Achieving Freedom but For Real

General Privacy & Security
21

I will explain the situation in more detail.

https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html

As this quote states, distributions must reject various closed-source software in order to the recommended by the FSF. However, in doing so, it makes it more difficult, but not impossible, to install such software from a user’s standpoint.

So, in regards to what I interpret to be your concept of freedom, you may not want these distributions to be omitting these software choices on your behalf. Instead, you may prefer the option and choice to install closed-source software, in spite of them violating the Four Freedoms, but with you understanding the consequences of doing so.

This is more about you still having your Android device and Windows laptop, in spite of already having the Librem 5 Liberty and Librem 14; perhaps the former two serve a proprietary purpose, since their existence is still justified. Otherwise, you would have made a full Linux transition.

22

I almost feel like this is a misguided way to look at this problem that almost everyone in society is facing today. How could I POSSIBLY understand the consequences of software that we designate as different because we don’t know exactly how it works or what it does? By the nature of that being the distinction that we are making, I think it is probably incorrect to say that I understand the consequences, or that I ever will. Because when we talk about proprietary software, proprietary means I as the user am not allowed to know how it works, among other things.

Maybe this gets to the topic title name of this thread. I want to say that, in my concept of freedom, I would be pretty happy to abide the GNU/FSF definition because it seems quite sensible if I was going to start out my use of computers from the beginning with intention. On the contrary, the systems and machines that I have now don’t abide that definition in their entirety not because I think the definition is wrong, but because I started out uninformed. That’s moreso how I’m looking at this.

If we take that approach, and assume that the problem was that I started out uninformed and beyond that it’s just really hard to change habits away from something that already works, I don’t think that I would really go so far as to say that the reason I use these other things is a different definition. That’s even why I say, “Freedom but For Real,” meant to say that the seemingly good definition would describe something I had/have not achieved.

2 Likes
23

Alright, so what is the next step for you? Do you have a long-term measurable goal in mind for your liberation? What priorities come first?

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24

I guess I should think about the “Googla Fi-asco” but it’s very difficult for me to picture not having that second backup of any texts or calls that would work on other devices. Even being able to just move to the Librem 14 for texting and calling is a big benefit, although I haven’t had the Librem 14 long enough to need to do it yet. But I would imagine it could fulfill that same supposed purpose as the dumb Windows tablet in my life, such as when a bank calls me and I really want to call them back without issue. That is assuming, of course, that the reason the Librem 5 struggles with calls is a processor deficiency and not due to incomplete software – which I suppose is a distinction I really wish was easier for me to see the heart of, sometimes.

If that isn’t clear, what I mean is: suppose the bank calls again, and I answer but they can’t hear me or whatever or I can’t hear them. Currently, even if I confined myself to devices purchased from Purism, I could at that point hop on my Librem 14 and open a browser, log into the evil Google proprietary page, and call the bank back from the browser – because my texting and calling are optionally also available via a web login.

But is there any other service which would work without that concern that maybe the bank is going to text you, and you might never even know it happened, or something? There probably is, but what is it? That level of convenience – even on PureOS – is hard to beat.

Other than that, as another goal, I go here and there with a Librem 5 in my pocket and tell myself that this has improved my personal information leakage, but actually now with the geoclue stuff I’m realizing that the Librem 5 is probably calling home to Amazon constantly – and due to my cell provider being Google and not some T-Mobile or Verizon or AT&T or whatever, always informing Google – and also the Librem 14 at least was constantly calling home to nominatim.gnome.org so I would imagine the Librem 5 does also.

So, I can be this guy telling myself that I am daily driving a Librem 5 and living some privacy type of life, and yet actually the thing going with me is still telling Google and Amazon where I am all the time. Google, it sounds like, is my own fault on this one. But Amazon is standard issue with all Librem 5s. I think not telling Amazon nor Gnome.org every where I go is a great possible place to start, too.

1 Like
25

Unfortunately, this is where our practices directly conflict with each other, so I must explain mine.

I do not tolerate any solicitation and urgent calls to action (AKA push notifications), so I have made an enormous effort to remove them from my lifestyle. Marketing calls from financial institutions are exactly within that definition, so more often than not, I keep the cellular hardware kill switch enabled and/or use Lockdown Mode for those who are unable to respect my preferences. At my conscious discretion, I disable applicable kill switches in order to fetch any missed messages, calls, etc. My concept of freedom is protecting my time, space, and attention towards what I deem important: my passion projects.

Your situation is different: you want to be reliably contacted. I can provide a handful of tips, mostly untested:

  • Increase the microphone gain until the other party hears you more clearly.
  • Keep the microphone/camera hardware kill switch disabled during boot and while the phone is on.

Additionally, you may be interested in SIP or VOIP, topics that I no longer have interest in due to my very strong interest towards eliminating these dependencies from my own lifestyle.

26

It wasn’t really that kind of thing and I don’t think that I would see it that way. You may still be right, but I think we are not as different as you are supposing.

The exact situation in that particular case that I was describing was basically that:

  • I happened to have my modem switch on as well as the wifi switch, despite being indoors. A lot of times I turn on modem while on the go, and wifi while indoors, and keep the other of the two switches off
  • I initiated a transfer of a substantial portion of my personal savings within my bank into a different type of account
  • About 30m after the transfer of money, a bank official tried to call my number. [After I did get a hold of him, he even said most people he calls for this kind of thing take a week to reply so he appreciated that I called him back]
  • When he did call, I heard the ringing of the phone because the modem was unusually on at that time, so I figured I would go ahead and break my focus and try to answer. I switched on the microphone that I usually have off, so that I would be able to talk to this bank man, and I then pressed the Chatty icon to answer the call
  • The call connected and I said “hello” into it a few times, hearing only dead silence in reply. “I guess maybe my phone is having trouble,” I said into the receiver, and then hung up. I didn’t recognize the number, and I didn’t know who had called, although I probably suspected that it might have been the bank. But I surely didn’t know that at the time.
  • Chatty showed an incoming call a second time shortly after. It was the same number again. I was frustrated again, wondering whether Chatty would function as expected if I answered this time. I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure if I could trust the current state of things, because it had just reduced my trust in it from the previous call. So, I let this call go to voice mail.
  • Later, I called back the bank guy a different way, using a different proprietary system whose functions maybe aren’t even worth focusing on, because ideally they shall be eliminated from my life in the long term.
  • When I talked to the man, he said that in the first call he could hear me say, “Maybe my phone is having a problem” even though I could not hear him at all. So, notably, it seems like that is not the kill switch that is a problem in that situation. It’s a software failure. We did it wrong. Collectively, as a community of people who try to build free software with special licensing and ideology behind it to share with each other, we failed. Or at least I did, because I haven’t taught myself even the proper channels or places to report this kind of failure, or the proper log to read which dang file descriptor of sound information was enumerated stupidly, or what it was.

So, in particular, I would even suggest that you will at some point most likely have a similar problem – if indeed Chatty sometimes cannot playback audio – even if you only make outgoing calls and never incoming calls. Saying that your policies are different from mine, I would figure, is almost just a distraction from the fact that these systems failed and it wasn’t the hardware switch being switched the wrong way, and it wasn’t even really a failure for me to be available. It was a failure of the “call function” that I did not write myself, so I did not study how to debug. And anybody who uses the “call function” is liable to potentially have this problem until the bug is isolated and resolved.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you only constrain yourself to using your favorite XMPP app for calls, and so Chatty just simply doesn’t matter to you. Even if so, I don’t think that stops us from continuing to discuss the sort of problem I was facing, because it is a seemingly real problem with the software of the Librem 5 and also not really dependent on any desire whether to be available or not. I assume I would have had the same problem if I didn’t notice the call until 5 hours later, saw a missed call, and then called that guy on the Librem 5. Some how, some way, there is a bug in Chatty and it dropped all incoming audio data. The cause was probably either (1) that I switched on the mic switch prior to answering the Chatty call but after it registered an incoming call was available, or (2) that I might have plugged in earbuds and expected them to be plug-and-play while Chatty was already open waiting for me to click the button to answer a call. But I have not spent further time to isolate that.

So, I think that a difference of opinion on whether to be reliably contacted is one thing, but I almost feel like it is a distraction from the more important problem: whether I only make 1 outgoing call with the phone features per year, or whether I take 1000 incoming calls per year, until the free software community can identify, record, reproduce, and fix all the bugs in Chatty I believe there truly is a value to having a “backup” or “second system” to check for bugs. And maybe some people only use data, and only use XMPP, but for those who do occasionally use the other features it is valuable to have a second system to continually verify that they are actually working, at least until we reach a future where they are always working reliably for the long term (at which time, I’m sure, big telecommunications companies will try to make pull requests to break them under the guise of legitimate contributions, and it will be up to us to turn them down).

Now, maybe I spent too long over-focusing on how I am seeing this differently than what you described, but I really think there is an issue that could be considered here that isn’t simply a matter of throwing up our hands and saying that I’m compromised/unable to achieve freedom, simply because I feel there is utility to me to have texting and calling that always works in some way – or that failing, that I can at least always know if I missed something, at least at those times that I choose to look.

And, all of this, distracts away from my other problem, which is that I don’t want my Librem 5 to send messages to Mozilla Location Services [Powered By Amazon] anymore, so that Amazon will not have a location history of where my device has been!

2 Likes
27

I do not use XMPP or any real-time calling application. All of my communication methods are asynchronous:

  • SMS
  • Email (Tuta)
  • Discourse

I have the opposite “issue” with my modem: I can hear the other party clearly, but they cannot hear me. I have little reason to troubleshoot the issue, considering the values I uphold. Your modem issue should be created as a different thread and separate from this one.

As for your Mozilla Locations Services issue, if I were you, I would probably go to the Settings application, select Time & Date, then toggle “Automatically set date and time” or whatever the setting is called to off. Or, perhaps you would prefer to read the geoclue source code.

I should probably let you know that I have a serious plan of action to become unbanked, so that I do not have to deal with financial institutions approving or disapproving my transactions, among other reasons: my Librem 5 USA order years ago was denied multiple times, so I had to call my financial institution to manually approve it. They way I see it right now, financial institutions want me to have a phone number, whereas I want neither.

28

Maybe. I just tried disabling and masking it away with systemctl, but I suppose maybe in the future I might come to regret that. I think I am actually not opposed to having the Librem 5 use the one-way incoming GPS feature, but to me the idea that we should contact Amazon periodically as the default way to facilitate the GPS-equivalent function seems like not something I want.

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29

You can also try my approach using hardware kill switches:

  1. When using any operating system/application with network capabilities, keep all hardware kill switches enabled.
  2. Configure every setting so that it respects your anonymity/privacy/security.
  3. Disable any applicable hardware kill switches.

This is exactly how I deal with my PureOS image on a USB drive whenever I boot it up, as well as Firefox ESR. You can also use your own user.js for the latter.

If you want more anonymity/privacy/security, I suggest checking out Qubes OS, and in particular, Qubes-Whonix. This is what I use on my Librem 14.