Librem 5 (finally) shipping

[marcih]

In my view - unless we have entirely open firmware for the modem there is no way PinePhone may be called privacy focused device.

Modems based on free software do not exist. Separating them via well defined interfaces, adding killswitches and removing their access to RAM significantly improves privacy though (which is what Pinephone and Librem 5 do).

[R]ight. But still - those are just workarounds, aren't they ? Not a clean foss solution.

From what I could gather, the cellular modem landscape is a patent-ridden minefield, making a FOSS cellular modem nothing but a pipe dream. The current approach of shoving the modem behind a USB and adding a hardware killswitch is the best privacy we can get out of those things. Sucks but it is what it is.

And in all honesty, pocket computing (or mobile computing in general, i.e. laptops) is somewhat neglected in the FOSS world, with everybody's focus being servers and desktops/workstations at best. We should use the PinePhone (and Librem 5) as a pioneer device for which the mobile software stack is developed, breaking the "no SW means no HW, which means no SW" chicken-and-egg scenario (which is, after all, the purpose of the PP), before looking at improving the privacy. For the time being, it's Good Enough™.