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Let me put it another way. Forget hardware for a moment. The purchaser of these counterfeit Blackphones thought they were buying a software license for Silent O
by sjwright 10y ago
Let me put it another way. Forget hardware for a moment. The purchaser of these counterfeit Blackphones thought they were buying a software license for Silent OS. In reality it is pirated software. And not just garden variety downloaded-with-bittorrent-for-free piracy but rather software piracy as a profitable business model.
Silent Circle doesn't owe these consumers anything and are well within their rights to have all of their software completely self-destruct. They don't owe these consumers a robust mechanism to install an AOSP distro. They don't owe these consumers a bootable device. They don't owe these consumers a discount on a genuine device.
The only correct resolution is for the scam victims to receive a refund from the seller.
- trome 10y agoWhoa whoa whoa, Silent OS is based on Android, incorporating many GPLv2 and other FLOSS software. They may have done some minor hardening & UI changes, but beyond that the value of Silent OS is the apps they have built for calling & texting securely. I could see stopping service on those apps, but bricking the baseband is a step too far, as you lose 911 access and Silent Circle almost certainly had no part in the baseband firmware development and is not a rightsholder to it.
- sjwright 10y agoLet's suppose one of the proprietary software components is a special secure bootloader. If Silent Circle disabled that one component, as they would be rightfully allowed to do, the phone is a brick. I should also point out the claim that the baseband was intentionally bricked is unsubstantiated. We don't know if that's actually happening. Or if it's happening, we don't know if it's intentional. The percentage of proprietary software on the phone — be it five percent or fifty — is orthogonal to the point.