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Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

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Re: Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

#221

Post by qmarchi »

Grombobulous wrote: post #85
threemux wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To which device are you referring? The Fairphone 6+ is compatible with AT&T and T-Mobile in the US and their MVNOs. https://us.fairphone.com/carrier-compatibility

Oh this is weird. They have some contradicting information. https://us.fairphone.com/the-fairphone-gen-6-plus Click on “see all tech specs” and under “compatibility” it says AT&T and Verizon. But it lacks Verizon’s primary band and clearly can’t be used with it.

Likely because Verizon will only let "certified by Verizon" devices on their network, while AT&T and T-Mo will let pretty much anything with an LTE modem connect.

Re: Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

#222

Post by m4xp »

stymaar wrote: post #22
NoboruWataya wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure their concerns are valid but just because GrapheneOS don't consider the Fairphone to meet their standards for security doesn't mean it is not worth considering for other people who may have different priorities. Fairphones have certain advantages over Pixels such as better repairability and more ethically sourced labour/components. IMO it's good to see the Fairphone do well (and I hope GrapheneOS's partnersh…

Unfortunately it looks like it's not just a issue of missing hardware security features: > Their partnership with Murena along with promoting it themselves with misleading marketing means no possibility of working with us. I want to like GrapheneOS, but the pettiness of its leadership is a real problem for the long term prospect of the project.

As someone that swapped from fairphone 5 to a pixel9a with graphene.

I have to side with graphene. Fairphone is a cool concept, but its a expensive phone, early on i had problem with the speakers and mic. Security updates are extremely slow, support is extremely slow.

Their missions is to make a fair phone, but is it fair if you are then forced to buy more ewaste because your phone breaks? Look at pixel software support, its really good, and eu made batteries replacement mandatory.

Re: Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

#223

Post by FromHoiPolloi »

gruez wrote: post #134
dnautics wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i dont get it, they are comparing eOS to graphene, not talking about the hardware. this would be like grapheneOS not using pixel because the stock android that ships with it does not respect privacy. am i missing something?

You still need to rely on the OEM to properly configure the bootloader, not leak the keys, and provide updated vendor blobs.

It should be doable with cooperation between the two, right?

If we add that FSF aims to provide free alternatives to some vendor blobs the landscape begins to look promising.[0]

One party to provide needed specs for hardware, one party to free the hardware from vendor blobs and another party to merge this into a working product.

[0] https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/librephone

Re: Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

#224

Post by bitwize »

grapheneos wrote: post #216
bitwize wrote: post #212

grapheneos when?

Fairphones have awful updates, privacy and security. They don't provide crucial hardware-based security features needed to have working encryption for the vast majority of users not using a strong passphrase. They don't provide what's required to have decent protection from remote attacks either. Their devices don't provide important driver and firmware updates we need to have for each supported device. Fairphones en…

OK, mate, looks like I might be buying a Motorola when my Googlephone goes kaputski then.

I meant that comment from a standpoint of "no graphene, no buy".

Re: Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

#225

Post by phasephantasm »

teekert wrote: post #217
grapheneos wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See our response at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49355122 .

[flagged]

Perhaps you misunderstood why is criticism voiced in the first place. What you ask for is here, as it has always been:

> https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices

A part of the criticism of Fairphone is exactly that they aren't even particularly sustainable or repairable, or ethical, have you read the posts. So there is no choice, not between the two groups you presented as opposing. They aren't even opposing each other as currently Pixels stand as fairly easy to repair and source some genuine parts for via Google's official iFixIt partnership.

An OEM reads the link above and gets the ball rolling as it should, privately, which was what Motorola did after showing up on the public Discord guild with an employee asking for further directions, but being aware of the linked resource already. Obviously GrapheneOS' merit is provably the product and the values it represents, not posts on social media (how could that make sense?). Think of that and how this one-sided criticism of "you should do that to avoid a certain image and get things done" of yours makes no sense either - it didn't scare anyone who would ever: currently only Motorola.

Edit: adding to the last point, the same applies to Fairphone but inversely, where they portray themselves as things they are not (sustainable, specially repairable, ethical, even privacy-respecting). Whereas a takeaway from your comment is that GrapheneOS is good but has a negative image (a false premise, in my opinion), Fairphone puts a lot of *effort* to construct a good image that signals the inverse of what they are. Effort ultimately signals intention.

Re: Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

#226

Post by grapheneos »

teekert wrote: post #217
grapheneos wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See our response at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49355122 .

[flagged]

Fairphone doesn't design or build smartphones themselves but rather their ODM partner does both. It isn't within their control to make devices meeting our requirements. When Fairphone moved to T2Mobile with the Fairphone 4, it came with significant changes to the hardware, firmware and software not within their control. They likely didn't want to remove the 3.5mm audio jack but the overall design of the devices isn't up to them. They want to portray themselves as being the ones designing the devices and stood behind it, but they likely didn't want it.

Fairphone has made it very clear they don't consider their awful updates and lack of important hardware-based security features to be a significant problem. Their response to our points has consistently been to downplay it. Fairphone has also consistently taken the approach of not responding to serious security issues such as several generations of their devices using publicly available private keys for signing firmware and/or the OS. Not acknowledging or addressing a security issue beyond partially fixing it for subsequent devices is worse than simply downplaying it.

/e/ and Murena spent years actively misleading people about GrapheneOS before we began regularly responding to it. They've taken the approach of misleading people into wrongly believing it isn't usable, isn't compatible with apps, somehow isn't a privacy project and much more. Their efforts have done immense harm to GrapheneOS, especially in Europe where they've mislead many companies and governments about it. /e/ and Murena have heavily pushed the false narrative of GrapheneOS not being usable by regular people but rather primarily useful to criminals and pedophiles. Those are their own words. These are 2 examples where they said it more broadly about hardened devices in general:

https://www.clubic.com/actualite-604786-murena-e-os-intervie...

https://nitter.net/GrapheneOS/status/2040887784253141142

They've been doing this towards GrapheneOS specifically for years by misleading people about what it provides and wrongly painting it as an OS for criminals. Fairphone chose to become directly involved in this by responding to questions from the media based on a post with made about Murena with inaccurate claims. They chose to mislead people and to try to make it seem as if the accurate information we provided wasn't correct. Fairphone is not a bystander but rather explicitly sided with Murena in their attacks on GrapheneOS. Claiming highly private and secure devices are primarily benefiting criminals is outrageous and yet Fairphone backs the company repeatedly pushing this.

Re: Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

#227

Post by grapheneos »

oever wrote: post #52
oever wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

In the current version of /e/OS, Voice to Text runs offline. > The earlier Voice to Text was a Premium-only, online feature: it streamed your speech to a third-party AI transcription service [...] The new Voice to Text is free, offline and on-device https://doc.e.foundation/os/apps/voice-to-text

/e/ has other privacy invasive services which are enabled by default. It gives highly privileged access to Google services which are always active and has user tracking in their update client.

/e/ lacks many crucial standard privacy/security patches and protections:

https://nitter.net/GrapheneOS/status/2081837057433915603

/e/ and Murena repeatedly claiming privacy/security hardened devices mainly benefit criminals and falsely claiming they're mainly used by criminals shows what they believe. Here are 2 clear examples:

https://nitter.net/GrapheneOS/status/2040887784253141142

https://www.clubic.com/actualite-604786-murena-e-os-intervie...

Re: Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

#228

Post by Fnoord »

guywithahat wrote: post #44
Noaidi wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would buy this phone in a second over a 17e. Replaceable parts? Expandable storage? Any companies that says they care about the environment and does not have these things are just liars.

I mean replacing a battery is something you do, at most, once every 5-7 years. If removing the battery requires a heat gun then it's not the worst thing imo.

5-7 years? With daily use device 100% drain your battery will be about 85-90% health after 1,5 years. Once it gets to 80%, Apple recommends replacement. I'd say replacement should occur at approc 2-3 years of daily usage.

Re: Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

#229

Post by grapheneos »

mrbluecoat wrote: post #3

"[GrapheneOS] lost most interest in that hardware due to the poor way privacy, security, updates and marketing based on these things has been handled." https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/28825-is-there-any-chance-o...

Fairphones lack the updates and hardware-based security features expected by GrapheneOS.

They're missing hardware security features needed to provide strong encryption for the vast majority of users not using a very strong passphrase. They're similarly missing hardware-based protections heavily used in GrapheneOS to protect from exploitation including remote attacks.

Fairphones have atrocious updates, privacy and security. They lag many months and even years behind on providing crucial standard privacy and security patches. They've failed to respond to the discovery of severe security issues including multiple of their devices using publicly available private keys for signing.

Fairphone lags months behind on providing Android Security Bulletin patches which are themselves delayed by months compared to when OEMs are first provided and allowed to ship the patches. They lag a year or more behind on major OS updates and count this as additional support time compared to other OEMs. For example, a final major OS update being delayed for 3 years is marketed as providing 3 more years of support compared to shipping it on time.

Fairphone 5 and earlier have an end-of-life kernel branch and the same fate awaits the Fairphone 6. Pixels move to newer kernel branches and are currently moving to 6.12 and then on to 6.18. Other OEMs are also beginning to use newer kernels and move to new branches. Linux LTS branches are only going to have 2 years of support going forward.

Fairphones are designed and assembled by an ODM. Fairphone has very limited involvement in engineering the devices. The working conditions and supply chain are also largely up to T2Mobile rather than Fairphone. Whether either of those are better than Pixels or especially iPhones should be demonstrated with evidence. There's extremely little information available on the working conditions, pay and other aspects of the assembly and supply chain for Fairphones.

Fairphone replaced their own open source OS without Google Mobile Services with /e/ as part of a close partnership with Murena. /e/ and Murena have repeatedly claimed highly private and secure devices mainly benefit criminals and pedophiles along with peddling other authoritarian talking points. They've falsely claimed GrapheneOS devices are mainly used by criminals and aren't useful to regular people. Fairphone has chosen to stand with this company included when contacted by the media about criticism.

https://nitter.net/GrapheneOS/status/2040887784253141142

https://clubic.com/actualite-604786-murena-e-os-interview.ht...

Despite the marketing, /e/ has very poor privacy and security. /e/ has their own invasive services with tracking, gives highly privileged access to default enabled Google services and doesn't keep up with basic updates. It greatly rolls back privacy and security compared to the Android Open Source Project.

https://codeberg.org/divested-mobile/divestos-website/raw/co...

https://eylenburg.github.io/android_comparison.htm

https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/24134-devices-lacking-stand...

Re: Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

#230

Post by fsflover »

handedness wrote: post #182
fsflover wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> I never claimed the lifetime updates for the modem, did I? Exactly. You get very precise when you want to paint the device as a panacea of liberty, to the point of potentially misleading people. The rest of the time, not so much.

Your accusation are so vague, I can't even understand you. Notice how I always give precise links to all your misconceptions and you don't.
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