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posted by martyb on Wednesday November 01 2017, @05:46AM   Printer-friendly
from the praise-me-for-fixing-what-i-broke dept.

news.bitcoin.com reports on a Samsung Initiative to repurpose older Samsung Galaxy devices rather than trash recycle them. From the article:

Samsung's new 'upcycling' initiative has seen the company repurpose outdated technology for novel and creative utilities, including the construction of a bitcoin mining rig from out of old smartphones. The 'Upcycling' Program Has Seen the Company Turn 40 Used Galaxy S5s Into a Bitcoin Mining Rig

[...] Samsung has reportedly claimed that eight Samsung Galaxy S5s can mine with superior energy efficiency compared to a standard desktop computer.

Of course in this age, GPU rigs are not even effective bitcoin miners, so beating a 'standard desktop' is complete nonsense. However, the later article has some actually interesting information:

Kyle Wiens, chief executive officer of iFixit – a company that is involved in repairing Galaxy S3s for Samsung's initiative – has given generous praise to the upcycling program. Wiens stated "what [Samsung] built is a layer between the hardware and you being able to install anything you want on it. It's a step lower than jailbreaking, it's removing Android entirely." Wiens describes the initiative... "the challenge with keeping old electronics running a long time is software," adding that "with phones in particular, the old software is insecure and doesn't run the new apps. So the question is, if you have this perfectly functional piece of hardware that doesn't have good software anymore and you want to keep it running for ten years, how do you do that?"

It is almost like this initiative would not even been needed if the hardware was not cryptographically locked down from running the owner's software of choice in the first place. At least there is this bit of relief:

The company has pledged to make plans for the showcased projects freely available online, in addition to the software that allowed Samsung's Creative Lab to unlock and repurpose old phones.

Anyone ready to place bets on whether the 'unlocking software' will be freely available or require onerous EULA acceptance?

Link to the Initiative: https://galaxyupcycling.github.io/


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  • (Score: 2) by Ramze on Wednesday November 01 2017, @11:32AM (1 child)

    by Ramze (6029) on Wednesday November 01 2017, @11:32AM (#590495)

    This is great and all, but... We're talking about a hardware manufacturer creating a way for their older, unsupported, insecure phones to be useful again. They MADE the phones and used an open-source OS to run them. Unless Android has evolved to the point where they can't back-port the OS to work on their older phones, then they are the cause of this problem to begin with. I could understand if the process were like trying to load windows 10 on a 486 box, but something tells me even the latest Android Oreo developer edition would likely run just fine on these devices with relatively few tweaks if any. It's not like they can't find drivers and recompile for the chipset.

    Oh, they meant something else for the end-user to use the phone for OTHER than as a phone... b/c they want you to buy a new expensive phone instead of making the old ones just work again.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 01 2017, @04:01PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 01 2017, @04:01PM (#590611)

    As long as the device is off the second hand market, anything is fine. Smash it with a rock or drink it or...

    Just keep buying, that'll save the world.