alt Hacker News> Japan has a camera shutter noise that cannot be disabled but this was a request by their carriers, apparently not a law
In some countries, regulation works in a way that the economy gets a chance to fix issues before the legislative needs to intervene. And with the Japanese and their massive issues with rampant sexual abuse... I get where that one came from, in addition to the two major phone brands not wanting to be associated with sexual abuse (which the last comment of the thread also references).
And personally, I do believe that this is the better way when forced with widespread ignorance of difficult to enforce laws - target the "accomplices" or "toolmakers".
I'm not making a judgement on it either way. These are things that are available to change in source. I'm just pointing it out, since others aren't aware of how things can be done.
But there are things locked out in the US I cannot get to. One of the things I've wanted to do for some years is turn on BeiDou reception, but it has a firmware geofence while inside CONUS. For Qualcomm devices there's no way that I've been able to find a way around this, it's not an opensource component. Just to preempt anyone saying it's because it's Chinese spywhere, Qualcomm/Tomtom engineers don't feel receive-only reception is a security risk (there's a report somewhere where military said the same, it's strictly a political prohibition): https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Research/Staff%20Re...