Phil Zimmerman Launching Secure "Blackphone"

judgecorp writes "Famed cryptography activist Phil Zimmerman is set to launch Blackphone, a privacy-oriented phone which allows secure calls and messages. The phone is a joint venture between Zimmerman's Silent Circle communications provider and Geeksphone, the creator of the first Firefox phone, and will run PrivatOS, a secure version of Android. Zimmerman says the venture will be taking orders for the devices from February 24, after it is unveiled at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona."

Comments

Wow, what a man!

[Anonymous Coward]

First he blows away that obnoxious black kid, now he's going to blow us away with a black phone!

Almost. there.

[leuk_he]

Hardware feature I would like to see:
-LED on when camera is taking pictures/recording.
-LED on when microphone is recording.
-Looking like a normal phone, If it screams PRIVACY phone, one might think ik have somthing to hide.

Software features:
-Restrict apps to a sandbox without telling them that. (feed apps fake data instead)
-Some kind of firewall/virtualiszation between apps i use at home and work and real private part.
-Secure boot. rootkit prevention. Including option by bypass the secure boot for open source mods.

Marketing features i would like to see:
-Real use cases. (like work/home phone virtualisation.)
-privacy is always a tradeoff. being online means giving away some of your data. what trade offs are made?
-Access to some more technical details HOW the pricay part is implemented and what has not been implemented.
-Respected names from the pricacy industy who did have to do something in the design/implementation phase. trust is important.

and ... open source... so useful parts can be reviewed and ported to populars android mods.

Re:Almost. there.

[mrchaotica]

You forgot the most important feature:

The main SoC controls the baseband processor (and can firewall the rest of the system off from it), not the other way around. Or better yet, the baseband is Open Source.