4 ms·

Neo900 – Crafting the private phone [pdf]

47 points by nextos 12y ago

edwintorok 12y ago
See also http://neo900.org/news/xmas-update http://neo900.org/news/xmas-update for a status update.
dogma1138 12y ago
I never got the purpose of projects like this, at least they admit that there is no current way of guaranteeing a safe device. Even with "open" firmware virtually any commercial hardware can be either backdoored or exploited. Modern phones (as well as any other computing device) have so many software components that i suspect intelligence agencies do not even have to exploit the main user OS to get data of them. Modem and BBP OS, CPU microcode, bootloaders, firmware for other hardware components ranging from the camera to radio's not covered by the BBP, USB/OTG controllers and more. I have serious doubts that "sandboxing" hardware components will actually work, especially in any useable way. For example modems behave badly all the time, both due to internal glitching and due to environmental reasons. Heck dump your BBP logs from your mobile device and see how much shit it pulls off regardless of what the OS tells it to do because it's manufacturer thinks they know better (and they do most of the time), so every time there is some BS signal on the same frequency or the modem decides to wake up or hop channels on it's own the device will reboot? GL making a single call with that then. Not to mention that i really don't see how they are going to do monitoring effectively, from the schematics they are doing power management monitoring which is nice but most BBP packages can receive even in "sleep" mode. The isolation they are suggesting might also not really work, sure putting in "breakers" (which i assume are either some low voltage relays switches or resettable fuses) and cut the power off completely to the BBP might work but cutting off the antenna from the BBP? doubtful RF signals should be able to hop most in circuit breakers, and many BBP modules these days come with integrated antennas for at least some of the low power/low gain RF stuff like BTLP and NFC. To me this seems like another one of these "experiments" that will only result in overpriced and outdated hardware with poor user experience. I would love to see an N900/950 modernization just for the ability to run actual linux on the phone to serve as a toolkit. But if anyone thinks that any device they can hack together will give them any level of privacy over organizations like the NSA is living in la-la land...
- seba_dos1 12y ago
  >I would love to see an N900/950 modernization just for the ability to run actual linux on the phone to serve as a toolkit. That's what Neo900 is. All privacy-wise "features" are just a side effects of designing it properly (as in: treating blackboxes as blackboxes instead of explicitely giving them full control over user OS, controlling what data the baseband has access to etc.). There are some additional measures like power switches, monitors, breakers - but those are pretty cheap to put in. Nothing will reboot "every time there is some BS signal on the same frequency or the modem decides to wake up or hop channels on it's own". The point of Neo900's monitoring is to let the user access to information that modem is doing something. Of course if you really want to, you can then setup your software to automatically reboot (or power cycle the modem alone) - but outside of very special use cases, that would be pretty pointless. If you don't care, you simply don't use that data. >But if anyone thinks that any device they can hack together will give them any level of privacy over organizations like the NSA is living in la-la land... Neo900 won't magically protect you from anything - no device will. Instead, it gives you tools which, when used properly, can allow you to fight off some of the mass surveillance techniques. Like encryption, which is pretty much rendered moot in most of modern phones where the modem has direct RAM access. Keep in mind however that when you are an explicit target of some three letter agencies, they can probably employ better and more effective methods against you than sniffing on your mobile phone. tl;dr: Neo900's privacy solutions are rather targeted towards Stallman, not Snowden or some intelligence agent from foreign country.
  - dogma1138 12y ago
    Again i went over most of the schematics and the specifications and nothing actually in this project seems to be worth while. The privacy features are kinda moot and not effective, and the hardware is a joke. Low end SOC(TI DM3730 which is 4-5 years old now) with poor media support and very low performance and only 1GB RAM. Limited RAM and extremely limited ROM/Onboard FLASH which will limit the OS in the long run or force you to use the SSD card which will lead to probably the most common leakage. Oh and the screen? 3.5" TFT, 800x480 resistive, seriously where did they even find a resistive touch screen these days at the bargain bin on Alibaba? And they expect people to pay 850 EURO's for that? So no this is not a modernization of the N900 it's pretty much the N900 with hardware that is only slightly newer than what was available when the N900 came to the market. There is seriously no reason for this phone to be so poorly designed especially with their mentality of sandbox rather than trust. We had quite a few phone projects that were either designed by the community or by small companies and all of them managed to use top of the line hardware. You have Snapdragon 800/801 phones under 300$ these days, why use a SOC that will not even be able to play a movie these days? So sadly this isn't the driod you should be looking for, still waiting for a Tizen/Meego phone worth while Samsung has been shipping some in India, and Yatta has a very nicely designed phone out in Europe and Russia but none of them are toolkit phones sadly.
mikegioia 12y ago
I'm a recent n900 convert and at this point I don't know if I can ever go back to Android/iOS. I'm eagerly awaiting the release of the neo900 and I honestly think this device is the closest we'll come to a truly open phone that you can use everyday. I encourage anyone interested to consider supporting Joerg, Werner, Sebastian and everyone else working on this project! [1] 100 euro now and at the very least you can have a really cool device to hack around with. [1] http://neo900.org/donate http://neo900.org/donate
- william20111 12y ago
  I agree im very exicited by this phone. if you donate 100 euros do you get anything or is it just supporting the project? Couldn’t quite figure out if by donating you got like an early revision type thing?
  - seba_dos1 12y ago
    If you donate at least 100 euros, you can be sure that there will be a device produced for you (it's built to order, not to shelf). Also, this amount you pay now will already count to the final price, so if you donate 100 EUR now, you'll pay 100 EUR less when finally ordering the ready device. http://neo900.org/faq http://neo900.org/faq
Timmmmmm 12y ago
Nice to see someone is attempting this. Physical keyboard and resistive touchscreen seem like pretty odd decisions though. I guess this is going to be as enthusiast-only as the previous Neo phones which is a shame.
- hf 12y ago
  s/odd/sane/: This oddity you've identified is precisely the reason people like me are interested or even invested in the project. Must everyone worship at the altar of smudgy screens and ineffective text input? The N900 is the last phone that was actually usable. And by usable I'm not only referring to the stylus/keyboard input duality, but also to the the fact that it's as trivial extendable as any reasonably open Linux system. In fact, I'd wager that the two are very closely correlated: the need to tinker and the desire to do so with sane input devices.
- seba_dos1 12y ago
  I hate capacitive screens. They're great for tablets, but overly limiting on phones with small screens - especially "hacker-oriented" ones. I used to code using on-screen keyboard with fingernails on my old Neo Freerunner. It maybe wasn't the greatest programming experience ever, but it worked for me and I had some great debugging sessions while in tram :) I can't imagine doing that if Freerunner had capacitive screen - even if there wouldn't be a bezel around the screen anymore. People seem to hate resistive screens based on their experiences with poor ones (which is understandable, as most of them are pretty poor). However, a good one is a real pleasure to use, and I find the one used in N900 a good one.
- vezzy-fnord 12y ago
  The N900 supports both touchscreen and physical keyboards, so you get the best of both and I'd wager the Neo900 continues this. Personally I've always found the physical keyboard to be far more productive and have wondered why smartphone manufacturers didn't keep on making them.
seba_dos1 12y ago
There's also a recording from the presentation. That was my first "big" talk in English and it's sometimes hard to listen to, but maybe someone will find it useful :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahPFCFooBv0&list=PL-s0IumBit8Mofxj0Fn2kH6RB9VtnKS4K https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahPFCFooBv0&list=PL-s0IumBit...
richiverse 12y ago
Can't you just boot Ubuntu touch on a Nexus 4 or dual boot a oneplus with 3gb ram?
- edwintorok 12y ago
  Can you make phone calls with Ubuntu?
- seba_dos1 12y ago
  Why for? It won't change anything. On OnePlus the modem is tightly integrated with the rest of the system, and on Nexus 4 you cannot even boot Android to any usable state without proprietary blobs, so forget about any non-Android based OS (remember that Ubuntu for mobiles is just a chroot-like layer on top of Android base system).
omilu 12y ago
Within a few years I think we'll see an open source phone similar to Bunnies novena laptop project. Imagine a crowd-sourced phone becoming the #3 contender in the smart phone wars, Android, Apple, and FOSS.

47 points by nextos 12y ago

See also http://neo900.org/news/xmas-update http://neo900.org/news/xmas-update for a status update.

I never got the purpose of projects like this, at least they admit that there is no current way of guaranteeing a safe device. Even with "open" firmware virtually any commercial hardware can be either backdoored or exploited. Modern phones (as well as any other computing device) have so many software components that i suspect intelligence agencies do not even have to exploit the main user OS to get data of them. Modem and BBP OS, CPU microcode, bootloaders, firmware for other hardware components ranging from the camera to radio's not covered by the BBP, USB/OTG controllers and more. I have serious doubts that "sandboxing" hardware components will actually work, especially in any useable way. For example modems behave badly all the time, both due to internal glitching and due to environmental reasons. Heck dump your BBP logs from your mobile device and see how much shit it pulls off regardless of what the OS tells it to do because it's manufacturer thinks they know better (and they do most of the time), so every time there is some BS signal on the same frequency or the modem decides to wake up or hop channels on it's own the device will reboot? GL making a single call with that then. Not to mention that i really don't see how they are going to do monitoring effectively, from the schematics they are doing power management monitoring which is nice but most BBP packages can receive even in "sleep" mode. The isolation they are suggesting might also not really work, sure putting in "breakers" (which i assume are either some low voltage relays switches or resettable fuses) and cut the power off completely to the BBP might work but cutting off the antenna from the BBP? doubtful RF signals should be able to hop most in circuit breakers, and many BBP modules these days come with integrated antennas for at least some of the low power/low gain RF stuff like BTLP and NFC. To me this seems like another one of these "experiments" that will only result in overpriced and outdated hardware with poor user experience. I would love to see an N900/950 modernization just for the ability to run actual linux on the phone to serve as a toolkit. But if anyone thinks that any device they can hack together will give them any level of privacy over organizations like the NSA is living in la-la land...

seba_dos1 12y ago
>I would love to see an N900/950 modernization just for the ability to run actual linux on the phone to serve as a toolkit. That's what Neo900 is. All privacy-wise "features" are just a side effects of designing it properly (as in: treating blackboxes as blackboxes instead of explicitely giving them full control over user OS, controlling what data the baseband has access to etc.). There are some additional measures like power switches, monitors, breakers - but those are pretty cheap to put in. Nothing will reboot "every time there is some BS signal on the same frequency or the modem decides to wake up or hop channels on it's own". The point of Neo900's monitoring is to let the user access to information that modem is doing something. Of course if you really want to, you can then setup your software to automatically reboot (or power cycle the modem alone) - but outside of very special use cases, that would be pretty pointless. If you don't care, you simply don't use that data. >But if anyone thinks that any device they can hack together will give them any level of privacy over organizations like the NSA is living in la-la land... Neo900 won't magically protect you from anything - no device will. Instead, it gives you tools which, when used properly, can allow you to fight off some of the mass surveillance techniques. Like encryption, which is pretty much rendered moot in most of modern phones where the modem has direct RAM access. Keep in mind however that when you are an explicit target of some three letter agencies, they can probably employ better and more effective methods against you than sniffing on your mobile phone. tl;dr: Neo900's privacy solutions are rather targeted towards Stallman, not Snowden or some intelligence agent from foreign country.
- dogma1138 12y ago
  Again i went over most of the schematics and the specifications and nothing actually in this project seems to be worth while. The privacy features are kinda moot and not effective, and the hardware is a joke. Low end SOC(TI DM3730 which is 4-5 years old now) with poor media support and very low performance and only 1GB RAM. Limited RAM and extremely limited ROM/Onboard FLASH which will limit the OS in the long run or force you to use the SSD card which will lead to probably the most common leakage. Oh and the screen? 3.5" TFT, 800x480 resistive, seriously where did they even find a resistive touch screen these days at the bargain bin on Alibaba? And they expect people to pay 850 EURO's for that? So no this is not a modernization of the N900 it's pretty much the N900 with hardware that is only slightly newer than what was available when the N900 came to the market. There is seriously no reason for this phone to be so poorly designed especially with their mentality of sandbox rather than trust. We had quite a few phone projects that were either designed by the community or by small companies and all of them managed to use top of the line hardware. You have Snapdragon 800/801 phones under 300$ these days, why use a SOC that will not even be able to play a movie these days? So sadly this isn't the driod you should be looking for, still waiting for a Tizen/Meego phone worth while Samsung has been shipping some in India, and Yatta has a very nicely designed phone out in Europe and Russia but none of them are toolkit phones sadly.

mikegioia 12y ago

I'm a recent n900 convert and at this point I don't know if I can ever go back to Android/iOS. I'm eagerly awaiting the release of the neo900 and I honestly think this device is the closest we'll come to a truly open phone that you can use everyday. I encourage anyone interested to consider supporting Joerg, Werner, Sebastian and everyone else working on this project! [1] 100 euro now and at the very least you can have a really cool device to hack around with. [1] http://neo900.org/donate http://neo900.org/donate

william20111 12y ago
I agree im very exicited by this phone. if you donate 100 euros do you get anything or is it just supporting the project? Couldn’t quite figure out if by donating you got like an early revision type thing?
- seba_dos1 12y ago
  If you donate at least 100 euros, you can be sure that there will be a device produced for you (it's built to order, not to shelf). Also, this amount you pay now will already count to the final price, so if you donate 100 EUR now, you'll pay 100 EUR less when finally ordering the ready device. http://neo900.org/faq http://neo900.org/faq

Timmmmmm 12y ago

Nice to see someone is attempting this. Physical keyboard and resistive touchscreen seem like pretty odd decisions though. I guess this is going to be as enthusiast-only as the previous Neo phones which is a shame.

hf 12y ago
s/odd/sane/: This oddity you've identified is precisely the reason people like me are interested or even invested in the project. Must everyone worship at the altar of smudgy screens and ineffective text input? The N900 is the last phone that was actually usable. And by usable I'm not only referring to the stylus/keyboard input duality, but also to the the fact that it's as trivial extendable as any reasonably open Linux system. In fact, I'd wager that the two are very closely correlated: the need to tinker and the desire to do so with sane input devices.
seba_dos1 12y ago
I hate capacitive screens. They're great for tablets, but overly limiting on phones with small screens - especially "hacker-oriented" ones. I used to code using on-screen keyboard with fingernails on my old Neo Freerunner. It maybe wasn't the greatest programming experience ever, but it worked for me and I had some great debugging sessions while in tram :) I can't imagine doing that if Freerunner had capacitive screen - even if there wouldn't be a bezel around the screen anymore. People seem to hate resistive screens based on their experiences with poor ones (which is understandable, as most of them are pretty poor). However, a good one is a real pleasure to use, and I find the one used in N900 a good one.
vezzy-fnord 12y ago
The N900 supports both touchscreen and physical keyboards, so you get the best of both and I'd wager the Neo900 continues this. Personally I've always found the physical keyboard to be far more productive and have wondered why smartphone manufacturers didn't keep on making them.

seba_dos1 12y ago

There's also a recording from the presentation. That was my first "big" talk in English and it's sometimes hard to listen to, but maybe someone will find it useful :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahPFCFooBv0&list=PL-s0IumBit8Mofxj0Fn2kH6RB9VtnKS4K https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahPFCFooBv0&list=PL-s0IumBit...

richiverse 12y ago

Can't you just boot Ubuntu touch on a Nexus 4 or dual boot a oneplus with 3gb ram?

edwintorok 12y ago
Can you make phone calls with Ubuntu?
seba_dos1 12y ago
Why for? It won't change anything. On OnePlus the modem is tightly integrated with the rest of the system, and on Nexus 4 you cannot even boot Android to any usable state without proprietary blobs, so forget about any non-Android based OS (remember that Ubuntu for mobiles is just a chroot-like layer on top of Android base system).

omilu 12y ago

Within a few years I think we'll see an open source phone similar to Bunnies novena laptop project. Imagine a crowd-sourced phone becoming the #3 contender in the smart phone wars, Android, Apple, and FOSS.