Elegy on the death of a smartphone
Note:This is not going to be a flowery post. I am famished and have no energy to think about style,merely content. Think of it as something akin to an engineer's log:P
I was heading home after a tiring day of work. All I wanted to do was to relax, but I had two long hours of travel before that. Music, my eternal companion to the rescue. I plug in my earphones and open up the music app on my phone to continue from where I'd left off. I also open up the browser to start reading something.
A few minutes later, the music pauses and there's a visible lag while the screen blacks out and then switches to Google's listening to input voice recognition menu. Hmm,weird but could happen I think. I hit cancel, go through the same annoying lag, and finally the music starts playing again. This repeats a couple more times, the response time and turnaround time getting significantly worse, and therefore I am forced to debug the issue.
I remember seeing a notification from Google that said Unlock your phone using your voice while you're using a wired headset. I did not enable this or anything, but it could be that an update that was freshly installed over WiFi brought in this functionality (bug would be more like it).
So my phone is constantly listening for voice commands and the ambient noise is high enough to spark a false positive. Yes, that should be it.This keeps happening and I curse the hypothetical update and consider rolling back to an older version. But I'm not sure, so I decide to give it some more time.
But then, this creepy thing happens. The music player detects a phantom touch on the next button and forwards to another song. This happens about a dozen times in rapid succession. Being from an electronics background, the first thought that comes to my mind is a faulty ground. Or leakage currents that trigger the capacitive touchscreen. If the device were charging, this would undoubtedly be the explanation. But could this happen while it was not charging? Not that I knew of.
My phone continues its bizarre behavior while I look at it as if it had descended into insanity. Which in a way, it had. But soon, the insanity progressed like a neoplastic tumor. It metastasized into other buttons. The volume kept oscillating,the song kept changing, and other strange things began to happen.Here's the time I tell you about my phone. Rooted, flashed with a custom ROM, bootloader unlocked(because I was a phone enthusiast who liked to tweak and meddle).Also, old. Not old by man years, but old by phone years in all certainty. So,I have been seeing glitches of late, nothing major,but a few abrupt restarts, considerable lags and all that you would normally expect as symptoms of senility.
Now this,these crazy phantom touches are something new. This is also the right time to tell you that I have been binge watching Black Mirror quite recently. So my mind, that simian of a creature, concludes instantly that my phone is being remotely operated by someone,possibly a crazy hacker. The sensible part of my mind goes, That isn't possible unless you did something stupid like click on an unknown link,or download an unfamiliar apk.
No,not always. There might be some low level vulnerability that was newly discovered and is currently being exploited.You never know, says the worst-case-scenario counterpart.I freak out at the thought and my first instinct is to google for any newly found exploits on my OS. But as I start typing into the search bar, it abruptly closes and a random song starts playing. The volume is then hiked up to a blaring unbearable racket and I pull out my earphones in despair.
Credits:
Title inspiration: Elegy on the death of a mad dog,Oliver Goldsmith
*Blue and lonely section of hell: The Stand,Stephen King
I was heading home after a tiring day of work. All I wanted to do was to relax, but I had two long hours of travel before that. Music, my eternal companion to the rescue. I plug in my earphones and open up the music app on my phone to continue from where I'd left off. I also open up the browser to start reading something.
A few minutes later, the music pauses and there's a visible lag while the screen blacks out and then switches to Google's listening to input voice recognition menu. Hmm,weird but could happen I think. I hit cancel, go through the same annoying lag, and finally the music starts playing again. This repeats a couple more times, the response time and turnaround time getting significantly worse, and therefore I am forced to debug the issue.
I remember seeing a notification from Google that said Unlock your phone using your voice while you're using a wired headset. I did not enable this or anything, but it could be that an update that was freshly installed over WiFi brought in this functionality (bug would be more like it).
So my phone is constantly listening for voice commands and the ambient noise is high enough to spark a false positive. Yes, that should be it.This keeps happening and I curse the hypothetical update and consider rolling back to an older version. But I'm not sure, so I decide to give it some more time.
But then, this creepy thing happens. The music player detects a phantom touch on the next button and forwards to another song. This happens about a dozen times in rapid succession. Being from an electronics background, the first thought that comes to my mind is a faulty ground. Or leakage currents that trigger the capacitive touchscreen. If the device were charging, this would undoubtedly be the explanation. But could this happen while it was not charging? Not that I knew of.
My phone continues its bizarre behavior while I look at it as if it had descended into insanity. Which in a way, it had. But soon, the insanity progressed like a neoplastic tumor. It metastasized into other buttons. The volume kept oscillating,the song kept changing, and other strange things began to happen.Here's the time I tell you about my phone. Rooted, flashed with a custom ROM, bootloader unlocked(because I was a phone enthusiast who liked to tweak and meddle).Also, old. Not old by man years, but old by phone years in all certainty. So,I have been seeing glitches of late, nothing major,but a few abrupt restarts, considerable lags and all that you would normally expect as symptoms of senility.
Now this,these crazy phantom touches are something new. This is also the right time to tell you that I have been binge watching Black Mirror quite recently. So my mind, that simian of a creature, concludes instantly that my phone is being remotely operated by someone,possibly a crazy hacker. The sensible part of my mind goes, That isn't possible unless you did something stupid like click on an unknown link,or download an unfamiliar apk.
No,not always. There might be some low level vulnerability that was newly discovered and is currently being exploited.You never know, says the worst-case-scenario counterpart.I freak out at the thought and my first instinct is to google for any newly found exploits on my OS. But as I start typing into the search bar, it abruptly closes and a random song starts playing. The volume is then hiked up to a blaring unbearable racket and I pull out my earphones in despair.
"Once is an accident. Twice is a coincidence. Three times is an enemy action."
This seemingly unrelated sequence of actions is no longer random in its manifestation,it has taken on an undoubted hue of malevolence. I imagine someone laughing at my despair and pressing random buttons just for the fun of it. And then, I wonder, what about all data on my phone? It's all on cloud. But if someone has access to my phone, and with superuser privileges on top of that, what good is it anyway? They have access to everything. Even all those stupid wallets that are linked to my bank accounts. I shudder,imagining nothing good and everything bad. I turn off the internet, reasoning that I can at least prevent some of the damage and check out my theory of a remote hacker running commands.
But my phone is still going berserk. Could be something local running as root, I reason. And then,with a note of resounding finality, my phone shuts down. I restart it,expecting to see more of the aforementioned behavior. Unexpectedly, to my utter disbelief, it is disarmingly normal and rational.
Could this have been a software bug? Not very likely. Hardware? Yes,more like it. But the thing is, you wouldn't expect it to go away once the phone restarts. It would persist. Some unholy combination of the two that almost seems conspiratorial? Maybe. My phone has gone into what's famously called UB. Undefined behavior. That blue and lonely uncharted section of hell.*
Time to get a new phone, you think? :D
P.S: After that wave of paranoia passed, I actually looked up what happened and found that it was a common occurrence in phones. So much for my imagination huh?:D
Credits:
Title inspiration: Elegy on the death of a mad dog,Oliver Goldsmith
*Blue and lonely section of hell: The Stand,Stephen King
"Time to get a new phone, you think? :D"
ReplyDeleteTrue. Its high time you get a new phone.
Amen
Delete