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Linux PinePhone has physical kill switches for its cameras, mic, data, BT, Wi-Fi

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Re: Linux PinePhone has physical kill switches for its cameras, mic, data, BT, Wi-Fi

#81

Post by unethical_ban »

dangus wrote: post #68

That’s cool, but hardware kill switches don’t help your privacy. Why? Because nobody is ever going to want to turn off that functionality. I don’t know anyone who turns off the software switches, why would they turn off hardware ones? A smartphone without a camera, mic, Bluetooth, cellular data, and WiFi is basically useless. What we need is a way to make these technologies more private while they’re in use. Also, th…

That is a huge, and incorrect, assertion.

If I could hard-off my mic, I would. I don't use it but once a day, maybe, while I use others frequently. I turn off location manually whenever I am not using an app that requires it. I leave bluetooth on because I use it frequently enough, but if it were an easy hardware switch, I could get in the habit of shutting it off.

Re: Linux PinePhone has physical kill switches for its cameras, mic, data, BT, Wi-Fi

#82

Post by tpxl »

Ardon wrote: post #76
tpxl wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is the battery life? On UBPorts a few weeks ago I got about 8 hours standby, which truly is atrocious. I would probably switch to it being my daily driver if I can get 3 days standby on a distro.

They recently got power management working for more components, I've heard people are getting ~40 hours standby now. There's still some gains to be made here, so this may still improve.

Wow, 40 hours is a lot!

Re: Linux PinePhone has physical kill switches for its cameras, mic, data, BT, Wi-Fi

#83

Post by kop316 »

syshum wrote: post #77
kop316 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the Librem Phone, the extra money is also paying for the development of the software ecosystem. I would argue that's worth the investment. For reference, a lot of the Pinephone distros are using the software developed by Purism. I am not saying that's bad, thats the whole spirit of open source!

PinePhone appears to come with PostmarketOS, and they give a small amount of every sale to PostmarketOS. Other than PureOS what other "pinephone distros" are using Purism Software? On top of that, how much of "Purism Software" is upstream linux?

Both PostmarketOS (if you use the phosh env) and Mobian use phosh, proc, chatty, libhandy, squeekboard, and a number of Purism packages. Mobian would take a lot more work (and likely would not exist) if they did not take advantage of Purism's work.

Feel free to go through https://puri.sm/posts/ to see their documentation of what they contribute, but here is one post I choose arbitrarily:

https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-may-2020-software-development... Note the "Linux Kernel" section.

Here's another one: https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-june-2020-software-developmen... Also note the "Linux Kernel" section.

Re: Linux PinePhone has physical kill switches for its cameras, mic, data, BT, Wi-Fi

#84

Post by Ardon »

tpxl wrote: post #82
Ardon wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They recently got power management working for more components, I've heard people are getting ~40 hours standby now. There's still some gains to be made here, so this may still improve.

Wow, 40 hours is a lot!

To be clear, this when the phone is allowed to be in a sort of 'deep sleep' mode, this probably isn't representative of day-to-day use. The point remains though that more and more power management is working and things are improving quickly.

Re: Linux PinePhone has physical kill switches for its cameras, mic, data, BT, Wi-Fi

#85

Post by labawi »

kec wrote: post #51
Erlich_Bachman wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> any normal OEM's support? What "normal OEM support" (like which company, for example?) has been good at regularly releasing security patches and keeping on top of various vulnerabilities? Especially past the 1-2 years after the release date of the device? Especially if you consider those companies that without any real consent from you install dozens of their own adware and spyware on each update that you can't eve…

Apple’s average full support for iPhone is trending to around 4-5 years since launch. Several times they’ve issued critical security updates years after ending official support.

To be fair, they are an outlier, so not really normal in that sense.

Re: Linux PinePhone has physical kill switches for its cameras, mic, data, BT, Wi-Fi

#86

Post by nabilhat »

input_sh wrote: post #18
Y_Y wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The librem phone is $750 and the pinephone is $150.

Also a crucial difference: You can get your hands on a Pine Phone, while Librem has yet to ship a phone.

Pine is using the Pinephone as a workbench to build open source, Purism is using open source as a workbench to build a phone. I'm not applying either of those negatively. In either case, I think one gets what they pay for and a delivery timeline to match.

Re: Linux PinePhone has physical kill switches for its cameras, mic, data, BT, Wi-Fi

#87

Post by tpxl »

Ardon wrote: post #84
tpxl wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, 40 hours is a lot!

To be clear, this when the phone is allowed to be in a sort of 'deep sleep' mode, this probably isn't representative of day-to-day use. The point remains though that more and more power management is working and things are improving quickly.

Can it receive calls/SMSs in this mode?

Re: Linux PinePhone has physical kill switches for its cameras, mic, data, BT, Wi-Fi

#88

Post by solarkraft »

mpol wrote: post #67
solarkraft wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The original Jolla 1 even used Btrfs, which was deemed a mistake. Why is that? Was it too young or is it generally impractical on a phone?

What I remember (not a linux developer) is that sometimes you have to rebalance the filesystem. You can have free space in megabytes, but no inodes left. (If I am wrong someone might correct me). There have been instances, especially later on in its lifecycle, where a system update was aborted due to no space (inodes) which ended in a lot of trouble.

I've been using btrfs as my main file system for about 6 years now and have run into the "no free space" issue about twice.

It's horrible. Everything stops working and freeing space is quite hard.

Other than that I had no issues with it. Subvolumes and snapshots are pretty cool to me, but I can see how the added overhead might not make sense in a processing power and space constrained environment.

Re: Linux PinePhone has physical kill switches for its cameras, mic, data, BT, Wi-Fi

#89

Post by Chris2048 »

autisticcurio wrote: post #56
Cantbekhan wrote: post #15

Off-topic but IMHO what is really needed these days is a privacy feature allowing all the UIDs to be changed freely by the user (without the need for rooting and firmware thinkering). Including randomized IMEIs and randomized Android ID (In addition to the already offered randomized MAC and Ad tracking ID changes). Especially IMEIs which are commonly used by many applications and law enforcement to track users (see B…

Changing the IMEI is illegal in the UK FYI and has been since 2002. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2002/31/introduction Perhaps this legislation gives you a clue about how on the ball some Govt's are when it comes to security matters? What you are suggesting is a phone that changes its obvious identifiers, but the problem with that is some services may not work, maybe an app purchased from an app store, or the…

But wait, is that changing the on-device IMEI, or just spoofing it when communicating with some random app?

I assume changing the device IMEI would have the same affect of directly spoofing it when connecting to mobile networks, which may be illegal; but If I leave all that alone, and only give a false IMEI to some random app, while connecting to mobile networks with the legitimate one, then what's the issue?

Re: Linux PinePhone has physical kill switches for its cameras, mic, data, BT, Wi-Fi

#90

Post by kop316 »

numpad0 wrote: post #62
kop316 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may actually be very interested in the work here: https://xnux.eu/devices/feature/modem-pp.html https://xnux.eu/devices/feature/modem-pp-reveng.html They were able to get root access within the modem. Depending on how the IMEI value is stored, it may actually be feasible here.

Not sure if it’s possible from running Android on app CPU, but people with copies of QXDM all knows how to do it from PC

Respectfully, I think you misunderstand the page. The Quectel EG25-G is the modem only, the main CPU on the Pinephone is an Allwinner A64 ARM Quad core Cortex-A53. The modem itself has its own linux kernel, app space, etc.
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