Librem 5 Smartphone Hits Its $1.5 Million Dollar Goal

[Uqbar]

From https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/

Quick facts

• CPU separate from Baseband
• Hardware Kill Switches for Camera, Microphone, WiFi/Bluetooth, and Baseband

The same way that you don't trust your cable/ADSL modem and the rest of the internet.

Exactly!

I already have plenty of choices for limited privacy solutions. Even if i run LineageOS, the mandatory blobs make its security and privacy levels just a dream.

My ISP, my mobile phone manufacturer and my ROM builder don't advertise their work as "Security and Privacy Focused".
They do. From the same "Quick facts":

• Security focused by design
• Privacy protection by default

A separate CPU for base-band (and wifi, microphones, bluetooth, GPS, fingerprint sensors and the likes) isn't a guarantee for privacy.
It's an attempt to.
Hardware kill switches are not a better solution, in my opinion, than allowing the user to pull the battery off the device.
You can protect your privacy by turning off the device.
That device security focus is rather blurred to me.
But it's a win: they have gone past USD 1.5M!

[johanb]

I'll believe it when I see it. No earlier.

Librem started with that laptop. Oh yeah, it will be, uh, eh, something with freedom and stuff like coreboot, m'kay? We will be using intel / nvidia.
WTF?! They must have lived under a rock the past 10 years.
Later they moved away from that silly nvidia idea.
The Coreboot developers wrote in their blog how interesting it would be that these people never even contacted the Coreboot project and that intel is rather coreboot hostile.
Finally they released their laptop. There was nothing about freedom. You could have bought the same thing cheaper at any Acer's, Dell's, HP's or whatnot.
To make shame complete later a Coreboot dev ported Coreboot to that machine, because obviously they couldn't.

Now they want to makle a free phone? It would be nice if it became reality, but with their track record... I don't believe in it. Have they ever talke to people from that very business before (e.g. Harald "laforge" Welte?). I doubt it.
Besides, there hardly is any freedom in the ARM world, esp. when it comes to GPUs, and it will be even more horrible when it comes to mobile communication.

I totally agree, I still don't quite trust Purism, but since they got support from Gnome and KDE I am sure that the software will be fine which is the most important part. I wouldn't be surprised if the resulting phone was slightly unstable and the hardware drivers did not become as good as promised at release, but from their track record and with the support from Gnome and KDE I actually believe that they will be rather successful with time, even though it might take them a year more and possibly another hardware revision. That's why I'm giving them my support.

[ssam]

Except aren't the drivers for i.MX6 all closed-source?

No, they have specifically chosen i.MX6 because it has open drivers and GPU acceleration (Vivante supported by the Etnaviv driver). Etnaviv does not yet support i.MX8, but if that support can happen in time, then librem5 can use i.MX8.

[ssam]

I'll believe it when I see it. No earlier.

Librem started with that laptop. Oh yeah, it will be, uh, eh, something with freedom and stuff like coreboot, m'kay? We will be using intel / nvidia.
WTF?! They must have lived under a rock the past 10 years.
Later they moved away from that silly nvidia idea.
The Coreboot developers wrote in their blog how interesting it would be that these people never even contacted the Coreboot project and that intel is rather coreboot hostile.
Finally they released their laptop. There was nothing about freedom. You could have bought the same thing cheaper at any Acer's, Dell's, HP's or whatnot.
To make shame complete later a Coreboot dev ported Coreboot to that machine, because obviously they couldn't.

Now they want to makle a free phone? It would be nice if it became reality, but with their track record... I don't believe in it. Have they ever talke to people from that very business before (e.g. Harald "laforge" Welte?). I doubt it.
Besides, there hardly is any freedom in the ARM world, esp. when it comes to GPUs, and it will be even more horrible when it comes to mobile communication.

It took them a while to get on track, but now they employ Coreboot developers. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...tream-Coreboot
And have a very detailed technical blog https://puri.sm/posts/author/_kakaroto/ .

The i.MX6 chipset they have chosen has open drivers in the kernel and mesa.

[caligula]

It took them a while to get on track, but now they employ Coreboot developers. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...tream-Coreboot
And have a very detailed technical blog https://puri.sm/posts/author/_kakaroto/ .

The i.MX6 chipset they have chosen has open drivers in the kernel and mesa.

Still RPi 3 would be quad-core ARM64 compared to i.MX6 which is usually single or dual core @ 1.2 GHz. RPi also has free Eric Anholt graphics. They also have a free bootloader..

[ssam]

Still RPi 3 would be quad-core ARM64 compared to i.MX6 which is usually single or dual core @ 1.2 GHz. RPi also has free Eric Anholt graphics. They also have a free bootloader..

The free boot loader for rasberrypi is not yet enough to do anything useful, and has had not work in months.

"Support for USB, DMA, and Ethernet are in the works, which will be sufficient for certain headless systems. Still, many other peripherals require bringup, such as video. Additionally, drivers for power management need to written." -- https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware

[slalomsk8er]

Exactly!


My ISP, my mobile phone manufacturer and my ROM builder don't advertise their work as "Security and Privacy Focused".
They do. From the same "Quick facts":

• Security focused by design
• Privacy protection by default

A separate CPU for base-band (and wifi, microphones, bluetooth, GPS, fingerprint sensors and the likes) isn't a guarantee for privacy.
It's an attempt to.
Hardware kill switches are not a better solution, in my opinion, than allowing the user to pull the battery off the device.
You can protect your privacy by turning off the device.
That device security focus is rather blurred to me.
But it's a win: they have gone past USD 1.5M!

Your ISP's Modem doesn't have full privileged access to the registers and RAM of your PC like I think the baseband has on most mobile phones.
This is what they want to fix with there design even if they can't source a baseband that can be trusted.

It is definitely better to have a kill switch for a cam and/or mic then to unplug the battery as I still can watch a video with the kill switch and be reasonably sure to not be recorded.
The later method certainly disables the cam and/or mic for the attacker but also the whole phone for me.

[nomadewolf]

I would love to say this was unexpected, but it really was not. Growth was steady, and now that it's past the goal it's only going to spike.
They can probably reach 2 millions if not more.

While i am happy that it reached it's goal, i was surprised by the news.
I hope they manage to ship the phone and that the project picks even more traction and attention.

[nomadewolf]

Exactly!


My ISP, my mobile phone manufacturer and my ROM builder don't advertise their work as "Security and Privacy Focused".
They do. From the same "Quick facts":

• Security focused by design
• Privacy protection by default

A separate CPU for base-band (and wifi, microphones, bluetooth, GPS, fingerprint sensors and the likes) isn't a guarantee for privacy.
It's an attempt to.
Hardware kill switches are not a better solution, in my opinion, than allowing the user to pull the battery off the device.
You can protect your privacy by turning off the device.
That device security focus is rather blurred to me.
But it's a win: they have gone past USD 1.5M!

If you think you can protect your privacy by turning off your phone, you are wrong...

[kingu]

You aren't right, but you are not wrong. Depends whether you turn it on again at all.