Comment by throwaway55717
1 year ago
Due to an incarcerated family member, I had to deal with privately run prison telecom software, which was as awful and exploitative as you would expect, I could see where someone might feel guilty for working in this area. Evil business model.
But one of the worst things about the software was all the bugs. Silent failures so we couldn't tell what was happening, if it was a software problem or if our loved one was being prevented from communicating with us. The messaging and video call system failed us at some crucial moments and created a lot of emotional stress.
In fact I think this is part of the awful business model -- cut costs even if it hurts people.
Bad software can really make the lives of incarcerated people much worse. So if you were able to do a decent job on that software, whether it was prison telecom or internal tools for a prison contractor, you may have still had a more positive impact than you think, despite the broader business model being totally evil.
I was involved in the internal reporting. The clincher was when I saw the P&L for the internal sales of "luxury" items. Literally selling to a captive customer base.
It's weird that such a data point was the final straw, but eventually these small details build up and the whole edifice comes crashing down.
It's especially tragic as the company seemed to be full of talented, intelligent and nice people. Such seems to be the typical makeup of faceless evil.
The software on those "Temu" quality Android tablets they sell in prison is the worst I've ever encountered. And I've never seen an update of any note in the years they have been running them. If there is even a dev anywhere that could fix a bug and deploy it...
Anyone know the best way to pull an image off a locked-down Android tablet? I have a prison tablet here and I want to see what is inside the APKs.
adb pull com.whatever will get you the apks which I think you don't need root for, but there isn't a way to just dd the whole image off, afaik.
Sadly I can't get into the settings. It boots into a custom menu, which might just be an app running over the default shell. I also can't get it into recovery mode. I need to do more digging.