Re: Building a new totally free phone
I'll reply to this now, even though the thread has been dormant for a bit. Quoth Michael Spacefalcon: I see that after your post, the thread on the mailing list veered off into a discussion of security. But that diversion totally misses the point: it isn't so much about secure communication as it is about the Four Freedoms of software: The four freedoms are about user freedom. And to me freedom from surveillance is an very important aspect of living and thinking freely. You're quite right the FSF don't explicitly list this, but to me it is just as important as their four freedoms (and indeed depends on them). But anyway. Meeting the four freedoms is an excellent place to start! There also are some practical considerations that affect only feature phones and not smartphones. I have yet to encounter a phone UI design that doesn't suck, and I hope that most people on this list will agree with me that being able to customize the UI to one's preferences is an essential freedom that a geeky, empowered phone user should have - and I mean *really* customize the UI, not just twiddle menu settings, but being able to study, modify or even totally rewrite the UI code. The ability to customise is good, but to be honest I am OK with just learning whatever weird idioms and bugs exist on a platform and working around them. Though obviously I've never had much choice before. Now look at the situation from the perspective of a user who does NOT want his or her phone to be anything other than a plain phone. For such a user, a non-smart feature phone ought to be ideal, but if the user also wants the freedom to fully own the UI design, s/he currently has to pay for an otherwise completely unnecessary application processor. And when I say pay for, I'm *not* referring to the purchase price of the device - I would gladly pay a lot more for my ideal Free Dumb Phone than the most expensive GTA04 or Ubuntu Edge or whatever. Instead I mean pay for in terms of carrying extra weight, extra power consumption, extra system complexity otherwise unneeded, many additional points of failure, etc. *That* is what I seek to rectify with my Free Dumb Phone project, aside from the moral issue. Freedom is a right that all phone users should enjoy, not a privilege that's limited to just Linux smartphones to the exclusion of non-smart feature phones. Sounds great to me. I've heard that the encryption used is really crappy, and while some things like MITM forced reregistration to disable encryption and ease surveillance could be countered by appropriate phone settings, if the best encryption algorithm available can be cracked by a home PC in a few days, you're still screwed. The GSM encryption is a red herring - it makes absolutely no difference whether it's there or not. Imagine if the GSM encryption were perfect and unbreakable - what would change? Nothing. The over-the-air encryption is only between the mobile station and the network. In a public phone network, where you can dial the phone number of any stranger and hear each other's voices if the other party answers, encryption can't be end-to-end. The network has to be able to decrypt with one end's key and re-encrypt with a different key for the other end, so the network itself has (and must have) access to the cleartext form of your digitized voice. If I am the world's most wanted criminal and enemy #1 of all major governments, and they want to spy on my phone conversations, they aren't going to bother with cracking GSM over-the-air encryption, they'll just put in a lawful intercept at the switch. The only way to render all lawful intercept mechanisms ineffective is to use end-to-end encryption. That won't work when calling strangers, or calling the transit line to check bus/train schedules etc, but it's a very feasible mechanism for private and secure communication mechanism among family members, friends etc. Aah, thanks for the clarification. Of course you're right, I hadn't thought through the GSM encryption thing, but of course it's only between the mobile station and the network. So yes, end-to-end is the only way, and that will obviously be a more distant goal (and one that sadly is impossible to make compatible with many other things). Fine. Because one of the nice things of free software traditionally has been the ability to say it's free software, so I can do what I like with it, and you can't invoke state violence against me for doing so, Counter state violence with your own violence: raise your own army that can challenge the forces of the state on a tactical battlefield. It isn't too hard, we did it successfully back in 1917, and we can do it again. This is where we certainly differ. State violence is awful, but organise to counter it with your own violence and you'll at best replace their bad reigime backed by violence with your good regime backed by
Re: Building a new totally free phone
joerg Reisenweber jo...@openmoko.org wrote: I invite you to visit me at my home If you meant it seriously, you might as well give your address or GPS coords (by unicast if you prefer) - but I highly doubt that you meant it seriously. trying to force me to hand to you Hand to me? What me? There is no me - I could be dead tomorrow and absolutely *nothing* will change. I have never, ever, ever asked any of you Openmoko bastards to give anything to me. Instead I have merely voiced the demand that the materials be released freely to all Humanity - with a capital 'H' - and yes, I have indeed contemplated being the one to sacrifice my life in order for the remaining 7 billion people on Earth to gain free unrestricted access to a working turnkey GSM firmware package in the form of COFF objects with full symbolic information - a format which any embedded software engineer worth his or her salt should have no problem working with. [FYI, there is a patch to GNU Binutils which enables objcopy and objdump to read TI's COFF. The support isn't perfect, but it can easily be improved if need be - and I also invite you to grep for my name in the binutils ChangeLog files.] the MOST SECRIT SOURCES that everybody [...] had access to since ~2011. The reference to ~2011 makes me suspect that you are talking about the TSM30 version - it was indeed late 2011 when this code (first released in 2004 apparently) became widely available once again - and the latter happened because *I* had sent it to Cryptome on a CD-R. And you know as well as I do (or would know at least, if you ever actually *looked* at the modem code you're sitting on) that the TSM30 version is drastically different from what you got from TI as Om-Inc: different RTOS (Nucleus vs. SOS), different code structure, different flash file system, totally different hardware (ABB, RF and probably a different Calypso variant), almost everything is different. Heck, the TSM30 code isn't even TI, it's Purple Labs, a company that bit the dust. OTOH, if you are talking about something *other* than the TSM30 code, something that everybody passing the idiot test supposedly has access to, why don't you try being transparent once for a change, and actually post a URL? everybody passing the idiot test Like anyone else, I have my own strengths and weaknesses. What I'm good at is designing and writing embedded software, and some hardware too. I've been doing it professionally since ~2000 (and as a hobby long before that), and I make enough money doing it to support not one, but two full households on my sole income - so I guess I probably do it pretty well. I do it on the hobby side of my life too, so you can look at any of my projects and judge for yourselves. Like this one, for example: http://ifctfvax.Harhan.ORG/OpenWAN/ I'm sending this email through the Internet connection served by that SDSL modem designed and built by me: hardware, firmware and the logic in the FPGA - not to mention all the reverse engineering that was needed to get to this point. But I have my weaknesses too. I am NOT good with people, and I am NOT good with finding information that is passed around in a hush-hush manner. I don't do *anything* hush-hush: if I have or find something that may potentially be of value to others, I announce it publicly and openly, on the relevant mailing list. I absolutely do not understand how someone can be like you. I absolutely do not understand how ANY human being (or so-called human being) can be as cruel and callous as the three of you (JR, HW and PF). It's one thing to be slow with releasing things on occasion. I've been slow with releasing my software many a time, mostly because of my handicaps with modern technologies and my heavy use of seriously ancient gear - as well as my fear and distrust of any servers or online services other than my own. But it's an *entirely* different thing when you are holding something that someone else is very willing to DIE for, something that you could easily share with the whole world at absolutely zero cost, risk, loss or other detriment to you, and yet you STILL refuse to share. It absolutely baffles and boggles my mind that there are such cruel people living on this planet, and *especially* in the so-called community of so-called freedom and openness. And because it is so totally incomprehensible to my mind how someone can be like you, and be able to live with yourself while watching someone else's life wither away because of your selfishness, I find myself at a complete loss as to how one should interact with people like you. And I even promise I won't call the police or any other officials. It doesn't matter whether you call them or not - I am still the most wanted criminal in their eyes. Your country is a police state, no different from the way it was in WW II and just before, and I have no desire to go anywhere near it. Unless, of course, I were to enter it in the same manner in which both of
Re: Building a new totally free phone
Your free phone idea appeals to me enormously, Michael. And I, (unlike I suspect some others on the list) very much like your framing of the issues, too. I fully support the idea that if a law makes private conversation illegal, it is a bad law, and regulatory blocks on GSM that forbid inspectable and modifiable cannot but be such. However, can GSM really be a base for secure communication anyway? I've heard that the encryption used is really crappy, and while some things like MITM forced reregistration to disable encryption and ease surveillance could be countered by appropriate phone settings, if the best encryption algorithm available can be cracked by a home PC in a few days, you're still screwed. A truly free phone is a worthy and very important thing for other reasons, but could such a thing be strongly secure too? Or is the only solution there to rely on something like ZRTP in voip, and give up wishing that GSM could provide security? I've always been somewhat vague about how modems and their processors interact with other parts of a system. Am I correct in thinking that once the first firmware part of your project was complete, one could flash load that the GTA02 modem, and have a (far more 'smart' and Linux-y than you're ultimately planning) free openmoko phone? Or would the modem firmware have to be programmed differently for the GTA02 compared to your feature phone? While I am more interested in a feature phone than a 'smart' phone, I would be very happy to have a really free modem firmware on my GTA02 in the meantime. It's interesting to think of the meanings of 'free' in your message. Because one of the nice things of free software traditionally has been the ability to say it's free software, so I can do what I like with it, and you can't invoke state violence against me for doing so, due to a careful 'respect' of the copyrights of people who don't want their stuff to be free. While regulatory reigimes seemingly make this impossible anyway with GSM, I don't relish the idea of essentially giving more power to other people to wield the law against the project or its' users. But I understand that writing a firmware from scratch for something like the Calypso would be a massive amount of work, and I would rather have a reusable and inspectable firmware that breaks copyright law, than none at all, particularly for something as directly dangerous to one's security as a phone. With this in mind, I do wonder why the OsmocomBB work isn't appropriate as a base for your work? Can you explain this a bit more why it isn't? Is it just that they are quite a long way from producing a complete firmware for a phone? And because it is so totally incomprehensible to my mind how someone can be like you, and be able to live with yourself while watching someone else's life wither away because of your selfishness, I find myself at a complete loss as to how one should interact with people like you. I do think you need to be more careful, kind, and forgiving of perceived differences, when speaking to others in the community. We're all in a similar position here, working towards helping people communicate freely. Sure, people have different things they will compromise in order to try to effect this, but ultimately I find it hard to believe that anybody in the openmoko community isn't here in large part because of their wish to see people able to freely communicate. It's fine and healthy to not always agree with others about what compromises are appropriate, and to argue to try to figure out what the best course of action is, but it is unjust to assume malice, and saying what I've quoted above (regardless of how true it may feel) is likely to just turn people off to you. We need all the solidarity we can muster, and we need to celebrate the work people are doing, and try to respect them, and their differences. Even - nay, especially - if there are major differences that you can't understand. I look forward very much to hearing your progress with your project. If there's something I as an enthusiastic but comparitively ignorant volunteer can do to help, let me know! Nick ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Building a new totally free phone
Nick, you raised very good questions. I believe, that we don't need GSM at all. I don't use it for two years now. When we use GSM we use carrier services. Can we be sure that carrier does not track us, don't record our calls etc? For instance, in my country secret service has direct access to the carrier's switches, and can follow calls of any person in real time. They also can write a paper and request this or that person's locations from the carrier. We don't use gmail, because we know they are watching us, then why do we use carriers? The way to be secure is to use trusted service providers, and carriers are too big to be trusted. However we can use own SIP or XMPP servers, we can create small community servers where we trust our service providers. And use them for chat/talk. Should I mention that we use encryption, in both cases - server to server, and client to server. Here we have connectivity problem. Okay, everybody has a wifi at home (or may have). But what if you would like to call someone from the forest? Here what we can do: get an Internet only tariff, use it for making calls/chat etc. But our location still can be tracked if the carrier requires you to identiy yourself when buying a sim card. Here we can do nothing except may be mass exchange of sim cards with random people. Like make an action, when 1000 people goes to get a card, and then they all exchange cards with people they don't even know and won't see most probably in the future. This also has another plus: why pay for each sms? We can chat in internet as long as we wish. --- sent with alpine https://spyurk.am/u/norayr http://norayr.arnet.am/weblog On Fri, 23 Aug 2013, Nick wrote: Your free phone idea appeals to me enormously, Michael. And I, (unlike I suspect some others on the list) very much like your framing of the issues, too. I fully support the idea that if a law makes private conversation illegal, it is a bad law, and regulatory blocks on GSM that forbid inspectable and modifiable cannot but be such. However, can GSM really be a base for secure communication anyway? I've heard that the encryption used is really crappy, and while some things like MITM forced reregistration to disable encryption and ease surveillance could be countered by appropriate phone settings, if the best encryption algorithm available can be cracked by a home PC in a few days, you're still screwed. A truly free phone is a worthy and very important thing for other reasons, but could such a thing be strongly secure too? Or is the only solution there to rely on something like ZRTP in voip, and give up wishing that GSM could provide security? I've always been somewhat vague about how modems and their processors interact with other parts of a system. Am I correct in thinking that once the first firmware part of your project was complete, one could flash load that the GTA02 modem, and have a (far more 'smart' and Linux-y than you're ultimately planning) free openmoko phone? Or would the modem firmware have to be programmed differently for the GTA02 compared to your feature phone? While I am more interested in a feature phone than a 'smart' phone, I would be very happy to have a really free modem firmware on my GTA02 in the meantime. It's interesting to think of the meanings of 'free' in your message. Because one of the nice things of free software traditionally has been the ability to say it's free software, so I can do what I like with it, and you can't invoke state violence against me for doing so, due to a careful 'respect' of the copyrights of people who don't want their stuff to be free. While regulatory reigimes seemingly make this impossible anyway with GSM, I don't relish the idea of essentially giving more power to other people to wield the law against the project or its' users. But I understand that writing a firmware from scratch for something like the Calypso would be a massive amount of work, and I would rather have a reusable and inspectable firmware that breaks copyright law, than none at all, particularly for something as directly dangerous to one's security as a phone. With this in mind, I do wonder why the OsmocomBB work isn't appropriate as a base for your work? Can you explain this a bit more why it isn't? Is it just that they are quite a long way from producing a complete firmware for a phone? And because it is so totally incomprehensible to my mind how someone can be like you, and be able to live with yourself while watching someone else's life wither away because of your selfishness, I find myself at a complete loss as to how one should interact with people like you. I do think you need to be more careful, kind, and forgiving of perceived differences, when speaking to others in the community. We're all in a similar position here, working towards helping people communicate freely. Sure, people have different things they will compromise in order to try to effect this, but ultimately I find it
Re: Building a new totally free phone
However, can GSM really be a base for secure communication anyway? IMHO the need for the GSM stack being open sourced is largely overestimated. Security experts say that the question is how to secure communication over an unsecure communication medium. Depending on which level you want to work, you can try to make GSM more secure because it is communicating over an inherently unsecure/open medium (electro-magnetical wave broadcast). Or you can just use what others have built into a black box (i.e. a modem with some AT commands). They promise that it is secure enough. But if you want to be really secure, just wrap the potentially unsecure channel and encrypt the data sent over it. BTW: all the recent nsa/prism things have shown that it is not sufficient to make a fully transparent (aka open sourced) terminal - if it is easy enough to tap the network nodes. Or the servers you are communicating with. I.e. securing yourself is best done if you put yourself into eremitage... So in my view, spending additional work to get an open sourced GSM or even UMTS firmware stack is a nice excercise for embedded and real time communication protocol engineering, but does not make anything more safe or secure than using a black box module, because it just tries to increase security of one small hop instead of end-to-end. In other words: security measures must be done on the highest layers of the OSI reference model, not on the lowest ones. And that is the area of the application processor and OS. And of course documented schematics help to understand if there are potential backdoors to circumvent the OS or not. So we need a device where you have control over the OS, but not necessarily over the inner workings of all peripherals. -- hns ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Building a new totally free phone
Security experts have moved on from that line of thinking long ago I think. The problem with it is that a GSM/3G/LTE modem is not just a communications channel. It is a generic processor running software. Probably buggy, insecure, proprietary software. Same goes for GPS, WiFi, Ethernet and other external-facing firmware. Depending on the architecture of your device and the simplicity and security of the interface between your modem and your, attackers may be able to turn their probably relatively-easy-to-aquire modem beachhead into full control and monitoring of the whole system. This is the reason the Replicant folks strongly recommend against Qualcomm devices, where the CPU is controlled by the modem. Based on the talks I saw at OHM2013, the SIM card may be a similar threat. The good news is that some SIM cards are insecure enough that you (and remote attackers) can calculate the Ki, remove the SIM and use the Ki instead. OHM2013 also taught me that the carrier networks are full of juicy insecure Linux based systems, so you don't just have to worry about carrier collaboration with nation-state adversaries. Yes, we need better protocols but we also need libre embedded software and carriers who run libre software and have some ethics. -- bye, pabs ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Building a new totally free phone
Am 23.08.2013 14:41, schrieb Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller: However, can GSM really be a base for secure communication anyway? IMHO the need for the GSM stack being open sourced is largely overestimated. Security experts say that the question is how to secure communication over an unsecure communication medium. Depending on which level you want to work, you can try to make GSM more secure because it is communicating over an inherently unsecure/open medium (electro-magnetical wave broadcast). Or you can just use what others have built into a black box (i.e. a modem with some AT commands). They promise that it is secure enough. But if you want to be really secure, just wrap the potentially unsecure channel and encrypt the data sent over it. BTW: all the recent nsa/prism things have shown that it is not sufficient to make a fully transparent (aka open sourced) terminal - if it is easy enough to tap the network nodes. Or the servers you are communicating with. I.e. securing yourself is best done if you put yourself into eremitage... So in my view, spending additional work to get an open sourced GSM or even UMTS firmware stack is a nice excercise for embedded and real time communication protocol engineering, but does not make anything more safe or secure than using a black box module, because it just tries to increase security of one small hop instead of end-to-end. In other words: security measures must be done on the highest layers of the OSI reference model, not on the lowest ones. And that is the area of the application processor and OS. And of course documented schematics help to understand if there are potential backdoors to circumvent the OS or not. So we need a device where you have control over the OS, but not necessarily over the inner workings of all peripherals. -- hns ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community I think so, too. At first, everyone is complaining about NSA/PRISM and Orwell. And then, same poeple discuss this topic on Facefuck and other social media sites, there they have to make an total data strip. It does not make sense! So, the better way is to create an phone with an free and save OS, reliable hard- and software, without spyware infected apps. I think, this can make the Moko interessting for bussiness use! One major problem for companies is, the data security (contacts, dates, ...). Most spyware apps send the data from infected phones via internet connection to the criminals/ competitors. Reaching this potential market can acquire customers, those are willing and able to pay more for an smartphone. The idea of getting an communication over GSM/ UMTS without the ability of being observed by the secret services can not be realized, because they have not to crack Your phone, they can get an link into Your communication at the next router in Your carriers network (the provider are forced by law to make this possible). So do not waste time in this idea, there are other issues to solve: - ability to use the Moko in sunlight (!) = other display (other case is required!) - reliability of hard- and software - other display, so then change to Multitouch (I do not need it really, but needed for creater market acceptance and increasing number of users) - greatest issue: marketing! (actually there is a real chance to place the Moko- idea in peoples mind: [1] so apple and co. are loosing there cool image bit by bit) - maybe, HDMI-output - working cam, not usable right now :-( (still pin striped picture) - better support for data sync (adressbook, dates, ...), not only with Google (everyone using this, should not discuss about security!) - maybe: LTE - ..[to be continued].. [1] http://www.cinema.de/film/apple-stories,5693840.html -- Regards Sebastian Reinhardt ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Building a new totally free phone
Nick openmoko-commun...@njw.me.uk wrote: Your free phone idea appeals to me enormously, Michael. Yay, one more supporter! However, can GSM really be a base for secure communication anyway? I see that after your post, the thread on the mailing list veered off into a discussion of security. But that diversion totally misses the point: it isn't so much about secure communication as it is about the Four Freedoms of software: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html When it comes to the matters of free software philosophy, I am very much like RMS. I have a major problem with carrying a device in my pocket containing firmware for which I lack the source - not because it is a security threat, but because it's morally wrong. The only difference between me and RMS/FSF is on the matter of legalities. While I define free software in terms of exactly the same 4 freedoms as the FSF, RMS and the conventional free sw camp add an additional condition that these 4 freedoms be exercised legally - whereas I add no such extra clause: whether it's legally free or illegally free, it's still free software to me. There also are some practical considerations that affect only feature phones and not smartphones. I have yet to encounter a phone UI design that doesn't suck, and I hope that most people on this list will agree with me that being able to customize the UI to one's preferences is an essential freedom that a geeky, empowered phone user should have - and I mean *really* customize the UI, not just twiddle menu settings, but being able to study, modify or even totally rewrite the UI code. Smartphones have a separate application processor to run the UI, so you can indeed play with the UI on Linux to your heart's content while keeping the modem as a black box. But this approach does not work for a feature phone where the UI and the modem are tightly integrated into a single whole. Exercising full freedom over the UI code in a feature phone requires having a complete and rebuildable source for the firmware suite as a whole. (Having the GSM stack pieces as binary objects to be linked with the UI source would work too, but then one gets tied to a proprietary compiler toolchain, etc. In any case we already have full source for the GSM stack thanks to the TSM30 and LoCosto leaks, so it's a solved problem now.) Now look at the situation from the perspective of a user who does NOT want his or her phone to be anything other than a plain phone. For such a user, a non-smart feature phone ought to be ideal, but if the user also wants the freedom to fully own the UI design, s/he currently has to pay for an otherwise completely unnecessary application processor. And when I say pay for, I'm *not* referring to the purchase price of the device - I would gladly pay a lot more for my ideal Free Dumb Phone than the most expensive GTA04 or Ubuntu Edge or whatever. Instead I mean pay for in terms of carrying extra weight, extra power consumption, extra system complexity otherwise unneeded, many additional points of failure, etc. *That* is what I seek to rectify with my Free Dumb Phone project, aside from the moral issue. Freedom is a right that all phone users should enjoy, not a privilege that's limited to just Linux smartphones to the exclusion of non-smart feature phones. I've heard that the encryption used is really crappy, and while some things like MITM forced reregistration to disable encryption and ease surveillance could be countered by appropriate phone settings, if the best encryption algorithm available can be cracked by a home PC in a few days, you're still screwed. The GSM encryption is a red herring - it makes absolutely no difference whether it's there or not. Imagine if the GSM encryption were perfect and unbreakable - what would change? Nothing. The over-the-air encryption is only between the mobile station and the network. In a public phone network, where you can dial the phone number of any stranger and hear each other's voices if the other party answers, encryption can't be end-to-end. The network has to be able to decrypt with one end's key and re-encrypt with a different key for the other end, so the network itself has (and must have) access to the cleartext form of your digitized voice. If I am the world's most wanted criminal and enemy #1 of all major governments, and they want to spy on my phone conversations, they aren't going to bother with cracking GSM over-the-air encryption, they'll just put in a lawful intercept at the switch. The only way to render all lawful intercept mechanisms ineffective is to use end-to-end encryption. That won't work when calling strangers, or calling the transit line to check bus/train schedules etc, but it's a very feasible mechanism for private and secure communication mechanism among family members, friends etc. Here in USA we have one advantage over the EU etc lands where most people on this list seem to be located: CSD (circuit-switched
Re: Building a new totally free phone
On Fri 23 August 2013 21:07:14 Michael Spacefalcon wrote: I would be very happy to have a really free modem firmware on my GTA02 in the meantime. Then maybe you should try talking some sense into Joerg etc - maybe they'll listen to you more than they are willing to listen to me. I wonder how a single brain can produce that much nonsense and be that dull. You seem a smart guy otherwise, so I really don't grok how you can be so weird in this single issue. I told you everybody who been interested - except you - got access to the sources you're so terribly _not_ wanting (I wonder what now. Do you need them or not? And if you do, then for what since you already got the full radio stack which OM never had, and you're not interested in the AT interpreter of GTA0x modem but rather in any UI which obviously OM also never had). Everybody except you since I don't give access to stuff that's under NDA to a guy who's calling OM a bunch of rogue idiots and threatening to shoot me. Also you clearly say you're not asking for me handing that stuff to you (verbatim, see your prev mail) , you want me to PUBLISH it under my full name and stating loud that I don't give a flying F about the NDA contracts I'm under, thus ruining my professional career just to meet your idea of how industry and FOSS and community and the world at large works or should or ought work. Grow up, dude! You're biting the hand that feeds you, like a rabid dog. Won't happen (again, recall glamo?). You're seriously blaming OM and its employees for not violating the agreements they had to sign (and believe me, we tried hard to avoid signing any such agreements, since OM was planned to be as open as feasible), to make the whole project possible? I honestly wonder what kind of mater is inside your skull. YOU are not even worth this lengthy answer, and nobody else got the problem YOU have with OM calypso firmware sources, since everybody else asking kindly had access to all the stuff since 2011, and nobody found it worth doing much leaking about it. Since in some regard, the calypso firmware *is* OSS, it's just not FOSS. Get that! Wrap your head around it. And stop throwing darts at my picture at your wall, you honestly need to find a new and better reason for living. Good bye! /j [ps: trying hard to not elaborate on a guy like you talking about morally correct behaviour, and about the paradox you're exposing there in just 2 sentences] -- () ascii ribbon campaign - against html e-mail /\ www.asciiribbon.org - against proprietary attachments (alas the above page got scrapped due to resignation(!!), so here some supplementary links:) http://www.georgedillon.com/web/html_email_is_evil.shtml http://www.nonhtmlmail.org/campaign.html http://www.georgedillon.com/web/html_email_is_evil_still.shtml http://www.gerstbach.at/2004/ascii/ (German) ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Building a new totally free phone
development and testing, but not enough to give out to members of my own coven (for use as everyday phones), let alone for the general public interested in a totally free phone, albeit by means of illegal firmware. Hence I have made the plan that after I'm done with the FreeCalypso sw/fw part (i.e., once I'm able to make and receive calls with my DP-L10 and my GTA02 running my freecalypso-sw), I will tackle the task of building my own hardware: * The core chipset will be Calypso, exactly the same version as in the GTA02 and Pirelli phones - the chips are still readily available in decent quantities from several Chinese sellers. * The rest of the hardware will be modeled after Pirelli DP-L10 - see OsmocomBB's description of that phone. I've already found the same flash+pSRAM chip used by Pirelli, so there is plenty of room to grow the firmware into a high-end feature phone, and I'll use a 128x128 CSTN LCD just like Pirelli's - either exactly the same LCM or a functional equivalent. I'll keep the super-neat USB arrangement used by Pirelli (using either the same CP2102 or maybe an FTDI chip), and I'm shooting for a quad-band RF front-end like in TI's Leonardo+ reference design. * Those components of Pirelli's design for which We the People lack documentation will be dropped - that means the camera and WiFi. The camera stands a good chance of being re-added in a later version, but not the WiFi - I have no use for the latter, the software complexity required to make use of it in a pure RTOS environment would be enormous, hence I'm not going to design hardware which I'll never use and for which I'll never justify expending the time to develop the necessary sw. The first version of my non-smart Calypso GSM phone design will be built as a bare board without caring too much about the form factor - just roughly the size of a typical candybar phone. And most important of all, all hw design source files for that board will be free to the world (in fact, the design will be done in a public source repository from the beginning, and using free EDA tools) - hence even if I never take the project any further, others will be free to take the PCB design source and tweak to whatever form factor or circuit changes they like. Of course there will be no requirement of running my (illegal) FreeCalypso firmware on this GSM board - if someone would rather run the purportedly-legal OsmocomBB code instead, there is no reason why that wouldn't work. But don't delude yourself into thinking that you can make a totally free GSM phone actually legal simply by abstaining from reusing TI's working GSM stack code and rewriting it all from scratch yourself a la OsmocomBB - it will *still* be an illegal phone, simply because it's an unlicensed radio transmitter operating in the highly regulated GSM frequency bands. No regulator will *ever* grant legal approval to a totally free cellphone which is specifically designed to empower every user to recompile the modem firmware from source and to tinker with it as s/he pleases. Hence any such totally free phone will always have to be explicitly-illegal, regardless of whether one reuses existing firmware source code or not - and I choose to reuse. But there is one thing which the community needs to grasp: just because something is illegal does NOT automatically mean that it's bad, or that it's impractical, or that it shouldn't be done. We the People outnumber the cops by 1000 to 1. The most effective way to get rid of repressive laws is to break them universally. If every single person is a lawbreaker, whom are they going to go after? The narcs were powerless to stop the People from drinking booze during the Prohibition, they are powerless to stop us from using drugs now, and we need to show them that they are just as powerless to stop us from using illegal GSM phones, operating without approval and reusing good working source code without regard for copyrights, trade secrets etc. Anyway, the point of my post was and is that someone *is* in fact working on building a new totally free phone, albeit illegal, and not a smartphone but of the plain/dumb/feature kind. Viva la Revolucion, SF ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Building a new totally free phone
ROTFL -- () ascii ribbon campaign - against html e-mail /\ www.asciiribbon.org - against proprietary attachments (alas the above page got scrapped due to resignation(!!), so here some supplementary links:) http://www.georgedillon.com/web/html_email_is_evil.shtml http://www.nonhtmlmail.org/campaign.html http://www.georgedillon.com/web/html_email_is_evil_still.shtml http://www.gerstbach.at/2004/ascii/ (German) signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Building a new totally free phone
On Fri 23 August 2013 01:58:04 Michael Spacefalcon wrote: [blablabla] I have found some new and exciting TI firmware source leaks (archived on my mini-Wikileaks at ftp.ifctf.org) which will hopefully make it unnecessary for me to sacrifice my life in a gunfire exchange with the German or Russian police after kidnapping a moko-hoarder: these new leaks appear to be much closer to TI's mainline than the famous PurpleLabs TSM30 source, and I'm quite confident that by using these new leaks I can recreate something very close to what Om-Inc and its former employees/contractors have wrongfully withheld from Humanity I invite you to visit me at my home trying to force me to hand to you the MOST SECRIT SOURCES that everybody passing the idiot test had access to since ~2011. And I even promise I won't call the police or any other officials. Rather I will do nothing but listening and laughing when I hear you screaming for helf, from the bottom of our manure tank you for sure inevitably will manage to find and drop in. good luck! /j -- () ascii ribbon campaign - against html e-mail /\ www.asciiribbon.org - against proprietary attachments (alas the above page got scrapped due to resignation(!!), so here some supplementary links:) http://www.georgedillon.com/web/html_email_is_evil.shtml http://www.nonhtmlmail.org/campaign.html http://www.georgedillon.com/web/html_email_is_evil_still.shtml http://www.gerstbach.at/2004/ascii/ (German) ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Building a new totally free phone
On Fri 23 August 2013 01:58:04 Michael Spacefalcon wrote: [yaggediyagediblabblablub...] In the case of hardware it means publishing full, *unredacted* schematics and PCB EDA files, Yeah that *evil* redacting! Oh, did you ever hear about that funny story? Somebody noticed that the GTA01 schematics were redacted by a true idiot who didn't notice that the huge black blob covering parts of the schematics was easily removed by simply editing the pdf, or even simpler by highlighting the area. PS, maybe that idiot been me :-o we all love you, no really, we mean it! /j -- () ascii ribbon campaign - against html e-mail /\ www.asciiribbon.org - against proprietary attachments (alas the above page got scrapped due to resignation(!!), so here some supplementary links:) http://www.georgedillon.com/web/html_email_is_evil.shtml http://www.nonhtmlmail.org/campaign.html http://www.georgedillon.com/web/html_email_is_evil_still.shtml http://www.gerstbach.at/2004/ascii/ (German) ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
