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Essential Phone, available now

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Re: Essential Phone, available now

#631

Post by lunchables »

baddox wrote: post #489
hohghitlblkh wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could type faster (and without looking) on the old Nokia style keypads than I can on a touchscreen.

That's surprising to me. The physical phone keyboards I have used have require far too much activation pressure for me to type anywhere near as quickly as I do on an iPhone. I do think my error rate would be lower with a physical keyboard, and I could obviously type better without looking at my keyboard, but the former isn't enough of a difference and the latter isn't something I would need to do anyway except perhap…

I think that lower error rate is the key. I've been using an iPhone since 2010 and I still can't type on it. The amount of time I spend pressing, holding, dragging the cursor back to make a correction, or backspacing, to fix errors more than offsets any difference in typing speed because of the pressure required on a physical keyboard.

Just speaking for myself, obviously, I'm sure other people may have different experiences.

Re: Essential Phone, available now

#632

Post by rikkus »

freehunter wrote: post #387
Hasz wrote: post #338

You want fixable and well designed, long software updates, and a good price? Buy an (old) iPhone. I've got a 5S -- still perfectly fast for what I use it for (email, youtube, brokerage account, general internet, some small games), and is getting OS updates and security patches until IOS11. It's $120 on eBay; a new screen can be had for $13, a new battery for $11. it's solidly designed and there's a gigantic field of…

Plus you have a great piece of industrial design. I love the look of the 5S/SE. It looks premium, it feels nice in your hand, it's solid, and those chamfered edges are so nice. It's a shame they went from that to the iPhone 6 design and stuck with it all this time. It might make bigger phones easier to hold but man it just doesn't look as nice IMO. It looks like a generic round phone. Nothing stands out about it at a…

I'm not bothered about my phone standing out. The 6 and later models are actually big enough for me to hold properly and read text on, without holding them up to my face. I first bought an iPhone when the 6(s) came out.

Re: Essential Phone, available now

#633

Post by pjc50 »

exikyut wrote: post #624
pjc50 wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's much harder for the fab to backdoor things than any other stage, and it also takes time for them to prepare such an attack once they have your GDSII files. So it would show up as a manufacturing delay. For anything other than milspec this probably isn't worth worrying about at this time. Also, I'm not 100% sure that two fabs would actually produce optically identical chips; would there be process differences?

Arg. I'm actually considering the problem of a secure design that's secure both through being transparently open source, and by using a super-simple architecture. And unfortunately these two properties mean that a) well, everyone has the GDSII, and b) the architecture is super-easy to hack. It makes perfect sense that a fab would need time to mount an attack on a closed and complex design though. Very good point abou…

http://sharps.org/wp-content/uploads/BECKER-CHES.pdf is probably the state of the art here. It's basically undetectable.

"Instead of adding additional cir- cuitry to the target design, we insert our hardware Trojans by changing the dopant polarity of existing transistors. Since the modified circuit ap- pears legitimate on all wiring layers (including all metal and polysilicon), our family of Trojans is resistant to most detection techniques, includ- ing fine-grain optical inspection and checking against “golden chips”. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by inserting Trojans into two designs — a digital post-processing derived from Intel’s cryp- tographically secure RNG design used in the Ivy Bridge processors and a side-channel resistant SBox implementation — and by exploring their detectability and their effects on security"

Re: Essential Phone, available now

#634

Post by lunchables »

afandian wrote: post #305
feld wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - And physical keyboards. Something for SSH'ing with. There is no market for this product. Nobody wants it except a tiny fraction of the market who work in IT.

I just can't type on screens. I have tried so many times. My current phone is a Blackberry Passport, previous one was an HTC Desire Z, and my next one (fingers crossed) will be this: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/gemini-pda-android-linux-... I'd like to ssh sometimes, but mostly I want to send text and emails like everyone else. Shame that few companies have the guts to break the monoculture. It is vaguely ridic…

Have you considered the Blackberry KeyOne?

Re: Essential Phone, available now

#635

Post by lunchables »

91bananas wrote: post #413
onli wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not either or. The optimal solution is a phone that has a touchscreen and a keyboard. I had a HP Veer, and that one was way better for typing than all smartphones I ever had. Touchscreens suck for typing. A smooth glass surface without haptic feedback can never be an optimal solution for that. It is only better for pure media consumption, if having only a touchscreen means having a bigger display.

Have you ever considered that maybe you're just bad at typing on a touchscreen, and some practice could help? I can type on my iPhone without looking at it, quite quickly, the OS's autocorrect fills in for my slight inaccuracies with pretty damn good accuracy. The size a device must be to have both a keyboard and usable touchscreen puts it squarely out of the optimal solution category.

Respectfully, I've been using iPhones exclusively for ~7 years and I can still type faster on a Blackberry after using it for five minutes. I type WELL over 100 wpm on a computer keyboard, up into the 140wpm for short periods of time. I really don't think the problem is more practice.

Re: Essential Phone, available now

#636

Post by boondaburrah »

exikyut wrote: post #554
boondaburrah wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can confirm, the Sharp phone I owned in Japan had an absolutely fabulous screen, 1080p in 4.5" (I long for compact flagships), vivid colour with customisable profiles, including an electronically switchable privacy filter (using the toggle buttons in the notification shade) with 3 designs! The OS had been optimised to run smooth as butter, even with crapware. Too bad it also had to have all the docomo apps.

What do you mean by switchable privacy filter? Something that reduced the viewing angle, perhaps by adjusting the color profile?

There's a physical layer of the screen between the touch glass and the LCD that can be turned on, reducing the viewing angle. Anyone looking from the side will instead see a floral pattern, butterfly pattern, or something else I forget (stars?), depending on your setting. (You can't pick beyond these three because each pattern is physically its own layer it looks like)

This is classic Japanese market electronics. Rather than increase bottom line, add loads of niceties to compete.

My phone was a smartphone, a mobile wallet (osaifu-keitai, tap-to-pay), my train pass (osaifu-keitai is different hardware to android pay, as it works on turnstiles, even when the phone is dead/off, and has been a thing since 2004), a television (over the air!), an answering machine (no messages stored by carrier; the phone picks up if you don't answer and records it to the SD card), had those privacy filter things, and a really responsive camera.

Sadly, it has a non-replaceable battery and refuses to update android unless it can connect to a docomo tower (I think docomo hosts it's phone's system updates on internal network only, not internet). I had to retire the phone long before the hardware gave out.

I'm pretty much stuck with the phone's stock android because A) It's sharp, so the android hacking community hasn't heard of it. and B) I don't think any ROM would have drivers for any of the galapagos features. (especially I need osaifu-keitai, which as well as being a wallet and my train pass, has all of my arcade top scores associated with it (whenever I go, I just tap the phone and the arcade machine looks me up - unlocks all the bonuses I've achieved and my prefs))

Re: Essential Phone, available now

#637

Post by lunchables »

hueving wrote: post #488
busterarm wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? I need my phone to do three things: 1) Make and receive calls & texts. 2) Run a small number of ubiquitous apps (maps, ride hailing) 3) Not get hacked at DEFCON. Phones with the Apple logo on the back do this job best. Their security posture is just so much better and you don't have carrier-enforced forced obsolescence from the software side. You literally can always run the latest iOS until the hardware _just…

>I'm an open source guy only as much as it makes sense. That means you're not really an open source guy. You're just using whatever is best on the market at the time.

So you don't use any closed source software? What exactly is the bar for "open source guy" ? Sounds kind of like a No True Scottsman situation to me.

Re: Essential Phone, available now

#638

Post by dmoy »

throwaway613834 wrote: post #403
veeti wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The app-level "mitigation" is that media isn't automatically loaded. You are still just as vulnerable after you decide to play that innocuous-looking MP4 file.

I wasn't aware, thanks for mentioning that. However, the videos I watch are on YouTube and news sites and such... not sketchy sites. And I never play MP4s on my phone directly (unless they're videos I've recorded). I'm not sure many others do either, frankly. So how much do I need to worry and how much of a justification is this to upgrade the phone every 1-2 years?

Right this is sort of the point. You were not aware, if you had based your defense against unlatched vulnerabilities based on your knowledge 24 hours ago, you could quite easily have gotten pwned. Knowing about all vulnerabilities that could affect you and how they work is incredibly difficult. I don't want that risk (nevermind that even if I was ok with that risk, my company would throw a fit if they found out I was using an unpatched OS).

Re: Essential Phone, available now

#639

Post by ericabiz »

jrs95 wrote: post #613
zanny wrote: post #483

Since no one else has, I'll take the piss out of this "hollier than thou" bullshit. > Devices are your personal property. We won’t force you to have anything you don’t want. Devices are your personal property. The SoC is still a proprietary trade secret, the baseband is still spying on you for the NSA, the GPU is still a closed blob piece of shit. No mainline driver support, bootloader is closed source, firmware is c…

> Devices shouldn’t become outdated every year. They should evolve with you. Doesn't have a removable battery...so, how exactly is this going to last me any longer than anything else?

Don't know about this phone (we'll have to wait for the teardown), but iPhone batteries are pretty easily replaceable, and you don't need to go to an Apple Store to have them replaced. I run a chain of independent repair shops and we replace iPhone batteries all day long.

A press push for environmental reasons has made sure most smartphone batteries aren't glued in.

Now MacBooks and Surface Books, on the other hand, do tend to have glued-in batteries on newer models, so more pressure is needed there. We can still replace them, but they're a pain, and glue is not environmentally friendly at all.

Re: Essential Phone, available now

#640

Post by coldtea »

Retric wrote: post #621
coldtea wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because 1/100000 of their customers might have JS turned of?

The global average it's 0.2% or 1:500, however Taiwan averages 2.3% though Android tablets hit 9.6%. And, some websites see significantly higher rates. https://blockmetry.com/blog/javascript-disabled LTDR; Supporting non JS users tends to be very cheap, so it's often well worth the investment.

>The global average it's 0.2% or 1:500, however Taiwan averages 2.3% though Android tablets hit 9.6%. And, some websites see significantly higher rates.

Even at 1/20 I don't think people who turn of JS would make the best kind of customers. I'd expect them to be cranky and demanding...

>LTDR; Supporting non JS users tends to be very cheap, so it's often well worth the investment.

Spending opportunity cost time because there might be some users missing out in Taiwan or some Android tablets? Bah...

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