Pinephone user experience - Possibly compromised by commercial & state-based hackers?

[tckosvic]

And how would the 3 letter agencies or google or apple sabotage the PPP development process?  Would they tamper with things at the factory; like tampering in parts, assembly, or software?  I would assume there is some form of post assembly QA and QC at pinephone that would detect some descrepencies.

or

Would they tinker with all of the OS/desktop software packages on the software acquisition sights?  Have any developers seen their posted code to be changed?

Posting and running with unsupported conspiritorial claims is running rampant in our country now.

tom kosvic

Since the Pinephone user pool is so small at present, said agencies or other entities could target individual users' devices once they are online, rather than repositories or development branches that could be easily reviewed. Anything that is posted by physical mail is subject to transit through customs and can be intercepted there, if there is a desire to physically tamper with a phone. One unboxing video on Youtube comes to mind, where a Pinephone recipient tries to start up his Pinephone and the OS is broken/corrupted. This user's intention to make a video review would have been known to agencies watching this space, and this result could have been choreographed.

If the users have been studied by agencies or other malicious hackers, their tolerance/intolerance for particular faults could be exploited. By that I mean, hacks could be tailored to deter individual users. Extra effort I suspect would be invested in deterring potential "influencers" with higher visibility on social media channels.

How many active Pinephone users are there? A few thousand globally?

And how many of those would be considered "influencers"? Less than a hundred, at a guess?

If people think that agencies and competitors are likely to wait until something gains traction before attacking it, I'm afraid that position is rather naive and divorced from reality.

PPP doesn't start and run right out-of-the-box until you put a system on it through a user supplied sd card.  That's pinephone's legacy not likely the NSA's.