Comment by zepto
4 years ago
The spirit of the internet won’t generate secure hardware or a transparent software stack.
Also, that spirit existed only in an adversary free environment. You may as well say the solution is for everyone to be nice to each other.
The solution is to build new technologies that are privacy preserving, transparent, don’t place trust in a central authority but are resistant to attack.
This is possible but nobody has built it yet.
You could run Mobian or similar on a phone from Purism/Pine/etc.
Problem is you end up with a vastly inferior hardware device that costs nearly as much as an iPhone.
I’m still waiting for my Librem 5 preorder.
Would love to hear if anyone is actually using a Linux phone and enjoying it.
> Problem is you end up with a vastly inferior hardware device that costs nearly as much as an iPhone.
The Pinephone is $150/$200.
> Would love to hear if anyone is actually using a Linux phone and enjoying it.
I have one, and I throughly enjoy it! One of the neatest things about it, and I still have to wrap my head around it, is that it can do anything you can do on a desktop. SSH? No problem? Dev environment? "apt install build-essentials". Want to install XFCE? Knock yourself out!
It is still missing MMS, which is why I don't use it daily, but that should be changing much sooner than later.
Exactly! Speaking from the Sailfish OS perspective but thats essentially also a normal Linux distro. It's just so refreshing that studs behaves in logical and introspective manner - have an issue ? Check journal, there will most likely be some hints! Need to transfer data ? Mount the device via sshfs!
In comparison my Galaxy Tab S6 is just so much more black box and some stuff just does not work with no apparent way to debug! Like, I tried to setup a samba or SSH server on it for easy data transfer, with zero success after trying all the related apps in frdoid and elsewhere. It just does not work at all! Most likely some brain dead "security" option one can't override 2without rooting the device that is impossible to track down in the mess that is Android.
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> One of the neatest things about it, and I still have to wrap my head around it, is that it can do anything you can do on a desktop. SSH? No problem? Dev environment? "apt install build-essentials". Want to install XFCE? Knock yourself out!
You can do all these things with a $10 raspberry pi-w. It’s not obvious why it helps with having security and privacy.
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I have been using a Linux smartphone since 2010 an I certainly do enjoy it - first Nokia N900 & N9 followed by a series of Sailfish OS[0][1] devices, with Xperia 10 II with Sailfish X[2] being the latest one.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailfish_OS
[1] https://sailfishos.org/
[2] https://shop.jolla.com/
This is clearly a good thing to do and supporting those projects is great.
So far though, they do nothing to solve the problems we are talking about. The software is not anywhere near audited, and even if it were, you are still interacting with people and services who are using unaudited software.
> The software is not anywhere near audited
Many of the projects leverage a well known OS as their base (e.g. pmOS uses Alpine Linux, Mobian uses Debian), and actively ensure that anything that can be upstreamed is upstreamed. So it's not like you're downloading some random ROM off of XDA.
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> The solution is to build new technologies that are privacy preserving, transparent, don’t place trust in a central authority but are resistant to attack.
I actually completely agree with this.
> This is possible but nobody has built it yet.
Doesn't mean we should stop trying. Here's my $0.02 - I've been building an email solution based on Self-Sovereign Identity ideas, still in progress, but check it out: https://ubikom.cc or https://github.com/regnull/ubikom
> Doesn't mean we should stop trying.
Who is suggesting ‘stopping trying’?
To me the only thing that sounds like ‘stopping trying’ is boycotting Apple, as though that has anything whatsoever to do with the problem.
It doesn’t matter what vendor you use. The only thing you can do to help is to identify parts of the solution, explain them, and build them.
I don’t have time to check out your email solution but I hope it is part of the solution.