Re: [Community] GTA04A5 / Letux 2804
i honestly don't get why this flares up again. the topic has been beaten to death, everybody knows where he stands on the question -- and yet whenever that bird crows again, there are always some to crow back. why can't you just let him alone? he'll get bored soon enough if nobody plays. On Fri, 17 Jan 2014 20:23:38 +0100, joerg Reisenweber jo...@openmoko.org wrote: On Fri 17 January 2014 19:13:24 Michael Spacefalcon wrote: Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller h...@goldelico.com wrote: ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: [Community] GTA04A5 / Letux 2804
I have added back your original statement because otherwise this discussion is not completely understandable: So please think again if you want to upgrade your GTA02 with a GTA04A5 board. Upgrade? Surely you must have meant downgrade - why would anyone in his or her right mind voluntarily give up a device that is 100% freeable down to the modem (GTA02) for a Qualcomm-based closed proprietary product like yours? Not everybody is weighting the factor of freeable down to the modem equally when calculating the relative position of two devices to decide between upgrade and downgrade. You have a different weighting than me. Both are equally right minded. Am 16.01.2014 um 21:31 schrieb Michael Spacefalcon: Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller h...@goldelico.com wrote: Why do you assume that your (IMHO unlawful) procedure done to free the Calypso is not possible for a Qualcomm modem? Because all modern baseband processors (MTK, Qualcomm etc) have ROM bootloaders which perform cryptographic verification of downloaded fw I don't know, but isn't *that* something you should fight against instead of modifying leaked firmware for a system that never has been locked? So I think your conclusion is just based on your pure incapability to do the same. s/incapability/disinterest/ Even worse. So your claim of GTA02 is 100% freeable and GTA04 is not is only based on your disinterest to work on solutions? ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: [Community] GTA04A5 / Letux 2804
Quoth Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller: Am 16.01.2014 um 21:31 schrieb Michael Spacefalcon: Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller h...@goldelico.com wrote: Why do you assume that your (IMHO unlawful) procedure done to free the Calypso is not possible for a Qualcomm modem? Because all modern baseband processors (MTK, Qualcomm etc) have ROM bootloaders which perform cryptographic verification of downloaded fw I don't know, but isn't *that* something you should fight against instead of modifying leaked firmware for a system that never has been locked? It is something that should be fought, certainly, but I am more interested in having free firmware for one device than just complaining to manufacturers. Doing much of the latter will lead to you feeling disempowered, doing much of the former is quite the opposite. Thanks Michael for your continued work in this area, and for the recent progress updates. Nick ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: [Community] GTA04A5 / Letux 2804
Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller h...@goldelico.com wrote: Not everybody is weighting the factor of freeable down to the modem equally when calculating the relative position of two devices to decide between upgrade and downgrade. You have a different weighting than me. If freedom is not important to you, then you might as well use an iPhone or the latest Android from Samsung. As Jim Marrs has said very eloquently in the preface to one of his books, being free is like being pregnant - either you are, or you aren't. I don't know, but isn't *that* something you should fight against instead of modifying leaked firmware for a system that never has been locked? Modifying leaked firmware is not an accurate description of what I am doing. As you should know full well, I am designing and building my own Free Plain Phone, and I have chosen to use the same Calypso chipset as used in the GTA02. I chose this chipset because it already exists, because it is known to work exceptionally well, at least in dumbphone applications (I've been using one of my Pirelli phones as my everyday cellphone since last spring, and I have nothing but praise for it in terms of battery life, GSM signal strength and call quality), because all hardware documentation and firmware sources for this chipset have already been freed, and because I have already amassed a great deal of experience working with this chipset. Providing hacking support for Openmoko-made modems is simply a side- product of my FreeCalypso work: I have chosen to bring my firmware up on known-working hardware first, so that when I build my own hw and get to debug it, I will have the benefit of known-working firmware. Put another way, the free phone community (combination of FreeCalypso and OsmocomBB projects) has already made great progress with the Calypso chipset. Switching to another vendor's chipset on a whim would be an enormous setback for the project and for the community, and it is not fair for you to ask that of us - here I am referring to the you should be working on this instead of that argument in your comment. So your claim of GTA02 is 100% freeable and GTA04 is not is only based on your disinterest to work on solutions? I am working on solutions, but the problem I have chosen to solve is different from yours. Some people, such as me, simply want a good working cellphone, a device for making and receiving phone calls on the go - and we want this cellphone to be free as in 100% owned and controlled by the user. If the objective is to have a plain phone, rather than a mobile computer, a device consisting of just one baseband processor, without an extra application processor, is a technically superior solution for the problem at hand: greater battery life, less unnecessary complexity, fewer points of failure. And the existence of the Calypso chipset makes it possible for such a simple and efficient dumbphone to also be 100% free by virtue of the user owning and controlling the complete firmware. Then there are those people who do want their pocket-resident device to be a computer complete with an OS like GNU/Linux, rather than just a phone - but some of those people would also want that device to be 100% free including the telephony processor - and not just half-free aka half-pregnant. For this class of users, the best currently extant device is the GTA02, made by Openmoko - not your GTA04, and not my dumbphone either. Yes, there is the problem of these devices no longer being made - but instead of solving this problem by building a new device that would be as near-identical to the GTA02 as possible, including the Calypso (just like how I seek to copy the Pirelli DP-L10 as closely to verbatim as possible), you are making it worse by *actively destroying* the remaining stock of Openmoko phones! Hence we will likely always be fighting on opposite sides. VLR, SF ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: [Community] GTA04A5 / Letux 2804
Am 17.01.2014 um 19:13 schrieb Michael Spacefalcon: Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller h...@goldelico.com wrote: Not everybody is weighting the factor of freeable down to the modem equally when calculating the relative position of two devices to decide between upgrade and downgrade. You have a different weighting than me. If freedom is not important to you, then you might as well use an iPhone or the latest Android from Samsung. As Jim Marrs has said very eloquently in the preface to one of his books, being free is like being pregnant - either you are, or you aren't. I don't know, but isn't *that* something you should fight against instead of modifying leaked firmware for a system that never has been locked? Modifying leaked firmware is not an accurate description of what I am doing. As you should know full well, I am designing and building my own Free Plain Phone, and I have chosen to use the same Calypso chipset as used in the GTA02. I chose this chipset because it already exists, because it is known to work exceptionally well, at least in dumbphone applications (I've been using one of my Pirelli phones as my everyday cellphone since last spring, and I have nothing but praise for it in terms of battery life, GSM signal strength and call quality), because all hardware documentation and firmware sources for this chipset have already been freed, and because I have already amassed a great deal of experience working with this chipset. Providing hacking support for Openmoko-made modems is simply a side- product of my FreeCalypso work: I have chosen to bring my firmware up on known-working hardware first, so that when I build my own hw and get to debug it, I will have the benefit of known-working firmware. Put another way, the free phone community (combination of FreeCalypso and OsmocomBB projects) has already made great progress with the Calypso chipset. Switching to another vendor's chipset on a whim would be an enormous setback for the project and for the community, and it is not fair for you to ask that of us - here I am referring to the you should be working on this instead of that argument in your comment. So your claim of GTA02 is 100% freeable and GTA04 is not is only based on your disinterest to work on solutions? I am working on solutions, but the problem I have chosen to solve is different from yours. Agreed. The problem the GTA04 solves is that the GTA02 has no high-speed modem. Has a quite old CPU with scarce RAM and NAND. Has no sensors for games. Has no camera option and some other gimmicks. All this was expected to be solved by the GTA03 which never appeared on the surface. This is what I understand as an *upgrade*. AFAIR it was never the claim of Openmoko to have an open modem firmware. And Openmoko did never provide that (because of contractual obligations). And having this was not formulated as an urgent problem of the Openmoko community and did not stop to have ~20k units produced in total. So we are not doing anything differently. We don't claim that the modem firmware is free and open. But the OS. So that you have 100% control over what the modem does since you can verify that it is turned off if you command it to be off. Some people, such as me, simply want a good working cellphone, a device for making and receiving phone calls on the go - and we want this cellphone to be free as in 100% owned and controlled by the user. Even if you have a free and open firmware, it still has components that are not free and open. Just for example the SIM card. And the network. And the other end of your communication. The speech sent by your 100% free phone is still decrypted at the BTS. And if you encrypt the whole communication path yourself, why do you care what the modem is doing? If the objective is to have a plain phone, rather than a mobile computer, a device consisting of just one baseband processor, without an extra application processor, is a technically superior solution for the problem at hand: greater battery life, less unnecessary complexity, fewer points of failure. And the existence of the Calypso chipset makes it possible for such a simple and efficient dumbphone to also be 100% free by virtue of the user owning and controlling the complete firmware. Then there are those people who do want their pocket-resident device to be a computer complete with an OS like GNU/Linux, rather than just a phone - but some of those people would also want that device to be 100% free including the telephony processor - and not just half-free aka half-pregnant. For this class of users, the best currently extant device is the GTA02, made by Openmoko - not your GTA04, and not my dumbphone either. Yes, there is the problem of these devices no longer being made - but instead of solving this problem by building a new device that would be as near-identical to the GTA02 as possible, including the Calypso (just like how I
Re: [Community] GTA04A5 / Letux 2804
On Fri 17 January 2014 19:13:24 Michael Spacefalcon wrote: Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller h...@goldelico.com wrote: Not everybody is weighting the factor of freeable down to the modem equally when calculating the relative position of two devices to decide between upgrade and downgrade. You have a different weighting than me. If freedom is not important to you, then you might as well use an iPhone or the latest Android from Samsung. As Jim Marrs has said very eloquently in the preface to one of his books, being free is like being pregnant - either you are, or you aren't. I don't know, but isn't *that* something you should fight against instead of modifying leaked firmware for a system that never has been locked? Modifying leaked firmware is not an accurate description of what I am doing. As you should know full well, I am designing and building my own Free Plain Phone, and I have chosen to use the same Calypso chipset as used in the GTA02. I chose this chipset because it already exists, because it is known to work exceptionally well, at least in dumbphone applications (I've been using one of my Pirelli phones as my everyday cellphone since last spring, and I have nothing but praise for it in terms of battery life, GSM signal strength and call quality), because all hardware documentation and firmware sources for this chipset have already been freed, and because I have already amassed a great deal of experience working with this chipset. Providing hacking support for Openmoko-made modems is simply a side- product of my FreeCalypso work: I have chosen to bring my firmware up on known-working hardware first, so that when I build my own hw and get to debug it, I will have the benefit of known-working firmware. Put another way, the free phone community (combination of FreeCalypso and OsmocomBB projects) has already made great progress with the Calypso chipset. Switching to another vendor's chipset on a whim would be an enormous setback for the project and for the community, and it is not fair for you to ask that of us - here I am referring to the you should be working on this instead of that argument in your comment. So your claim of GTA02 is 100% freeable and GTA04 is not is only based on your disinterest to work on solutions? I am working on solutions, but the problem I have chosen to solve is different from yours. Some people, such as me, simply want a good working cellphone, a device for making and receiving phone calls on the go - and we want this cellphone to be free as in 100% owned and controlled by the user. If the objective is to have a plain phone, rather than a mobile computer, a device consisting of just one baseband processor, without an extra application processor, is a technically superior solution for the problem at hand: greater battery life, less unnecessary complexity, fewer points of failure. And the existence of the Calypso chipset makes it possible for such a simple and efficient dumbphone to also be 100% free by virtue of the user owning and controlling the complete firmware. Then there are those people who do want their pocket-resident device to be a computer complete with an OS like GNU/Linux, rather than just a phone - but some of those people would also want that device to be 100% free including the telephony processor - and not just half-free aka half-pregnant. For this class of users, the best currently extant device is the GTA02, made by Openmoko - not your GTA04, and not my dumbphone either. Yes, there is the problem of these devices no longer being made - but instead of solving this problem by building a new device that would be as near-identical to the GTA02 as possible, including the Calypso (just like how I seek to copy the Pirelli DP-L10 as closely to verbatim as possible), you are making it worse by *actively destroying* the remaining stock of Openmoko phones! Hence we will likely always be fighting on opposite sides. VLR, SF Please can you save me from reading those walls of text filled with ideologically biased trolling, offenses and badmouthing of good work others do that you obviously are not interested in? If you have nothing better to contribute than a silly Upgrade? Surely you must have meant downgrade - why would anyone in his or her right mind voluntarily give up a device that is 100% freeable down to the modem (GTA02) for a Qualcomm-based closed proprietary product like yours? just to start your usual trolling based on the deserved reply, then you rather simply shut up. Many thanks! /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
Re: [Community] GTA04A5 / Letux 2804
joerg Reisenweber jo...@openmoko.org wrote: Please can you save me from reading those walls of text filled with [...] Thinking about it more, I realize that my initial post in this thread was more inflammatory than necessary. So I do apologize for posting that on an emotional impulse without thinking some more first. In retrospect, perhaps my initial post in this thread would have been better worded like this: Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller h...@goldelico.com wrote: So please think again if you want to upgrade your GTA02 with a GTA04A5 board. Please understand that some people may find the word upgrade in this context to be objectionable - it is a matter of personal opinion and different choice of emphasis as to which device (GTA02 or GTA04) is better. Perhaps instead of calling the conversion an upgrade, it could be called a sidegrade, or just simply use the neutral word convert? And for those who do choose to convert their GTA02s into GTA04s, please be considerate of others in the community who may see the GTA02 as having more value, and please try to do the following simple gestures: * When removing the original GTA02 motherboard, please exercise due care and caution to not damage it in the process - please do NOT treat it as a throw-away item; * If you no longer want that original GTA02 board, please do not discard it, and do not subject it to any treatment (such as recycle) that would destroy the ability to use it for its original purpose. Instead please offer it to others who may have more appreciation for its original functionality. * When storing or shipping that GTA02 board for the benefit of other community members who may view it as being better than GTA04, please observe the full precautions for handling delicate and sensitive electronic components, including ESD protection. -- Would the above have been better? Aside from that, there are only two points in Nikolaus' last post which I feel a need to respond to: And if you encrypt the whole communication path yourself, why do you care what the modem is doing? Because there are many kinds of bugs which have nothing to do with privacy/security issues - plain old bugs which cause the device to simply not work under certain circumstances. I have encountered more than my share of such bugs in products of every kind, cellphones and modems being no exception (although none in Om's firmware so far), and I highly value the ability to diagnose and fix such bugs myself when and if I get bitten by one. No. If you fight for freeing the Qualcomm modem you will satisfy both sides: Your 100% freedom and a device that can be produced as many as you need - and has higher data rates and a better processor. Of course it would wonderful for all kinds of reasons to have a free modem that can connect to UMTS networks in addition to GSM, and can make use of mobile data services at EDGE or even 3G speeds rather than just plain GPRS. But given a choice between (a) continuing my current FreeCalypso work and producing a 100% free GSM-only phone/modem in a foreseeable time frame with 100% certainty or (b) abandoning this work and venturing into the completely unknown territory of baseband chipsets from other vendors, with nowhere near the guarantee of success in the near future like we have with the Calypso, I feel that (a) is a much more sensible choice for a developer in my position, and I suspect that at least some people on this list would agree with me on this question. VLR, SF ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: [Community] GTA04A5 / Letux 2804
Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller h...@goldelico.com wrote: So please think again if you want to upgrade your GTA02 with a GTA04A5 board. Upgrade? Surely you must have meant downgrade - why would anyone in his or her right mind voluntarily give up a device that is 100% freeable down to the modem (GTA02) for a Qualcomm-based closed proprietary product like yours? Sorry, couldn't resist. VLR, SF ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: [Community] GTA04A5 / Letux 2804
Am 16.01.2014 um 17:55 schrieb Michael Spacefalcon: Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller h...@goldelico.com wrote: So please think again if you want to upgrade your GTA02 with a GTA04A5 board. Upgrade? Surely you must have meant downgrade - why would anyone in his or her right mind voluntarily give up a device that is 100% freeable down to the modem (GTA02) for a Qualcomm-based closed proprietary product like yours? Why do you assume that your (IMHO unlawful) procedure done to free the Calypso is not possible for a Qualcomm modem? So I think your conclusion is just based on your pure incapability to do the same. Sorry, couldn't resist. Why? ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: [Community] GTA04A5 / Letux 2804
Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller h...@goldelico.com wrote: Why do you assume that your (IMHO unlawful) procedure done to free the Calypso is not possible for a Qualcomm modem? Because all modern baseband processors (MTK, Qualcomm etc) have ROM bootloaders which perform cryptographic verification of downloaded fw images, and will not boot any image that has not been signed by the secret key corresponding to the public key whose hash is burned into OTP (one-time programmable) fuses right in the modem chip silicon! The FSF term for this freedom-robbing feature is tivoization. Even the later chips from TI (Calypso+ and LoCosto) have this feature, but the classic Calypso used in Openmoko GTA0x and Pirelli DP-L10 phones does not - that is the critical distinction. Of course the classic Calypso chips are no longer made, but I have a stash of 100 of them sitting right here in a desk drawer - should be enough to make illegally-free phones for the true freedom lovers among us. And if I'm not mistaken, some Chinese sellers still have quite a bit more available. So I think your conclusion is just based on your pure incapability to do the same. s/incapability/disinterest/ If I wanted to obtain a bootleg copy of Qualcomm's modem source code, I could probably do it. Don't forget that I operate in the very same geographical area where Qualcomm has its HQ, Qualcomm has a habit of employing desperate for a job programmers for stupid grunt work at offensively low pay rates (with high turnover as a result), and people in USA are not as obsessed with being law-abiding citizens like Europeans. But life is short, I have plenty of other things I wish to accomplish before I kick the bucket (building a new quad-band GSM-only dumbphone based on the Calypso being just one of them), so I leave the task of freeing Qualcomm/MTK/etc modems to someone else who, for whatever reason beyond my comprehension, finds the good old GSM and the good old Calypso to be not good enough for him or her. If and when someone posts sources and instructions on this list that do for the GTA04 modem what my hack does for the Calypso, only then will GTA02 and GTA04 become equally free. Until then, GTA02 is significantly more free, and GTA04 is a freedom downgrade. VLR, SF P.S. As to your IMHO unlawful comment, if some lawmaker decides to make a law that makes it illegal to breathe, does it mean that we should all obediently suffocate ourselves? ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community