The Making of the Kosher Phone (2014)

&gt; A Kosher phone would be an adapted feature phone to the “special” needs of a certain community of the Ultra Orthodox Jews. The community in target asked for a phone that is more dumb than the dumb phone, a phone that suffers from complete retardation. The general idea is that they don’t want to be open to the outside world in any way, but they still want a means to communicate between themselves without breaking the strict boundaries they made.<p>An interesting challenge. I imagine the market is large enough to support such a device.

I&#x27;d like to point out that:<p>- the term kosher applies directly to food, not technology; this is a metaphor<p>- the insularity of a particular subgroup of Jews should not be considered to apply to all the rest of us. Even for most Orthodox Jews, turning off your phone Friday evening and turning it back on Saturday evening is a perfectly cromulent option.

It gets me thinking about community agency in technology.<p>Large scale consumer technology has a lot of central planning in it, by nature of how specialised the skills required to produce many aspects of it are.<p>But central planning has its tail risks and other downsides as history attests.<p>I&#x27;m curious about how communities can be better empowered to make these choices for themselves, be it how moderation is done on social media, or what features are prioritised in consumer electronics.

A simple phone is still strangely appealing to me.

There&#x27;s a need for services that get around this kind of censorship in the same way we have VPNs for state censorship. But the challenges are very different, obviously.<p>I remember helping a family member still in the community, but after I had left, using an email-as-the-browser service to get around the kosher phone some time back (not sure if this is still possible with the current kosher phone version). I realized something like that must exist so I found <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.labnol.org&#x2F;internet&#x2F;receive-web-pages-by-email&#x2F;18117&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.labnol.org&#x2F;internet&#x2F;receive-web-pages-by-email&#x2F;1...</a> for them. But that service doesn&#x27;t seem to work anymore.<p>A different family member works on the opposite side, people call him to whitelist websites from their kosher filtering software so they can visit it. He has to check it out and then allows it if it is ok. But having these filters is a requirement for having a PC.

I will never understand the thinking of people who believe in an omnipotent god that can be tricked

There are plenty of ultra-orthodox people with smartphones and then there are those with no phones at all...<p>They have a severe lack of information which brings them to rely upon their leaders (rabbis) for every single piece of advice, even not pertaining to their religious needs directly.

It was a bunch of years ago, but my first cell phone was a &quot;kosher phone&quot;. A feature phone with no camera, no sms, no internet. It had the word &quot;מאושר&quot; (approved) engraved on it.<p>AMA

it&#x27;s arguably much easier (nowadays) to use an off-the-shelf app like TimeLimit[0] to achieve the same kind of functionality on smartphones, without ever having to flash custom firmware using undocumented&#x2F;unsupported techniques. Granted, back in &lt;=2014 this probably made more sense.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;timelimit.io&#x2F;en&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;timelimit.io&#x2F;en&#x2F;</a>

I will only buy if it comes with Pegasus pre-installed, that&#x27;s Kosher for me.

as an aside, why do all the jewish religion topics always get posted on the sabbath when most readers of HN who live the life related aren&#x27;t around to reply?

Why not just a stripped down custom Android image?

&gt; No one forces this phone on them<p>If by &quot;them&quot; you mean religious community as a whole, this statement is true.<p>If by &quot;them&quot; you mean actual users, this statement is a lie<p>This kind of devices are forced on users by community leaders as a method of limiting access to independent information.

It amazes me how people can compartmentalize their rational brain and their romantic brain and never let the two speak to each other. How can you believe so hard in the supernatural that you feel the need to make a kosher phone, but still be smart enough do it?