PinePhones on assembly line

[WarpLover]

Yes

Then let's hope they use standard technology "clean room" processes, including manual handling with rubber gloves.
When I got my BH phone, I did wipe it down with an alcohol-soaked tissue (good thing there was a screen protector on it with the next-to-last film on top of that - nice "touch", Luke ;-}  ).

You shouldn't worry about the virus surviving the long trip to your country. Shipping is taking longer than expected and the phones are being sealed in their boxes probably many days before your unpacking. No virus will be on your phone. You should be more worried about your delivery man coming to your door, and coughing on your parcel

Or HW backdoors.

lol this concern is always interesting. People need to realize that hardware backdoor is in no realm detectable by ANY company on the planet. A hardware backdoor in practice can exist on the transistor level.. Do you know how many transistors are produced globally? Its more than allll the grains of rice... It is physically unrealistic to be able to determine if on a transistor level , if the device will behave malicious - since it isn't even possible to inspect every transistor on every chip, on every device.. And since this is on the transistor level, almost any device that has any chip at all made in China (even just transistors) - would be suspectible to hardware backdoors. I would bet basically every phone had, or currently has a chip manufactured in china. So in summary, if you're worried about a hardware backdoor in the pinephone, I think you should also apply that to almost any electronic device (especially ones that are in more hands of the general population - there is some truth to security through obscurity, not enough pinephones to make this worth it).

 A small group of transistors will never be able to phone home. Functional blocks can.