Q-Link terminated my cell service when the ACP laws changed and i've been without a phone for a few months, but i walked by a street salesperson for Stand Up Wireless who was giving away to homeless people in the area, a phone branded as the Vortex HD65 . I don't presently qualify for a free phone as I'm between states and you need to be set up with any local social service to qualify with Stand Up, but I bought one of them anyway online for some very low price because of that dream of letting everybody have a free liberated device and how I sometimes get into tiny reverse engineering binges in this crazy half of my life. Like my Hot Pepper Serrano from Q-Link, according to the web this phone has a MediaTek chipset, so it's possible most of the same tools and approaches and repair avenues will transfer to this phone. I'd like to image the firmware, remove secure boot and encryption such that reimaging is straightforward, and install an open-source OS. It's 2024-10-11 2149 and I'm multitasking with other tasks, and this e-mail client is going very slowly. 2152. 2333 so i tried using mtkclient and it just works without having to enable anything in the phone settings or anything. ‘mtk printgpt’ shows the gpt, ‘mtk rf’ images the flash. mtk rf won’t pipe, but it will write to a fifo so i can pipe it to zstd or arweave or such that way. - to decrypt the image a hardware key would need to be extracted better look for notes on how to do this better somewhere so hard to pursue this 2335 2339