For example, the most common issue is that many people must first activate their sim in an android device, then place their sim in the pinephone. We have also seen several carriers who are obviously against the idea of using a custom linux device on their network use measures to stop the previously working pinephone from connecting to their network any longer. Two examples I could use is Straight Talk and Visible. Straight talk worked for several hours without issue after activating their card in an android then placing it in the pinephone. After that I got a audio message when trying to place calls to place the sim card back in the original device to restore service. (It is very likely that the different IMEI's played part in this) I suspect Visible also uses similar tactics to keep unwanted phones off the network although I have not been able to prove it. With something like this, I could easily test that by using the IMEI of one of my old bricked Visible phones and placing the sim in the pinephone and seeing if it worked.
Anyway, just food for thought. I personally think that this information should be available. Yes, the legal issues should be mentioned and a list of do nots should be posted so someone doesn't unknowingly do something illegal. As for others who could use this knowledge for evil, true there are always those people out there but should that stop us from knowing?
Anyway, just food for thought. I personally think that this information should be available. Yes, the legal issues should be mentioned and a list of do nots should be posted so someone doesn't unknowingly do something illegal. As for others who could use this knowledge for evil, true there are always those people out there but should that stop us from knowing?
