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Dear amazing Hackers, I need your help.

Dear amazing XDA android developers,
I need your help. You have an opportunity to help someone in need and at the same time do something fun and challenging.
But first a little backstory.
Over the last two years, my car has been broken into numerous times. I've had an old smartphone stolen(my treo 650 which I repurposed for gps nav), a stereo stolen, car chargers stolen. My car dash ripped open. I got another stereo from my grandma for christmas which was stolen a month later, even without the faceplate on it. I've also had my garage door beaten in(not to gain access, just to beat it, I suppose). I lock my car at night, but I also have clinically verifiable ADD, and I can never remember for absolutely sure every single night if I locked it - or if they're getting in some other way.
So you're probably wondering why I'm posting this on the Android hacking forum. I need your help catching the hoodlum who is doing this. I bought a new android phone, the thunderbolt, and it replaced my very aging Droid Eris.
What I want to do is activate the Eris on a second line for a month, and use a rom with specially cooked features to make sure it works flawlessly. I need a rom that can do a fake shutdown, where if you hold the power button and choose shutdown from the menu, it'll do a throbber or some other indicator and then shut off the screen, but continue to run. I plan on supergluing the battery case to the phone. I need the tracking apps to never quit from memory no matter what, and I need the GPS to be accurate and the phone to be stable. I plan on running multiple tracking apps(in case one fails). I have a 3500mah battery for the phone so I'm not terribly concerned with battery life. I need the indicator light blinking fairly often to attract attention. Since the Eris has that nice big white light under the trackball I thought that would help more. I also need to hide the tracking apps from the phone home launcher as well.
I'd leave this specially prepared phone on the dash of my car at night, and when it gets stolen(which I bet will take less than a month to happen), I will be able to call the police and find the neighborhood hoodlums and restore order. I've already talked with the police and they've said if I got them the GPS coordinates they can take action to retrieve the phone.
Can you help me with these features and fight crime in the process?
I wasn't sure if this was the right forum to post this in. I know there's a lot of Eris specifics, but I also know this could be a useful project for others with other phones as well who suffer from vandalism and regular thievery.
I will reward the forum with the story of what happens and the result.

[Q] Best 3G solutions?

Hey guys
After a notable absence of Android in my life I'm heading back over with a TF300T. Now, as you may guess from the title I want to talk about my various connection options and draw from your experiences with the device to help me make the right choice in terms of getting my new baby online outside my house.
Obviously I could have gotten a device with built in modem but nothing really turned my head in terms of price and stuff, and as I recall just buying a device that just does what you want it to do already isn't really the Android spirit; half the fun is getting there.
Anyway, this leaves me with a number of imperfect options for data connections:
My phone will happily tether up to the tablet and because my network are cool dudes I can do that for free. Problem is that doing so means I can't make/recieve calls and texts while I'm tethered up and since I want mobile data love when I'm out of the house working that would seem to not be a great idea.
Secondly I could jump in with a mobile wifi thing, but I'm really not keen to get a another contract to make that happen and the amounts of data I'm likely to use (literally just web browsing for now and forever) are somewhat low and somewhat infrequent, making this seem to be a pretty bad useage of money. Also with devices offering 'Up to 5 hours of battery life'; well lets just that's not going to last me long enough to be useful.
Finally, I can grab a 3G USB stick and duck tape it to the device. It's the right stuff for my requirements, but it seems kinda non-trivial to hook up a USB device to the undocked tablet and certainly it seems totally unrealistic to wander around holding the tablet with usb adapter, then modem dongle sticking six inches out of the bottom. At worst it'll fall out, at best I'll break it. In the dock this looks great, assuming it'll work in the standard USB port, but outside it just seems silly.
My hope really was that I'd be able to find a cable that'd go from the propitiatory connector (Bad Asus!) to female usb so I could potentially stick the dongle flat against the back of the tablet without noticeably increasing it's footprint, but that seems unlikely. I've seen a guy on youtube who can make such a cable, but it takes soldering and that's somewhat outside my abilities.
So what kind of approach had you guys taken and what experiences have you had using this kind of ghetto-interweb solution? The key is to find the right add on that will let me still use my phone properly, that will give me long endurance but also minimal hassle... A bit of a reach really, but maybe I'm not thinking of all the options.
Apologies if anyone thinks this is in the wrong place, my XDA-fu is a little rusty but I'm pretty sure I'm in the right place. I've googled around and while I can find plenty of stuff telling me all the ways to hook the internet up, no-one seems to be answering what way I should approach making it all happen.

Best choice for me has been a mifi. Look up a Huawei 585 or 589 and plug in a sim and away you go. You can get some very cheap rolling monthly contracts these days for data only plans.

How have you found the battery life to be in practice? Can I leave the thing switched on and get some reasonable proportion of a day out of it? My hope really is that the battery estimates they give are 'x hours of actual internetting' instead of 'x hours of being switched on'. If it'll just quietly sit and stay connected for most of a day then that'll probably be fine, but if I have to finesse the thing on and off all day long just to get past lunch time that sounds pretty bad for my situation.

[Q] "Retroactive Bricking" or "spontaneous" hardware fault?

PSA: *This will be crossposted in xda HTC One X and HTC One X+ forums, I hope cross posting is allowed, haven't seen it mentioned in rules.*
Hi all,
Quick disclaimer: I've been lurking parts of xda now and again for a couple years now, have flashed a couple of phones and tablets now and again for mainly practical reasons, recently getting more interested in it as a ""fun" interest or "hobby".
SO: I am very aware that this is my first post, the rules, search function, etc. ..
BUT: After extensively searching both google and specifically xda to help me resolve this issue *myself*, I decided to create an account and post. I'm sorry if this Q should have been put in the newbie thread, my assessment was that it probably has no place there.
ALSO PLZ NOTE: What was meant to be a succinct summary and question somehow turned into a condensed but complete rundown of events, so here is a...
TL;DR:
- Replaced HTC One X+ display/digitizer unit myself, ran fine for 5 weeks.
- Then: flashed twrp 2.7x or 2.8, not sure anymore, before installing Android HD Revolution 33.1 by mike1986, and following the official instructions, which ran great for about week until my phone spontaneously BRICKED THE F*CK OUT COMPLETELY.
(yes, true brick, paperweight, robot-corpse, whatever)
=> Question: IS "RETROACTIVE/RETROGRADE BRICKING POSSIBLE/A "THING"??
If so, what could I have done wrong? (POSSIBLY something to do with a bootimage of firmware that I was sure I had the up to date version of... dunno though).
=========================================================================
About 6 weeks ago:
- Cracked the display of my HTC One X+ badly by dropping it onto concrete-type floor at a rave/party
=> Decided to try and replace it myself, researched for a good while (talking several days here, 90s/00s kids),
=> Decided to replace the display/digitizer unit myself to save money and gain knowledge.
Repair process was challenging and nearly as nerve wracking as playing the WSOP (not kidding, have played it three times), had an issue immediately after putting it back together where it suddenly wouldn't charge AT ALL anymore (NO LED), and overheated, and had unusually fast battery drain of its remaining charge (which never ran out completely before resolving that issue, since I kept turning it off whenever possible).
=> Took it apart and put it together again XX times until realizing the power switch flex cable kept slipping out of its two (jawbone?) connectors during putting it back together (I was doing something wrong with the flex positioning).
=> This resolved the issue.
=> Felt like a hero and that I win at life (since this phone has a rep as being hard to meddle with, and this was my first time even opening, let alone taking apart a smartphone).
=> Continued joyful phone shenanigans for over one month.
=> THEN: Decided to root it, mainly because there was a particular app I wanted that required root ("Quick reply for Whatsapp/Pushbullet", for the curious).
My previous, very limited rooting/flashing experiences =
- Google Nexus One (CWM/Cyanogen) a few times, years ago
- Galaxy Tab 10.1 (CWM/Cyanogen 10.1 ages ago, TWRP/Omnirom Kitkat 4.4.4 recently) a couple times.
So, did my research (or so I thought..?) for this particular custom ROM, decided to go for Android Revolution HD for HTC One X/+ 33.1 by mike 1986 (because it looked fckin awesome, and it was, while it ran) and loved the sh*t out of my "new" phone for about a week. Especially the vastly improved battery life seemed almost surreal, a big deal for a fixed-battery phone.
Then, ONE FATFUL EVENING in a bar, I remember looking at my phone and seeing 35% left, (days before it would've been an amazing 70-80% on an avg. day), which may not be relevant as it was my birthday, so had been using it a lot that day => may be a moot point
- Next time I looked at the phone ( < 1 hour without active use for sure) it was dead.
"Hmmmm," thought slightly drunk me. Whatever, charge it later, weird sh*t happens.
- Got home later, charged it over night after booting it with usb cord attached (mains).
Seemed normal, I even set an alarm.
=> Alarm never rang because it was in a powered-off state again come morning, despite all-night charging.
=> It booted to HTC logo. Seconds later, it turned off again. Held down power again, all I saw was the soft touch buttons flashing red a few times. After this it unexpectedly became (or was secretly crowned):
!! COMPLETE AND UTTER FCKNG KING BRICK OF BRICK COUNTRY AND ATTACHED TERRITORIES !!
No power on with or without volume up/down held for whatever amount of time;
No charging, no heating up when "charging";
No LED in any colour or flashing frequency, ever;
No response after hours and days of charging on different USB cables on PC/wall socket;
PCs and laptops don't register a sign of anything when it penetrates their port parts, etc etc...
...
.Even that semi-mystical bright-light-exposure-while-charging "light sensor manipulation" thing (which apparently worked for a lo of people with similar issues) did nothing for the cause.
Promotion: *Paperweight status successfully acquired.* Yay.
=====================================================
Now, obviously my first thought was that the power flex that gave me trouble during display replacement probably slipped again., somehow (I had taped it down solidly I thought).
=> SO I opened it once again, flex position seemed ok, but I wasn't sure of its functionality as it did look kind of battered from the somewhat unprofessional repair I had conducted on it (which I openly admit to, though I really did try my absolute best).
- Spontaneously took mainboard/battery combo to a local independent phone/accessory shop after being told they'd take a look for free
(I was in there was in there buying a microsim adapter so I could use my ancient Nexus One, since my GF has my old S2 now, which she kindly offered back, but its hers now, so nah. Great phone though.)
=>Shop's advice echoed my thoughts: Flex cable may be screwed, I may have damaged it by bending in the wrong direction/too often, and that damage somehow didn't manifest until much later. I didn't mention the recent rooting + flashing as I deemed it irrelevant at the time.
Their secondary thoughts: Battery or mini-usb port fukt, (which would require soldering, which they don't even offer).
=> SO, feeling confirmed in my layman's assessment, I cheaply got a pristine new replacement flex on ebay, double checked all videos/tutorials, implemented the damn thing with considerably more skill/experience and even higher anticipation. What happened next was shocking:
Absolutely nothing, obv.
=> Did an additional epic f*ckton of internet/forum research, found similar problems and some resolutions, but no real answers, probably because my main problem translates to a kind of hybrid question.
So here I am now am with my core question:
Is it possible to FULLY brick an HTC/any smartphone but not become aware of this until one week later, when the device dies OVER ONE WEEK of reliable and amazing performance?
(and if yes, what aspect/stage of the flashing process is this likely related to?)
If the answer is NO, it must be a hardware fault with probability rank (I think)
:
1.) Battery dead for whatever reason
2.) Mini USB OR mainboard/integral component (equal rank as not sure), possibly caused by incompetent repair, but why or how would this express itself over a month later??
3.) Other, which I'm not aware of.
While researching new ROMS for the N1, I realized that I may have messed up on the "bootimg part" of the flashing process of the Revolution ROM, a part I found v. confusing in the instructions, even after rereading them many, many times. It was about the most recent firmware, which I was pretty sure I had anyway, since it was unrooted before and I do remember installing some firmware updates over the air.
I still did my best to follow the instructions though.
=> Maybe this has something to do with it, i.e. the hardware can't accept a charge because the software allowed it to become too uncharged (a fairly paradox concept to me, but apparently it can happen. Guess it's like a BIOS-type thing).
Thank you for anyone who read this far!
As it stands, I refuse to give up hope so soon after experiencing that rush of having fixed it myself.
Any specific or general help, tips, hints, pointers, replacement phones (One M8 or S5 plz., Iphones will go straight on ebay) would and will be greatly appreciated!!
The obvious choice is to get a new battery and see what happens, but I'm not sure if I wanna sink any more money into this phone, only to later find out the mainboard is at fault (not worth the money replacing), AKA "get a new phone without a contract", which would more than suck for me financially atm (Im ignoring my N1 here, which I love, but don't wanna be stuck with, esp. as it has the standard-issue broken power button (which I actually had repaired once under warranty, back in the ol' days of yore some prefer to refer to as 2009.
So guys: What's my move, if there is one, besides going to a local/online service centre (I live in Germany btw.) and probably paying unproportionate cash money to even have it looked at?
Cheers, thanks, merci, danke
PS: Just saw the polling function, so I attached one just for the hell of it, to see what happens (never used one before).
If you feel both qualified AND so inclined as to pass judgement on this here serious business, please indicate what you think may be the cause of my issue.

*BUMP 1*
Come on guys, I know it's a wall of text, but can't someone at least answer the TL;DR?
=> Is is possible to flash a custom rom which then (possibly because of improper installation) causes the phone to brick about a week later?
Simple question surely!

How could this person be locating my devices?

I'm sure I'll get some haters, who think I am simply nuts but this is a REAL problem that I've got to solve.
For the last 6 years I've had a mysterious stalker and hacker, who renders most of my and my family's devices nonfunctional and breaks into my accounts and generally makes my life much harder. It has recently come to light that it isn't a hacker SINGULAR but at least 3 guys, hellbent on destroying me: my daughter's father, her uncle, who is a military hacker and their friend, who managed to ingratiate himself with me, until my daughter's father confessed, when I confronted him with evidence against him and his brother, saying he didn't mean for it to get this out of hand. Well, thanks for the heads up but it's a little late, because it IS this out of hand and the wheels of justice grind slowly.
Meanwhile, I am still hacked, even worse now, because his brother got out of the military and moved back to town and has a lot more time and access now. Calls and texts are being intercepted so frequently, that I now use Google Voice/Hangouts to communicate, knowing that nothing I say is ever private but at least people get my messages and I get their calls that way.
I'm looking for a job and I need a device that he won't be able to spy on, so I went to Best Buy and purchased a phone card and moderately priced android phone and took it home to resume my job hunt. I planned never to call any of my usual contacts with the phone but just use it for work stuff. Within hours, it was acting buggy and when I restarted it, it did not go to the regular black screen that says "your device is encrypted for security" but showed my regular background and said "please enter your password when starting android". On my note 8 and 9, that would often happen and when I went to security options, secure startup would be disabled. I checked and secure startup was still supposedly enabled. In ADB "adb shell getprop ro.crypto.state" returned "unencrypted".
I returned the phone and purchased a Google Pixel, hoping their physical security device MIGHT be more effective than Knox at protecting me from this guy. I purchased a brand new sim card and spent another 50 bucks on a phone card, from a different company.
Since my daughter's father has moved within a half-mile of me (despite having no contact with her and very little with me) 4 times now, I speculated that he was, perhaps, using a directional yagi antenna to scan my area for new device beacons and then (skip forward a few steps) find out what apps are installed on those devices, to determine if they are mine. With that in mind, I never even turned the Pixel on at my house.
That night, I took the phone to a random emergency room with secure wifi, to which I know the password and proceeded to set it up. I made a new google account, as usual and installed a bunch of random apps, such as black dating apps (since I am white, I figured that, if my theory was right, it might throw them off my scent) and games I would never play and apps for banks of which I am not a member. By the first time I restarted the phone, still at the emergency room, it had the exact same problem. It purported to be encrypted but (adb later verified) it was not. Apparently, the cheap phone faired slightly better than the pixel, in this department, because the first one was reencrypted upon reset, while the Pixel was not. I never activated or inserted a sim card in the pixel and while I had my regular phone and tablet along with me, they were powered off, in the car.
I was pretty sure, after the first phone was compromised, that I was onto something with my beacon frame theory but it would not explain what happened at the emergency room, unless there is a tracking device in my car, which IS likely, because I continually find my car torn up in all sorts of ways. They even broke off the panel on the driver's door with lock and window switches and the lid of my center console and I continually find the carpet pulled away from the trim. Then again, they also put something caustic in the wiper fluid tank, which destroyed both tank and windshield, so it could also have all been done simply out of malice.
Having no better ideas, I ran a bug detector over my car and found that there IS a radio signal being emitted from somewhere around the gearshift or cd player. I took apart the area around the gearshift and found nothing. In that department, the only remaining possibility is that they've actually put something inside of the cd player itself, the screen of which quit working a while back. I have the ribbon cable to fix it, so maybe I'll get lucky when I crack it open in a bit. The signal DOES appear strongest at the CD player but it could be anything, even catalytic converters can emit radio signals.
Assuming my bug theory is wrong, does anyone have any other idea of how these guys could have discovered and hacked those phones? I've got to find a way to evade these people or I'll never have anything like a normal life, until they're finally in jail.

Wow!
I have not heard of such hacks, even when it comes to national security.
What is the motive of these three people ?

I have no clue but with there skill in not sure an iphone would fare much better

Keyboard issue on brand new and warranty replacement - long time returning user

Hi. I'm not your typical noob person, I simply haven't had an issue I couldn't find a solution for that required me to come to XDA in a very very long time.
Long story short, I got the Galaxy S8+ 5G tablet brand new from T-Mobile in less than a week.. immediately noticed issues with swiping/glide on both Samsung and Gboard keyboards(Gboard is my STRONG preference for a long time now)
This is brand new out of the box, before a screen protector was added or any apps installed. Still did all the standard trouble shooting - installed update, no dice. Force closed each keyboard, wiped cache and data on each keyboard, tried turning sensitivity off and on and.. no dice. Restarted into boot mode and wiped cache.. most of these things not really something that should apply to a brand new out of the box tablet except update and factory reset - both of which I did, neither of which, nor anything else has helped.
I even added a tempered glass screen protector thinking it's TOO sensitive, and even after that, and again trying to toggle sensitivity setting in the settings.. still just will not swipe.
I type this currently on my Samsung Galaxy S20 FE5G absolutely flawlessly. I can type without looking at the phone at all and type near perfect accuracy with just the occasional need to choose a different word in the suggestion bar.. that is using Gboard "glide". The tablet using Gboard bloating mode is almost an identical match to the size of this keyboard and would make it a nearly *perfect* way of typing just as quickly and accurately on the new tablet.. I understand that some of the accuracy comes from use of the keyboard and locally stored into but.. the tablet types gibberish half the time. If I push FAR harder than I should have to while gliding, a few words may work.
Called T-Mobile Saturday, had a warranty replacement sent(God I didn't want a refurbished device) because the only natural conclusion I could come up with is the digitizer has an issue, maybe during shipping.. etc. I don't know..
Got it last night, booted it up, this time I made them include a "invisible shield glass fusion+" screen protector which went on flawlessly and should have no effect on typing at all.. and it's got the same EXACT issue. Maybe a HAIR better, but still completely unusable in my opinion.
I want this for work, the tablet and this phone and a 4k Chromecast, with features like dex, second screen, etc.. there's just about no scenario I can think of where this WON'T be beneficial in any support scenario..
T-Mobile already wants to give me the tablet for free, I've had so many issues with them for so long they switched me to a "business select" package only certain managers can apply, and I get unlimited everything for each device at $25 per device.. forever. No matter how many.
No discounts for auto pay or mass numbers or.. just a flat number that beats the company I was going to switch to when I unlocked my phone 12 days ago.
But I've been a customer customer for 8 years and a T-MOBILE customer since before the first iPhone smartphone was released.. even a few years before that when the best phone you could get had a slide out keyboard and basic touch functions..
So they are supposed to be calling me within the hour, I expected to see numerous threads or posts about this issue, because clearly it isn't ME..
I find some other links I've tried fixes from like:
Strange Gboard bug temporarily breaks glide typing, here's how to fix it [Update]
Over the past 24 hours or so, users have started noting a strange issue with Google’s Gboard keyboard on Android,...
9to5google.com
And see this post of Galaxy phones describing exactly the same issue
https://www.reddit.com/r/GalaxyS22/comments/u8y4cz
and describing it happening with a specific update..
I've got 2 devices, the first is brand new and factory reset as of last night, has a glass screen protector, and the refurbished one in front of me with the same issue.. I've restored data so I can continue using it, but tried all the SAME fixes and nothing.. and T-Mobile is calling in 45 minutes or so.
Obviously I'd like to keep the brand new device rather than the refurbished one- but IS THERE A FIX, or anything I can do with them on the phone.. I got a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse and aftermarket case.. I can type using the keyboard obviously, but I typically can type WAY faster with Gboard the way I am on my phone right now..
I tried doing searches on XDA but it seems like their search functionality has changed for the worse in the years I haven't been here.. that or I can't find the advanced search and forum search I KNOW I used to use daily.. not in the app, the mobile page, or desktop version.
And because it isn't worth it's own post I'll ask one more question -originally I had them send me a Galaxy tab 7 FE 5G becauseb the S20 I'm using still works so well and it was only $100 if I added the line.. and it's just an oversized worse version of my phone.(but don't recall it having this issue now that I think about it) Which is why I'm here now with this tablet..
The problem created by that is I can't tell the pen for that tablet and the new one apart, and here https://m.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone1=11342&idPhone2=10922# it is showing the new one has less latency, Bluetooth, etc..
Part of the reason they are calling this morning is they were like "oh, just keep the Galaxy tab 7 for free, on us"
Me: "I don't want that oversized garbage, that's why I'm ordering the 8+!"
T-Mobile guy: "Oh, well then return the 7 and you can have the 8+ on us!"
Then I've been trying to get a shipping label for 11 days now, only to find out that he never put in the system that I wanted to return the device and he already voided out the equipment plan for it.. meaning I'm stuck with a tablet I don't even want- and can't tell which s-pen is supposed to be the better pen!
I mean, the chance I'll lose one is so high I won't return the pen and keep it as a backup.. but.. I'd still like to know how to tell the difference, when I attach either one it connects with no issue and I can't find anywhere that shows the pen type connected!
I'm so sorry this is so long, but like I said.. I normally do not need to come here and get my issues resolved myself, it's what I do for work.. and I haven't needed to root/rom a device in so long that I just kinda.. stopped.
(But I'm not going to lie, I got super excited when I came here and there seems to be the option to root/ROM and that it seems like a well supported device in that way! I've kind of dreaded KNOX because previously I never could.. but I'll look into that later once I fix my CURRENT issues..!)
Best I can do as far as pic of S-Pens https://photos.app.goo.gl/pfqKMiiG49L21gx7A