0608 I'm a little confused around my goals with my mediatek phone. I'm aware of these specific parts: - flash an open source operating system - be able to dump firmware images for security We could call the goals "OS" and "IMG". IMG can appear partly compromised if access to the phone's firmware is not reliable. If there is a way for code to be installed that fakes the firmware download. In the end, a possible and likely solution to that would be to wire directly to the arm chip on the board. I don't need to do that here. I'm happy just making progress; improving my habits. But the imperfection of the IMG goal if the flasher I'm using uses an exploit that I don't understand, can seem strongly to make it hard to hold and relate with other things.