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Blackphone

blackphone.ch

41–50 of 210 posts

Re: Blackphone

#41

Completely useless web page. All wooly 'feel-good' words and no hard, concrete information. So I guess we just have to take it on trust then? Also, their privacy policy is laughable: We turn the logging level on our systems to log only protocol-related errors - great! the pages on our main web site pull in javascript files from a third party. This allows our web developers and salespeople to know which pages are bein…

Well, Silent Circle is based in Washington DC, so even if they were keeping logs themselves, it wouldn't be much of a privacy reassurance...

Re: Blackphone

#42
"and anonymize your activity through a VPN."

iOS and Android support VPN but it needs to be manually activated each time, making it rather useless unless you're using some public wifi. If I understand correctly there is a possibility for large companies to integrate VPN but for the average guy it's rather useless if you have to activate it. If this phone has VPN really integrated that'd be great.

Re: Blackphone

#43
post #39

Android having the most granular permission system ever seen on any operating system is already the most secure operating system. The biggest security hole next to the baseband processor and the SIM is the user who installs every app in seconds without checking permissions.

Not really, iOS permissions are more granular sometimes - iOS will ask you before an app accesses your phonebook, and you can deny the access. You can't do that with Android.

Re: Blackphone

#44
post #43
post #39

Android having the most granular permission system ever seen on any operating system is already the most secure operating system. The biggest security hole next to the baseband processor and the SIM is the user who installs every app in seconds without checking permissions.

Not really, iOS permissions are more granular sometimes - iOS will ask you before an app accesses your phonebook, and you can deny the access. You can't do that with Android.

> iOS permissions are more granular sometimes

Not true, http://developer.android.com/reference/android/Manifest.perm...

Re: Blackphone

#45
I know they are pre-launch and this is just a landing page, but it doesn't tell us much. Questions:

1. Is this just a stock phone with some privacy-orientated applications built-in, or is the OS and hardware contributing anything?

2. They seem to be using Android. AOSP or Cyanogenmod? Have they any work themselves to harden the OS? Are they using virtualisation?

3. Any closed binary blobs in there? What about the baseband firmware? (Does open source baseband firmware even exist?)

4. Whats the hardware like? Is it hardened in any way?

Re: Blackphone

#46
post #34

Completely useless web page. All wooly 'feel-good' words and no hard, concrete information. So I guess we just have to take it on trust then? Also, their privacy policy is laughable: We turn the logging level on our systems to log only protocol-related errors - great! the pages on our main web site pull in javascript files from a third party. This allows our web developers and salespeople to know which pages are bein…

Expecting people to write their own metrics stack for a promo site is a bit OTT - there are a lot of good analytics stacks out there which let you get up and running very quickly, complete with dashboards, metrics, etc.

You don't need to write your own, just self-host it: http://piwik.org/

Re: Blackphone

#47

Completely useless web page. All wooly 'feel-good' words and no hard, concrete information. So I guess we just have to take it on trust then? Also, their privacy policy is laughable: We turn the logging level on our systems to log only protocol-related errors - great! the pages on our main web site pull in javascript files from a third party. This allows our web developers and salespeople to know which pages are bein…

This web page is clearly marketing page not technology information page. They simply try to gather information if there is interest/demand for something like this. LEAN startup :-)

Re: Blackphone

#48
Unless they have some really special hardware in this, I don't see how its that much different than running cyanogenmod + secure applications on top, such as textsecure.

Re: Blackphone

#49
Geeksphone is doing pretty impressive for a startup that they were launch partners for Firefox OS and now have roped in PGP founders for this project.

Were they successful in delivering on the Firefox phones?, Their website always says 'out of stock'. Blackphone seems to be ambitious too. Is it possible for a startup to sail these two boats?

Also I find it odd that the PR is always just before the Mobile World Congress (MWC) which happens in Spain, last year with Firefox OS and this year with Blackphone

Re: Blackphone

#50
I am not getting it, how do you prevent the carrier from knowing where you are if you sign up to it with your number?
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