On Fri, Mar 11, 2022, at 18:42, Rohan McLeod via luv-main wrote: ... > 1/I vaguely remember that part of the original motivation for the Librem-5, > fundamental hardware design philosophy, was the discovery by the > Lineage researchers that > the information leakage from mobile-phones was not just OS related ie > you could plug, > OS leaks by replacing Android with Lineage ; but the underlying hardware > had issues ? > or is this just wishful thinking aggravated by faulty memory ?
Yeah, Rohan, I think this is true of both the Librem-5 and the Pinephones. Most mainline systems have the cellular modem integrated as part of the system-on-a-chip, with direct access to RAM, with all the risks that has for security and privacy. The Pinephones and the Librem-5 by design have the modem separated from the CPU/RAM, accessed via USB. That's much better for security. But it does mean a bulkier phone, and higher power consumption from having more chip components. And there might be other hardware leaks on mainstream phones I'm unaware of. ... > I notice : https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ > dated 28th Feb 2022 is quoting 52 weeks for Librem-5; > so I'm not expecting my Evergreen phone till Feb 2023; I ordered my (hypothetically mine) Librem-5 late October 2018. Still waiting — and I guess I'll have a while to wait yet. (However, a friend of mine recently got notification that their Librem-5 shipment was imminent.) In the meantime, I've got a Pinephone and (like I mentioned in another post) more recently a Pinephone Pro. The old Unix proverb comes to mind: "Worse is better". Ummm... Pine64 and Purism have taken contrasting approaches. Purism have, I guess, tried to produce a phone that "just works" with a whole suite of apps and services, all in-house. (I've thought in a way that Purism is trying to be the Apple of free software and open hardware — at least in respect of providing a complete user experience.) Pine64 have just produced the hardware, and relied on the active community for the software, OS ports and apps. Both are reasonable strategies. Pine64's has led quicker to a usable phone, but more for enthusiasts, not so much for the (up-market) mass market, which Purism seems to be aiming for. I guess we'll see what happens longer term. > ....contingent on China not invading Taiwan ! :-) It's hard to say for sure — one can always be surprised — but I think it unlikely mainland China will take any overt military action against Taiwan. It'd be bad for business. But they won't give up their claim on Taiwan, which has a long history, since it was annexed by the Qing dynasty after the colonial Dutch left near the end of the 17th century, through the loss to Japan in the Sino-Japanese war in 1895, then the take-over by the retreating KMT forces at the end of the Chinese civil war. And one should not forget that the KMT is the current main opposition party, with about 48% of the vote, and their policy is still eventual re-unification with mainland China (though on their terms). As with many things in geopolitics, it's really pretty messy, and not the simple black-and-white version you too often get in mainstream media. But that's more a topic for luv-talk than luv-main. > Mean time I'm playing with PureOS on a laptop! Yeah. I tried out PureOS on my Librem-13 when it first arrived (as I recall PureOS was pre-installed). But I pretty quickly switched to Debian with Xmonad, the tiling window manager. I tend towards minimalism in my user interface. (And I think — though I might be wrong — that at the time xwayland wasn't as far advanced, so I couldn't run my legacy X apps, like Emacs, in the way I wanted under PureOS's Wayland setup.) But PureOS seems fine. I might try it again on some other machine some time. What's your experience with PureOS? — Smiles, Les. _______________________________________________ luv-main mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
