MikroPhone: A privacy enhanced, simple and featured RISC-V mobile phone
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Re: MikroPhone: A privacy enhanced, simple and featured RISC-V mobile phone
#2Tbh I would accept anything usable without being bound neither to Google nor Apple. Like a Linux phone but with usable apps which is quite important.
For example Samsung gets free MP3 player and more important, background-running voice recorder, which is extremely important for me, but was impossible to find on OnePlus One.
Re: MikroPhone: A privacy enhanced, simple and featured RISC-V mobile phone
#3What is the cost for the hardware BoM?
Also curious why someone is motivated? Pretty great, would love a 3rd alternative option to Apple and Android.
Mostly I care about phone calls, texting, and web browsing.
Re: MikroPhone: A privacy enhanced, simple and featured RISC-V mobile phone
#4This looks really cool! I don’t know if this more of a feature phone or a smart phone though. Would like to see pictures of completed builds and what they can do.
Re: MikroPhone: A privacy enhanced, simple and featured RISC-V mobile phone
#5Ah, another privacy-oriented phone project. As if the Pine-, Libre-, Jolla-, Neo900- etc. etc. endeavours weren't successful enough.
Re: MikroPhone: A privacy enhanced, simple and featured RISC-V mobile phone
#6Tbh I would accept anything usable without being bound neither to Google nor Apple. Like a Linux phone but with usable apps which is quite important. For example Samsung gets free MP3 player and more important, background-running voice recorder, which is extremely important for me, but was impossible to find on OnePlus One.
You should try GrapheneOS
It is basically Android with all the crap from Google removed.
Re: MikroPhone: A privacy enhanced, simple and featured RISC-V mobile phone
#7This looks really cool! I don’t know if this more of a feature phone or a smart phone though. Would like to see pictures of completed builds and what they can do.
The main processor is a very low-performance microcontroller, so even "featurephone" might be ambitious.
Re: MikroPhone: A privacy enhanced, simple and featured RISC-V mobile phone
#8Hm. I'm not sure what to make of this, really.
The concept of a RISC-V based "assemble it yourself" phone is solid enough - there have been the PiPhone concepts based around a Pi Zero for long enough, and while I don't think they're terribly usable, they're also a fun looking little project.
But then they throw the ElipticCP concept on top, and sort of handwave it being "secure" if you're talking to someone else who is using a similar device, or similar capabilities, or such. And, unfortunately, there's not a lot of information about that I'm seeing (or, that which there is seems rather vague and handwaving).
https://mikrophone.net/about.html
> The security of the whole system is not compromised even though none of these modules is trusted, because all sensitive data is encrypted by the central MCU before sending it to a communication module. Secure communication uses a protocol EllipticCP originally designed for this project. It provides end-to-end encryption and an additional anonymizing layer based on the principle of onion routing. In order for a security protocol to function to its full extent, the end recipient in the communication channel also needs to use mikroPhone or some other phone with comparable security performances (in other words, both communication parties must be secure enough).
There's a lot of words in here that sound good, but there's a serious lack of details, and then when you go to build the phone, you have open JTAG ports to the device.
So I'm not really sure what threat model they're dealing with exactly. "People who can build their own hardware and firmware, who work in investigative journalism or human rights activists, who have iron clad control over their hardware, who want to talk to other people with identical hardware," maybe? It seems designed to counter remote threats only, and without a lot more details as to what it's doing, it's hard to say if it is or isn't doing that competently. I don't have the time right now to go dig through their firmware to see, unfortunately.
If it weren't a build it yourself sort of thing ("Here's the schematics, go get boards fabricated!") it would trip my honeypot sensors ("Secure Phones!" being more government ops than anything actually useful, IMO), but... it's not that, fairly obviously?
Dunno. I doubt it would work on any US carriers, they're all VoLTE only now. :/
Re: MikroPhone: A privacy enhanced, simple and featured RISC-V mobile phone
#9What is the cost for the hardware BoM? Also curious why someone is motivated? Pretty great, would love a 3rd alternative option to Apple and Android. Mostly I care about phone calls, texting, and web browsing.
> Mostly I care about phone calls, texting, and web browsing.
"Easy, Easy, Brutally Difficult."
If all you want is phone and text, there's no shortage of cheaper flip phone/candybar phones out there that handle it, though I will caution you that older versions of KaiOS, at least, struggle badly with handling any sort of modern text quantities (a few hundred messages on a phone on a KaiOS 2.x device lagged it badly enough that it stopped alerting me to new messages or phone calls, and I had to trim it down regularly, though even then it struggled).
I'm a fan of the Sonim stuff, it runs Android Go, and is properly stout.
Web browsing, though. That's hard. If you want a simple phone, your best bet is to carry a tablet or laptop for that sort of thing, and just hotspot off the phone if/when needed. Most current featurephones have a thing called a web browser, and it ranges from "almost useless" to "literally can't render the modern web." That's before you sort out using it on what is typically a 320x240 pixel display. You're way better off just carrying something different for that need.
Re: MikroPhone: A privacy enhanced, simple and featured RISC-V mobile phone
#10This looks really cool! I don’t know if this more of a feature phone or a smart phone though. Would like to see pictures of completed builds and what they can do.
Looking at the hardware, it's likely to be a "mostly usable interface to a cell modem." So, SMS, audio. No idea if it can handle MMS or not. And anything beyond that is iffy.
They've got some interesting concepts for a separate application processor that can route to the screen, but... right now, consider it the sort of project to build if you don't actually need to talk to anyone with any reliability.