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You Can Help Purism Build the Secure Open Source Linux-based Librem 5 Smartphone (betanews.com)
BrianFagioli writes: Thankfully, consumers are starting to wake up and become more aware of security and privacy, and some companies, such as Purism, are designing products to safeguard users. The company's laptops, for instance, run an open source Linux-based operating system, called "PureOS" with a focus on privacy. These machines even have hardware "kill switches" so you can physically disconnect a webcam or Wi-Fi card. Today, Purism announces that it is taking those same design philosophies and using them to build a new $599 smartphone called Librem 5. The planned phone will use the GNOME desktop environment and PureOS by default, but users can install different distros too. Sound good? Well you can help the company build it through crowdfunding. "Purism, the social purpose corporation which designs and produces popular privacy conscious hardware and software, has revealed its plans to build the world's first encrypted, open platform smartphone that will empower users to protect their digital identity in an increasingly unsafe mobile world. After 18 months of R&D to test hardware specifications and engage with one of the largest phone fabricators, Purism is opening a self-hosted crowdfunding campaign to gauge demand for the initial fabrication order and add the features most important to users," says Purism.
I like this idea enough I may well go ahead and support it. I have been saying for a long time that Gnome 3 would be great on a tablet\phone. The interface is just about perfect for it. Past that, Google has spent the last few years falling out of my good graces. An iPhone is not an option. That said, this would probably be such a niche device as to fail. But I'm still going to back the project.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
>> On the surface, this offering sounds compelling. But X is a total deal breaker for me. I refuse to use any (thing I value) that uses X (as a default option).
Your day job wouldn't happen to be "Republican Member of Congress", would it?
Don't bother. This has been tried before, and failed. Over and over. It's one thing to get linux running on it after a fashion, quite another to get the telecommunications parts working. And no, being able to connect only via usb is not a viable alternative.
As the article points out, these are just artist's renderings. Also, they claim to have an arrangement with a manufacturer, but since they won't say who, my guess is it's just an informal "okay, if you can actually get it working, we'll talk." Certainly not a formal commitment to manufacture anything at this point, since it's only vaporware..
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Considering that building a smartphone involves negotiating over 100,000 patents, ain't gonna happen.
None of the Purism hardware has been.
It's all a bunch of cheap gimmicks that don't live up to the hype.
I mean for fuck's sake, they used an Intel chip with ME in their Purism laptop.
AND it took them what, two or three years to get Coreboot on it to replace the AMI Bios it came with stock because, as it turned out after pitching otherwise, it couldn't run libreboot on it because Intel ME, as had been known for a few years by that time, wasn't libre, and any device requiring it would never be supported by Libreboot, short of Intel providing a signing key for 3rd parties to develop their own Intel ME firmware images.
The fact that slashdot still posts these slashvertisements for Purism products is personally offensive to me, especially without documenting these facts in the editorial.