Shortening the Let's Encrypt Chain of Trust

Re:Shortening the Let's Encrypt Chain of Trust by redox99 on Monday July 10, 2023 @07:35PM (#36674535)

Meh. Samsung (and Huawei) are still the best selling phones in developing countries.

Samsung could definitely both reduce the unnecessarily large number of SKUs, and better unify their software stack so they could update for 5 years all of their phones.

It's crazy how we went from PCs having the right abstractions, where you can easily keep a 10 year old PC updated, to this awful Android situation.

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Re:Shortening the Let's Encrypt Chain of Trust by paxys on Monday July 10, 2023 @07:40PM (#36674583)

There is a very long tail of Android smartphone manufacturers that most people in western countries haven't even heard of. Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo and Realme for example all have double digit market shares globally. The "others" section in most graphs is >30%. If you narrow down the price range to say <$100 there is an even larger spread.

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Re:Shortening the Let's Encrypt Chain of Trust by redox99 on Monday July 10, 2023 @07:47PM (#36674645)

Sure. I don't know enough about those companies so I'm not complaining about them.

But I know Samsung has the money and manpower to drastically improve the situation, yet they don't care.

With the right abstractions, they would only have a single version of "Samsung OS", like you only have a single version of Windows/Ubuntu. And all devices within reason would be able to immediately update to the latest version of Samsung OS, like PCs can.

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Re:Shortening the Let's Encrypt Chain of Trust by paxys on Monday July 10, 2023 @07:49PM (#36674663)

Go to a developing country and see the share of PCs that are running Windows XP and you will realize that things aren't that simple. The majority of the world doesn't care about OS updates, and they are definitely not spending money on it. They simply want stuff to continue to work exactly as it did when they bought it. Mobile phones already get updated at a much higher rate than PCs. The vast majority of PCs in the world stay on the version that the manufacturer installed throughout their lifetime.

And say in your example Samsung does get its shit together and spends a ton of money to upgrade every phone in the world...that's still ~25-30% of the Android population. What about the rest?

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Re:Shortening the Let's Encrypt Chain of Trust by redox99 on Monday July 10, 2023 @07:52PM (#36674681)

I already live in a developing country lol

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Re:Shortening the Let's Encrypt Chain of Trust by pdpi on Monday July 10, 2023 @09:41PM (#36675467)

The situation is understandable for budget phones sold in developing countries, but that's almost entirely irrelevant to what companies like Samsung and Google do for their flagship products.

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Re:Shortening the Let's Encrypt Chain of Trust by rkagerer on Monday July 10, 2023 @10:26PM (#36675739)

They simply want stuff to continue to work exactly as it did when they bought it.

My hammer can do this but I have never had a smartphone that achieved it.

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Re:Shortening the Let's Encrypt Chain of Trust by bombolo on Tuesday July 11, 2023 @02:30AM (#36677127)

Android updates change the UI and inevitably make the phone slower.

As a user, I don't really appreciate all the menus moving around, just because some designer in california needs a promotion.

Unfortunately, currently, updating a device might mean making it useless.

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Re:Shortening the Let's Encrypt Chain of Trust by kelnos on Tuesday July 11, 2023 @05:41AM (#36678512)

* * *

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Re:Shortening the Let's Encrypt Chain of Trust by bandrami on Monday July 10, 2023 @09:01PM (#36675222)

I've got a stack of Xiaomi phones because they randomly don't work with various south- and southeast-Asian countries' carriers, but not in any predictable or documented way. So I have my Sri Lanka phone and my Maldives phone and my Bangladesh phone, plus two different India phones because of course West Bengal has to be different.

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Re:Shortening the Let's Encrypt Chain of Trust by SOLAR_FIELDS on Monday July 10, 2023 @09:17PM (#36675317)

Doesn’t this have more to do with the hardware bands available in the device rather than the carrier software installed on the phone? Perhaps as part of the race to the bottom on price Xiaomi forgoes hardware components that allow a given phone to operate on bands that are common outside the region it was sold in or the carrier it partners with. It would make sense if that was the case, because the people spending $20 USD on a phone typically aren’t going to be traveling a lot anyway

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Re:Shortening the Let's Encrypt Chain of Trust by unmole on Tuesday July 11, 2023 @07:54AM (#36679701)

> plus two different India phones because of course West Bengal has to be different.

This makes no sense whatsoever. West Bengal has the same carriers and bands as the rest of the country.

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Re:Shortening the Let's Encrypt Chain of Trust by bandrami on Tuesday July 11, 2023 @09:02AM (#36680383)

> This makes no sense whatsoever

Neither does a 1:5 scale model of Big Ben, but Kolkata has that too.

I'm sure there's a knob I can tweak somewhere that makes it work, but a Xiaomi handset is like $20 so I never bothered.

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Re:Shortening the Let's Encrypt Chain of Trust by bombolo on Tuesday July 11, 2023 @02:27AM (#36677102)

> that most people in western countries haven't even heard of. Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo

Never heard of vivo. The other 2 are well known phone brands in italy.

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Re:Shortening the Let's Encrypt Chain of Trust by sofixa on Tuesday July 11, 2023 @05:41AM (#36678518)

> that most people in western countries haven't even heard of. Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo

Please stop considering US+Canada == "most western countries". Xiaomi and Oppo are big brands, quite popular in Europe (especially Southern Europe), and FFS Oppo are one of the major sponsors of the Champions League, one of the biggest and most popular football competitions in the world.

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Re:Shortening the Let's Encrypt Chain of Trust by hospitalJail on Monday July 10, 2023 @10:42PM (#36675825)

Classic popular=/= Good

Samsung is garbage tier and on my list of Never Buy.

They have big marketing campaigns and their phones at max brightness with a cool default wallpaper. The crapware is annoying and the performance is average at best.

I feel its my duty to warn people about Samsung.

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Re:Shortening the Let's Encrypt Chain of Trust by stOneskull on Monday July 10, 2023 @11:38PM (#36676158)

they can be good but i think they're too expensive. oppo is pretty equivalent but half the price.

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Re:Shortening the Let's Encrypt Chain of Trust by KronisLV on Tuesday July 11, 2023 @02:04AM (#36676952)

> It's crazy how we went from PCs having the right abstractions, where you can easily keep a 10 year old PC updated, to this awful Android situation.

I feel like TPM and some modern OSes and software requiring it would like a word in that regard. :(

But yes, it feels like PCs are generally more open to both updates and running different OSes instead of smartphones getting turned into e-waste because of the more closed ecosystem (drivers, bootloaders, support).

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