Librem 5 & Phone Calls

Hello All, I hope everyone is doing good,

I know this may have been covered elsewhere, But can the Librem 5 actually make reliable phone calls yet?

I see a lot of bad press on youtube about the Librem 5, but then again a lot of these guys just sound like they have old & bitter issues with Purism, or maybe personality clashā€™s with others, however what is being said is not great.

I have been wanting a Librem 5 ever since I discovered Purism & the Linux community, from which may I say has many awesome people in :smile:

I hope for the day when the Librem 5 can be purchased and used by a novice as a simple out of the box phone all over the world.

If anyone has videos, and info about the Librem 5 please let me know

Thanks in advance

LinuxNew

Hi there :grinning:

Iā€™d suggest to look at some of forum topics about Chestnut. Like this one.

Since then, my impression is, a lot of improvements have landed. To get an overview, peek at the Chronology.

Otherwise Iā€™d suggest to wait for Dogwood reviews in April, those should be much closer to the ā€œfinalā€ experience.

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Thanks Caliga, thatā€™s awesome news and thanks for the info, anymore like this would be awesomeā€¦

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Once Evergreen has shipped, there will be thousands of people all over the world who will be able to attest to what is working (and what is not), and what the user experience is like i.e. how suitable for a novice.

We are all looking forward to that day. Even though I am not a Linux novice, I still want a phone that ā€œjust worksā€ and hence is suitable for a novice.

One minor caveat ā€¦ if you expect to use your phone ā€œall over the worldā€ (i.e. you are an international road warrior, or is that an air warrior?) then it may not be suitable at Evergreen shipment - or at least you would want to investigate carefully what countries you visit and what specific modem model, if any, supports all of those countries. That is, at this time, Purism is not specifically advertising an ā€œinternational modelā€, as far as I know (particularly in regards to 4G support).

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Hi kieran,

Thanks for the information much appreciated.

How do you know that what you put in the cloud is not looked at or used by malicious intent? What the site promises and what it does can be very opposite, even not known to themā€¦

Open source client-side encryption.

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Meaning you think that is what they got you thinking is happening. Prove it.
If is send a file with whatever, and I hit the send button, where do I see that it was encrypted before it was sent by a back door AS A COPY NOT ENCRYPTED.

@kazmroz You would have to make sure that you can trust the hardware/firmware, the OS and the app you are using itself. Of course, proving that a plaintext backup has not yet been or will not be sent is practically impossible. It could be divided into many little parts which could be sent to an ā€˜attackerā€™ over time hidden into plausible data chunks.

So all sensitive stuff I keep on a separate computer not attached to a modem. Back in university 1970ā€™s, I worked as a guard at a big computer research place CONTROL DATA where the head of IT told me that much of their files were literally going out the window by the competition focusing a laser on their big window to read their data bouncing around inside the building. Now that same spying is even more high tech, by 50 years more so.

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Yeah I donā€™t buy the security unicorn some try to sell. I personally donā€™t care who can see what itā€™s really not that important. Everything in this life is only temporary anyway.

If the client software is open source, it is assumed that I know exactly what the client is doing.

If the file is encrypted on the client by that software before being uploaded to the cloud then that is private against being looked at in the cloud provided that the encryption algorithm itself is not broken.

Of course there are additional points of leakage e.g. potentially filenames, directory structures, traffic analysis - but those can be wholly or partly addressed if your need for privacy warrants it.