I'm putting this here because I'm not sure if this deserves its own thread.
Some people on other sites have voiced concern that this shipment of pinephones has been subject to "Method Interdiction". Obviously, without leaks, we'll see no proof of this, but New Zealand does have intelligence-sharing agreements with several other countries, and it's not exactly a secret that many of the people who buy these phones did so out of a desire to escape the problems android and iOS devices have with sending gobs of user data to the servers of large corporations.
Fortunately, there's published images of the PCB you can compare it to so you can check for hardware modifications. Also, that would probably cause a longer delay if they were to physically replace components but you can't be sure since other things could very well cause the pallet to sit there for over a month. But if I were you I'd treat these things as any computer if you're concerned about that: load a new operating system before doing anything else. Overwrite the EMMC with random data (dd if=/dev/urandom) to be really, really sure.
I would hope Pine64 can inspect the phones before they ship to customers but I'm aware that might be infeasible.
Some people on other sites have voiced concern that this shipment of pinephones has been subject to "Method Interdiction". Obviously, without leaks, we'll see no proof of this, but New Zealand does have intelligence-sharing agreements with several other countries, and it's not exactly a secret that many of the people who buy these phones did so out of a desire to escape the problems android and iOS devices have with sending gobs of user data to the servers of large corporations.
Fortunately, there's published images of the PCB you can compare it to so you can check for hardware modifications. Also, that would probably cause a longer delay if they were to physically replace components but you can't be sure since other things could very well cause the pallet to sit there for over a month. But if I were you I'd treat these things as any computer if you're concerned about that: load a new operating system before doing anything else. Overwrite the EMMC with random data (dd if=/dev/urandom) to be really, really sure.
I would hope Pine64 can inspect the phones before they ship to customers but I'm aware that might be infeasible.