The Freedom Phone is not great at privacy
mjg59.dreamwidth.orgWikipedia has a good summary for anyone unfamiliar; it's a $120 phone whitelabeled and sold for $500.
Love the irony that the "American Conservative" Freedom phone is just a generic phone from a Chinese tech company...
Reminds me of the cooler company Blue Coolers, whose entire business model is that they source from China to compete on price against USA made Yeti coolers. The company almost didn't make it, until they had their big break selling thousands of coolers at a trucker rally. The truckers loved the cheap coolers, even though they are only cheap because they are undercutting USA made coolers with Chinese ones. False consciousness in action! Source for this story via clips of a the reality show "I Quit" in this youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZqt2bPZT1w
This is interesting and thanks for sharing.
I don’t think it’s accurate to describe Yeti coolers as USA made though: https://www.allamericanmade.com/where-are-yeti-coolers-made/
For USA made, I found Cordova, which I recommend especially because they use a denser foam, so you get more storage capacity for the same exterior dimensions: https://shop.cordovaoutdoors.com/48-qt-adventurer/
Oh thanks! Yeah all I know about this situation is what was in that youtube video, but this is good to know.
There is so much money to be made selling stupid people things that align with their biases.
Leverging Stupidity ... welcome to my Ted Talk.
Hmmm, do you know what ... time to jump on that bandwagon!
Doing what, don't be a tease.
You will have to pay for a ticket to go to the conference. /$
Yeah, it's so funny to see that people who believe a domestic manufacturing base is important have been so utterly defeated that there's not a single US-made phone they can buy. Well, except the niche Librem 5, but the leaders of the "conservative" movement are mostly swindlers, so they picked a cheap phone they can mark up more.
They lost what they valued, their leaders are selling them out, everybody laugh.
There's nothing more American than exercising your freedom to be an uninformed consumer and get swindled
"No one ever went bankrupt under-estimating the intelligence of the American public"
Isnt the entire amazon marketplace doing the same? Marking up cheap white label alibaba products by a couple 100%s and selling it to americans?. And then bragging about making millions with "dropshipping"
Anything that includes bloatware is untrustable. No question.
Why even bother? You can't seriously run a project like this, add a load of bloatware, and expect to be trusted.
Even that misjudgment is enough to understand that the people running this have no genuine interest in user privacy. Talk about undercutting your own reason for existing.
I think you might be misattributing their reason for existing.
Hook, line and sinker. Why would anyone take offering seriously?
Because they are targeting people who know nothing and are scared, common tactic for fraudsters, cults, etc.
Of course real solutions exist but the lay person can't easily discern.
Anything referencing blockchain or cryptocurrencies is a scam. That also applies to the original Signal.
As opposed to what?
If referring to Session, nobody refers to it as "the other Signal", lol
The subject of the article is a modified version of Signal called ClearSignal, so most likely that.
Signal's tie-in with cryptocurrency MobileCoin:
https://www.wired.com/story/signal-mobilecoin-cryptocurrency...
I would say that there are scenarios where blockchains are legitimately useful.
Such as?
They are out there, and they aren't necessarily related to crypto [1] [2]
Seriously though, blockchain is an interesting technology. It's a shame it has got such a bad rap because of its ties to cryptocurrency.
I had a skim of both links (sorry but just dumping a list isnt exactly proof), and taking the first example [0], I really dont see what a blockchain brings you over a database. When you have a private blockchain, or a managed blockchain by an entity, you inherently have centralisation. What happens in the automotive case if the blockchain is forked? Which chain do I trust?
Every single use case (I have yet to see a single one, and I am) has been a use case for an append only ledger, not a decentralised ledger, and in every one of those use cases the problems that a blockchain actually solved and the advantages of a blockchain are immaterial. Can you provide one example in the two lists (which you've claimed are good examples) where the properties of a blockchain are wanted, not the properties of an append only ledger? Because if you want an append only ledger, a SQL database (or even a nosql database) is a simpler solution that will perform orders of magnitude better than 500 transactions per second.
None of the "research" and use cases linked need blockchains or are made better by blockchains. These are quite transparent cash grabs while hype is strong.
> None of the "research" and use cases linked need blockchains or are made better by blockchains.
You can read at a speed I could only wish. Kudos.
And of course they don't "need" them. We don't necessarily "need" the cloud, Docker, or web frameworks either, yet here we are. Yes, there could be a new, completely open, distributed database that let multiple users monitor and inspect all historical changes, while allowing some others to make modifications in it.
We could just use Cassandra and build the whole distributed identity and storage infrastructure based on it.
> You can read at a speed I could only wish. Kudos.
I read the sensational headlines. They are as boring and as old as ever: it's the same "use-cases" over and over again, none of them require blockchains, and in none of them blockchain provided anything of value.
> Yes, there could be a new, completely open, distributed database that let multiple users monitor and inspect all historical changes, while allowing some others to make modifications in it.
You have just described a regular database with an open dataset.
> We could just use Cassandra and build the whole distributed identity and storage infrastructure based on it.
Yes. Yes, we could. And that's what all of those "researches" and "use cases" will inevitably end up doing: scraping "blockchain" and replacing it with MySQL, Postgres, BigQuery, Cassandra, MongoDB, sqlite etc.
> Yes. Yes, we could. And that's what all of those "researches" and "use cases" will inevitably end up doing: scraping "blockchain" and replacing it with MySQL, Postgres, BigQuery, Cassandra, MongoDB, sqlite etc.
I must admit that this right here was bait, because one of the storage backends used in enterprise blockchains is indeed Cassandra.
That’s part of the issue here. Blockchain technology is just something built on top of pre-existing tools, like Docker or Spring. My point is that if we were to scrap abstractions just because they could be done at a lower level already, why stop at blockchains?
An abstraction has to offer value or solve a problem over the technology it's abstracting. Docker solves a myriad of problems that VMs and LXC have, and k8s solves a pile of problems that docker has. Blockchain's primary advantages are features that _every_ use case I've read does not want, and enterprise blockchains (from what I've seen at least) avoids those use cases by removing the features that differentiate blockchains from a normal DB.
> I must admit that this right here was bait, because one of the storage backends used in enterprise blockchains is indeed Cassandra.
That's really interesting. So is one party responsible for hosting maintaining and running that cassandra data store?
> Blockchain technology is just something built on top of pre-existing tools, like Docker or Spring. My point is that if we were to scrap abstractions just because they could be done at a lower level already, why stop at blockchains
This sentence reads like it was written by GPT-3. It makes sense on the surface level, but makes no sense when you try and understand it.
Apparently the creator was 22 at the time. I wonder if he ever kept the phones in a warehouse, or just used dropshipping.
Really not a bad business idea on his part, just highly unethical. I'd imagine you could just send the factory a custom ROM for the device, provide them with custom branding, and have them ship to the buyer's doorstep at a $380 markup. No warehouse or investment necessary, just a store website and a bunch of marketing $$$
For anyone moderately competent with Android / who uses a custom ROM, the Freedom Phone looks like an absolute joke after 5 minutes. If you look at videos of it from social media influencers, you can clearly see how it's basically a LineageOS clone with apps like "Freedom Store" (Aurora Store) included. It's not at all good for privacy.
(I'm sure if I went back to look at reviews of the Freedom Phone, I could point out another 10 open-source projects they blatantly copied and slapped their own name onto.)
On the point of social media influencers, I remember how one commentator asked if it was running iOS. This goes to show how much forethought and research went into the influencers' demos of this phone. IMO it casts a bad light over all of them (not that I saw them in a good light anyway).
That being said, it is quite curious how many people believed the marketing and bought the phone. It has to be said that not nearly enough overall research was done, and a lot of people suffered the consequences of that (and still don't realise to this day).
Pretty much all privacy advocates, right and left, meet in the middle with the cryptography mathematicians who broadly speaking are apolitical about maths, if nothing else.
Their common points being do not roll your own and publish and check everything in your protocol model and codebase
The eternal vigilance of checking your security model. It's a cost.
There's a Darknet Diaries episode that points out how a lot of 'privacy' phones turn out to be honeypots
> Remote Frequency Health Tuning through Quantum Entanglement
What is that supposed to be?
A little sci-fi sprinkle on an old scam. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_medicine
Probably some "holographic bracelet" stuff.
In other words: BS.
>"holographic bracelet"
Oo! Is it radioactive? : <https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=news: 'radioactive hologr...>
Reads a bit like the ANOM phone honeynet playbook being reused but on some oddly specific domestic extremists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANOM
Upstream Signal was already questionable with mandatory telco identifier and social graph disclosure, yet this manages to make it even worse.
>It's ok, though, each upload has some sort of nominally unique identifier associated with it, so it's not trivial to just download other people's backups.
This part confuses me. If it matters who ends up with your backups that implies that the backups are not protected. Then wouldn't you be more concerned about access to your backups by the Freedom Phone people?
I find it amusing their options actually repeat themselves. So I am assuming this was mocked up in photoshop and not even double checked.
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0588/5385/1291/files/say-h...
And this just feels weird. https://www.clear.co.com/leadership-team
70% restocking fee too.
Rererences 3G radios, but do any providers even support that anymore? No 5G mentioned. Of course. :p
It sounds like the SKU is really old then, if it doesn't even support 4G.
And Nunes in charge of building another Twitter. Another in a long line of sad jokes in the same vein as the "Freedom Phone".
I found more info on the frequency thing: https://www.clearhealth.coach/clearscan-remote.html
After scrolling, and scrolling, and scrolling some more ("is this literally peddling clairvoyance?") I finally encounter a... DNA test kit at the bottom of the page. Oh. So this is either the internet equivalent of overnight infomercial TV (oversell oversell oversell) or they actually are doing Weird Stuff to the DNA that gets sent in.
Going further and checking out https://www.clearhealth.coach/ClearTUNE.html, the latter does seem to be the case: they've apparently come up with the idea that DNA is "quantum-entangled" and that when you send your DNA swab off to their lab, exposing that DNA swab to frequency (how?) transmits supposed benefits back to you via a "quantum link".
Congratulations, you giant acorns, you've just provided all the raw material to enable some unfortunate numpty with us-vs-them syndrome to come along and "discover" the conspiracy of But What Are All The Other Testing Companies Doing To DNA They Might Be Transmitting Harmful Frequencies Making People Stupid???
Please stay a niche. Please stay a niche. Oh, good, it's $500, hopefully that prevents it from scaling.
*Headdesk*
The unhinged/unbounded nature of the way this has been presented sadly only serves to weaponize the impact of any reactive conspiracy theories: the claims this makes about purported benefits (there's a list just above the price section, which includes such humdingers as "EMF protection", "essential nutrition", "GMO detox", and "injury regeneration", along quite a few more) are entirely vacuous and without substance (understandable and par the course) - but if you flip this sort of non-closed-ended mindset around in a what-if setting, no amount of substantiation and concrete data will fill the sort of false information vacuum (for want of a better way to put it) that gets created.
(On a side note, it's curious how everything in the aforementioned list fits reasonably comfortably into "can be influenced by the placebo effect". The bit about "Covid Care" neatly sidesteps claiming significant effect too. Really gives me the impression this was definitely sniff-tested by a lawyer or two - whoops, there go several bits of plausible deniability out the window...)
Poking around the little web of shell^Winterconnected organizations this setup has cobbled together, I noticed:
- MLM identified at https://www.clearcellular.org/ - down the bottom, "reward yourself": "...a robust rewards program for those who refer their friends and family."
- The little "made in china" stock image at the bottom of https://clearfoundation.co.nz/ is cute
- They really do appear to have registered co.com to get clear.co.com, but despite co.com having an A record the IP times out, nice
- After drowning in the word "decentralized" everywhere on all the cryptocurrency fluff, https://clearfoundation.co.nz/webwallet obtusely notes front-and-center that "This password encrypts your private key. This does not act as a seed to generate your keys." ...k
- While poking around https://www.clear.co.com/clearcenter I was curious about the VM offeri--oh it was shut down. Why is it the 2nd callout?
- Clicking around between different websites I cannot straightforwardly figure out what any of them do. Yes there are PDFs and value propositions and case studies and interconnections but there's so much information it's overwhelming and I cannot see straight. Oh. That's the strategy. Wait where did all my money go??? ...What business overheads? Consulting? Consulting for what? What have I actually gotten out of this?
I was wondering if HPE even realized what they were associating with. I now wouldn't be surprised if they don't realize themselves.
> - They really do appear to have registered co.com to get clear.co.com, but despite co.com having an A record the IP times out, nice
They didn't register co.com; someone else did and is running it as a "domain registry". That's a whole scam of its own, if you ask me. https://registry.co.com/
> - While poking around https://www.clear.co.com/clearcenter I was curious about the VM offeri--oh it was shut down. Why is it the 2nd callout?
It only gets weirder the more you look. ClearGlass (next icon over) is some pretty wild cloud technobabble (it's described simultaneously as a "secure and scalable hybrid Blockchain platform" and a "single dashboard to manage multi-cloud infrastructure"), and the ClearShare website (which looks like a rebranded FileCoin, or something similar) links to a PDF describing a battery-powered generator called "ClearPOWER".
A lot of the web sites look like they were made from templates. Some of them even still have Lorem Ipsum text on them.
Jolla's Linux-based Sailfish (descendant of Nokia Maemo) runs on Sony Xperia 10 II (2020 device), https://jolla.com/sailfishx-5/
The hardware is quite underwhelming though. Sony as always deliberately crippling their mid-level phone to protect sale of their flagships...
Is this true, though? Their mid range phones are usually $400-$500 cheaper than their mainstream flagships.
> We have a company that seems to be combining blockchain and MLM
It's not a stretch to say that the whole Blockchain industry IS MLM.
But that headphone jack.
None of your BlueTruth goes into my ears.
Brilliant!
Somehow with multiple comments about how embarrassing the phones association with republican organizations is, no one seems to be talking about how they backup your messaging data in a possibly insecure way and exposing peoples email address if you have an associated phone number.
Surely I can't be the only one who finds it incredibly frustrating to see how many people think being republican associated is noteworthy when in the context of scary privacy violations. It would seem to me you're just encouraging republicans to buy this phone. Surely, the privacy conscious people in this community want privacy for everyone regardless of political affiliations, right?
>Surely I can't be the only one who finds it incredibly frustrating to see how many people think being republican associated is noteworthy when in the context of scary privacy violations.
I think the point of the conversation is that this is a bad privacy product that is being heavily marketed towards (technically) unsophisticated people who subscribe to a specific brand of politics. Those two facts aren't unrelated. In other words: conservatives are the intended victim here, not the butt of anyone's joke.
> marketed towards (technically) unsophisticated people
it's being marketed towards gullible people, period.
as a conservative programmer, I saw the ad and laughed.
it was called out by people in conservative online communities as well.
Yeah there are lots of bitter people in these comments making sweeping generalizations.
I haven’t seen any comments encouraging anyone to buy this phone.
If you take making fun of the phone and the people dumb/gullible enough to buy the phone, “encouraging republicans to buy this phone,” well, I don’t know what to tell you. If someone is so full of spite for the evil leftists that they’ll run to anything some of those users make fun of, that’s on them.
But no one thus far has encouraged anyone to buy this piece of shit product.
Here? I don't think you're going to see any.
And I think there's a legitimate use-case for people who feel that their favorite social networks are censored. Doesn't matter if the apps are full of garbage, that is what they want.
I don't think this phone can unban abusive former Twitter users for the user, so it still won't support that use case (in addition to being not great at privacy)
> * Somehow with multiple comments about how embarrassing the phones association with republican organizations is, no one seems to be talking about how they backup your messaging data in a possibly insecure way and exposing peoples email address if you have an associated phone number.*
> Surely I can't be the only one who finds it incredibly frustrating to see how many people think being republican associated is noteworthy when in the context of scary privacy violations. It would seem to me you're just encouraging republicans to buy this phone. Surely, the privacy conscious people in this community want privacy for everyone regardless of political affiliations, right?
It's frustrating when people unnecessarily politicize things— like when they express righteous indignation over their inaccurate accusation of political discrimination in a thread that's literally just pointing out its association with divisive partisan political groups.
> think being republican associated is noteworthy
I think a phone associated with a specific political party is noteworthy.
> It would seem to me you're just encouraging republicans to buy this phone.
I don't see anyone in this thread doing this.
The problem here is that "Freedom" in "FreedomPhone" does not seem to be "freedom" the way free software advocates define it, or privacy advocates define it; it seems to be "freedom" the way far-right activists use it as a dogwhistle. If people are a bit focused on the company's politics, it's because they put those politics front and center.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that if there was some company doing the inverse of this -- marketing to the segment of the far left that believes tech companies are, if not explicitly conservative, explicitly uber-capitalist and willing to pander to conservatives at every turn to prove how "centrist" they are[1] -- and was doing the same thing that the FreedomPhone is, then the discussion on HN would be pretty similar: we'd be going, "Hey, this looks like it's basically a rebranded phone with dubious software that's being marketed to people with a political chip on their shoulder." The flavor of the chip isn't irrelevant, but it's not what's specifically curious and scammy about it.[2]
[1]: I am sure there are conservatives who are reading this and scoffing at the idea that leftists think social media companies are biased against them. All I can say is that I probably follow more leftists than you do, then, and you're gonna have to trust me on this one.
[2]: There is an interesting and weird history of marketing scams that specifically target conservatives, and evidence that there's more of that on the right than the left (although by no means is it exclusively right-leaning).
Re: [1] I was wondering what a phone targeting left-leaning people would look like, but I think that's pretty much just Twitter, Tumblr etc? You seem to disagree on this point, so I'd be curious to hear more.
Probably a Fairphone since it values sustainability and worker rights in their supply chain even if the value for buck of their devices is lower than the main corporate brands like Apple/Alphabet/Samsung. (Plus support for unlocking the bootloader, flashing a custom ROM and relocking the bootloader which means it recently got CalyxOS support)
A left-targeting phone would be something like purism's offerings [0] or pine [1], would it not? Though, those aren't exactly rebranded junk as a scam, so they might not count for the purpose of this discussion.
Bingo.
I think an Antifa/socialist/anti-capitalist phone would look very different from Twitter or Tumblr. It would in some ways, maybe look similar to a very pro-privacy/anti-Big Tech phone the way the FSF and some other groups see things (which isn’t to say that everyone who follows the FSF is a leftist or that everyone who identifies as more left of whatever center you want to choose supports the FSF, because that obviously isn’t true), against anything with a proprietary or closed bent.
Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, etc., for better or worse really don’t represent a left or right ideology. They represent the mainstream. Now, you or I may find that mainstream too conservative or too progressive, but I do not believe that any of those platforms are ideologically driven one way or another (even Tumblr, where the userbase is historically younger and thus more leftist, banned porn (a distinctly anti-leftist move) and has historically had a much more laissez faire attitude towards banning users than many left-leaning people would like…). It’s important not to confuse the userbase that is most visible on a platform for the platform itself).
The Freedom Phone isn’t targeting run of the mill conservatives. Those users are just fine using their iPhone or Samsung. It’s targeting people who are zealots and convinced the world is against them. It’s targeting Q Anon believers (tho not exclusively) and people who think Fox News is too left of center. That’s why it’s a grift. It is targeting people who would rather adopt something that is a scam, just because it agrees with their idea that the system is rigged and everyone is against them.
As chipotle_coyote says, there are, for whatever reason, less scams aimed at leftists. I don’t think it’s b/c the group on the right is any less intelligent, but because the nature of this sort of culture tends to be that the left eats its own, so selling a specific grift to them is a lot harder.
I don't honestly know how you'd make a phone targeting left-leaning folks, but I wouldn't have actually thought how to make one targeting right-leaning folks, either, because to me both of those use cases are covered by, well, phones. :) If I was trying to follow the scam playbook, I guess I'd probably install Mastodon, Signal (or its weird broken fork that started this conversation, I dunno), and maybe a few leftist news apps, but even that's actually a bit tough -- there's multiple surveys over the last few years suggesting that conservatives get news from markedly fewer news sources than liberals do. As much as MSNBC may desperately wish otherwise, there is no liberal equivalent to Fox in terms of audience loyalty. (Although, the FreedomPhone specifically calls out NewsMax and OANN, which suggests they're going for people who think Fox may be a little too liberal!)
As for whether Twitter, Tumblr and friends are canted to the left, here's why I'm doubtful of that. (Also doubtful of the inverse, to be clear.) It's fairly trivial to create a Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, etc., follow list which is curated to your favored sociopolitical bubbles -- that's basically going to happen if you use the sites as designed. The more you interact with those bubbles (e.g., what you like and what you retweet/reblog), the more focused they become.
Okay, so, that's all probably pretty obvious, but here's the thing. Once you're in your favorite bubbles, the problems you see on, say, Twitter are going to be the problems that bubble experiences. If most of the people you follow are deeply invested, either directly or indirectly, with far right activism, you're going to see and hear about far right activists that Twitter has flagged or suspended or banned. If most of the people you follow are deeply invested, either directly or indirectly, with LGBTQ activism, you're going to see and hear about LGBTQ activists that Twitter has flagged or suspended or banned. But those two streams are very, very rarely going to cross. And that makes it very easy to think it's your particular in-group that's bearing the brunt of Twitter's evil machinations.
The corporation that makes/develops the phone would be a co-op with equal ownership/profit sharing between all workers.
No capitalist would steal the surplus labor value of the workers involved in making the phone.
It would be hard to get the entire supply chain to fit this model without first creating an organization like Mondragon. [1]
Look, I’m resigned to the fact that most of the leadership and investors in most of the companies I support are voting red. It’s in their self-interest, and the majority of them are highly ranking members of the church of self-interest; acolytes of the reverend Milton Friedman. Many of the open source projects I love most for their utility and verve are built by libertarians who aren’t very amenable to paying for social safeguards. Needless to say, my political and economic views skew elsewhere. Regardless of that, I’m going to support their services and projects on their own merits, and according to my needs and those that I perceive in others.
This is different. The Freedom Phone is another cash grab against some of the most vulnerable people in my country. Their susceptibility to manipulation has been laid bare and the wolves of the world have picked them over again and again. This is targeting marketing it is most cynical conclusions. The formula is well known: Push a high margin product and service to an addressable group. Speak to their fears and with their in-group language. Tell them exactly what they want to hear and make them scared to death to do anything but buy it. It matters not what substance is behind the product. In fact, in schemes like these, actually delivering real value is antithetical to the point: to become rich, by way of filth.
I’m not politically aligned with the group that is being targeted for The Freedom Phone. In fact, they as a group have repeatedly gone out of their way to hurt people that I care about. That said, they are people just like me and don’t deserve to be defrauded. This post did an excellent job of demonstrating how they are being lied to and that makes me mad as hell.
Based on the way they treat security and compliance from what we can see on the front end, I shudder to think what it is like on the backend. Unencrypted PII+payment methods, sloppy secrets, resale and abuse of customer data are all on the table, possibly more. The thing about these kinds of schemes is that they are almost never sustainable. Technical, social, legal, and/or financial debt will eventually cause their implosion. It’s just a matter of how many people they screw over in the process.
I’m going to spend part of my Easter Sunday sending this blog post and my thoughts to the FTC and some attorneys general. I would encourage you to do the same if you’re able and so inclined. Getting this in front of media is also valuable. Exploitation of this variety is cancerous and fully deserves to called out early and often.
Quick follow up:
When I was putting together my report I found some wild stuff. I had to share this gem from their terms:
>The relationship between Federal and State Agencies, the privacy of records, and non-participation in [medical insurance]: In addition, I understand that, since the Association is protected by the 1st, 7th, 9th, and 14th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, it is outside the [jurisdiction and authority of Federal and State Agencies and Authorities] concerning any and all complaints or grievances against the Association, and Trustee(s), members or other staff persons. All rights of complaints or grievances shall only be settled by an internal Association Committee. Therefore, for the benefit of the association and its members, I agree not to seek any remedy for relief in the [Public Domain]. I agree that my violation of any part of this membership contract would result in a [no contest legal proceeding] against me. The privacy and security of membership records maintained within the Association, which have been held to be inviolate by the U.S. Supreme Court, the undersigned member waives [HIPAA, ADA, FDA, FTC privacy rights and complaint process].
https://www.clear.software/pages/clear-companies-private-mem...
Well said.
I don't really have much to add other than saying thanks for being a good person.
Indeed. When I clicked on the thread I expected more serious technical analysis of the bad security. I could get "lol stupid suckers with victim mentality" pretty much everywhere else on the internet. Fortunately at least some of the more egregious comments have since been edited.
When a bunch of the comments are about how stupid the target demographic is, when there's tons of interesting technical meat to talk about, it's kind of embarrassing.
> when there's tons of interesting technical meat to talk about
There is nothing technically interesting to talk about - its litterally big tech tech with an eagle, fighter jet and amaerican flag skinned on it.
> Somehow with multiple comments about how embarrassing the phones association with republican organizations is
As of this writing, no comments exist that match that description. One comment mentions that it's a phone marketed at conservatives, but does not describe that association as embarassing.
Front running victimization.
This certainly isn't the first example of a sketchy/deceptive product targeted at a conservative audience, and it won't be the last...
Grifters have found an easy target in leveraging outrage & persecution fetish, and for all their bluster - their privacy & security practices are typically laughable at best.
As an observation I would note that all marketing I have come across for this device has aimed at people concerned about privacy.
I am concerned when privacy and freedom have somehow turned into a right wing signal.
"freedom" has long been associated with the right in the US. Concern about large companies asserting their outsize influence being associated with the right is a new development, as is the right's focus on privacy and security.
Not too long. The left used to care about freedom until they owned the academia, the entertainment and most of the major press, and then they decided the freedom is no longer required. It happened not so long ago. Then the woke movement rose where expressing thoughts diverging from the dogma is equated to violence, and this of course doesn't need any freedom.
Freedom Phone comes with Newsmax and OANN apps pre-installed. This takes red flags to a whole new level.
The website states
"Pre-Loaded Apps Some of the most popular banned & unbanned conservative sites & apps. Come pre-loaded directly on your Freedom phone."
It's basically "Conservative Phone"
"con phone" for short
The guy in the Freedom Phone video seriously compared Donald Trump to MLK and Abraham Lincoln. lol?
He also says "we don't ban apps, period", and the website even calls it "truly uncensorable" – I wonder how that works, but there's no technical details. I also wonder how they'll deal with spam, scams, malware, and other stuff of, ehm, questionable value that will inevitably pop up.
I couldn't find much of this "truly uncensorable" app store on the Freedom Phone website, other than the name "ClearAPPS", so I assume it belongs to ClearOS. The ClearOS website is anything but clear though; even the corporate maze sites of HP, IBM, Lenovo, etc. are more clear than that ... thing. I eventually found https://www.clearos.app, and I assume that must be it(?) I installed it on Android Emulator, and it's installed as "ClearAPPS", so I guess so.
The thing bills itself as "The Marketplace Built On the security of Decentralized Storage", whatever that may mean. If I press "News" on the app's homepage there are exactly four apps: "Fox News", "Fox Nation: Celebrate America", "America's Voice", and "Just The News". Actually, that's not true: if I select an app and go back I have 8 apps: the app list gets duplicated. If I select "Categories" and go to "News" I see much more. As will surprise probably no one, the entire thing is a buggy piece of crap.
When you first start their app it downloads the repository list from their servers; this must be the "truly uncensorable decentralized storage" they're talking about shrug. I couldn't find any clear Terms of Service for this entire thing in either the app or on the website.
Source isn't available either as near as I can find; ClearOS has a GitHub, but last update is from 2019.
[1]: https://www.clear.software/pages/marketplace-terms-of-servic...
That marketing video on the homepage is... not particularly convincing, and watching it gives me secondhand embarrassment.
You mean you weren't convinced by the argument that if MLK or Lincoln didn't have access to Facebook the world would have been a different place?
Or was it the credentials of "I bought $12 of Bitcoin when I was young and it increased in value" that didn't sell you?
It seems like a slam dunk from over here, so I'm confused as to what you didn't find convincing....
Wow. With "secondhand embarrassment" you have deftly labeled a feeling I have had so many times in my life but have never been able to succinctly name.
That term even has its own Wikipedia page:
It’s a pretty popular German word as well: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fremdsch%C3%A4men
It's also called 'cringe' in gen Z speak
Does that video... actually have the "Activate Windows" watermark in the thumbnail?
How did they even manage to put that watermark there in the first place?
Did they just take a screenshot from an unactivated Windows machine?
This whole project is a joke.
...It does!
I honestly don't know what to do with this information. Is this an intentional message? It's extremely overt.
I wonder if it's similar to how some phising emails will contain intentional grammar and spelling errors. I've been told that this works as a filter, since savvy people will be put off by such things leaving only the easy targets.
Ha ha, the "PatriApp" store.
Is this guy a Libertechian?
Wow. Is this a parody phone or something from The Onion?
Reality has become indistinguishable from the onion since somebody actually built and shipped a five blade razor
Reality overcame the Onion when somebody actually built and shipped a seven blade razor. I wish I were making this up.
They went full circle and now Gillette is selling a premium razor for sensitive skin… with two blades. No kidding: https://gillette.com/en-us/products/razors-trimmers-and-blad...
I think this also happened years ago in a whole different context when some marketing genius invented the "shampoo without balm".
Jillette, the best the Gullible Man can Get! - Now with over 24 rotating nano-blabes!
“They’re not sending their best.”
Since you can't trust any company, and you're not going to build your own device from first principles, best to avoid mobile devices alltogether. Get an old pre-owned Nokia for phone calls and use laptop-based messaging if you need it.
I wrote a messaging app based on one-time pad encryption but ended up not using it due to poor-quality random numbers available to me (you can buy external random devices but I don't trust any vendor).
Always remember Leidner's First Law: "Security is an illusion."
We live in 2022. Eschewing modern inventions and "returning to the wilderness" is a rhetorical cop out.
The problem has nothing to do with taking a "since you can't trust any company" approach is you avoid the reality of the situation -- which is that certain companies index lower than others.
The company making this phone seems a little dubious.