Purism Partners With PIA For VPN Solutions On Librem Smartphones & Laptops

[Jabberwocky]

Won't this make any imports of Librem 5 phone into Australia illegal?

Most manufacturers release a specific model for a region. I wonder what Librem's strategy will be (since Librem isn't typical a manufacturer). I hope they won't make a compromise and release a less secure model. That said, does anyone know what they are using for their baseband processor(s) and how they obtain certification?

(Because our government makes Pi look rational!)

TLDR; You are not alone.

Long Rant Below...

Australia surely has increased the "funny" news headlines in the past few years. I used to get my kicks out crazy policies like my government trying to put a tax on solar energy while the country's national power provider is without power. Typically I'd just laugh it off, however things are reaching a new level of crazy. A few days ago double standards from the South African Human Rights Commission allowing politicians to use hate speech (inciting violence) if you target a specific races and on the other hand you have a civilian that was in shock due to being attacked which used a racial slur many times when the police showed up (not inciting violence) you get into big trouble with the law. IMHO both cases are wrong and deserves punishment, but the one was sent to jail and the other did not even have to apologise. It does not take an expert to notice that the cases completely contradict each other.

By the looks of it 1st world countries are playing catch up in levels of irrationality, but still has a bit to go. Journalists who covers these stories are extremely bad at getting people to open up, edits sources to make it more sensationalistic and or to show their political views. From what I have seen Katie Hopkins was the worst on the right and Vice Media worst on the left with many between. Most reporters are here for a few days to weeks, I think it would take months to a year to get the full story.

I agree with Jimmy Wales that the decline of funding in journalism over the past 15 to 20 years has contributed to many problems we face today. Politicians have mostly been greedy ignorant excuses for "leaders" in the past but it seems that they have much more power in "western" democratic countries. From a legislation point of view South Africa turned communist end of last year, no headlines about it. Perhaps people are too busy or tired to complain? Either way, greater motivation for Librem devices and services like blockchain, VPN, and others like signal for those that are still allowed to use it I guess.

[Vistaus]

You do know that Wireguard is not production ready yet?

Yikes! So Cloudflare is going to push something that's non-production ready in a few months? (their new Warp technology uses Wireguard) That's going to disrupt the internet.

[Vistaus]

Are they even going to sell to chinese people at all? I'm not under the impression that they are going to sell outside of the "western internet userbase" pool.

You could order the Librem 5 worldwide, so China fits the definition. OTOH: maybe the Chinese government doesn't really care about the 5 Chinese persons using a Librem 5?

[Jabberwocky]

PIA has said so themselves, last September https://www.privateinternetaccess.co...-we-there-yet/ I'm sure it'll eventually get there, and I know they are supporting the project. Personally I hope much sooner rather than later, but I'm not even close to an expert on crypto/security.

This is great news thanks for sharing. I don't have any certification in crypto, but I do know rushing and security are mutually exclusive. Like the post says having support for Windows is a challenge, but at least that doesn't bother me (us?). I can't wait to use Wireguard, it will simplify things for me. For now I'm waiting though.

PS: Many years ago I did some self study in crypto when I reverse engineered and wrote game clients for personal use, also learned a lot from my brother when he was busy with his MSc in ECC (we shared an apartment at the time). In the past year or so I have studied range-proofs as hobby it really fascinates me, my maths is too weak to come up with this stuff!

You do know that you're not the only living being that knows things right?

Sorry if I offended you. That was not my intention.

[Jabberwocky]

Yikes! So Cloudflare is going to push something that's non-production ready in a few months? (their new Warp technology uses Wireguard) That's going to disrupt the internet.

I guess they are willing to help test Wireguard https://www.wireguard.com/#work-in-progress

[fuzz]

Sorry if I offended you. That was not my intention.

No offense taken, sometimes phrasing means everything . I don't use Wireguard yet either, as it's not widely available yet. I'm just really interested in it on mobile because of the power efficiency gains over openvpn.

[starshipeleven]

You could order the Librem 5 worldwide, so China fits the definition.

No it does not. "importing" is usually used for companies moving products inside a country so they could sell from inside that country.
As I said, Purism isn't doing it, they sell online and all their sites and press material is in english, the amount of chinese that are actually with us here in the english western Internet is a minuscule minority.

OTOH: maybe the Chinese government doesn't really care about the 5 Chinese persons using a Librem 5?

As with all things chinese, yep, they can't really enforce these things anywhere as well as they would like.

Quite a few chinese use stuff to sidestep censorship, usually shadowsocks project (which was born for this exact reason) or VPNs. This is one of the main reasons OpenWrt receives contributions from chinese people adding chinese devices to the supported hardware list, they want to run shadowsocks on OpenWrt routers they can actually buy locally https://github.com/shadowsocks/openwrt-shadowsocks

Getting through customs shouldn't be a major issue as long as the packaging isn't too obvious about using VPNs, but once that is done it should be ok.

[Auridwynss]

Nowadays we can see a great variety of out-of-the-box VPN services for different devices. Also, there are some kind of universal services like VeePN that you can use on your personal computer or laptop and you can install it to your mobile devices as well. In my opinion, it's better to have one app for all devices and connect them to one personal account. That can be much easier