12-01-2020, 03:08 PM
(This post was last modified: 12-01-2020, 03:10 PM by bcnaz.)
I have family/relatives who in the past few months have spent $1,200.00 $1,400.00 and $1,500.00 USD for "Android" phones,
So what is the big deal if someone pays $800.00 to $1,000.00 for a "privacy" phone ?
The more pressing question "I think" is, : will the new radical government, outlaw privacy phones ?
(12-01-2020, 08:25 AM)fsflover Wrote: Half of the Pinephones work with Phosh created by Purism (so I'm supporting Pinephones). let's be honest, Phosh is just a slimmer build of Gnome-Shell. it's not very different from, say, cinnamon, except that Cinnamon developed most of their own apps. Phosh just borrowed from the existing GNOME apps
12-02-2020, 01:12 AM
(This post was last modified: 12-02-2020, 01:19 AM by kern707.)
(12-01-2020, 03:08 PM)bcnaz Wrote: I have family/relatives who in the past few months have spent $1,200.00 $1,400.00 and $1,500.00 USD for "Android" phones,
Well everybody will buy what he likes, I mean.. people are probably still buying those new $1200 iPhones even though Apple is repeatedly ripping them off and now even the charger and earbuds disappeared from the box "for the sake of environment" (yeah right... said the $39 charger that is being sold separately).
Those $1500 Android phones probably cost less than $300 each to produce (including development, marketing etc..), and this is a free market. so Companies can sell at whatever price they believe their target audience will pay, heck, Apple now charges for an aluminum monitor stand that probably costs them $50-60 to manufacture $999 USD, and yeah some people will of course buy it because it is tagged as "Pro" (coolness factor) and it has the apple sticker on it.
I think good profit is important, without it a company can not sustain it self, but greed is another thing, Apple is a good example for too much greed.
Anyway back to the topic 
I would pay $800 and even $1000 for a phone with real privacy features such as the PinePhone, Liberm etc.. but such price should only be asked when the device is market-ready, which means other than small bugs it must already have a solid working OS with all important features of a phone, no issues with calls or texts, or waking up from sleep, or camera not functioning properly, or problem getting out of deep sleep, or battery/power management issues etc.. that is why people will pay the premium, because the costs of paying people to take care of all that needs to be taken care of.
With the PinePhone, I actually like the fact that the community and developers together are working on it voluntarily, I mean yes I make donations to linux-arm teams because I want to help them with the small expanses they have to face while working on this project, but most of the resources are people's free time which they give away for the good of the project, we all purchased devices that are not yet market-ready, and we are the testers and somehow also the contributors to push this project forward so that is why we got it "for cheap", this is not yet the phone for the Average Joe but with time it will be.
that is IMHO, anyway.
(12-01-2020, 03:08 PM)bcnaz Wrote: The more pressing question "I think" is, : will the new radical government, outlaw privacy phones ?
That is a very good question, I think that once privacy phones get traction, governments will be interested in an least finding way to infiltrate into them , god forbid if they have a million turned-on devices on their landscape that they can't ping apple or google and get whatever information they want about those devices and their owners.. but I do not think they will try to ban such devices, because governments never want you to actually know their real intentions - such an act will reveal the fact that they are anti-freedom of choice, and even if they are (and there are many hypocrite governments that act like that) they will not want you to know.
We will need to protect our right to own and operate such phones, including watching out for any funny looking application that is offered, or "custom kernels" that might appear, or "developers" that will try to make pull requests to certain code repos, all of those will be trojan horse attempts. I know it sounds like fiction, but it is not too far fetched IMHO.
(12-02-2020, 01:12 AM)kern707 Wrote: ...
(12-01-2020, 03:08 PM)bcnaz Wrote: The more pressing question "I think" is, : will the new radical government, outlaw privacy phones ?
That is a very good question, I think that once privacy phones get traction, governments will be interested in an least finding way to infiltrate into them , god forbid if they have a million turned-on devices on their landscape that they can't ping apple or google and get whatever information they want about those devices and their owners.. but I do not think they will try to ban such devices, because governments never want you to actually know their real intentions - such an act will reveal the fact that they are anti-freedom of choice, and even if they are (and there are many hypocrite governments that act like that) they will not want you to know.
We will need to protect our right to own and operate such phones, including watching out for any funny looking application that is offered, or "custom kernels" that might appear, or "developers" that will try to make pull requests to certain code repos, all of those will be trojan horse attempts. I know it sounds like fiction, but it is not too far fetched IMHO.
Governments are already asking for the keys of chat apps.
They are pushing for new laws and the next could be asking for the keys to the hardware.
https://european-pirateparty.eu/pirates-...-a-threat/
In the first place PinePhone is not entirely privacy phone. Remember that it has Quectel modem which has it's own Linux based operating system. So there are backdoors probably. Maybe not NSA but chinese almost for sure.
I know it's connected to the main system using USB bus but that does not guarantee anything.
In my view - unless we have entirely open firmware for the modem there is no way PinePhone may be called privacy focused device.
(12-03-2020, 07:18 AM)as400 Wrote: 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).
@ fsflover - right. But still - those are just workarounds, aren't they ? Not a clean foss solution.
(12-03-2020, 06:21 AM)jiyong Wrote: (12-02-2020, 01:12 AM)kern707 Wrote: ...
(12-01-2020, 03:08 PM)bcnaz Wrote: The more pressing question "I think" is, : will the new radical government, outlaw privacy phones ?
That is a very good question, I think that once privacy phones get traction, governments will be interested in an least finding way to infiltrate into them , god forbid if they have a million turned-on devices on their landscape that they can't ping apple or google and get whatever information they want about those devices and their owners.. but I do not think they will try to ban such devices, because governments never want you to actually know their real intentions - such an act will reveal the fact that they are anti-freedom of choice, and even if they are (and there are many hypocrite governments that act like that) they will not want you to know.
We will need to protect our right to own and operate such phones, including watching out for any funny looking application that is offered, or "custom kernels" that might appear, or "developers" that will try to make pull requests to certain code repos, all of those will be trojan horse attempts. I know it sounds like fiction, but it is not too far fetched IMHO.
Governments are already asking for the keys of chat apps.
They are pushing for new laws and the next could be asking for the keys to the hardware.
https://european-pirateparty.eu/pirates-...-a-threat/
Not surprising, governments in the last few years are not even trying to be discreet about their overreaching, and making a "good" excuse for invading people's privacy even when they do not have any lawful reason to do so.
I guess that they really wants us to "own nothing" like they say, if they want to control even an ordinary piece of free software that is installed on a device that you own.
It is dangerous.
(12-03-2020, 07:40 AM)as400 Wrote: (12-03-2020, 07:31 AM)fsflover Wrote: (12-03-2020, 07:18 AM)as400 Wrote: 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™. 
@ marcih - sure. Don't get me wrong guys. I'm not lamenting. What we have now is much better than having nothing.
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