killswitch-indicator

Shows an icon in the phosh status bar while one of the FuriPhone FLX1's hardware switches is engaged.

Without it there is nothing on screen to tell you: FuriOS creates no rfkill device for these switches, so the bar goes on showing the signal strength of a modem that is no longer there.

It comes in two halves, and they are installed in different places:

• the icons — a phosh status-icon plugin (phosh-plugin/). They sit in phosh's own indicator box, at its left end, so the box lays them out with everything else in it and nothing can overlap. They were a layer-shell strip of our own once, and a strip can only pin them a fixed distance from an edge: it cannot see how wide the indicators are at that moment, so anything that appeared beside them ended up underneath.
• the daemon — what a widget in the shell's process has no business doing: taking Wi-Fi or Bluetooth down with the network switch and bringing them back, saying in the journal when a switch moved, and answering status for the app.

Switch	Icon	What it means
Camera	crossed-out camera	the camera HAL is stopped
Cellular	crossed-out signal bars	the radio interface is stopped
Microphone	none	the state cannot be read — see below

The microphone switch is the only one of the three that physically cuts the line, and that is exactly why software cannot see it. This program does not guess at it: telling would mean opening the microphone — the one thing the switch exists to prevent — and the answer would only hold for those few seconds. For that switch, the slider on the case is the display.

If you do want a reading, take one by hand with killswitch-indicator mic-check.

Install

./install.sh        # without sudo

Builds the plugin, puts it where phosh looks for plugins, and installs the daemon into ~/.local/bin with a systemd user unit - and switches nothing on. Turn it on in the app, or with

killswitch-indicator icons on
systemctl --user enable --now killswitch-indicator.service

Remove both again with ./uninstall.sh. It puts the phone back to what it had before - recorded then, not guessed now; see below.

The icons appear after the next reboot. phosh scans its plugin directory once, when it starts, and its unit refuses to be restarted on its own — stopping the shell by hand takes the whole session with it. Switching them off again, on the other hand, works immediately: the shell follows the setting while it runs.

The one step that needs root is the plugin: phosh takes its plugin directory from a compile-time constant, so there is no place in the home the shell would look in. The daemon needs none — it reads two sysfs attributes and nothing else.

Usage

killswitch-indicator status          switch positions, no display needed
killswitch-indicator status --json   the same for the app
killswitch-indicator cameras         which cameras the switch affects
killswitch-indicator mic-check       measure the microphone once, by hand
killswitch-indicator run -v          follow the switches, log every change

systemctl --user status killswitch-indicator
journalctl --user -u killswitch-indicator -f

The cellular switch only powers down the modem; Wi-Fi and Bluetooth keep running. You can have either of them switched off along with it, and back on when the switch is released:

killswitch-indicator config                 show the current setting
killswitch-indicator config wifi on         take Wi-Fi down as well
killswitch-indicator config bluetooth off   leave Bluetooth alone

Both are off by default, and only what this program switched off is ever switched back on.

The Switches tab in the misc-de app shows all three switches and offers the same settings.

What was there before

Everything this project changes is written down before the first change, in

~/.local/state/furios-killswitch/original.json     (${XDG_STATE_HOME}/furios-killswitch)

• at the first install.sh, before it writes anything: every path it and the daemon write — the plugin in phosh's plugin directory, the program in ~/.local/bin, the unit and its enable link, the docs, the config directory ~/.config/furios-killswitch — whether it was there, and which directories above them were missing;
• when the icons are switched on for the first time (by killswitch-indicator icons on or the app's switch, which calls it): phosh's plugin list mobi.phosh.shell.plugins status-icons — whether it had a value in dconf at all, and which. "No value" and "the default written as a value" read the same through gsettings get, but only the first follows a later phosh's default.

Each part is taken once: a reinstall, or switching the icons off and on again, keeps it. uninstall.sh goes back to it: the list to no value when it had none (gsettings reset) and to exactly its value when it had one — even when that equals the default; only the directories that were missing are taken out again, and only while empty. If the list was changed since the icons were switched on, only our entry comes out, and that is said. Without a record (installed by a version that kept none) it does what it always did — compare the list with phosh's default — and says that this is a guess. killswitch-indicator original status shows the record.

The radios the network switch took down have their own record, as before: state.json lists the ones this program switched off, and only those are switched back on.

Tests

./tests/run-tests.sh        # never with sudo

Runs without a display, except for the plugin's own suite — that one builds the plugin, loads it the way phosh does and moves the switches under it, and skips itself when there is no display or no phosh-dev. Switch positions come from a test directory, via FURIOS_KILLSWITCH_BASE on both sides.

Licence

MIT — see LICENSE and NOTICE for what this builds on. How it works, and why the microphone switch is left alone, are in FINDINGS.md.