31–40 of 148 posts
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Are they the first company to ship a phone with an open source baseband OS?
My understanding is that's essentially impossible, but they're isolating the cellular modem into a detachable peripheral so it has no deep access into your device.
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It's Libre Baskerville: https://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/libre-baskerville I find Baskerville pretty readable. Is it the same font you're seeing on the page? I wonder if something caused your browser to show a fallback instead. I think it reflects that all phones made in China have the potential to be compromised by malicious actors. That risk shouldn't be in most people's threat model, and if you're comparing the…
why shouldn't, in this case, security be binary? either there is a threat or there isn't. if someone in china is adding additional monitoring malware to librem's phones then isn't the whole privacy/security thing out the window? either they believe in their chinese supply chain or they don't. and it's not like their usa manufacturing is done in-house by librem so they still don't have 'control over the entire assembl…
The likelihood of China compromising the Librem 5 is very low, and there are safeguards in place to prevent that. But no safeguard is absolute. Even manufacturing in the US isn't absolute security -- it's just a bit less dangerous than China.
Whether that reduced risk is important enough to be worth $1300... I tend to think it's not, but I assume there are a few people who will care enough to pay that.
The same situation applies to companies like Apple, Samsung, etc... the only difference is that those companies have judged that the potential market benefits of catering to people who have extremely strict privacy requirements is too low to justify starting up US operations.
The hardware switches are also a good example of what I'm talking about here. There is a small risk of malicious firmware or a bug in software allowing a camera to be turned on without your knowledge. Does this mean the iPhone is insecure? There's not a yes or no answer. It means there is a specific subset of users who would be served by a stricter (but still imperfect) extra security control -- a physical kill switch.
An even safer policy would be to remove the camera entirely -- then you could be certain that the physical hardware isn't defective and allowing the camera to be flipped back on. But even that wouldn't be binary security. There is no such thing as binary security.
A fair warning to anyone looking at placing an order for this. https://jaylittle.com/post/view/2019/10/the-sad-saga-of-puri... https://jaylittle.com/post/view/2019/10/the-sad-saga-of-puri... https://jaylittle.com/post/view/2019/10/the-sad-saga-of-puri... The company practices a lot of shady business. Their "phone" that they are so proudly claiming to be releasing to backers cannot place phone calls , the camera doesn…
They also shipped a devkit, whose screen did not work. But a software update made it work. Same here. This is the only phone, where updates make it better, not worse.
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No, this is a desperate attempt to raise money.
Sure, but there is a significant increase in costs to produce everything in the US. I've been shocked by how certain production processes are simply super difficult to find in the US. Even things as simple as injection molding can cost 2-3x as much. Add on shipping costs, etc. within the US and you can easily add several hundred dollars or more to the cost of this product. That's especially true given the low volume.
https://jaylittle.com/post/view/2019/10/the-sad-saga-of-puri...
https://jaylittle.com/post/view/2019/10/the-sad-saga-of-puri...
https://jaylittle.com/post/view/2019/10/the-sad-saga-of-puri...
A fair warning to anyone looking at placing an order for this. https://jaylittle.com/post/view/2019/10/the-sad-saga-of-puri... https://jaylittle.com/post/view/2019/10/the-sad-saga-of-puri... https://jaylittle.com/post/view/2019/10/the-sad-saga-of-puri... The company practices a lot of shady business. Their "phone" that they are so proudly claiming to be releasing to backers cannot place phone calls , the camera doesn…
I'm unsold on spending $2,000 or even $700 on a new phone, but I also care deeply about privacy and security. Is there any strong reason to choose "Librem" over a cheaper Android running LineageOS or GrapheneOS? They can be purchased for a fraction of the cost and have been quite reliable for me.
The PinePhone will likely be preferable to most LineageOS phones, since it will run a closer-to-mainline kernel. It's also expected to be available for a "fraction of the cost" compared to the Librem.
IMO an android app runtme would be essential for any of these efforts to be comparable to Lineage. Anybody working on that?
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My understanding is that's essentially impossible, but they're isolating the cellular modem into a detachable peripheral so it has no deep access into your device.
Why is it essentially impossible? Compared to the rest of the phone that seems like a relatively small thing.
A fair warning to anyone looking at placing an order for this. https://jaylittle.com/post/view/2019/10/the-sad-saga-of-puri... https://jaylittle.com/post/view/2019/10/the-sad-saga-of-puri... https://jaylittle.com/post/view/2019/10/the-sad-saga-of-puri... The company practices a lot of shady business. Their "phone" that they are so proudly claiming to be releasing to backers cannot place phone calls , the camera doesn…
Seems like it can be fixed with a software update, though. A few days of waiting doesn't seem like that big of a deal. It's not like the phone is going to be forever unusable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My understanding is that's essentially impossible, but they're isolating the cellular modem into a detachable peripheral so it has no deep access into your device.
Why is it essentially impossible? Compared to the rest of the phone that seems like a relatively small thing.