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Reading about this, I wonder if there is a market for legitimate secure phones, i.e. not marketed towards criminals. Businesses are afraid of industrial espiona
by captainmuon 6y ago
Reading about this, I wonder if there is a market for legitimate secure phones, i.e. not marketed towards criminals. Businesses are afraid of industrial espionage. Political activists are afraid of persecution (and yes, it can also happen in the west, even if you are doing "good" things and are non-violent).
The defenses in both cases can be quite different. For some people, a cheap Chromebook that you can wipe quickly plus 2FA gives great security, or using a modern (encrypted) phone with Signal. But what if you are, say, protesting against the construction of a new Google campus on top of your neighborhood? Then you'd don't want all your secret stuff on their infrastructure. Normally you assume everybody is playing fair, but it would be so easy for them to push out a malicious update to your phone to gather dirt on you.
If one has experience with AOSP and security, there seems to be a market for an open, secure phone. But I wonder how you'd keep the organized crime out, or at least keep plausible deniability to not get into trouble...
- yrgulation 6y agoI dont even need a legitimate secure phone. All i want is a phone where i can install debian or any linux flavour, just like on a regular pc or a raspberry pi. There are too few options that allow for it and are quite low spec. Once we gain such freedom then we can get the security we want the way we want - not security as defined and controlled by a third party.
- ttt0 6y agoThat'd definitely be an improvement, but you still have backdoors on your CPU brought to you by Intel(tm).
- mPReDiToR 6y agoThe only closed (and staying closed) part of the PinePhone is the FCC regulated part of the modem. If someone wanted to make a modem with no binary blobs we could have fully Open hardware in toto. There's the opportunity to make Linux programs scalable to small screens right now; that's a big part of the dev time currently.
- tartoran 6y agoThe pinephone looks very promising though softwarewise is not there yet, it keeps on inproving quickly.
- doggodaddo78 6y agohttps://www.silentcircle.com/looking-for-blackphone/ https://www.silentcircle.com/looking-for-blackphone/ https://www.encrypted-os.com/ https://www.encrypted-os.com/
- nix23 6y agoThe logo of encrypted-os is...unfortunate...my eye read instantly "pedos" in it.
- doggodaddo78 6y agoHow's that? It looks like a fingerprint mixed with wires and a circuitboard to me.
- jfhrnrkfkf 6y agoAny truly secure phone will attract criminals which in turn will attract law enforcement scrutiny. It's like building a private house with barbed wire, armed guards, ... people will wonder what's going on inside. Today, the only way to make it as a criminal in the West is to fly under the radar. Stuff like "the Amazon of drugs", or "the WhatsApp for criminals" will always be taken down.
- EliasWatson 6y agoIf you want to stick to Android, this is the best option: https://grapheneos.org https://grapheneos.org If you want secure hardware, it's basically impossible. All cellular modems are backdoored: https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/malware-mobiles.en.html https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/malware-mobiles.en.html