7 ms·

The Making of the Kosher Phone (2014)

47 points by grlass 5y ago

avipars 5y ago
There are plenty of ultra-orthodox people with smartphones and then there are those with no phones at all... They have a severe lack of information which brings them to rely upon their leaders (rabbis) for every single piece of advice, even not pertaining to their religious needs directly.
- names_are_hard 5y ago
  Ultra-orthodox people (I hate that term, in Israel they self identify as Haredi) are not a monolith. There are many communities with different standards, and there is a spectrum of behavior within most of those communities. There are things they all agree on, smartphone use is not one is them.
grlass 5y ago
It gets me thinking about community agency in technology. Large scale consumer technology has a lot of central planning in it, by nature of how specialised the skills required to produce many aspects of it are. But central planning has its tail risks and other downsides as history attests. I'm curious about how communities can be better empowered to make these choices for themselves, be it how moderation is done on social media, or what features are prioritised in consumer electronics.
- dotancohen 5y ago
  I'm interested in a reduced feature phone for myself, strictly to reduce pressure from every bank, pharmacy, clothing store, and supermarket to install their apps. So long as it runs Ankidroid and syncs via CardDav, I'd like a phone with as few features as possible. The problem is that _my_ two important features are different from _your_ two important features. Almost by definition, no reduced feature phone would be fit for a large audience, unless that large audience has a single common denominator. Like with this Kosher Phone and it's religious target demographic.
  - grlass 5y ago
    Toffler's book Future Shock has some interesting discussion about advanced production techniques allowing high degrees of bespoke customisation with very little additional costs beyond a generic production line. We're still a long way from there RE smartphones, though projects like the PinePhone with hardware switches for things like microphone, camera, WiFi etc, along with a less locked down OS perhaps show a path to achieving this.
ykevinator3 5y ago
It amazes me how people can compartmentalize their rational brain and their romantic brain and never let the two speak to each other. How can you believe so hard in the supernatural that you feel the need to make a kosher phone, but still be smart enough do it?
- names_are_hard 5y ago
  Indeed, but this is not unique to religious people. I've been deeply religious and I've been very secular, and one of the things I've learned is that smart people can believe incredibly dumb things. The real hard question we each need to answer is to determine which really dumb things we believe despite our intelligence. PS Isaac Newton spent a large portion of his life on alchemy and the hidden mysterious of the Bible. We all have blind spots, we just don't know they're there.
- TheFreim 5y ago
  Faith and reason are not contradictory.
  - gnadsucks 5y ago
    Believing in the tooth fairy and reason are not contradictory.
- gowld 5y ago
  You're asking why super smart people can go over the top in pursuing nerdy hobbies?
- xyzelement 5y ago
  Is it a romantic brain or highly rational? Secular society is battling many problems (tech addiction, isolation, burnout, collapse of community etc) which religious society is protected from because of these superficially backwards practices. As we watch our society grapple with issues that the religious community doesn't suffer from, won't at some point it make sense to question whether we are the rational ones? To make this point another way, the more people on HN learn about the issues of tech addiction, lack of privacy etc, the more their technological preference "converges" to what you are currently making fun of.
mikeytown2 5y ago
A simple phone is still strangely appealing to me.
- TheFreim 5y ago
  I think there is something in minimalism that is abundantly attractive. To stick with the religious subject, I wonder how the human attraction to simple elegance relates to the concept of divine simplicity. Very interesting stuff.
dsr_ 5y ago
I'd like to point out that: - the term kosher applies directly to food, not technology; this is a metaphor - the insularity of a particular subgroup of Jews should not be considered to apply to all the rest of us. Even for most Orthodox Jews, turning off your phone Friday evening and turning it back on Saturday evening is a perfectly cromulent option.
- gowld 5y ago
  It's a shomer phone.
- shenberg 5y ago
  In Israel these phones are referred to as "פלאפון כשר" [1] which most definitely means Kosher Phone, so the name is apt despite the lack of religious rigor. It's definitely aimed at the ultra-orthodox communities. [1] Pashkevil from an ultra-orthodox community warning people off the internet and not to use non-kosher phones: https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%90%D7%99%D7%A0%D7%98%D7%A8%D7%A0%D7%98_%D7%9B%D7%A9%D7%A8#/media/%D7%A7%D7%95%D7%91%D7%A5:%D7%A4%D7%A9%D7%A7%D7%95%D7%95%D7%99%D7%9C_002.jpg https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%90%D7%99%D7%A0%D7%98%D7%A8...
  - names_are_hard 5y ago
    As someone who grew up Haredi enough that my first cell phone was a so called "kosher phone" but not haredi enough that I would take that pashkevil seriously... who comes up with this stuff? Like... cell phones cause cancer? I thought everyone knew that was women's elbows?? I guess both can cause cancer, but only one can be "enemy #1"
- dotancohen 5y ago
  > the term kosher applies directly to food, not > technology; this is a metaphor Kosher means "fit for purpose" and is often used for items other than food. For one example, during the Sukot holiday it is customary to erect and eat in tents. Due to shody construction and safety issues, not to mention adherence to biblical prescription of certain tent features, there exist "kosher" tents which one can buy and know that it is fit for purpose. Source: דובר עברית
gnadsucks 5y ago
You forgot the last three bullet points: Enslaves palestinians Collects welfare checks for your 15 children Lets you sit around reading the talmud, paid for at the expensive of responsible tax payers 90% of ultra orthodox jews have their entire lives paid for by taxpayers. The true welfare queens of our world
- xyzelement 5y ago
  This may be lost on you but perhaps can be clear to others. You woke up on a Saturday morning, made a new account, just to post an anti religious/anti Jewish comment. What's your life/set of priorities/spiritual balance like?
  - rrrazdan 5y ago
    OP seems to be himself an Israeli and presumably a Jew. I did not read his post as being anti-Jewish or anti-religion in anyway.
    - giggly_gopher 5y ago
      Context is important. Imagine someone randomly starts talking to the one black man sitting in an Omaha airport about violent crime
    - gambiting 5y ago
      Same - I don't see that post as being anti-Jewish in the slightest.
    - gnadsucks 5y ago
      My mother is Israeli. I’m an atheist in New York pissed off at how many of “my people” live off the welfare while the rest of us bust asses to put a roof over our head. The haredim live fat off of our taxes and put targets on our backs. They literally have jack booted thugs, “private security” walking around new york keeping non-haredim out of their enclaves. Wherever you are, if an orthodox jew has a dollar or a scheckel to spend, 9/10 times it came from public assistance. These “kosher” phones designed to help haredim hide from the outside world are paid for by your tax dollars.
fouc 5y ago
> A Kosher phone would be an adapted feature phone to the “special” needs of a certain community of the Ultra Orthodox Jews. The community in target asked for a phone that is more dumb than the dumb phone, a phone that suffers from complete retardation. The general idea is that they don’t want to be open to the outside world in any way, but they still want a means to communicate between themselves without breaking the strict boundaries they made. An interesting challenge. I imagine the market is large enough to support such a device.
helge9210 5y ago
> No one forces this phone on them If by "them" you mean religious community as a whole, this statement is true. If by "them" you mean actual users, this statement is a lie This kind of devices are forced on users by community leaders as a method of limiting access to independent information.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- lozenge 5y ago
  If the (admittedly dramatised) TV shows are to be believed, half of them also have non-kosher phones on the sly. Religion is part pretence. (edit: word)
  - TheFreim 5y ago
    > Religion is part performance Yeah...? Religious people want to build a society which fit there view of how things should be, of course they "perform" actions which reinforce it. Literally everybody, every single person, does this.
  - neartheplain 5y ago
    "Shtisel", my favorite show of this genre, just released its third season on Netflix. Seems like every ultra-Orthodox character in the show had a flip phone. I didn't get the impression that the phones were prohibited, though. Either way, great show that I highly recommend.
- lornaGal 5y ago
  Indeed, forced through indoctrination at young age. Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted. --Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Give us a child till he’s 7 and we’ll have him for life. -- St. Ignatius / Jesuit saying. He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future. - ...
xan92 5y ago
I will only buy if it comes with Pegasus pre-installed, that's Kosher for me.
throwawaykosher 5y ago
There's a need for services that get around this kind of censorship in the same way we have VPNs for state censorship. But the challenges are very different, obviously. I remember helping a family member still in the community, but after I had left, using an email-as-the-browser service to get around the kosher phone some time back (not sure if this is still possible with the current kosher phone version). I realized something like that must exist so I found https://www.labnol.org/internet/receive-web-pages-by-email/18117/ https://www.labnol.org/internet/receive-web-pages-by-email/1... for them. But that service doesn't seem to work anymore. A different family member works on the opposite side, people call him to whitelist websites from their kosher filtering software so they can visit it. He has to check it out and then allows it if it is ok. But having these filters is a requirement for having a PC.
ai_ja_nai 5y ago
Why not just a stripped down custom Android image?
- AssafNativ 5y ago
  We needed a phone that is in mass production and very cheap. Nokia was a good brand and a good manufacture at the time (Around 2012).
- twic 5y ago
  They could call it Golem.
throwaythiesit2 5y ago
I will never understand the thinking of people who believe in an omnipotent god that can be tricked
- NortySpock 5y ago
  It's not tricking, it's rules-lawyering.
- twic 5y ago
  I'm not Jewish, or any sort of expert on Judaism, but I understand that Judaism has a very different conception of the relationship of man, god, and law than Christianity. The Christian god wants people to behave in a certain way, and has made laws accordingly. Following the letter of the law but not the spirit is defying god, and is bad. The Jewish god has made laws as a test of faith. Following the letter of the law but not the spirit is creative, and is fine. After all, "it is not in heaven": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oven_of_Akhnai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oven_of_Akhnai
- names_are_hard 5y ago
  There's an interesting conversation to be had about different conceptions of God and the reasons for religious law and whether loopholes in the law should be exploited or not, which would be relevant if this was an article about eruv or prozbol or selling land during the shmitta year. But I fail to see how this is relevant to kosher phones. How is God being tricked? The claim is that God desires purity, which is damaged by unfiltered exposure to the outside world, and so adherents who want cell phones must purchase models that will not give them easy access to temptation. It's a pretty reasonable position if you accept the initial premise. It's like not buying heroin because you know it's harmful.
names_are_hard 5y ago
It was a bunch of years ago, but my first cell phone was a "kosher phone". A feature phone with no camera, no sms, no internet. It had the word "מאושר" (approved) engraved on it. AMA
amself 5y ago
it's arguably much easier (nowadays) to use an off-the-shelf app like TimeLimit[0] to achieve the same kind of functionality on smartphones, without ever having to flash custom firmware using undocumented/unsupported techniques. Granted, back in <=2014 this probably made more sense. [0]: https://timelimit.io/en/ https://timelimit.io/en/
- SonOfLilit 5y ago
  The functionality the customer asked for is not having access to the Internet. TimeLimit won't cut it.
compsciphd 5y ago
as an aside, why do all the jewish religion topics always get posted on the sabbath when most readers of HN who live the life related aren't around to reply?

47 points by grlass 5y ago

There are plenty of ultra-orthodox people with smartphones and then there are those with no phones at all... They have a severe lack of information which brings them to rely upon their leaders (rabbis) for every single piece of advice, even not pertaining to their religious needs directly.

names_are_hard 5y ago
Ultra-orthodox people (I hate that term, in Israel they self identify as Haredi) are not a monolith. There are many communities with different standards, and there is a spectrum of behavior within most of those communities. There are things they all agree on, smartphone use is not one is them.

grlass 5y ago

It gets me thinking about community agency in technology. Large scale consumer technology has a lot of central planning in it, by nature of how specialised the skills required to produce many aspects of it are. But central planning has its tail risks and other downsides as history attests. I'm curious about how communities can be better empowered to make these choices for themselves, be it how moderation is done on social media, or what features are prioritised in consumer electronics.

dotancohen 5y ago
I'm interested in a reduced feature phone for myself, strictly to reduce pressure from every bank, pharmacy, clothing store, and supermarket to install their apps. So long as it runs Ankidroid and syncs via CardDav, I'd like a phone with as few features as possible. The problem is that _my_ two important features are different from _your_ two important features. Almost by definition, no reduced feature phone would be fit for a large audience, unless that large audience has a single common denominator. Like with this Kosher Phone and it's religious target demographic.
- grlass 5y ago
  Toffler's book Future Shock has some interesting discussion about advanced production techniques allowing high degrees of bespoke customisation with very little additional costs beyond a generic production line. We're still a long way from there RE smartphones, though projects like the PinePhone with hardware switches for things like microphone, camera, WiFi etc, along with a less locked down OS perhaps show a path to achieving this.

ykevinator3 5y ago

It amazes me how people can compartmentalize their rational brain and their romantic brain and never let the two speak to each other. How can you believe so hard in the supernatural that you feel the need to make a kosher phone, but still be smart enough do it?

names_are_hard 5y ago
Indeed, but this is not unique to religious people. I've been deeply religious and I've been very secular, and one of the things I've learned is that smart people can believe incredibly dumb things. The real hard question we each need to answer is to determine which really dumb things we believe despite our intelligence. PS Isaac Newton spent a large portion of his life on alchemy and the hidden mysterious of the Bible. We all have blind spots, we just don't know they're there.
TheFreim 5y ago
Faith and reason are not contradictory.
- gnadsucks 5y ago
  Believing in the tooth fairy and reason are not contradictory.
gowld 5y ago
You're asking why super smart people can go over the top in pursuing nerdy hobbies?
xyzelement 5y ago
Is it a romantic brain or highly rational? Secular society is battling many problems (tech addiction, isolation, burnout, collapse of community etc) which religious society is protected from because of these superficially backwards practices. As we watch our society grapple with issues that the religious community doesn't suffer from, won't at some point it make sense to question whether we are the rational ones? To make this point another way, the more people on HN learn about the issues of tech addiction, lack of privacy etc, the more their technological preference "converges" to what you are currently making fun of.

mikeytown2 5y ago

A simple phone is still strangely appealing to me.

TheFreim 5y ago
I think there is something in minimalism that is abundantly attractive. To stick with the religious subject, I wonder how the human attraction to simple elegance relates to the concept of divine simplicity. Very interesting stuff.

dsr_ 5y ago

I'd like to point out that: - the term kosher applies directly to food, not technology; this is a metaphor - the insularity of a particular subgroup of Jews should not be considered to apply to all the rest of us. Even for most Orthodox Jews, turning off your phone Friday evening and turning it back on Saturday evening is a perfectly cromulent option.

gowld 5y ago
It's a shomer phone.
shenberg 5y ago
In Israel these phones are referred to as "פלאפון כשר" [1] which most definitely means Kosher Phone, so the name is apt despite the lack of religious rigor. It's definitely aimed at the ultra-orthodox communities. [1] Pashkevil from an ultra-orthodox community warning people off the internet and not to use non-kosher phones: https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%90%D7%99%D7%A0%D7%98%D7%A8%D7%A0%D7%98_%D7%9B%D7%A9%D7%A8#/media/%D7%A7%D7%95%D7%91%D7%A5:%D7%A4%D7%A9%D7%A7%D7%95%D7%95%D7%99%D7%9C_002.jpg https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%90%D7%99%D7%A0%D7%98%D7%A8...
- names_are_hard 5y ago
  As someone who grew up Haredi enough that my first cell phone was a so called "kosher phone" but not haredi enough that I would take that pashkevil seriously... who comes up with this stuff? Like... cell phones cause cancer? I thought everyone knew that was women's elbows?? I guess both can cause cancer, but only one can be "enemy #1"
dotancohen 5y ago
> the term kosher applies directly to food, not > technology; this is a metaphor Kosher means "fit for purpose" and is often used for items other than food. For one example, during the Sukot holiday it is customary to erect and eat in tents. Due to shody construction and safety issues, not to mention adherence to biblical prescription of certain tent features, there exist "kosher" tents which one can buy and know that it is fit for purpose. Source: דובר עברית

gnadsucks 5y ago

You forgot the last three bullet points: Enslaves palestinians Collects welfare checks for your 15 children Lets you sit around reading the talmud, paid for at the expensive of responsible tax payers 90% of ultra orthodox jews have their entire lives paid for by taxpayers. The true welfare queens of our world

xyzelement 5y ago
This may be lost on you but perhaps can be clear to others. You woke up on a Saturday morning, made a new account, just to post an anti religious/anti Jewish comment. What's your life/set of priorities/spiritual balance like?
- rrrazdan 5y ago
  OP seems to be himself an Israeli and presumably a Jew. I did not read his post as being anti-Jewish or anti-religion in anyway.
  - giggly_gopher 5y ago
    Context is important. Imagine someone randomly starts talking to the one black man sitting in an Omaha airport about violent crime
  - gambiting 5y ago
    Same - I don't see that post as being anti-Jewish in the slightest.
  - gnadsucks 5y ago
    My mother is Israeli. I’m an atheist in New York pissed off at how many of “my people” live off the welfare while the rest of us bust asses to put a roof over our head. The haredim live fat off of our taxes and put targets on our backs. They literally have jack booted thugs, “private security” walking around new york keeping non-haredim out of their enclaves. Wherever you are, if an orthodox jew has a dollar or a scheckel to spend, 9/10 times it came from public assistance. These “kosher” phones designed to help haredim hide from the outside world are paid for by your tax dollars.

fouc 5y ago

> A Kosher phone would be an adapted feature phone to the “special” needs of a certain community of the Ultra Orthodox Jews. The community in target asked for a phone that is more dumb than the dumb phone, a phone that suffers from complete retardation. The general idea is that they don’t want to be open to the outside world in any way, but they still want a means to communicate between themselves without breaking the strict boundaries they made. An interesting challenge. I imagine the market is large enough to support such a device.

helge9210 5y ago

> No one forces this phone on them If by "them" you mean religious community as a whole, this statement is true. If by "them" you mean actual users, this statement is a lie This kind of devices are forced on users by community leaders as a method of limiting access to independent information.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
lozenge 5y ago
If the (admittedly dramatised) TV shows are to be believed, half of them also have non-kosher phones on the sly. Religion is part pretence. (edit: word)
- TheFreim 5y ago
  > Religion is part performance Yeah...? Religious people want to build a society which fit there view of how things should be, of course they "perform" actions which reinforce it. Literally everybody, every single person, does this.
- neartheplain 5y ago
  "Shtisel", my favorite show of this genre, just released its third season on Netflix. Seems like every ultra-Orthodox character in the show had a flip phone. I didn't get the impression that the phones were prohibited, though. Either way, great show that I highly recommend.
lornaGal 5y ago
Indeed, forced through indoctrination at young age. Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted. --Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Give us a child till he’s 7 and we’ll have him for life. -- St. Ignatius / Jesuit saying. He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future. - ...

xan92 5y ago

I will only buy if it comes with Pegasus pre-installed, that's Kosher for me.

throwawaykosher 5y ago

There's a need for services that get around this kind of censorship in the same way we have VPNs for state censorship. But the challenges are very different, obviously. I remember helping a family member still in the community, but after I had left, using an email-as-the-browser service to get around the kosher phone some time back (not sure if this is still possible with the current kosher phone version). I realized something like that must exist so I found https://www.labnol.org/internet/receive-web-pages-by-email/18117/ https://www.labnol.org/internet/receive-web-pages-by-email/1... for them. But that service doesn't seem to work anymore. A different family member works on the opposite side, people call him to whitelist websites from their kosher filtering software so they can visit it. He has to check it out and then allows it if it is ok. But having these filters is a requirement for having a PC.

ai_ja_nai 5y ago

Why not just a stripped down custom Android image?

AssafNativ 5y ago
We needed a phone that is in mass production and very cheap. Nokia was a good brand and a good manufacture at the time (Around 2012).
twic 5y ago
They could call it Golem.

throwaythiesit2 5y ago

I will never understand the thinking of people who believe in an omnipotent god that can be tricked

NortySpock 5y ago
It's not tricking, it's rules-lawyering.
twic 5y ago
I'm not Jewish, or any sort of expert on Judaism, but I understand that Judaism has a very different conception of the relationship of man, god, and law than Christianity. The Christian god wants people to behave in a certain way, and has made laws accordingly. Following the letter of the law but not the spirit is defying god, and is bad. The Jewish god has made laws as a test of faith. Following the letter of the law but not the spirit is creative, and is fine. After all, "it is not in heaven": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oven_of_Akhnai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oven_of_Akhnai
names_are_hard 5y ago
There's an interesting conversation to be had about different conceptions of God and the reasons for religious law and whether loopholes in the law should be exploited or not, which would be relevant if this was an article about eruv or prozbol or selling land during the shmitta year. But I fail to see how this is relevant to kosher phones. How is God being tricked? The claim is that God desires purity, which is damaged by unfiltered exposure to the outside world, and so adherents who want cell phones must purchase models that will not give them easy access to temptation. It's a pretty reasonable position if you accept the initial premise. It's like not buying heroin because you know it's harmful.

names_are_hard 5y ago

It was a bunch of years ago, but my first cell phone was a "kosher phone". A feature phone with no camera, no sms, no internet. It had the word "מאושר" (approved) engraved on it. AMA

amself 5y ago

it's arguably much easier (nowadays) to use an off-the-shelf app like TimeLimit[0] to achieve the same kind of functionality on smartphones, without ever having to flash custom firmware using undocumented/unsupported techniques. Granted, back in <=2014 this probably made more sense. [0]: https://timelimit.io/en/ https://timelimit.io/en/

SonOfLilit 5y ago
The functionality the customer asked for is not having access to the Internet. TimeLimit won't cut it.

compsciphd 5y ago

as an aside, why do all the jewish religion topics always get posted on the sabbath when most readers of HN who live the life related aren't around to reply?