An EXTERNAL modem connected by USB with no DMA access would solve what the Tor Project has called the single biggest security hole in smartphones: access to system RAM by the baseband radio. Not only is the baseband radio a totally closed system to us, it is required by law in many nations (e.g by CALEA in the US) to have backdoor acces for law enforcement. No CALEA compliant device can be trusted with access to your private filesystem, which means all smartphones should isolate the baseband radio to lock governmental spies out of things like the microphone, the camera, GPS, the user's entire filesystem on disk, etc.
Because of this sort of thing, there are a great many things for which I will not use a phone as anything more than a dumb modem passing on https packets from a separate system, one of them being random web surfing. If I have to go someplace I need to deny presence at, it's batteries out for all phones.
Because of this sort of thing, there are a great many things for which I will not use a phone as anything more than a dumb modem passing on https packets from a separate system, one of them being random web surfing. If I have to go someplace I need to deny presence at, it's batteries out for all phones.
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