I’m done with google but before purchasing a Librem 5 phone, there are questions that need answering.
Does the Librem 5 work well with Starlink Wi-Fi? {not in my real name}
What are some reasonably priced ISP’s that support the Librem 5? My current ISP is T-Mobile, {also not in my real name and the refill card is paid with cash}, however I’ve given them notice when downgrading the plan.
Do the ISP’s accept a prepaid debit card as payment or do they want a passport, fingerprints, retina scan, voice recording and blood sample for positive dna? Laugh if you will but москва россий has 220,000 cameras recording a persons biometrics as they tool aroung the city.
Are apps available to rival Googles Maps and Translator?
Does the Librem 5 have a wipe the phone you’re about to be captured button?
I’ll log off now and put this Librem laptop back in the Faraday Bag while giving you a few days to answer.
Just because you have your internet connection with Starlink doesn’t mean that you are using a Starlink-provided WiFi box. You can, if you wish, get the ethernet connection option with Starlink and then provide your own WiFi via a separate Wireless Access Point. (That is certainly the direction that I would go in if I were getting Starlink. Yes, that is more expensive but if you are paying for Starlink every month, you can hardly complain about the one-off cost of a WAP.)
I don’t have Starlink. So I am not in a position to answer the question as asked.
It goes without saying that there is a trade-off between immediacy (how quickly can you trigger a wipe) and a horrible accident.
The above link also specifically talks about backups. If you have no backup then a horrible accident wipes out everything irretrievably. If you have a backup then you can be coerced into accessing a backup and it may be more difficult to do a panic-wipe on your backups.
These forums are a good source of information. My solution has been to ask Google maps for directions before I go someplace, or to know the way and use my personal sense of direction instead. I am in my early 30s, and lived through the rise of GPS. When I was born, people would travel the world using a paper atlas. Someone handed me one such atlas, and last time I found myself in the wrong town on a long car trip where all I had was the Librem 5, I used the atlas. Are you afraid of being human instead of joining the modern experiment?
That being said, someone in my DMs sent me a really good tutorial for how to download the maps of the whole Earth onto a Librem 5 and use inward-only GPS to conveniently travel them. It’s not necessarily the default in your libgeoclue / GNSS defaults so if you’re as seriously paranoid as it sounds like you are, then you need to FIND THAT geoclue config and master it so your device does what you actually want it to. Before I understood, I found my Librem 5 sending my location to Google Cloud servers (rented by Mozilla that Google allegedly “has no access to” although Mozilla is on Google payroll). In some instances, it was sending my location as frequently as every 5 seconds, but the issue here is not the Librem 5. It’s software inherited from GNOME and most “modern” Linux ecosystems, and when we commented it on here on the Purism forums, the people at Mozilla shut down the server on the other end of that connection and then the GNOME people updated the geoclue service default to just literally be Google since now there’s not an alleged alternative. I definitely saw this update in one of the updates to my Librem 5, although I think someone from Purism had the literally Google maps default endpoint turned off with a comment instead of the default-on that was happening with the Mozilla endpoint. But if you’re going to be paranoid, you’re going to want to research what geoclue is doing.
I prefer to believe that we should be able to use inward-only GPS to pinpoint our location without submitting a report of that location to a remote location. I have not, however, bothered to set it up on my Librem 5. But if you’re going to set it up, the guy who DM’ed me a guide of some sort said that it is better to use PureMaps than to use the default GNOME Maps that shows up on a Librem 5 default install by default.
No problem and thank you for asking. I installed PureMaps and OSM Scout Server via Flatpak, I am fairly certain. (This was several years ago).
I downloaded my state map via OSM Scout Server. Then, within the flatpak of PureMaps, I asked it to use offline maps with OSM Scout Server.
That is pretty much it. The location services are not always great. I think that is the Librem 5’s fault and I do not have a lot of help there. I have always been a little frustrated with the GPS on the phone. It is sometimes near perfect and sometimes cannot find my location at all.
Anyway, I hope that helps you.
I hope it is no offense to the person who sent me this DM that I shared it here, but for their benefit I did not provide their username. Looks like generic information to me, so hopefully is helpful.
Last time I went to a country where I did not know the local language, I asked the ChatGPT to make me a completely offline translator app that worked on the Librem 5 using only approved libre tools that would work without internet connectivity, since I wasn’t sure my cell provider would support the country I was visiting.
The LLM essentially coughed up a tiny GTK gui with two boxes, and typing text in the boxes would invoke a command line tool that exists in PureOS apt that has language translation guides from before the LLMs that were hand-crafted to automate translation across languages. It was vastly inferior to AI-driven translation but it allowed me to decode some signs and other things that I encountered, and was always very accessible to me since I had multiple Librem 5 batteries and chargers so unlike Androids I never had to charge my phone and had infinite uptime – so in an unknown place with potentially no internet, the Librem 5 was an ever-present computational tool with this weak translation capability, even in lockdown mode (modem and wifi killed by hard switch).
My hard drive is encrypted and if I hold the Volume Down key while booting, it boots the SD card instead. So I could very easily power cycle the device while holding Volume Down and boot into an entirely alternate environment which doesn’t know the main drive password, and hand someone else the phone. This would give them the ability to pilfer through it, find nothing, and hand it back to me while never touching (nor being capable of touching) the primary eMMC drive on the device. And that way I also don’t lose my data. If you are facing a threat actor sufficiently capable of decrypting your encrypted hard drive, then is it safe to say that wiping your drive might not save you from them?
It is definitely necessary to understand who threatens you and what their capabilities are.
It is also quite difficult to erase data on solid state storage, due to the constant block remapping.
A full analysis of the technical risks would be large but I think the simplification of it would be that if you successfully actually erased the LUKS header, it is doubtful that it can be decrypted, with the only proviso being that you must have re-encrypted when you took delivery of the device so as not to be using the factory default master encryption key.
However perhaps what you are implying is that with this threat model … you may save your data but you won’t save yourself.
Refer recent discussion of US-based activist who is being prosecuted in the US for using his duress code (and that is basically what Q5 is talking about).
Great stuff guys. This area in the southern USA got hit with 80 mph winds 2 days ago and we have no electrical power except solar batteries so we are in survival mode. Don’t know how long until power is restored however a year and a half ago an EF3 tornado hit here and we were without power for 8 days. There is no high speed Internet out here so Starlink is the only option. We had Hughesnet but it was slow (not able to stream) and expensive ($70 month for 15 gb shared by everyone). We also got rid of the landline saving about $70 a month and installed Ooma TeloAir with VOIP from Starlink. The Ooma service is free and we only pay taxes. Starlink is $85 a month with unlimited data and speeds of up to 200mb. Also we receive free tv from LG, Prime, and YouTube. I’ll check out the links you mentioned when the power is restored. Thanks
