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Really not a bad business idea on his part, just highly unethical. I'd imagine you could just send the factory a custom ROM for the device, provide them with custom branding, and have them ship to the buyer's doorstep at a $380 markup. No warehouse or investment necessary, just a store website and a bunch of marketing $$$
Wikipedia has a good summary for anyone unfamiliar; it's a $120 phone whitelabeled and sold for $500. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umidigi_A9
Love the irony that the "American Conservative" Freedom phone is just a generic phone from a Chinese tech company...
Their common points being do not roll your own and publish and check everything in your protocol model and codebase
The eternal vigilance of checking your security model. It's a cost.
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Love the irony that the "American Conservative" Freedom phone is just a generic phone from a Chinese tech company...
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https://hothardware.com/news/us-government-subsidized-lifeli...
Not the best writeup but not the worst. I experienced this myself.
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The problem here is that "Freedom" in "FreedomPhone" does not seem to be "freedom" the way free software advocates define it, or privacy advocates define it; it seems to be "freedom" the way far-right activists use it as a dogwhistle. If people are a bit focused on the company's politics, it's because they put those politics front and center. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that if there was some company d…
Re: [1] I was wondering what a phone targeting left-leaning people would look like, but I think that's pretty much just Twitter, Tumblr etc? You seem to disagree on this point, so I'd be curious to hear more.
Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, etc., for better or worse really don’t represent a left or right ideology. They represent the mainstream. Now, you or I may find that mainstream too conservative or too progressive, but I do not believe that any of those platforms are ideologically driven one way or another (even Tumblr, where the userbase is historically younger and thus more leftist, banned porn (a distinctly anti-leftist move) and has historically had a much more laissez faire attitude towards banning users than many left-leaning people would like…). It’s important not to confuse the userbase that is most visible on a platform for the platform itself).
The Freedom Phone isn’t targeting run of the mill conservatives. Those users are just fine using their iPhone or Samsung. It’s targeting people who are zealots and convinced the world is against them. It’s targeting Q Anon believers (tho not exclusively) and people who think Fox News is too left of center. That’s why it’s a grift. It is targeting people who would rather adopt something that is a scam, just because it agrees with their idea that the system is rigged and everyone is against them.
As chipotle_coyote says, there are, for whatever reason, less scams aimed at leftists. I don’t think it’s b/c the group on the right is any less intelligent, but because the nature of this sort of culture tends to be that the left eats its own, so selling a specific grift to them is a lot harder.
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Re: [1] I was wondering what a phone targeting left-leaning people would look like, but I think that's pretty much just Twitter, Tumblr etc? You seem to disagree on this point, so I'd be curious to hear more.
A left-targeting phone would be something like purism's offerings [0] or pine [1], would it not? Though, those aren't exactly rebranded junk as a scam, so they might not count for the purpose of this discussion. [0] https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ [1] https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/
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The problem here is that "Freedom" in "FreedomPhone" does not seem to be "freedom" the way free software advocates define it, or privacy advocates define it; it seems to be "freedom" the way far-right activists use it as a dogwhistle. If people are a bit focused on the company's politics, it's because they put those politics front and center. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that if there was some company d…
Re: [1] I was wondering what a phone targeting left-leaning people would look like, but I think that's pretty much just Twitter, Tumblr etc? You seem to disagree on this point, so I'd be curious to hear more.
As for whether Twitter, Tumblr and friends are canted to the left, here's why I'm doubtful of that. (Also doubtful of the inverse, to be clear.) It's fairly trivial to create a Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, etc., follow list which is curated to your favored sociopolitical bubbles -- that's basically going to happen if you use the sites as designed. The more you interact with those bubbles (e.g., what you like and what you retweet/reblog), the more focused they become.
Okay, so, that's all probably pretty obvious, but here's the thing. Once you're in your favorite bubbles, the problems you see on, say, Twitter are going to be the problems that bubble experiences. If most of the people you follow are deeply invested, either directly or indirectly, with far right activism, you're going to see and hear about far right activists that Twitter has flagged or suspended or banned. If most of the people you follow are deeply invested, either directly or indirectly, with LGBTQ activism, you're going to see and hear about LGBTQ activists that Twitter has flagged or suspended or banned. But those two streams are very, very rarely going to cross. And that makes it very easy to think it's your particular in-group that's bearing the brunt of Twitter's evil machinations.