Technology @lemmy.world Joker @sh.itjust.works 7d ago

iPhones stored for forensic analysis unexpectedly reboot, causing problems for officials

appleinsider.com iPhones stored for forensic analysis unexpectedly reboot, causing problems for officials

Multiple iPhone units stored for forensic analysis have rebooted themselves, causing concern among law enforcement officials that Apple has a new security feature.

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I wouldn't mind having the ability to schedule a reboot on my phone as an extra precaution.
- I think graphene does this by default now? Like if you don't unlock it for 24 hours it'll reboot.
  
  18 hours by default.
  
  Its an aosp feature i believe, but its disabled on many phones. Graphene and calyx have it. With calyx its default off, but you can set it between 1 and 72 hours. Very handy feature.
- It probably requires root, but I'm sure Tasker can do this.
  
  Really, all phones should have the option to reboot into locked mode on certain conditions like being taken out of network or being unattended for a while.
  
  The interesting thing is if the manufacturer is shipping them that way by default.
  
  Could possibly also look at the motion sensors to see if it is in a pocket moving around or if it was sitting around for a while.
- There is a shortcut action to shut down the phone which you could trigger with an automation, I suppose.
  
  I can put the phone in lockdown by press-holding the power button and select the "lockdown" option. Not bad, but an actual reboot daily at night wouldn't be so bad.
- I thought it's a standard feature (auto restart at set times). Maybe a samsung thing and not android.
- GrapheneOS has an option to reboot your phone after being locked for X hours.
- Check out GrapheneOS.
Hardly ever have I seen an article so full of "could be", "alledgedly", "supposed", "likely", and "probably".

It may be because I have stopped reading about UFO's after the age of 15.
- Because they have no actual proof of it, and direct evidence against it. They talk about phones communicating with each other to restart... yet a phone inside a faraday box restarted.
  
  It's almost certainly just a software bug in iOS which is why it's inconsistent.
  
  It's also the most unlikely explanation of all, that phones brought in communicated with the ones in custody to reboot them. Even if it was a security feature to reboot phones under certain conditions, which is very likely TBH graphene OS does this, the best implementation isn't going to be relying on other phones randomly passing near by, it's going to be self-managed by the phone that reboots.
That would be super cool if that was a feature instead of a bug because anything that makes law enforcement's job harder is worth praising and doing properly.
- GrapheneOS includes this feature
  
  It would be nice if this feature did not disable immediately if you turned it off and would require like say 48 hours and two more reboot cycles. That way if a cop took your phone from you and had it and went into the settings and turned the feature off it still wouldn't work.
  
  I just heard this like yesterday or today and so that's absolutely amazing. I don't think lineage has it though, which is sad. Although it is less useful on lineage since you can't re-lock boot loaders.
- Yeah, seems like a reboot every 24 hours you're not unlocked would be extremely useful
Aren’t iPhones switching from AFU to BFU if you don’t unlock them long enough anyway? Or is BFU not the same state as entered if lock and volume down button are pressed for some time?
- YSRCEABP
  
  What?
- From what to what?
  
  BFU deez nuts lmao gottem
  
  BFU = Before First Unlock
  AFU = After First Unlock
My phone rebooted occasionally on iOS18 and this was mentioned as fixed in 18.1 release notes so this story sounds plausible.
Ha.

This is the only good thing about Apple products. Yes, the only one.

48 comments