Thanks OEM?

[winternicine]

While prepping an 8.1 I enabled the update profile setting accidentally. The device hadn't been used for nearly a year and there was no service either, so I didn't sweat it. About 30 minutes later a download icon surrounded by asian writing abrubtly appeared and moments later it rebooted and I suddenly had all the former sp's bloatware installed along with several mb's of code. I was poking around these settings in prep to root it and I'd already unlocked the bootloader before I tripped the update and after this update it was reset. I grock some code and it really seems that they flash/recovered it ota?!? I used lucky patcher to look at some of the apps involved and they even had permission to take a dna sample and my firstborn. They had ALL the permissions. I guess my question is, did oem just flash my stock rom? I've rooted successfully but I'm pretty green otherwise.

 

[Hadron]

There must have been an internet connection for them to do anything, unless the update had been downloaded previously and you just enabled application of it. But if you hadn't yet installed a custom recovery or modified the system software then yes, an OTA could go through - usually it would ask you to confirm installation first, but our US friends have experience of service providers who don't care about that and remove your ability to decline it.

(On sufficiently old software it could even install an OTA after you had modified the ROM, but the results of doing that are unpredictable, which I hope is why more modern versions are supposed not to do that. I honestly can't remember where 8.1 stands there, as that was a long time ago for my phone).

 

[winternicine]

It was a real wakeup as to what level of intimacy we form with these gizmos. I've spent roughly 10 hours just slowly going thru all the debugging attempts(and inevitable successes) and it's damned sobering. They got access to every, single device I own(almost)thru my apps and synced accounts and... It's a creepy feeling. Oh yeah, if they did indeed flash me, do you think there might be a copy of the boot image in the passal of new system files that have appeared. Btw, thank you. I'm not going to sleep better, but at least I'll sleep.

 

[mikedt]

While prepping an 8.1 I enabled the update profile setting accidentally. The device hadn't been used for nearly a year and there was no service either, so I didn't sweat it. About 30 minutes later a download icon surrounded by asian writing abrubtly appeared and moments later it rebooted and I suddenly had all the former sp's bloatware installed along with several mb's of code. I was poking around these settings in prep to root it and I'd already unlocked the bootloader before I tripped the update and after this update it was reset. I grock some code and it really seems that they flash/recovered it ota?!? I used lucky patcher to look at some of the apps involved and they even had permission to take a dna sample and my firstborn. They had ALL the permissions. I guess my question is, did oem just flash my stock rom? I've rooted successfully but I'm pretty green otherwise.

It may have said something like "Update is ready to install. Do you wish to proceed?" You might have tapped "YES" rather than "NO", if you couldn't read it? Seen as the default language apparently was in "Asian", is it a Chinese phone or tablet you've got there?

 

[winternicine]

I guess I should've said 'eastern'. It's very possible I ok',d the DL and I had a nice fat hotspot going as well. It popped up when I was trolling thru an icon pack or something equally critical to my devices impending rooting.
Since you can instigate this sort of thing,do you think there's a way to ...IDK...intercept it?
It seem there's a lot of good stuff in there for folks like ...good citizens.

 

[winternicine]

I mean,I've been actively trying to find some of this info for awhile. It's probably buried too deep for my skill level to extricate,but if I possessed the skill,this would be kinda rad.

 

[winternicine]

I mean,I've been actively trying to find some of this info for awhile. It's probably buried too deep for my skill level to extricate,but if I possessed the skill,this would be kinda rad.

 

[Hadron]

It was a real wakeup as to what level of intimacy we form with these gizmos. I've spent roughly 10 hours just slowly going thru all the debugging attempts(and inevitable successes) and it's damned sobering. They got access to every, single device I own(almost)thru my apps and synced accounts and... It's a creepy feeling. Oh yeah, if they did indeed flash me, do you think there might be a copy of the boot image in the passal of new system files that have appeared. Btw, thank you. I'm not going to sleep better, but at least I'll sleep.

I think you should probably be far more creeped out by the way outfits like Google and Facebook try to track everything you do, no matter what device you use, no matter whether you log into their services or not, and the effort, financial, technical, legal and political, that they put in to working around or limiting any restrictions on this. The fact that the device's software updater has full privileges isn't a surprise, and is nothing in comparison to the activities of the main surveillance capitalist corporations. And if you believe the BS they spout about data being anonymous then I've a bridge I'd like to sell you (one newspaper recently showed how "anonymised" location data could easily be used to identify individuals involved in the invasion of the Capitol in Washington, for example, and many researchers have shown how easy it is to "de-anonymise" the "anonymised" datasets these companies gather).

If your device was reflashed that was just an automated procedure from your OEM's or your service provider's servers (I say "service provider" because if you have a device that was bought on a contract and the service provider had added their own stuff to the ROM then it will be them rather than the OEM who actually updates your device). There would be nothing personal, nothing to do with your data, it would just be that after your device's block of IDs hit their update server and it connected to the network that process could start.

When you talk about "Eastern" language on the message though, that's surprising: update messages should match the language you have set for the device. The fact that the manufacturer is for example Korean does not mean that any dialogues about updates should be Korean. So if you saw a message that wasn't in your normal language that is unexpected (though it may depend on the device and its history).