From Arter himself:
I already see couple of people reporting that they bricked their device from the "leak" Telegram group.
I assume many more accounting that some won't have a secondary device to use Telegram.
I don't know what to say to those using the leaked kernel other than that you played yourself.
While I never anticipated that this would actually happen, I did post a warning.
This "leaker" deliberately modified my kernel to brick the device.
With the attached screenshots, right one is the leaked kernel and the left is the one I released to my private Telegram group.
First screenshot:
The versioning string is different. My release tells you which exact Git HEAD commit was at the time of building. The "r20b6+" means that it's been built without CONFIG_LOCALVERSION_AUTO set.
Also, my build server's host name is "arter97-dgist". The leaked one is "arter97_dgist".
Second screenshot:
The highlighted part is the address of where execprog's data is located. It's different, which means that it's likely that the leaked one is built from source and not a binary modification.
The r20b6 includes some touch panel optimizations and removes the "[FTS][Error][IIC]: i2c_transfer" string in one of its commits. The leaked one still has that, which means it's not even r20b6.
Third screenshot:
The "leaker" actually wanted to brick devices. They injected a piece of code to execprog to wipe all internal UFS storage(including the bootloader) on January 29th 00:00 UTC time.
Forth/fifth screenshot:
Meanwhile, the admin there seems to be fine with it and says it's from a "trusted source" and keeps on posting Wolf of Wall Street memes with no context.
I hope this can be a wake up call to everyone: Always download stuffs from trusted and reliable sources.
Poco telegram channel statement:
On behalf of poco updates channel, this is a caution I make.
Since the past week or so, there have been people spamming a link to a channel with all the Arter97 leaks in the official group.
Though we do not support Arter97 making his kernel builds for poco in specific private, we do not endorse people leaking a developer's private work without permission in any means, it's not only unethical but very disrespectful.
It has come to notice today that the Arter97 kernel leaker has modified the build to clean UFS and bootloader partition, which basically bricks devices and makes them potentially permanently unusable. Many users have got their devices bricked already.
Always verify the source before flashing anything, stay safe.
TLDR; If you see any "Arter97 kernel leaked build", do not flash it.
@strongst sir please take care of this. Many users are repeatedly releasing the leaked kernel here specially @hbuilder
