Librem 5 concern

Hardware Librem 5
61

It blows my mind that people like you attempt to make someone look stupid by making a claim and if you yourself spent two seconds reading your own post you might not have posted it. QUOTE: “A social purpose corporation (SPC) is a type of for-profit entity, a corporation, in some U.S. states that enables, but does not require, considering social or environmental issues in decision making.”

From very first sentence of the wiki link you sent. Please note the words “BUT DOES NOT REQUIRE” That means something I think.

G

62

Sorry, There are plenty of such claims above and I wasn’t responding directly to any one post. But you need to keep a few things in mind as well:

  1. People want free stuff. Look at the entire Linux community. If anyone comes by and tries to make a profit for something they wrote they are bashed and beat repeatedly until they give up. resulting in mostly sub par experiences when compared to the other OS’s.

  2. Nothing is free: which means you pay for it, get something not much worth having, or get it for free but allow someone to record information that they can use to make a profit somewhere else.

  3. If this phone is sucessful, which I hope it is, then Google, Facebook and the like will write apps to run in it. When they do, people are going to install it. When they do install it, your phone will be no more safe than the current phones with these same apps installed.

Also, none of the apps mentioned are required installs so if they are the only apps bothering you guys then I don’t understand where the problem is to begin with as you are just as safe by just not installing them.

Again, I don’t want to come across as not being 100% for this phone to succeed. This entire thread was started because of some concerns and misleading I feel on Purisms side and everyone chose to jump the poor guy asking the questions instead of being nurturing and sweet to him. In fact, some of you were down right ugly to him and now take issue with me calling you idiots.

Blows my mind how you guys can dish out ugliness until it is returned and all of the sudden the world is ending.

63

How much do you know about how much Apple spies on you currently?

Closed source means at best “trust but not verify”. If you trust them, great, but it will never be possible to verify whether that trust is misplaced.

Any given app might be a privacy / security risk but so might be the underlying operating system.

Apple has some kudos in the bank. Spying may not be their business model. But you don’t know to what extent they are spying.

That is missing one aspect of open source. Someone else can support. It can be forked. The community can support. You can support yourself (if you have the skills).

You know that all Raspberry Pi devices have an ARM CPU and run Linux? They’ve only sold 25 million Raspberry Pi devices.

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64

You come across as a lot more reasonable (the concerns you listed were not the same as the OPs) than the OP did. He had clearly done no research on what the phone was about, a good part of it was avoiding spyware apps. He then complained the phone didn’t come with the very spyware apps we’re trying to get rid of!

He got called a troll because, in essence, he’d come onto a Harley Davidson site complaining that H-D is not making half ton pickups. Now I don’t think he was necessarily a troll, but his fundamental complaint was THAT out-of-place here, so some jumped to that conclusion and I don’t entirely blame them.

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65

On a more serious note: I watched the videos you linked to to show how the phone is progressing. However, I don’t see anything substantial being shown. Where are the videos of actually placing calls, texting and so forth that would be required of any phone? Where is the video to show the calendar and camera apps being used?

Your posts seem to illude to everything being solved for the most part yet I can’t find a single image or video to make me think that is true. yet the promotional videos seem to show it all working. This is the point I was making that I don’t think Purism is being clear as to exactly where this project is and how it is going.

66

I appreciate that and do consider myself thoughtful before I speak and I do try to research things as best as I can. However, I would disagree completely with your assessment of the OP. If you read his first 3 posts he was clearly confused as to why the phone didn’t handle the basic things every phone in 2019 should. I see not a single thing he said that was out of line or not true.

The phone doesn’t seem capable of making phone calls at all in the US. It is absolutely running on older hardware. There are no apps available for it to do anything at all (yet). I don’t care about the apps like facebook and such but do care about being able to navigate and take pictures. Also his concerns about the 32gb memory is totally reasonable as that is just not enough in today’s environments to handle the amount of pictures and videos alone we take. An SD card doesn’t resolve those issues on its own.

G

67

First off I don’t trust anyone at all. Apple is 2nd only to Google on the most hated company by me. However, that isn’t keeping focus on the ball. So lets try this for a better point:

  1. We get this phone and it is everything we hoped it would be. People pick it up and love the openness and start writing apps for it. Some are paid, some are free but it just takes off.

  2. The OS is linux so we can trust it. Yet I don’t have time to check every line of source code and instead rely (or assume) others are doing that job. But if you know anything about Linux then you know that even it had source code a few years back implanted by the CIA (suspected) that no one caught for a bit. The point isn’t that it was there but that it could still be that someone just hasn’t caught yet.

  3. So do we really trust Linux to be 100% safe? Also, 100% of all hardware is made in China. Do you 100% trust that they will not sneak things into the hardware to spy on you? Because lenovo already got caught doing just that.

  4. now that explosion of apps people are writing. yes, some will be open source, some will be closed to make a profit which is their right. Will you trust every single app available for this phone just because it was written for linux?

I could go on forever about this. The point is email will never be safe and yet is used by 100% of us. Web browsing is only as safe as the browser and while Firefox is our current go to for that I’m not sure they are 100% trust worthy to not have code placed somewhere in the future that spys on you.

The only way you can truly be safe is to just unplug from the world but then what would the point be there? So, we have to minimize our risk as much as possible and right now it pains me to say but Apple is the only player doing it right. They look at all apps on the store to at least attempt to make sure they are being honest about what they claim to do, they do not advertise to you so have no good reason to spy on your searches or anything else. All of which will need to be marshalled in this new OS and platform if it will continue to be “SAFE and SECURE”. I don’t see how that will be accomplished with the current direction.

Again, I very much want this to be sucessful to give us our own phones without having to buy into Apple and Google. But lets be honest and approach it from that front instead of telling us some fancy story about security and safety when they can no more guarantee that than I could that I will be the next President.

It turns people off when they find out they’ve been mislead and any security minded person can see this phone will be no more secure than any other phone and I will argue it will be less safe given its current direction.

G

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68

LOL. Yes. What I meant was that no amount of testing will demonstrate that a blackbox is free of intentional (particularly) or unintentional privacy / security failures.

The context of the discussion above was:

person A: the baseband firmware is closed source so you can never be sure that your calls are not being, for example, monitored

person B: but it will be tested for exploits

me: the above comment

The above discussion kind of misses the point that mobile phone calls are inherently unprivate, regardless of the baseband firmware, and that the only truly private way of making a phone call is to layer a secure calling protocol over the top of an insecure mobile data call - exactly as on the internet as a whole.

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69

Urgh…

You are right, he did mention the 32 GB limit.

What he doubled down on, though, when challenged, was the lack of apps from companies that spy on you. So that’s what we remembered; that’s certainly what I remembered, and mea culpa, there was more to it than that.

But on the apps complaints–which became central to this discussion even if it didn’t start that way, Dwaff laid it out quite succinctly in post 9:

He completely misses what Purism is doing. The problems he lists are actually the design goal of the Librem5: No cooperation with surveilance capitalism businesses (so no facebook, google, whatsapp, tinder and the likes).

He’s looking for a pickup truck, and he’s walked into a Harley Davidson discussion site, blasting Harley Davidson for not building one.

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70

Now, having learned that SPC is a legal thing, you may proceed to read the actual articles of incorporation, which are definite source of what Pursim is required to do. You may find them published by Purism here or you may go to the Washington Secretary of State website and retrieve them from there.

The words on wikipedia state the general rule, from which any corporation can form an exceptions, the limits of which are set in the SB-1301 Corporate Flexibility Act of 2011: Social Purpose Corporations Act.

The bottom line: Purism may not ignore the social purpose aspect when making business decisions.

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71

I have not responded to you yet because it seems to me that you make a lot of strong but unsubstantiated statements.

  • SD storage is plenty fast if you don’t buy cheap equipment.
  • Matrix is much more than you think it is. Starting point: Comparison
  • Calls have been demonstrated to work months ago in several progress updates. First time, more than a year ago.

The current videos start with simple things and most likely will get to that stuff, too. And quite possibly to other stuff you are missing.

I’d suggest you do some reading / watching and wait a few more days for the upcoming videos and announcements. This could save us all from some kilometers of needless arguing :sunglasses:

Here’s a comprehensive list of stuff that happened:
Librem 5 — Development Chronology

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72

show me a non-smart-phone that is open-hardware/free-software/linux-libre (RYF) oriented and developed by a SPC (social-purpose-company). the point is to support the open/auditable/documentable free-software ideology and see where it leads as a mass social experiment (hopefuly it will turn into something more sustainable than what we have with the walled gardens today).

also … you ARE RESISTING … STOP RESISTING … @cybercrypt13

life doesn’t suck, people are persons and everything is as hard as we make it …

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73

actually you can trust it if it’s the linux-libre kernel (FSF vetted) that we are talking about and don’t forget about the GNU project.

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74

my s3ns0r is telling me you posted that just so you could harden your point. finally someone who uses words as a surgical laser.

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75

This is a huge problem if it is really what you mean. It would mean that you need to live out on your own and never rely on society or anyone else ever again. I trust the people I have been able to meet and spend some time with to get a sense of how they are. For instance I have met Stallman, some of the gnome people and debian people amongst others. My sense of them is that they are doing their best to make a system that is private and secure and their priorities seem to line up somewhere near my own. So yeah I more or less trust the GNU/linux system because other people I have an amount of trust or respect for also think it’s trustworthy and have dove further into it than I could.

This is what we need to do as a society. We need to meet, establish realtionships, and through those relationships develop a certain amount of trust. Maybe that trust is just in the sense that you know what their motives are. Sometimes that is enough. My point is that without some level of trust in our fellow human beings we don’t have a society we just have a dog eat dog world of chaos.

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76

My lord, can I post again yet? Waiting 18 hours to the freaking second in order to be able to continue a conversation is insane.

77

Again, it clearly states that an SPC is not required to follow any specific process and what exactly would that process be? How would you govern it? It only states that decisions will be based on social purpose but who’s social purpose? Who decides if they did it right or wrong? Where are these guidelines listed and defined in order to “Sue” them if they don’t follow the rules?

I have to say that all the Politically correct speak gets under my skin and all these people that act like they are saving the planet with a computer and a phone, well, sorta blows my mind. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the concern, but at the end of the day the world as a whole could care less and most of these types of people drive rocking cars, fly airplanes that burn lots of gas and live in huge houses. Maybe the owners of Purism are different but only time will tell. What I do know though is there is no legal ramification if the company goes one way or the other. The federal government doesn’t even recognize these types of corps which means they more likely follow the paperwork trail of an S-Corp at the end of the day.

This is sorta of a stupid conversation to have anyway as I could care less what type of company it is or how they run it. I was only commenting to someone saying they could be sued if they didn’t save the world with each decision and that they could NEVER sell out to another larger company because of it. I seriously doubt they have that in their corporation papers.

G

78

Sorry guys, would love to continue the conversation but this forum in a word sucks. It won’t let me respond for 18 hours and now will only allow 3 replies. I’ll post all of my replies here to each of you and you can figure out what I’m talking about. I’m not waiting another 20 hours to respond so I’m done. Don’t think I got scared and ran though as I didn’t. Just frustrated with the forum here.

Wow, so now we are going to claim SD Storage is fast and reliable. Very strange that most all media failures I suffer lately are at the hands of tiny little sd cards. But I’m sure you have a source where this is not the case. In order to capture 4k Video you most definitely have to have a fast card but also the hardware itself needs to be able to take advantage of that speed. So there is more to the picture than just a fast card.

Matrix is actually not more than I think it is. Here is a question for you: Matrix is meant to bridge the gap between all chatting programs so that you can communicate from Whatsapp to iPhone Messages app as an example. First for this to even matter every chat program has to support it and at the moment I’m not aware of ANY that actually do. BUT: Messages is end to end encrypted and Facebook owns Whatsapp so who knows what is going on there. The point is, if I send you a message from my messages app and you get it on your whatsapp, is the message encrypted? Is it protected? Is it secure?

Matrix has no say in that matter as it is a messaging protocol not a storage requirement.

Here is the point with current progress: We are in 2019 and you start doing videos about how great the phone is coming along and what great progress we’ve made. I see 5 videos so far and they show adding 1 + 2 on a calculator, playing chess and a few other things. Who the heck is their marketing guy? I would fire him immediately as there isn’t a single person on earther bar you guys that thinks that stuff is awesome.

Better progress videos would be looking up a contact in the address book, calling them on a video call, scheduling to get back with them next week and texting them my contact info in the mean time. You know, actual phone stuff.

I have searched all over and see NO videos or examples of what that looks like and yet they are supposedly about to release the phone in a few months. A phone that no one has disputted will not work in the US. But did they let everyone know this when they asked for the front money?

My main issue with this entire endevor is the fact that people are being mislead by a supposed “Social Company”. AGAIN!!! I am 100% behind the project and seriously hope it works out. You guys though are not helping the situation by acting like the company must be great just because they claim they are for social fairness (whatever the heck that means).

reC response to flip phone:

I’m not really sure how to respond to you because you really didn’t make any points that I see. There are no such phones for the following reasons:

People have to get paid in order to live. So if they are going to work on free stuff for other companies to give away it takes a 1000 times longer to complete (and they will more than likely give up before done) than it does the guy that gets paid big money to work 8-10 hours a day. Also the guy working alone in his basement while ignoring his family has no real care about others opinions on the looks and feel of the finished product so you just get what you get.

Phone hardware moves at an incredible pace and as such these small teams of free programmers working on Linux to run on a phone can’t possibly keep up. So a company like Purism comes along and tries to take advantage of all their hard work and make a profit selling hardware that runs their software. And yes, they also work hard to put this all together but at the end of the day, they are the only ones that might stand to make a profit. So in the end, most of these projects die quickly because they just can’t keep up with the rest of the world.

And Again (feel like a broken record here), I use Linux every single day, I manage a lot of Linux servers, I run a linux thinkpad X1 Extreme and have it with me 24 hours a day. I AM A LINUX DUDE!!! I want this to succeed.

What I am not into though, are you guys acting like social justice police and not being even slightly offended that Purism isn’t exactly handling this in the best possible way. Taking money with the promise of delivering what no other company before them could pull off and providing zero details as to exactly what people will get seems dishonest to me.

I was about to pay $700 for the idea of having a linux phone because it would be the coolest thing ever. I thought twice though and researched the cell chip a bit more to discover it did not and will never work in the US. There is no mention of this fact on their site and no mention of them even working on a solution to this. I realize the chip is M.2 and can be replaced, but they haven’t addressed that and you’d still need to deliver drivers for it which could be literally years away.

But they were AOK with taking my $700 and giving me a brick in a few months. And I see plenty of people here and on the net that didn’t consider this fact and spent the money thinking they’d have a working phone.

It would have been much more honest and social if they had said give us $1000 and we’re going to make a development phone to do an experiement and see if we can get a linux phone functioning like a modern phone. If we can, then round 2 will be designing and building the hardware around our development efforts.

That I could get behind!

And btw: I will always resist ignorance. sorry.

reC to trust it:

I think you completely missed my point to trust.

reC surgical laser point:

Yes reC, a mention of a comprehensive list just destoryed my entire point. Are any of you over 30? Beause I feel like I’m having a discussion with a bunch of kids. (oh, before you get upset about that comment you guys said same thing about the original poster :slight_smile: But seriously, are any of you over 30?

Lastly:

I have had 18 hours to watch and read everything I can find on this phone since this forum locked me out for that long. What amazes me most is the complete and absolute lack of anything impressive about what is going on other than them taking 2 million off people that think they are going to get a phone in 2 months. The videos showing calls are 10 seconds long and only show the phone ringing, not them answering it and having a conversation.

The text message example was a single word send and an immidate response. I literally feel like I’ve been transported back to the 80’s and we’re finding computers for the first time ever. Watch me print this word on paper… lol

I’m not meaning to knock what is going on here as I love it, but I’m blown away that you guys are so defensive about a product like this on anything but the coolness of what if. I hope I’m wrong but I predict that IF the phone releases in 2 months that it will be a complete joke and make the linux community look ridiculous to even consider such a thing a phone.

I wish instead that Pursim was only releasing a more complete dev kit that more of us could get hold of to develop apps and such for it. I see this phone still being 2 years out before it could possibly be called a basic phone and even then it will have barely enough apps to function as a smart phone.

I also researched Matrix a bit more and it is what I stated in my original post with the exception that they also talk of end to end encryption through a phone app that I see no sign of them actually building. This encryption would also only work as VOIP calls which means only if you have a good internet signal, which means, umm, why not use some other VOIP program that already does this? Matrix is a good concept but I don’t see a single company taking advantage of it as it would undermine their business model.

Again, social justice thoughts of a beautiful and friendly world where everyone has all the same stuff and shares everything in harmony THAT WILL NEVER EXIST!

I’m honestly disappointed because I was hoping this was a real effort to get Linux on a phone, but instead appears to be someone’s dream of social fairness that will never happen. How about we backup and rethink this whole thing before it crumbles as it surely will in its current form.

Sorry I have to leave but I’m sure you guys are happy to see me go. I really do wish you the best with this phone as I’d love to have one. But in my opinion unless something major changes it will never happen.

G Out.

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79

See, finally I found something we both agree :slight_smile:
I just don’t see any problem with that. To the contrary.

Good bye :wave:

80

Yes sure so a US based company is developing a phone that they themselves cannot use? what chip are you referring to? They are using a Cinterion PLS8 which has various models and a US model so you will get the model that corresponds to your country.

This is from the manufacturer of that chips own datasheet

The PLS8 and its variants, PLS8-E, PLS8-US, PLS8-J, PLS8-X and PLS8-V, supports multiple Mobile Network Operators including AT&T, TMobile and Verizon from a single variant. Depending on activated SIM/MIM, correct network configurations are automatically detected and activated. In addition, 2G and 3G connectivity is also supported for maximum roaming capability.

This will absolutely work in the US. And Purism goes on to list the exact bands it will work for:

https://puri.sm/faq/supported-networks/

in addition to all that if it really didn’t work there is this:

w/ single SIM on replaceable M.2 card

so just replace it with another M.2 card if you really want tell me another manufacturer that give you that option. In addition they could offer a 5G upgrade down the line just on an M.2 card literally any other company would just make you buy a whole new phone.

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