Open Phones

[grarpamp]

On 7/22/16, Mr Nobody <mrnobody at mail-on.us> wrote:
> 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.