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Blackphone

blackphone.ch

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Re: Blackphone

#171

Post by IgorPartola »

ansible wrote: post #158
IgorPartola wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, thanks for the explanation. So it sounds like this comes down to vendors competing and not wanting to have their code exposed for fear that others might copy their chip + code when the vender is the one paying all the fees to make the chip + code usable. I guess this is similar to Nvidia vs AMD (vs Intel I suppose), except perhaps even more entrenched and without much hope of a community reverse engineering a sol…

So it sounds like this comes down to vendors competing [...] I guess this is similar to Nvidia vs AMD (vs Intel I suppose) [...] Yes, exactly. Sometimes just seeing how something is organized, or the API can give significant clues to how it is done. It is much harder to start from scratch. Do we have any alternatives? Are there any completely open radio chips in development? See my parent post. First you need a few b…

> See my parent post. First you need a few billion dollars to buy some spectrum.

So that's the tragedy of the mobile computing revolution isn't it then? That communication tech is technically a free market but realistically is controlled by very few corporations with very deep pockets. I did not realize that this is how it was set up and now I am sad.

Re: Blackphone

#174

Post by noselasd »

IgorPartola wrote: post #151
ansible wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I come to a carrier and say "Here's a codebase for your baseband. The carriers don't want baseband code, they just want finished products to sell. It's OSS, well tested, secure, and supported. Buy support from me." why won't they go for it. Surely, an OSS solution is cheaper for them than developing an in-house crap solution that I'm sure it is now. OK, assuming you get a current-generation baseband chip for free…

OK, thanks for the explanation. So it sounds like this comes down to vendors competing and not wanting to have their code exposed for fear that others might copy their chip + code when the vender is the one paying all the fees to make the chip + code usable. I guess this is similar to Nvidia vs AMD (vs Intel I suppose), except perhaps even more entrenched and without much hope of a community reverse engineering a sol…

> except perhaps even more entrenched

By a lot. On the plus side, all the specs to create a component in a cellular network(protocols, procedures, network architecture and so on). are open and free.

On the other hand, the specs that cover all the parts of a cellular system is _many_ thousands of documents - and there's patents hidden in quite a lot of them.

> without much hope of a community reverse engineering a solution.

* specs for the chipsets are not available.

* You might get the spec. for the pinouts for the chips if you sign an NDA, but not the specs for being able to run your own code on it.

* But the chipset manufacturers won't talk to you unless you're serious about buying quite a few million of them anyway.

http://bb.osmocom.org/ have managed to reverse engineer an old GSM chipset (with help from leaked documents and source code) and created an open source GSM base band for those old phones. But there's little to suggest doing the same for 3G or 4G will be possible in the near future.

Re: Blackphone

#175

Post by brudgers »

aidenn0 wrote: post #153
brudgers wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two different connotations of 'privacy' that are often conflated in discussions about Facebook, Google, etc. Conflating them probably obscures the more important connotation to the benefit of such companies' bottom lines. The first connotation is the one my mother warned me about. It's Facebook photos of that tequila weekend in Tijuana and those two PM Tuesday tweets from the beach bar when I called in sick…

You can disable third-party cookies (I do so), and watch how many websites cease to function.

I've been running Firefox with Ghostery and NoScript for about four years. I know the consequences.

I only access Facebook from a VM or an old smartphone with no SIM. That's because browsers are designed to circumvent my attempts at privacy and to facilitate the ends of third party cookies.

Using a Git analogy, there is no reason for a single cookie repository. Suppose foo.com injects a third party cookie from bar.com into my data stream. It could sit on the foo.com branch of my cache, so that when I visit baz.com, it does not know about the bar.com cookie, and injects another one [which sits on the baz.com branch of my cache].

When I want to have a single bar.com cookie for foo.com and baz.com, then I merge them and let bar.com sort out any discrepancy. To put it another way, there might be a few websites where I wish to allow a shared persistent Facebook cookie, but I don't want to share that information with every website with a LikeUsOnFacebook widget or share all my browsing with Facebook.

But browsers thwart that process and facilitate tracking. It is by explicit design that browsers break the web when there are attempts at privacy. They are designed to mislead users and be truthful to remote websites rather than vice-versa.

The

Re: Blackphone

#177

Post by RegW »

huhtenberg wrote: post #6

For a project concerned with privacy and anonymity the news subscription form is asking way too much. Also, why is domain on .ch ?

"The company itself will be based in Switzerland due to that country's strict privacy rules."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/15/encrypted_blackphone...

Re: Blackphone

#179

Post by Mikeb85 »

ianlevesque wrote: post #143
redacted wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't actually need a gmail account for what its worth - Google just makes it difficult. On the screen where it requests a login you (seriously) need to tap each corner of the screen in clockwise order starting from the top left. That should skip the step.

That's useful, and user-hostile. On iOS you can just tap "Skip this step" if you don't want to use an Apple account with it.

Yet you need an Apple account to download anything from the App Store or iTunes... An iPhone without apps is barely useful.

Re: Blackphone

#180

Post by oh_sigh »

I get the feeling this phone was designed by a marketing group, and not competent engineers. Unless they completely design every chip in the phone, including the SIM and wireless chipsets, the device will never achieve their stated goals.
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