[log][personal][ot] digital strangenesses

Undescribed Horrific Abuse, One Victim & Survivor of Many gmkarl at gmail.com
Tue Aug 8 17:55:26 PDT 2023


[today went much much better for me, internally, than i had feared it
could last night.]

today i stumbled on a day shelter, part of a church, offering free
wifi, and asked around it; their internet was down, so i asked if i
could look at it, they didn’t know where the modem was

i nmap’d the gateway from my phone. at first it found port 53 open,
and i could get domain names off it. i thought maybe it was another
dns glitch, and i found a public laptop set up and configured it to
use the router as domain server wondering if it would magically work.
no. no domain names on the laptop.

ok, my phone was still on cellular data, so i thought maybe there was
a gateway on my cellular network with the same ip address as the wifi
gateway? i turned off the data, and did a full nmap over the whole
port range like i was probing an unknown home router decades ago. it
took a really long time. all ports were filtered this time.
i also monitored a packet log of the dhcp assignment with my phone,
which looked fine, but i only saw arp and dhcp packets from the
router, nothing else. in the dhcp, the router said it was a unix
system, which to me is new, dunno, not that worldly. started wondering
if it was a real unix routing system with tuned firewalls and such,
which would be cool. it had a local domain name that i think was
associated with the church.

anyway, my phone turned itself off when i started exploring further,
and started bootlooping.

during one of the first few boots it mismounted my sd card, instead
mounting an old hidden partition i had from a previous flash of the
phone. i had written the previous image’s encryption key into the
hidden partition, and this file was displayed to me in the file
manager when i went to look  what was wrong with the sd card, i don’t
remember how to mount that partition manually.

poking at the bootlooping it seemed like something to do with mounting
of the sd card is now crashing the phone. i’ve just now troubleshooted
it enough to get back online, with thr sd card mounted as i expect, by
chance, but should probably find an alternative device if i want to
rely on this.


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