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The Rise of the Linux-Based Cellphone
mrscotty99 writes with a link to a Linux.com article about the rising star that is the Linux-based cellphone. Author Murry Shohat argues that the transformation of the cell into a mini-PC this summer is a landmark opportunity for Linux. Apple's offering and Motorola's US launch of the RAZR2 V8 (a linux-based device) may be heralds of great things to come for a new OS frontier: "In the cell phone market, consumers will pay for content, and corporations need to deliver secure content to applications in the palm of employees' hands. These trends suggest products that are simultaneously more functional and less expensive than a Treo or BlackBerry and more secure than an iPhone. MontaVista Software claims to have deployed Mobilinux on more than 35 million mobile devices worldwide. CEO Tom Kelley says, 'Linux is growing rapidly on mobile devices because of its solid reliability, its great flexibility, and because it accelerates the development cycle.' Vendors using or contemplating the use of Linux for mobile devices unanimously point to the operating system's footprint, memory usage, and fast growing ecosystem of developers producing software for graphics, multimedia, connectivity, and security." Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by SourceForge.
http://openmoko.com/
- Touchscreen
- WLAN
- completely open
- A-GPS
Motorola is no the only manufacturer offering mobile phones with Linux operating system. Here is an overview of mobile phones with Linux pre-installed. The entries marked with an asterisk *) show around twenty manufacturers which offer Linux on mobile cellular phones.
Now imagine this:
1. use VoIP from the cellphone (duh!)
2. GPG-encrypt the data stream, without relying on AT&T's proprietary "encryption" which goes directly to whichever government asks for it
3. use the existing GPG web of trust for keys; generate a new key for the phone and sign it with your main key so if the phone is stolen you lose only the phone's secret key
The above makes you imprevious to plain main-in-the-middle snooping. What is left is information whom you talk to.
4. get an account at a company/group of volunteers who provide a number of servers; the more such independent group of this kind the better
5. have the phone connect only to the nearest server of your group; this is all the phone company can find out about you
6. once there, the server will peel the outer onion layer, connecting to the next hop
7. these servers will be usually already connected as conversations can be aggregated into a single connection; if not, random data can be sent through idle links to thwart traffic analysis
8. unless you're paranoid, the next hop will be your interlocutor's privacy company/group. 2 hops should be enough for most cases, but if you value privacy more than latency, toss in full onion routing.
While Tor is WAAAY too slow to allow for usable VoIP, having a network of servers connected with opaque noise-filled pipes should give you decent enough privacy with just two geographically close hops.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
You might find useful information (concerning the first OpenMoko compatible phone) on this page : http://wiki.openmoko.org/index.php?title=Neo1973
The end user version is the one named "Phase 2" (GTA02, "Mass Market").
Allong with hardware specs, you'll find there an estimated timeline :
* Sep 20 - GTA02v3 design finalised.
* Oct 20 - GTA02v3 design produced, and shipped to qualified developers.
* Nov 20 - GTA02v3 design verified through testing by developers.
* Dec 10 - GTA02v3 produced in moderate volume
* Dec 20 - GTA02v3 goes on sale
* Dec 25 - GTA02v3 arrives