Purism Launches a Privacy-first, Made in USA Smartphone: Librem 5 USA, as an Alternative to Big Tech Offerings

27    03 Jun 2021 02:58 by u/RootHouston

4 comments

3 u/lul 03 Jun 2021 06:17
Unless all of the lithography masks for the SoC are open source (and detailed), you can bet your pants that it has a sophisticated hardware level backdoor instruction sequence both in the CPU and modem.
3 u/RootHouston [OP] 03 Jun 2021 06:55
Ideally, I think they'd like to do that, but they'd then have to engineer their own silicon, and then get enough serious engineers to put in the effort to mainline it into the Linux kernel. One step at a time. If this fails, it's going to be a lot harder to get to that point. There aren't a lot of companies trying to put in even close to this much effort.
3 u/Gundam 03 Jun 2021 10:45
It can barely make calls, pretty doubtful it has "sophisticated backdoors". All code on it is free software as far as the OS. As far as the modem it has a hardware Killswitch to shut it off.
1 u/lul 10 Jun 2021 19:30
Modem hardware switch definitely sets it apart. That's nice.