On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 8:52 PM, Matt Willsher <[email protected]> wrote:
> > On 4 March 2011 20:09, Tracy Reed <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On Fri, Mar 04, 2011 at 10:53:13AM -0800, Tony Godshall spake thusly: >> > both the above have a remote sysadmin. >> > >> > named Apple and Google. >> >> Only in the same sense that my Linux box has a remote sysadmin named >> CentOS or >> RedHat. Apple/Google never directly ssh into your phone. Although since >> you are >> running their code they can do whatever they want just like RedHat can >> theoretically do whatever they want with my servers. > > > RedHat has no remote kill switch for your apps. Apple does for iOS, Google > does for Android. > At least in the Android case, replacing the Google firmware with something that lacks this backdoor is not terribly hard. Now, I'm not saying we should advocate everyone reflash their phones - but the devices themselves are quite capable and are being mass produced already. As such, they are a very interesting development platform. Cutting a deal with one of the manufacturers would be within the realm of possibility for an organization like the FreedomBox foundation. A better argument against using phones as a basis for FreedomBox development is simply cost. Those big fancy touch screens are not cheap and for a server device that is probably wasted money (unless it doubles as a clock or picture frame or something). But prototyping on a phone and assuming that when mass produced the screen and battery will be replaced with a wall socket and charging circuit could be a completely sane strategy for this project. I'm not saying it *should* be, but I really think you are being overly negative here. And if we end up with something that *can* run on refurbished mobiles (cracked screens are a common failure mode), taking advantage of built-in bluetooth and 3G and wifi, then that's not a bad thing, now is it? For most people it goes via a proxy and there is little that can be done > about that until there is a wifi mesh and then you've going to want either > mobile IPv6, VPNs or dynamic DNS so the clients can find the 'server'. > All of these problems apply to some degree to other in-the-home consumer devices as well. There are all sorts of ISPs out there and as I've argued on other threads, assuming that the FreedomBox will be a router with a routeable, unfiltered IP address will exclude a massive number of users (myself included). As the IPv4 crunch gets worse it may even exclude most people on the planet - if it doesn't already. -- Bjarni R. Einarsson The Beanstalks Project ehf. Making personal web-pages fly: http://pagekite.net/
_______________________________________________ Freedombox-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss
