do you know the necunos.com phone?
do you know about this company?
Looks interesting. If the main operating system and bootloader are free than these phones will be freer than Replicant phones, and if Wifi and Bluetooth work then they will also have practical advantages over Replicant phones.
However, the modem will still be proprietary, which makes it a little misleading to say
"our goal is to give you 100% open source device, from metal to pixel, from hardware to software."
More generally, promises of privacy should be qualified with the fact that liberating the main OS will not address an important privacy issue. All cell phones are tracking devices. This is not because of proprietary software or hardware. It's inherent to the design of the cell network. The only way to turn a cell phone into something that does not allow you to be tracked is to disconnect it from the cell network (i.e. disabling the modem) at which point it is no longer a cell phone, just a portable computer.
The neo900 and Purism phone will have a modem kill switch, allowing the user to disconnect from the cell network when they don't require the ability to send or receive calls and texts. This does not solve the tracking issue either, but it mitigates it. Being tracked some of the time is better than being tracked all of the time. It does not appear that the Necunos phone will have such a kill switch.
All cell phones are tracking devices. This is not because of proprietary software or hardware. It's inherent to the design of the cell network. The only way to turn a cell phone into something that does not allow you to be tracked is to disconnect it from the cell network (i.e. disabling the modem) at which point it is no longer a cell phone, just a portable computer.
Another option (lo-fi, also much cheaper and readily available) is a faraday pouch.
Better test it first, don't forget to enable airplane mode to save power.
And also some signal could still leak out a bit if you're very close to a power cell. Could be worth a test too.
Also, xprivacylua (sends useless data instead).
> it a little misleading to say
Agreed. Like purism they are not writing anything incorrect. But
they should say free software for the modem is unlikely.
> It's inherent to the design of the cell network.
That should be common knowledge.
According to replicant's forum replicant will get in contact
with necunos.
> That should be common knowledge.
I'm not so sure. You are more knowledgeable of these things than the average person. I think many people who are aware of tracking at all do not know what a modem is and believe that only the main operating system tracks them. Advertisements claiming that a phone won't track you contribute to this misconception, although to be fair to Purism last time I looked at their website (several months ago) they had removed this claim.
Yes, definitely not common knowledge (unfortunately).
Just like the Purism mobiles do Necunos mobiles also offers Replicant installations, that directly runs F-droid without long long tweaks, this comes to be my main concern before I buy these Purism and Necunos mobiles.
Interesting. If I'm getting this right, they will build their own operating system on Kernel version 4.14
Quote: "We are using Linux as our kernel and our goal is to have mainline always running on our device. We have concentrated on the LTS 4.14 version. In our own system we have used components from known embedded and phone projects. ‘Our’ operating system will be opensource, it did come from the community and we want to give back to the community. More about our operating system will follow with official announcements."
So it sounds like it will be an independent OS (like Sailfish) rather than an Android knock-off (like Replicant).
> it will be an independent OS
If it turns out the phone adheres to replicant's hardware
requirements then replicant will probably, if resources
are available, provide a replicant system.