What most critics miss about its hardware is that the few closed subsystems have no access to system memory and storage. It is <i>very</i> different from say a ME module into a CPU, or a closed card stuck into the same bus with the disk controller, which is the case of just every "open" laptop out there. USB, i2c and SPI are effective measures against malicious hardware taking control of the system bus and sucking data from peripherals.
Even in the unlikely (but technically possible) scenario in which some chips loaded with malicious firmware attempt to sniff the i2c bus, they will be fed data that has been already encrypted on a system memory, bus and storage they have no access to.<p>If the user encrypts the data before sending it, whether the 4G modem/WiFi/BT are closed or not, they will see just noise.
> It’s worth mentioning that LPDDR3 initialization is done by u-boot SPL, which is also open source. There are no blobs in there either.<p>That's actually pretty impressive, isn't it? I was under the impression that RAM setup was a mess.
This just sounds like a classic case of perfect being the enemy of good. A bunch of "purists" unironically lamenting the fact the device isn't 100.00% FOSS while typing on much more closed platforms. Or maybe just planted misinformation by competitors or three-letter agencies, either of which don't seem too far-fetched these days.
Replicant has an evaluation page incorporating this info with a handy table.<p><a href="https://redmine.replicant.us/projects/replicant/wiki/Pinephone" rel="nofollow">https://redmine.replicant.us/projects/replicant/wiki/Pinepho...</a>
All network connected systems have a boundary where they become untrusted. With the exception of the GPS, this all seems like a securable, hackable, and supportable system architecture.<p>RE cellular modems, there are some things worth noting. First, they are a huge privacy hole. It doesn't matter if they run open or closed firmware, the real adversary is the cell provider's hardware. Second, interoperability is a real problem. There would be large consequences if enough improperly configured cellular modems ended up in the wild.<p>Edit: Another point here. Open firmware does guarantee security. It is unlikely that whatever distro you end up running on your pine phone will be nearly as secure as iOS or Android. Of course privacy is a different story.
A removable battery AND a headphone jack? I mean, this is my definition of luxury.<p>Has anyone actually gotten one of these yet? Any critical impressions? Could I actually rely on it as a phone?
> The LTE modem on the PinePhone is a ‘black box’, and runs its own <i></i>Linux system<i></i> internally.<p>First mention of Linux I’ve seen wrt modem firmware. Interesting!
How long before PinePhone goes the way of Phantom Secure?
<a href="https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/courts/sd-me-ramos-plea-20181002-story.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/courts/sd-me-ramos...</a>
It’s just as closed as the typical laptop (better in many ways, some newer laptops have some nasty stuff in the bios) I think there might be 2 WiFi cards that even have open source firmware and the firmware isn’t complete enough to be usable for most people.<p>I’m not sure who would be surprised by this, I feel like anyone that cares this much would be paying enough attention to know what’s going on.