Carmakazi

Whenever someone says they had a moderator action taken against them, I am suspicious. Some mod teams are notorious, sure, but it’s almost always a case of unreliable narration.

I imagine behavior like the allcaps reply above had something to do with it.

IIRC Burger King was one of, if not the first companies to use computerized inventory/bookkeeping. And they used it to try and crack down on employees giving away extra food. It was a giant waste of money.

Google is still the one that provides the hardware/security updates to my knowledge. They could choose to cut that off based on the “legitimacy” of your OS or other arbitrary reasoning. It wouldn’t brick the phone but it would lose all future support, making GOS much less compelling.

It seems to be a concern to the people behind GOS, enough that they are looking for an OEM to make phones to their specs, but I haven’t heard anything to the effect of “Google will stop all support or brick devices that aren’t verified.” Maybe existing GOS Pixels will be fine, maybe they’re sandbagging, I don’t know. It’ll definitely suck for me with a Pixel 9 Pro XL that I expected to keep into the 2030s if that happens.

IMO just having your personal device on you in the presence of a protest puts you in danger. They have ample tools to track cellular devices that basically cannot be guarded against without disabling the function altogether, such as with a Faraday bag. They will catch and log that you were at a protest, and use that against you later.

The humble sawzall: