I noticed the date on the last post was 5 years ago. But I wonder, how’s it going with the backdoors?
That’s a US problem for it’s people to lap up. I imagine any device built in/by/for the US will be the same for everyone - every where.
I doubt the US has any plans to omit back doors on devices sold outside the US.
I think it’s fair to say that most of the Internet servers are based in the US.
I’ll update and wordsmith a old saying … ‘Remove one freedom each day and soon there will be no freedoms and no one will notice.’
Underground will be privacy’s only saving. We could always send snail mail - no one looks at that any more.
Any thing the govt does, can be undone by the sheer will of the people.
I had an incoming mail inspected last week, and postage increased by $5.27. The offense, my ebay seller sent a magazine via media mail. That only works if there are no ads. The magazine had 58 year old advert.
With ham radio, the government forces manufacturers to put lockouts in to the circuitry of any transceivers that they manufacture, to prevent the owner of the radio from transmitting outside of the ham radio bands. So I bought a book called “Radio Tech Modifications” (that was thirty-five years ago). The book listed nearly every make and model of ham radio and told the reader of the book how to modify the radio to circumvent those lockouts.
At the time, in the case of my Icom T22A handheld transceiver, I had to remove a surface mount size 0603 resistor from the circuit board. That was difficult to do without a surface mount rework solder station. But I was able to do it using tweezers and an exacto knife. That, combined with some secret key-in commands that the book gave, and the radio was fully unlocked. On my Yaeseu transceiver, the process was much easier. When you open up the back of the radio, there is a conspicuous blue wire that jumps from one part of the circuit board to the other. It was the only wire. The instructions said to simply clip the blue wire. Job done.
Maybe Purism could build these kinds of vulnerabilities in to their back doors if forced to put them in. Just clip the blue wire, enter in a certain code, and you’ve irreversably locked out all back doors. Since the modification would be done by the user, Purism wouldn’t be responsible. With the OS being owned by the community, Purism wouldn’t be responsible. The purpose of the vulnerability could be stated as a feature for use in countries that do not require the back doors. Each unit could ship with instructions and a warning not to do these steps for phones used in the US.
A user could also install a second OS on to an SD card. If the back doors are accessed, then the sanitized OS comes up and the other OS gets erased and shreaded.
At least were not limited to crystal transmitters, which would only have one frequency to begin with. Then the governtment would only sell “authorized” crystals.
