"Blackphone" said to be "a super-secure nsa-proof"

[grarpamp]

> On 23July2014Wednesday, at 18:11, Ulex Europae <europus at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> < http://www.yahoo.com/tech/startup-launching-a-super-secure-nsa-proof-73511096050.html>
>> It's been long enough, has anyone acquired one of these and tested it?

> On Wed, Jul 23, 2014 at 9:21 PM, manning bill <bmanning at isi.edu> wrote:
> it is being delivered.   will let folks know

http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/06/exclusive-a-review-of-the-blackphone-the-android-for-the-paranoid/
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/06/blackphone.html
https://www.blackphone.ch/
https://blog.silentcircle.com/category/blackphone/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackphone
Though it's more consumer oriented and the price is lower, blackphone isn't
the first to market a crypto phone to the public, these guys have been around
for many years... lately doing a GSM+Android combo as well...
http://www.cryptophone.de/
And a couple companies claim to be building 'open' hardware phones,
I'd call them 'more/mostly' open. I forget their links at the moment :(

I see these cute silent* demo screens of one or two word 'verification strings'
with this and tech like ZRTP, that's not even close to OPIE strength.
I'd rather be able to see and read a full real hash, key import/export, etc.
Maybe the option is there, I don't know yet. No doubt because these sorts
of companies bury all their real tech docs deep behind glitzy Web3.0 splash,
(points finger at blackphone.ch, ahem!)

https://source.android.com/
https://guardianproject.info/
https://github.com/SilentCircle
https://github.com/WhisperSystems
https://lists.mayfirst.org/pipermail/guardian-dev/2014-January/003055.html
http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/search?q=silentcircle

I don't much care what they've done with opensource Android and things
riding on top of it, since anyone like Guardian can do that as a project.
Blackphone does have some Cell, Server, VoIP, etc stacks deployed
to complement the phone, that's handy and takes $capital. But what I
really want to know is:
- What phone make and model is it based on?
- About how, if at all, they've managed to open (or claim to
certify, reverse engineer, substitute open replacements, or somehow control)
the closed Android blobs and/or the closed phone firmware/hardware below
that??? That's would be the real progress, and worth buying as an integrated
system (I'd definitely buy that progress), but only if it was open in turn.

Does Blackphone accept BTC? I was begging for BTC the other day... :)
Thanks Bill, we'll need more than a few quality reviews of the security
model of the system as a whole.

If this phone and company does well, maybe it will use its power to leverage
that progress as time goes on, but it only matters if it's open.

And for where you need Cell based voice/data connectivity, I'd like to see them
offer a GSM hotspot wifi tether so you don't have to trust the cell baseband
(now unused, or even physically neutered) on your device (phone/pad/tablet)
as much.