Punkt MC02: As private, and pricey, as a Swiss bank account Punkt adds a fondleslab to its lineup of minimalist tech kit, with a very unusual build of Android – and a hefty pricetag. Punkt's splash screen just has the word Punkt, with the period, on a plain background. Punkt's MC02: a black slab with black buttons, a black boot screen and black wallpaper – click to enlarge The MC02 …
> Being a price-sensitive buyer with little use for secrecy, encryption and so on,
If you have no need for privacy then those sensitive prices are going to be very sensitive to the condition of your wallet, and will adjust appropriately, for the seller at least
Apple users have had to deal with it for a long time.
YMMV
AAC
> Being a price-sensitive buyer with little use for secrecy, encryption and so on,
If you have no need for privacy then those sensitive prices are going to be very sensitive to the condition of your wallet, and will adjust appropriately, for the seller at least
Apple users have had to deal with this issue for a long time.
YMMV
AAC
I wonder how much of this is privacy theater. If I need more privacy than I can achieve with the hardware I have*, I'm building my own environment. That limits my hardware options and I may have to do some modifications to the software, but using something open means I have at least a little more ability to do that. A modified Lineage or Graphene environment doesn't have a connection to someone else's cloud, doesn't have a mail client that only works on an email account I'm unlikely to use, and still lets me customize as needed. True, that means I lose their VPN, but I'm not quite sure whether their VPN is any more trustworthy than another.
For the same money I could buy a fairphone 5, and probably would if I didn't still have at *least* 2.5 years of life left in my fairphone 4. (That's 2.5 years of warranty remaining for a phone I bought 2.5 years ago.... Last security update I had was last month, I started out with it on Android 11, it's gone through version 12 and 13 updates, supported by the manufacturer, and there's supposedly an android 14 update coming for the 4 later this year.)
A truly private phone would have hardware switch or switches built in that physically airgap wifi, microphone, camera and satellite positioning in the phone. That would be my minimum requirement for starting to call a phone secure. Even then, the phone could still be tracked through triangulation of the 5G connection.
Pinephone from pine64 does that, mostly. Unfortunately you have to take the battery cover off to get to the switches, and they're the tiny DIP switches you probably need tweezers to manipulate. It's cheap too, mostly because the hardware makes it basically an older raspberry pi that can (ostensibly) make phone calls. But it's open source, mostly. (Wireless modem manufacturers are adamantly secretive about their software. For reasons... *Adjusts tinfoil hat ostentatiously*)
If you want real security go open source, that way you can always know what the code does and don't depend on a private company that may suddenly stop updating your phone and or sell your data. Heck if the comoany goes bankrupt and their assets liquidated... you are done for.
Or you know keep as much sensitive data away from phones as you can, computers are way easier to make private and come in all kind of sizes. Just remember to avoid Windows.
That's just not (entirely) possible. Wireless modem manufacturers absolutely not allow you to see their firmware or drivers without ironclad NDAs. Pinephone tries really really hard to be open source, but the modem drivers are not and they can't do anything about it. And there doesn't seem to exist any modem manufacturer that is any different. It makes ones tin foil hat itch.
Given that, when I retire in around a decade, I won't be needing my Gmail connection, maybe this kind of thing could fit my personal bill.
Not to mention : a week on a single battery charge ? That sounds like music to my ears.
By then, I suppose the kinks will have been ironed out . . .
Error FoundWe are sorry but an unrecoverable error has happened
Our developers have been notified about the error and will make every effort needed to solve it.
If you prefer you can contact them directly by writing to the following address(es): XXXXXX
Looks like their website isn't work at this Punkt in time...
Has this article Slashdotted ElReged them?
aphy.io seems to be hosted on not-impressively-secure Hetzner. The MX record is mx01.aphy.app on Flow Swiss AG, so there's some hope that the phone doesn't actually use aphy.io.
The best private cloud is my own. If I wanted a very secure phone, the first requirement would be no OS dependencies on a 3rd party cloud.
For how long before the The Reg posts an article about a backdoor built into this, hackers taking over their email infrastructure to spy on the people using it, or the Feds/Interpol quietly seizing the infrastructure because the owners are involved in some criminal stuff, and run it themselves for a few months to collect data on other criminals.
As the title says, buy a Pixel, install GrapheneOS and add a double press action to volume or something to turn on flight mode. Alternatively you can just buy Pixels with GrapheneOS preinstalled. Add Proton Mail and calendar for free if you want to avoid using google equivalents.
Why pay such an expensive subscription for a phone and an OS that a Swiss company has wrecked when you can do all that for free?
Not exactly, just willing to pay a lot more for a phone than I am. Maybe you actually use some of the things that make that more expensive, but I won't, so I am not willing to spend that much. There are also people who would find that price difficult to fit into their budget, but that's not the only thing the line referred to. After all, you could probably pay twice as much for that phone as you did, but you might not have been willing to.
There is a great open source alternative to Google translate called Lingva translate, which basically scrapes data off of Google translate and does not access it directly. The front end for Lingva on Android is called Lentil translate. I have to say that Lingva translate is as accurate as Google translate is.
As far as I can see, that's basically just a proxy. While it works, Google will only see the proxy's address instead of yours, so less tracking of you, but they'll still see the material you're translating and the proxy will see both. This is also until Google breaks it, either deliberately or accidentally.
Fortunately, the AI boom has also meant more capable models which can be run offline and are actually open source. For instance, the models that are now available in Firefox, while they support only a subset of languages, provide reasonable quality and don't use a cloud server to do this.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
