4 ms·

Still has the baseband in it though, right, or am I missing something?

• wffurr 5y ago
  Well yeah. Usually the "smart" in smartphone refers to the application processor and user facing OS. I don't think you can connect to an LTE network without a baseband processor. If your threat model includes the firmware on the baseband processor, best not to use a smartphone at all. Or leave your cave in the mountains of Pakistan.
  • _joel 5y ago
    True, just wondering...
• krisoft 5y ago
  You are right it does have a baseband processor. It is using a uBlox TOBY-R20[02] chip to act as one. That runs some proprietary code written by who knows who and it can act against your interest. There are some mitigations in place: They claim to have a physical cut-off switch for the microphone. They also say that the power switch is an actual slide switch. If these are correctly implemented you can be certain when is the phone able to listen to you, and when is it properly off. Also it is much more likely that the AtMega2560 acting as the application processor is properly isolated from the baseband processor. (If for no other reason that the developers would have to go out of their way to program/wire it in such a manner to be half as vulnerable as most other phone's application processors are.) That being said the text of the product page focuses on the usability of the phone not on the privacy or security aspects. Out of the 9 positives they list, only 1 talks about privacy/security. This would indicate the focus of the people who built it. Just to be clear on this: There is nothing wrong with focusing on UX. Not every product has to be laser focused on privacy/security. It is clearly made by a small team. (Perhaps only by a single person?) They wanted to make a phone which causes less distractions to the phone's users. All the power to them.