19 Replies to “You’ll Pry My Flip Phone From My Cold, Dead Hands”

  1. … and all the scienceI don’t understand, it’s just my job 5-days a week …
    Yep. I realize that I use about 3.7% of what my iPhone is capable of. Time to downgrade to a flip phone. I don’t EVEN have a bitmoji that replicates my salt+pepper sideburns. Talk about a Luddite.

  2. I’ve never advanced beyond a Flip phone and I don’t care that I don’t know what I don’t know about “smart” phones.

  3. Another thing about ‘smart’ phones that is sad pertains to people like my parents. They’re elderly and really are not computer savvy in any way (even though I have tried to enlighten them).
    However, they need a smart phone like most people need a coffee enema. If Kenji only uses 3.7% then they only need to make and receive the odd phone call which is surely less than 1%. They’re phone people. No text or email or internet searches or apps. Just a phone call once in a while when they are away from home.
    Does anyone make a phone that does that anymore? (yeah, I know – Google it…) 🙂

  4. Android runs on a Linux kernel and OS X on a BSD-derived kernel. At one time, using an operating system that no one had ever heard of was security through obscurity. Malware writers target system that actually exist in the wild. As more and more abstraction layers pile on top of the kernel in modern systems, though, that advantage vanishes.

  5. Yes. Every cell service provider has flip-phones or “feature phones” for lease as well as smartphones. You just have to ask the kiosk staff for them specifically if they aren’t on display. The last time I went to the Freedom Mobile kiosk they had three flip-phone models on the rack.
    But they also cost as much as the bottom-end $100 smartphones you can buy. Just because a smartphone *can* run apps doesn’t mean you have to install any.

  6. I think I’m going to start using “burners” … it seemed so kewl in The Wire, and on Homeland. Hey … I wanna be a kewl drug dealer or deep state spy … !

  7. I’ve been using FreeBSD off and on for the last 10 years. The current version is terrific and it’s now my preferred OS. I subscribe to one of the community’s mailing lists and there have been no reports of rogue software.

  8. You don’t say.
    It runs my ZFS-based NAS, but I wouldn’t put it on a machine I needed to do real work on. Security comes at a cost, and when that cost is more than the cost of a security breach amortized over the lifetime of a system then it’s a waste of resources.

  9. This is one reason why:
    https://www.freebsd.org/security/
    I watch when a new version of FreeBSD becomes available and install it soon after it’s released. I also update my packages and ports every few weeks.
    Mind you, one Linux distribution I used to run produced frequent updates, many of which were concerned with vulnerabilities as well.

  10. My flip phone works great. Open the phone, dial the number, talk to the person you called. Perfection.

  11. Hell will freeze before I part with cash for this thing.
    You’ll see Jimmy Hoffa and Elvis at a gas station first.

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