"Open"... being relative, yet interesting... https://neo900.org/ Are you tired of all those closed mobile platforms? Do you want to truly own a device that has the ability to do whatever you want, just like your PC? The Neo900 project aims to provide a Fremantle (Maemo™ 5) compatible successor to the N900, with a faster CPU, more RAM and an LTE modem. This is all based on a free, mature and stable platform - the GTA04. We'll provide complete, ready-to-use devices, as well as motherboard replacements for your current devices. Most importantly, the Neo900 is an open platform, carrying on in the tradition of the Openmoko project. Neo900 will support all operating systems available for GTA04 (QtMoko, SHR, Debian, Replicant, ...) and should serve as a great platform for porting systems like Maemo, Ubuntu or Firefox OS - or even for writing your own one! We bring the hardware, you choose the operating system.
Seems like an awesome initiative but jeez... a thousand dollars. Don't get me wrong, I believe is a right price for a handmade piece of engineering like that. It's incredible what economies of scale can do in technology. Nowadays you yet decent android phones for $60-70... how it went down that much. grarpamp:
"Open"... being relative, yet interesting...
Are you tired of all those closed mobile platforms? Do you want to truly own a device that has the ability to do whatever you want, just like your PC?
The Neo900 project aims to provide a Fremantle (Maemo™ 5) compatible successor to the N900, with a faster CPU, more RAM and an LTE modem. This is all based on a free, mature and stable platform - the GTA04.
We'll provide complete, ready-to-use devices, as well as motherboard replacements for your current devices.
Most importantly, the Neo900 is an open platform, carrying on in the tradition of the Openmoko project. Neo900 will support all operating systems available for GTA04 (QtMoko, SHR, Debian, Replicant, ...) and should serve as a great platform for porting systems like Maemo, Ubuntu or Firefox OS - or even for writing your own one!
We bring the hardware, you choose the operating system.
Hi,
grarpamp: https://neo900.org/
"resistive [is] superior to capacitive screens" GTFOH. Wordlife, Spencer
On 7/22/16, Mr Nobody
Seems like an awesome initiative but jeez... a thousand dollars. Don't get me wrong, I believe is a right price for a handmade piece of engineering like that.
New model closed source iPhones go for $700+. I'd happily pay $1k+ for an open phone if it used an open community designed baseband chip, ran a real unix, and was hopefully modular repairable / upgradeable even if bulkier version... the hackerspace of phones.
It's incredible what economies of scale can do in technology. Nowadays you yet decent android phones for $60-70... how it went down that much.
People can safely tether these to an IP hotspot / wifi, but lose cellular voice and SMS which won't make basic users happy. They could emulate it with VoIP, SIP trunks etc. Add in openvpn, tor, whatever. But it's a mashup. Given it's widely known to be a backdoor, the push for open baseband chips should really happen. And someone should test it with a kickstart. It can't be that hard to pull off. After all, baseband already exists in SDR, and ASIC miners have proven startup sized community fabrication efforts producing chips in large very sellable quantities. And there are now plenty of well heeled potential donors who are rather pissed at the surveillance and backdoor issues.
On Sat, Jul 23, 2016 at 04:28:18AM -0400, grarpamp wrote:
New model closed source iPhones go for $700+. I'd happily pay $1k+ for an open phone if it used an open community designed baseband chip, ran a real unix, and was hopefully modular repairable / upgradeable even if bulkier version... the hackerspace of phones.
Well, Tor appears to me partial counterexample to "the theory of many eyes". Even if the chip is community designed, do you really know what "the community is?". Who audited it? Also, the implementation must be exactly what is designed. Can't find reference ATM, but pretty sure I read that faulty NAND gates can compromise a lot of things (crypto too), while the metal appears to work as designed. How do you verify a chip is what is claimed to be? Maybe peel it, take snapshots and then reverse engineer the wiring/gates and compare to the source (VHDL?) ? As for phones, I don't keep anything of importance on them and consider them compromised. Might not work for you.
participants (5)
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Bastiani Fortress -
Georgi Guninski -
grarpamp -
Mr Nobody -
Spencer