this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2024
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55
Fairphone 3 (LineageOS) acted weird in France (near military bases), possible explanations? (linux.community)
submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
15 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Hi

I just remembered a strange behavior I had with my Fairphoen 3 with LineageOS and I wanted to share it and maybe find an explanation.

A while back I was in France for holidays and my phone started to act wired. At first nothing was out of the ordinary, but when I arrived at my destination my phone started to turn off or rebooted in random intervals. It seemed to have no pattern, sometimes I could use my phone normally for a few hours before it shut down or rebooted. Other times I had it shut down almost all 30 minutes or so. The moment I was back in the middle of France everything was back to normal, no shutdowns or reboots.

My friends with normal phones (IPhone or Google-Andorid) had no problems.

Sadly I had the logs not turned on back then, so I can not see what the system did... I thought of a few possible reasons for such an behavior:

  • Phone and/or Lineage was not compatible with the local telecom infrastructure
  • Some App made system errors
  • Other OS errors
  • Jamming/Government action

Even though I assume something trivial, like compatibility or software related, I find it worth mentioning that I was near Brest. Brest is a french navy port for destroyers and nuclear submarines. I also saw some heavy guarded bases and bunkers where I assume nuclear bombs are stored, to load them onto the submarines. The military presence in and around Brest was quite high. This brought the question to my mind, could it be that out of caution, the military jams or attacks non-Gogole phones that are not easy to track or just fall out of the ordinary? It is a far stretch I know, but it was just strange to have those problems starting the moment I traversed into a high military presence area and resolve themselves when I was out of that area.

What are your thoughts?

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[โ€“] [email protected] 26 points 7 months ago (2 children)

I once had a phone reboot upon connecting to a specific hotel wifi network, then bootloop until I took it out of range. Sometimes things just break. Military interference seems unlikely; a phone carrier, and by proxy a government with jurisdiction over one can track any phone connected to the network regardless of the software running on it.

It's useful to immediately save the logs from logcat when something like that happens. There's often enough information in there to find out why a crash or reboot occurred, or at least what part of the OS was responsible for it.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Doesn't make sense that it crashed even before it's online... Is it possible for the interference to run so deep?

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

Could be something in this direction, but the when it happened I was some times out in the nature, no building or antenna near me. As far as I know some military equipment can interfere with civilian technology, as they do not care much about it when a war is going on.

[โ€“] [email protected] 12 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Maybe the base's wifi is a weird state operator that has peculiar protocols (ie old or misimplemented)

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Good thought, just remembered I had something similar one time when working at a festival. There it was because of wireless microphones that somehow interacted with the phone network.

Maybe some special equipment of the bases use special protocols that interfere with other devices that are not programmed for it.

[โ€“] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Nuclear submarines are not nuclear-weapon-equiped submarines, they're nuclear-fueled ones

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

Depending on the country, the reason for staying submerged and undetectable for extended periods of time is often to carry nuclear weapons, however.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

I am aware of that, but Brest (or better said Ile Longue) is the base where the french nuclear ballistic missile submarines are stationed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%8Ele_Longue).

In this article you can see the different buildings/bunkers, I went to all of them (as near as you were allowed) was very interesting (https://thebulletin.org/premium/2023-07/nuclear-notebook-french-nuclear-weapons-2023/).

[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago (2 children)

It's not like they can track what phone model and operating system you have just by you being in the area. I think it could still have to do with the military base though. The phone could have picked up some sort of military frequencies which it couldn't process and so it crashed.

[โ€“] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago (1 children)

If you connect to the wrong tower, can't they get IMEI info? That won't include OS, but it will give phone model/mfr and other details. I remember reading about regional police forces or intelligence agencies gathering data in North America at least (and they were explicitly gathering personal & usage data too, to see if they could find criminals supposedly).

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

I think also in the UK where The Guardian (or was it some other paper), found and published the use if IMSI-Catchers on protests?

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Could be, maybe some frequency band is still not handled well by LineageOS but other phone OSs do, and the military uses those.

I want to go back, this time with my radio analyzing tools just to find out more, but would not be a wise move with today's tensions in Europe... (or in general near military bases)

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago (1 children)

The fairphone 4 had an issue where 5G made it reboot under certain circumstances on manufacture OS but this was fixed.

Maybe the fairphone has a similar issue, but I think it only had 4g right?

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Yes I only have 4G with my FP3. Maybe Brittany has some newer (or older) cell-towers that LiniageOS (or the FP3) could not handle.

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

Maybe some interference crashed your baseband firmware