back to article The billionaire behind Trump's 'unhackable' phone is on a mission to fight Tesla's FSD

This month, presidential hopeful Donald Trump got a tool in his arsenal: some allegedly "unhackable" communications kit. The Register has talked to the man behind the operating system, who also ran for the US Senate on a campaign to get self-driving Teslas off the road – and is on something of a crusade about the matter. Dan O …

  1. Tom Chiverton 1 Silver badge

    Big deal. NSA got the Windows source too.

    Publish your source, or a bootable image, or GTFO.

    1. Michael Strorm Silver badge
      Trollface

      Lemme guess, the NSA looked at the Windows source with a fine-toothed comb, reported that it *definitely* had no vulnerabilities a nation state entity might want to exploit to track or spy on people and was therefore perfectly safe to use for all your legal and illegal activities without worry?

      (And I'm sure they said the same here too!)

    2. CompliantChaos

      I am not 100% convinced that publishing source will harden the OS. Still, maybe - only maybe - you have a point.

      1. Jaybus

        Yes. We would never see something like heartbleed if the source were published.....Oh Wait!

  2. EricM Silver badge

    10k lines of code?

    Even if we go back to the simple times of a C64 or ZX81, 10k LOC won't buy you much functionality.

    On a (modern) phone, initializing the hardware, radio, GPS, etc. will already take more than that.

    So I'd like to see what definition of "OS" is being used here.

    Is the actual functionality located then in "applications" that interact with the hardware, so in case of a security problem you can claim your OS is secure, because the problem was in one of the many applications needed to actually work with a device?

    Overall I'd suspect this claim to be true only under a very specific set of circumstances.

    1. Tom Chiverton 1 Silver badge

      Re: 10k lines of code?

      I assume he's talking about a microkernel, so nothing more than a message bus, and everything else lives in user space, including the device drivers and application software. Which of course aren't "OS" and so don't count when they have the inevitable exploit in PNG parsing or hard coded credentials in the provisioning app.

      1. Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

        Re: 10k lines of code?

        If everything interesting moves to user space, then that's the new target. It doesn't change security much.

        Or maybe the lines are really long. 4K+ monitors a meter wide aren't exotic tech anymore.

        1. TimMaher Silver badge
          Coat

          Re: really long lines

          And you can put your editor on auto-wrap so a line could be, I don’t know, 10k long with carefully embedded function starts and ends.

          Or just compose the whole thing in really long streams of machine code.

          1. doublelayer Silver badge

            Re: really long lines

            If they're writing in C, which seems likely given the age and what it's supposed to be, you don't need any line breaks at all. For convenience, set your editor to interpret any semicolon and either curly brace as having a new line after it, but don't actually insert them. Only use /*...*/ comments and do the same with those. Insert a few line breaks so that you don't actually claim that it's just one line.

            I'm still expecting that it turns out that ten thousand is the lines of code for some component that is important, but not the only thing in which vulnerabilities are found, or that it can't actually do very much and won't get used. I could see an encrypted text-only message system being built in 10kloc, most of which would be the code for whatever communication system was chosen, but what's much harder to imagine is people using it when they are more familiar with smartphones.

            1. Draco
              Windows

              Re: really long lines

              Back in the early 80s, C would have been a fairly "minor" language - Ada would have been the serious and "secure" language choice. It is definitely suitable for writing an OS.

              I've coded in both and I like both. Ada had concurrency built into the language, type safety (even user defined types), excellent templating system, low level bit fiddling, memory safety, etc.

              It wouldn't surprise me if the OS was written in Ada. The alternative would be a custom language (and, yes, lots of those existed as well).

    2. Roland6 Silver badge

      Re: 10k lines of code?

      The first release of the Linux kernel was a little over 10,000 lines of code…

      Looking at BSD (*), I suspect they are being very precise on what constitutes the “OS”.and what is add-ons.

      (*) https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/design-44bsd/

    3. Bebu
      Windows

      Re: 10k lines of code?

      Minux 1.0 ran to 12k lines of code and were reproduced as an appendix to Andy Tanenbaum's Operating Systems: Design and Implementation

      From personal experience at the time Minix was pretty capable on a IBM PC running two serial vt100 terminals plus the console which was vastly more capable than MSDOS 3.x in use at the time.

      I would guess 2k+ lines were for the PC's floppy disk controller (fdc) driver - hardware which I think AST called totally broken or brain dead.

      Minix cannot have been too shabby if Intel half inched it for their onboard management engine (ME.)

    4. abend0c4 Silver badge

      Re: 10k lines of code?

      So I'd like to see what definition of "OS" is being used here.

      You can find out on their website. It's basically an RTOS kernel with optional additional software components.

      As far as I can tell, only the RTOS kernel is level 6, although the optional layered components can leverage some of the resulting security. The phone UI itself is presumably custom software.

      However, the soft underbelly of phone security is often the proprietary binary blob that comes with the air interface and I'm not sure where that fits in the picture.

      1. Nick Ryan

        Re: 10k lines of code?

        I suspect the proprietary blob is handily excluded, at which point the discussion comes down to the level of security.

        It should be very possible to ensure that the proprietary blob cannot access the content of communications, however guaranteeing that it doesn't leak anything else such as location or similar usage metadata is something else. On the other hand, unless the device is connecting to an entirely separate and private mobile communications network the location and usage is just never going to be remotely secure. This can be mitigated a bit by regularly changing the device identification codes, but somewhere in the mobile communications stack it will be possible to link them.

    5. Michael Strorm Silver badge

      Re: 10k lines of code?

      Technically, I don't think one could even fit 10,000 lines worth of code into a 16K ZX81.

      (Except possibly a Z80 assembly language program with 10,000 copies of "NOP".)

      1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

        Re: 10k lines of code?

        ..and, FWIW, the ZX81 "OS" was only 8KB, including the BASIC interpreter :-)

        I had a commented disassembly's of TRS-80 model I 16K ROM and I'm pretty sure that was no where near 10,000 lines of code either. Or the book would have been a bit thicker :-)

    6. vtcodger Silver badge

      Re: 10k lines of code?

      I think there may be a confusion here because everyone is so used to systems designed to handle arbitrary workloads and diverse hardware configurations that it never really occurs to them that if you forego flexibility, systems can be MUCH smaller. The first large computer I ever worked with was the AN/FSQ-7 computer used in the SAGE Air Defense System. It was designed in the 1950s and was huge for the times -- 64K (That's K not M or G) of 32 bit words. Vacuum tubes,not transistors. Thousands of 6SN7 dual triode tubes. 6 uSec cycle time. i.e. 0.167Mhz clock. Somehow, it managed to process raw radar data from a dozen sites, track many dozens of aircraft, drive several dozen interactive display consoles, guide unmanned missiles, manage manned interceptions, talk to manual sites, and even communicate with adjacent sectors well enough to hand over tracked aircraft when they reached the edge of the sector. Even more amazing, it actually (mostly) worked.

      How could it do all that on a computer roughly equivalent to an IBM PC with 256K of memory? Lovingly hand crafted code operating in fixed time slots with fixed time slots. Polled, not interrupt driven IO. No software data bus. My point, you can do a lot with very limited resource, if you don't use the ubiquitous modern system architectures and you forego flexibility.

      Cheap? Heck no. It cost a fortune back then. And anything done similarly today is probably still going to cost a fortune. BUT, IF YOU WANT SECURE SOFTWARE AND DON'T REALLY NEED FLEXIBILITY, AND HAVE LOTS OF MONEY TO SPEND, you can possibly get pretty good results with a small, carefully curated, "There's only one way (at most) to do things" OS. Perfectly secure? I doubt it. But pretty good, maybe good enough, security? Maybe.

      1. nijam Silver badge

        Re: 10k lines of code?

        > ... if you forego flexibility, systems can be MUCH smaller ...

        if you forego functionality, systems can be MUCH smaller.

        1. Roland6 Silver badge

          Re: 10k lines of code?

          >"if you forego functionality"

          Depends on what you mean by "functionality"

          A routine that simply rejects an out-of-bounds reference is just as functional (in the core functionality) as one that does bells and whistles error reporting and recovery.

          Although they aren't operating systems, in terms of functionality, there is nothing really between a C compiler and a Rust compiler, just that the C compiler does a lot less hand-holding...

    7. Bill Gray

      Re: 10k lines of code?

      As noted elsewhere, this does sound like a microkernel architecture. For comparison, Minix 3 has about 12K lines of code in the kernel (usual comments comparing "what's a line of code" to "how long is a piece of string" can be added here, but you get the general idea.)

      Given its use in the Intel Manglement Engine, Minix 3 may be the most-run OS on the planet. I kinda wish it had gone further; as best I can tell, the project had some interesting ideas, but has been idle for about a decade. As noted, it basically causes almost all kernel bugs to become user-space bugs. So, not (necessarily) fewer bugs; just the ones you get have less ability to ruin your day.

    8. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: 10k lines of code?

      The 10,000 LOC probably doesn't include the quadrillions of libraries he used in the project.

      I can write you some pretty useful stuff in very few lines of code...if I use React, Svelte, Vue.js, jQuery, Tailwind, DaisyUI etc etc.

      My code will be extremely secure...I can't really comment on all the frameworks, plugins, extensions and themes though.

  3. munnoch Silver badge

    "the result of 40 years of technology"

    40 years ago you didn't really have an OS as we know them now. All you had was a program loader and majority of machines weren't connected to anything other than a power outlet.

    Its taken us the intervening 40 years to build a Hydra-like nightmare with all the unintended consequences for security. All the billionaire had to do was stand still...

    1. Hugh McIntyre

      Re: "the result of 40 years of technology"

      (More than) 40 years ago, we had Unix, VMS, and various other operating systems including networking and email. Definitely more than a program loader and power outlet ...

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: "the result of 40 years of technology"

        But Unix is a "program loader" + "program scheduler", but everything else run atop it - even BASH. But ... even "program scheduling" maybe the consequence of a loaded program - granted, for "efficiency", lines get blurred as things get/got merged into the kernel.

        1. Roland6 Silver badge

          Re: "the result of 40 years of technology"

          I think you've been infected with the MS school of thought as to what an OS is...

    2. Jamie Jones Silver badge

      Re: "the result of 40 years of technology"

      An "OS" like we know them now have been around at least 50 years.

      My first multiuser/multitasking computer was an ICL PERQ from 1979 (*) https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/63966/ICL-PERQ-1-Workstation/

      It ran Unix. I had login prompt on 2 dumb terminals I had connected, as well as the on the graphical console.

      (*) I got it from Manchester University for about 70 quid in the early 90's. 1024x768 graphics, 1Mb ram, and hard disk drive, a year before the ZX81 cost a pretty packet when new!

    3. Irongut Silver badge

      Re: "the result of 40 years of technology"

      Checks calendar... yes, I was using DOS over 40 years ago and my first forays with Windows were around 37 years ago.

      So even Microsoft had operating systems 40 years ago, let alone Unix, VAX, etc.

      1. Pascal Monett Silver badge

        Oh I remember 40 years ago.

        There was no Internet back then.

        Not for the general public.

        1. Atomic Duetto

          In 1982, my dad signed us up for a MIDAS account (dial up internet gateway, Australia 1979) and using my newly minted Commodore VIC20 and a 300baud modem we logged into a bulletin board in the US where we proceeded to play some text based adventure games and download some news and stuff (recipes ?). Heady stuff for a young high school kid in Forbes, Central West NSW. Population 7,500 peeps.

          So yep, it was available to the public… even in the middle of bumfucknowhere, if you knew where to look

          (we’ve got loads of it round the back).

          1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

            Wow! I bet the phone bill was enormous! Or did you get cheap international dialling from Australia back then?

            Trying that from the UK would probably have bankrupted my parents and had me locked in my room for the rest of my life, only allowed out to sweep chimneys to help pay off the debt!

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              I had some fun with ISDN...

              ...when we got the Home Highway trial that caused me to rack up a massive bill...

              During the trial, they would just run a regular bundle of ISDN lines to your house, but only terminate two of them in that wall mounted HH box along with your POTS lines...they would leave the rest of the ISDN lines unterminated in the wall behind...but they were terminated at the phone exchange.

              After a while, I knocked the box off the wall because I used to rest my feet on it (it was under my desk) and I noticed the extra lines...some brief chatting on IRC and a quick request for my old man to buy me a crimping kit later I was adding RJ45 connectors to those extra lines and using a bunch of cheap Fritz PCI cards to create a multilink connection under windows...I bonded 6 ISDN lines together into a single connection giving me a total of 384kbps of internet speed...I used it like this for maybe a week or two until the phone bill arrived...old man hit the roof...no idea what the actual bill was, but the swearing and arm waving was off the charts...he came in my room and asked "how the fuck did you rack up this bill? It's like you've used 10 phone lines or something!"...so I showed him the work I'd done under the desk. He was still pissed off, but he went from 110% to about 40% when he realised that it actually took effort and I wasn't just pissing around...he wasn't entirely cool with it, but he did start buying me a lot more used kit to mess about with....and occasionally found me little side gigs with local businesses doing tech work to pay off the bill...this was quite funny in itself occasionally, he'd arranged for me to setup a printer at a local estate agents, but he told them nothing about my age...so I rocked up on my bike and walked in told them I was there to setup the printer and they immediately thought there must be a mistake...I was 12 or 13 at the time..."It's a laserjet 4000 isn't it? Should be easy, where is it?"...I could hear them whispering away nearby..."are we sure about this?", "$DADS_NAME says he can do it, so I guess we leave him to it?", "Do we have to pay him?"...I was done in about 30 minutes...at that point they were expecting me to walk out without payment I think, because I walked up to the boss and said "Dad told me you're going to give me £50"...to which he replied "haha, your old man is funny, we'll see him later and talk to him, on your way"...so I said "He said you'd say that, and if you did I should mention the petty cash tin in the filing cabinet over there and if there is nothing in it, I should remind you about the £500 cash you go everywhere with he also said that if he has to collect the payment there is an additional £50 handling fee"...I didn't really understand what I was saying at the time, but he paid up the £50. My final instruction from the old man was to go to the shop up the road from their with the £50 and buy myself a snack and a drink. Which I did. Cherry Coke and a Biscuit Yorkie. Awesome. Looking back as a grown man now...it's hilarious to me...it was by no means a one off either...my old man back then was not a daft man...he is now, because he's fucking old and just wants to kick back...but he still has his moments. I get random phone calls from people occasionally that he's spoken to asking me if I can provide them with tech support..."I spoke to your Dad the other day in $PUB and he says I should talk to you about a technical problem I'm having".

              He hasn't stopped at me either...one of my kids (10) went to the old mans allotment one day because he likes helping grandad with his plot...this particular day, he came home with £20...had to ask him "alright, whose plot was it and what did you have to do?"..."It was the man at the end, I just had to dig a hole, move some pots and dig up some potatoes, it was easy, I did it and grandad told me to ask him for £30 and mention the free horse muck he got last week"..."and you only got £20 for it?"..."No it was £30...but we went to the pub afterwards, I had a Sprite and some crisps and Grandad had a pint"...I'm starting to seriously wonder whether my old man has ever paid for a pint out his own pocket in the last 30 years.

        2. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

          True. But...

          First BBS, 1978

          Prestel, 1979,

          Minitel (France), 1982

          I think we're all getting old and think 40 years ago was 1950ish :-)

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            True. I recently found the docs for some freeware I wrote in the days of BBS, and it had my then FidoNet address in it.

            We've come a long way since. Except Microsoft, their code is *still* not secure and they never really got comfortable with the whole multi-user thing (probably because doing it right is not going to make them more money).

          2. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            We absolutely are...the thing that scares me the most is when some of us reach 90 odd years old in a few decades, we're going to be wheeled out like war veterans because we're the last people to remember the birth of the internet in the 90s...and we'll be interviewed on the BBC about "what it was like in the dark ages"...

            BBC Presenter: You were actually there and can remember Geocities.

            You: Oh yes, we had to build websites by hand and upload over a connection that ran over telephone lines.

            BBC Presenter: Wow, it must have been hard...what did the internet look like? Take us through what browsing was like back then.

            You: They were very interesting days, we had the images called GIFs...one minute it would look like a skull then poof...it turned into smoke...everywhere they were.

            BBC Presenter: Amazing...it was also quite an austere time in terms of design, some might say a classic era...why were most websites black with green text and why did lots of people have an animated banner that looked like it was bleeding?

            You: Well we thought it looked cool you see, some of the edgier ones amongst us used to put a button on the sites that said "works best in Netscape Navigator @ 800x600".

            BBC Presenter: Is it true that you all had guestbooks and nobody ever moderated them?

            You: Oh yes, I've brought a print out of one of my guestbooks to read for you if you like...people used to post deliberately offensive messages to try and get your website taken down.

            BBC Presenter: Interesting, we better not read any of it on air, quite a lot of those words were banned 30 years ago and some of our sensitive viewers my have heart attacks.

            You: Here's one, posted by AnalC*nt69 in 1997..."Nice f**king website virgin, ur Dad is gay, ur a gay f*cking ni...."

            BBC Presenter: *horrified*

            BBC Weather: I'm sorry we've had to cut from that segment due to technical issues, but here is the weather...it's hot...everywhere.

        3. StargateSg7 Bronze badge

          There kinda was a TYPE of Inter-Network aka Internet (ARPANET for the military since the 1960's) since the 1960's at least, but for the public in North America it was called FIDONET and BBS (Bulletin Board Systems)! In Canada where I live, by 1982 we even had the precursor to X.25 networks and even pre-DataTAC WIRELESS networks which worked at 160 BAUD (Bits per second) which ended up being around 20 characters per second typically!

          Using AM radio transmission links at high wattage, I remember getting over 500 km transmission distances using repeaters spaced every 5 to 10 km! I thought it was GREAT at the time in the Early 1980's since I was one of the FEW young people who had access to that sort of gear! We literally "Text Messaged" waaaaaaay before anyone else did using our custom-built text messaging software that duplicated what the VAX VMS operating system had for LAN communication but made for WIRELESS communications. It just meant we had to use the VERY HEAVY portable terminals or our office HAM-like AM-band radio comms suites in order to do it! So on a typical Friday or Saturday Night SysAdmin shift during the early 1980's, MANY guys and gals would be having cross-Canada wired and wireless-based "Text Chats" waaaaaaaay before the time of smartphone-based instant messaging apps! AND EVERYTHING under the sun would be discussed! Politics, Sports, Dating, Sex, Games, EVERYTHING you could name would be discussed on a Party-line like chat system!

          V

          1. Not Yb Bronze badge

            I'll just point out that pretty much 0% of the commenters here have ever counted as "the general public".

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              For sure, unless general public got on their bike in the early 90s in the rain to cycle for an hour (to that one phone box that was obscured by enough trees) with a heavy ass shitty laptop to croc clip into the phone line for "free" internet for 20 minutes before the battery ran out to then cycle home to check if the download actually finished.

    4. grumpyoldeyore
      Coat

      Re: "the result of 40 years of technology"

      In the embedded world OS-9 and pSOS were both available in the early 1980s.

      Mine's the one with the Forth manual in the pocket.

    5. Stuart Castle Silver badge

      Re: "the result of 40 years of technology"

      40 odd years ago, we had various varients of Microsoft's DOS (PC Dos, MS DOS, DRDOS etc). We also had Apple's DOS, Macintosh System 1, CP/M, Digital Research's GEM, various Unixs. We were also about to get the first releases of Windows and OS/2. Also, in an increasing amount of businesses, we were starting to network devices, with software such as Novell Netware.

      OK, so we didn't have nearly as many security problems. Not even a fraction, but I do think the large part of the reasons behind that is simply that to get into a given system, hackers usually needed physical access, unless it belonged to a large company or Uni, and was networked. Most hackers would think twice if they had to break into the building first.

      But it did happen.

      Of course, that's not to dismiss the problems adding features have caused. Make software more complexe *does* increase the potential number of security problems. even if you

    6. Waryofbigbro

      Re: "the result of 40 years of technology"

      Some operating systems of the 1960s were very sophisticated and ahead of their time. While the Burroughs B5500/5700/6500/6700 series machines did not have internet connectivity, the operating system (Master Control Program or MCP) did support many interactive terminals, multiprogramming, virtual memory and powerful programming languages.

      https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Computer_System_Organization_The_B5700_B6700_Serie?id=CiijBQAAQBAJ&hl=en-US

    7. vtcodger Silver badge

      Re: "the result of 40 years of technology"

      IBMs OS/360 dates to 1965. There were a few problems -- most obviously JCL (dubbed, not entirely inaccurately, by one early victim as the world's first syntax free language) but it WAS a real OS in the modern sense. My vague memory is that there were a few other less ambitious OSes around even before 1965, but their names escape me.

      OTOH, your description of the current situation seems pretty damn accurate. A Hydra-like nightmare it certainly is. And I don't see any sign of a mythological hero on his way to slay it.

      1. abend0c4 Silver badge

        Re: "the result of 40 years of technology"

        OSes around even before 1965

        CTSS is probably the best known - an early time-sharing system with memory protection which was a template for many systems that followed (including Multics and Unix). Less well known, the English Electric KDF9, had a VM-like architecture that allowed multiple programs to run in protected memory spaces granted access to designated peripherals.

        It's not really the case that historic computers were primitive - the features that we now take for granted arrived pretty early on, were ruthlessly eliminated in the early days of microprocessors and have belatedly been grudingly reinstated.

    8. Roland6 Silver badge

      Re: "the result of 40 years of technology"

      >40 years ago you didn't really have an OS as we know them now...

      1984...

      I think you might find this a useful starting point in your education: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_operating_systems

      What is interesting about that timeline, is the decline in OS releases that started in the 1990's.

      >"majority of machines weren't connected to anything other than a power outlet."

      Whilst I do agree with the point in general, I suggest you look at 1981 when "First Apollo/DOMAIN systems shipped"...

      In 1982~1985 I developed an RTOS for highly distributed systems (think each "computer" straddled circa 30 individual microprocessor-based computer boards) that sat in under 16k of ROM on each board...

  4. mark l 2 Silver badge

    It sounds like this phone with 10000 lines of code is only going to be able to do basic stuff so calls and perhaps email/messaging. So when the orange one wants to post on Truth social, or watch videos of himself on Fox news etc he will no doubt revert back to a regular phone and therefore be using insecure devices for most of the time.

    1. MachDiamond Silver badge

      "It sounds like this phone with 10000 lines of code is only going to be able to do basic stuff so calls and perhaps email/messaging. So when the orange one wants to post on Truth social, or watch videos of himself on Fox news etc he will no doubt revert back to a regular phone and therefore be using insecure devices for most of the time."

      It's the voice calls and texts that will be the most sensitive. If he also has a tablet for Social Media, it can be shorn of voice and text capability so there aren't any slips.

      1. doublelayer Silver badge

        Not if, for instance, people like sending pictures. A lot of people do like that. SMS can't handle them. Likely this OS, if it's actually as small as described, can't do it either. Say hello to WhatsApp or something like it. The same applies if people like videocalls. True, they probably aren't needed, but that doesn't stop people from preferring them to voice calls for some reason. If you're careful to use the secure device whenever possible and to do without things that your secure device can't do, then you're in a good place. A lot of insecurity comes because people are not willing to do one of those things.

        1. MachDiamond Silver badge

          "Not if, for instance, people like sending pictures. A lot of people do like that. SMS can't handle them. "

          I think you are trying to generalize too much here. "People" like to do many things that don't apply to a President or Mr Trump using a secure phone for official communications.

          I don't snap photos and send them to people. I don't make videos on a phone nor make video calls. I don't want anybody sending me that stuff either since it's like Twitter in the old days when you follow somebody and your feed just fills up with what people are having for lunch and the graffiti they have run across. If I want inane blather, I can watch the evening news or a talk show.

          1. doublelayer Silver badge

            This isn't just a president. If, for example, this was used by the president and their protection detail to coordinate routes, that might work. However, the stated purpose was to be used by campaign officials so that things like the Iranian attack on them don't happen again. Campaigns are made up of lots of people who are not trained in security or anything else, working in all sorts of places doing unplanned things. It is more difficult for them to adapt to restricted methods and they're the kind of people who aren't eager to adopt that in the first place.

            A campaign is a lot like a company. Consider what would happen if you had to convert an employer to a restricted communication system for all internal messages. If it was a small company where everyone was knowledgeable about security risks, you could probably do it. I think you can imagine how hard it would be and how many people would ignore you if you tried the same with managers who don't want anything that will slow down their messages, technophobes who have become comfortable with something and resist any change, and processes that are considered critical and indispensable which don't yet work through the system you're trying to switch to. I've had to do it before and, even more frequently, I've had to watch the IT people try it and struggling to implement something against organizational inertia, then catch all the people who deliberately bypassed their policies.

            1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

              The simplest way to test it out would be to eliminate all but plain text emails at the mail server and configure all mail clients to only render plain text.

              In most organisations these days, most would freak out. The Marketing dept. would probably be jumping from the upper floor windows![*]

              Hey, I didn't say it was ALL bad news :-)

      2. Fruit and Nutcase Silver badge

        is only going to be able to do basic stuff so calls and perhaps email/messaging

        Perfectly adequate for a "very special" person's daily tasks.

        Caller (on very secure phone): I'd like to order a Big Mac and Fries please

        Hedging his bets - Just in case he does not get into the Big House in Washington D.C., he's been trying out for an alternative job

        https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/2024/10/22/trumps-mcdonalds-appearance-wont-get-him-an-endorsement/75790431007/

    2. Irongut Silver badge

      That's ok, the orange buffon has no idea how to use a regular phone and has never posted on Truth Social, X, Twitter or any other site.

      His staff do that for him.

      1. Simian Surprise

        You really think so? I'd be hard pressed to find someone to hire who can post with his level of buffoonery.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Given that some posts are randomly capitalized collections of words and others form coherent sentences with punctuation, it is likely that *at least* 2 people are writing his posts.

          1. Tim99 Silver badge
            Trollface

            Both Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde?

            1. PerlyKing
              Joke

              I can't remember where it's from, but it feels apt: "He does the work of two men. Laurel and Hardy.".

        2. VonLugersButter

          Not to mention where he gets the time... especially as he's holding down a second job with McDonalds and all that doling out of fries he's doing.

        3. R Soul Silver badge

          Surely Lettuce Liz fits the bill?

        4. stewwy

          1, He writes it out in crayon,

          2 Then interpreted by a trained monkey

          3 Save to teletype machine

          4 Post

          5 goto 1 ( yes, really :-) )

          Why do you think we had the bizarre dance routines, it musk have stalled at 2.

        5. newspuppy

          Advanced Technology....

          @Simian Surprise....

          What you fail to understand.. is that President Trump had access to advanced technology... and he was using one of the first AI chat-bot systems...

          Has to fit into 10K lines of code.. so that is why it appears to be primitive, full of errors, and contains many misspellings.

          It is not people posting.. it is Aggregated Idiocy (AI) that uses a small LLM model, with small words to make biggly impressions...

  5. An_Old_Dog Silver badge

    "Yes, But ..."

    I think the principles Mr. O'Dowd has used in software development have led to the creation of the most-secure OS to this date, and I laud him for doing it.

    BUT ... I would never consider it "unhackable", because it executes on flawed hardware. That hardware may even be logically-correct, but it won't be physically-correct -- that is, free from artifacts which allow info to be extracted and/or injected.

    This physical-incorrectness stems from the physics of packing so (astoundingly) many transistors on a single die.

    1. stiine Silver badge
      Facepalm

      Re: "Yes, But ..."

      No, it would still be flawed if the transisitors were 1cm². Being as small as they are only means you can't stick a probe on them.

      1. An_Old_Dog Silver badge

        Re: "Yes, But ..."

        Go read about microstripline parameters.

  6. SFC

    Trump?

    I'm just trying to figure out why he's trying to secure the phone of the guy who openly works with hostile nation states. Congratulations on securing Trump's communications from Russia and China - unfortunately he already intentionally emailed them all of the US' state secrets. They have no reason to try to hack him, they can just ask for whatever info they're after.

    1. Henry Hallan
      Holmes

      Re: Trump?

      The reason is obvious - to provide a chain of evidence that it really was him that did it.

      If his phone can't be hacked, then the defence of "my phone was hacked" is not going to work.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    What's the point of a secure phone for Trump?

    when the password will always be one of trumpwins, Iluvtrump, trump2024, or obamasucks?

    1. Sampler

      Re: What's the point of a secure phone for Trump?

      ivanka69?

      1. Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

        Re: What's the point of a secure phone for Trump?

        Ewwww. Pass the mind bleach.

        1. Sampler

          Re: What's the point of a secure phone for Trump?

          Yeah, sorry, I'm not proud of myself...

          ...I mean, it won't even be true, to 69 you'd have to do something for someone else and we all know the orange one ain't doing that..

      2. Bebu
        Facepalm

        Re: What's the point of a secure phone for Trump?

        ivanka69?

        Wash your mouth out! ;)

    2. FrogsAndChips Silver badge
      Facepalm

      Re: What's the point of a secure phone for Trump?

      'maga2020!' was the reportedly real one.

  8. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Unhappy

    178b is the standard for aeronautical OS's

    IE fly-by-wire.

    No dynamic memory allocation in the kernel. Micro-kernel looks logical (but what about the performance hit from all those messages being passed around?).

    It should be obvious that the FOCF doesn't fear China, Russia, North Korea or Hungary.

    They are his "friends."

    He's really worried about the NSA collecting things which would be misconstrued as treason.*

    *Not that they are treason of course. Oh no. Definitely not. Not at all. No way. It's just stuff taken out of context. Fake news. BTW "They're eating the dogs! "

    1. Bebu
      Unhappy

      Re: 178b is the standard for aeronautical OS's

      "...misconstrued as treason.*

      *Not that they are treason of course."

      Of course that buffoon also laughed off "a little light treason" as matter of hilarity and nothing more.

      A more petty and treacherous individual would be hard to imagine.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      "FOCF"?

      Free Operating Cash Flow?

      Friends of Charnwood Forest?

      Ferrari Owners Charitable Foundation?

      Those were literally the first three (different) results Google came up with.

      1. Jimmy2Cows Silver badge
        Mushroom

        Re: "FOCF"?

        I suspect it's Fat Orange something something. But then my imagination runs dry. I dunno... Cow Fart?

      2. John Smith 19 Gold badge
        Coat

        Re: "FOCF"?

        Fat Old Convicted Felon.

        Originally Fat Old Crook, but as Jake pointed out they are a convicted felon, although the Judge is leaving sentencing till after Nov 5th, suggesting some form of custody is likely. Looks like that's going to be rather a bad week for them.

        For fans of the movie "Con Air" I'd also go with "Donnie34"*

        *But under the rather narrow definition of NYC law he's not a rapist. Under UK law (which is about consent, not the genders or body parts of those involved) he would be.

        1. The Oncoming Scorn Silver badge
          Coat

          Re: "FOCF"?

          Fiddler Of C*** Flaps

    3. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

      Re: 178b is the standard for aeronautical OS's

      "He's really worried about the NSA collecting things"

      Yeahbut, the NSA have the source code and probably the backdoors into any cryptography used already :-)

      1. MachDiamond Silver badge

        Re: 178b is the standard for aeronautical OS's

        "Yeahbut, the NSA have the source code and probably the backdoors into any cryptography used already :-)"

        Wasn't it the NSA that got caught spying on the Congressional committee that was their overseer?

  9. NXM

    Really really unhackable

    The only truly unhackable phone is here:

    https://thenophone.com/

    Looks cool, infinite battery life, takes selfies, etc etc

    1. VonLugersButter

      Re: Really really unhackable

      Mine is better. It has 2 cups and a string.

      1. StargateSg7 Bronze badge

        Re: Really really unhackable

        Re: Really really unhackable

        Mine is better. It has 2 cups and a string.

        That won't work either as I can use Sonar, LIDAR or RF imaging to grab frame-by-frame acoustic waveform vibrational patterns of the vibrating strings and then demodulate them into computer-playable acoustic waveforms I could do speech-to-text comversion on and then search at my leisure!

        So even the two cups and a string is STILL hackable!

        V

    2. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

      Re: Really really unhackable

      Remembers me of the no car and less less car....but nobody every considers that as an option.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Nice piece

    Thanks. Enjoyed that, could have read more.

  11. SteveK

    There is no feature that goes in until we figure out how to make it secure. Completely secure. None of the other operating systems … did that. They put the features in, and then they thought about later, how do we make them secure? Well, it's already too late.

    He even speaks like Trump...

    1. doublelayer Silver badge

      I don't think so. That sounds like the thing you often get when transcribing someone's informal speech. It wasn't too much repetition, and the fragment is a pretty standard thing when trying to intensify something, so standard that a grammarian would probably accept it if a comma was used instead. To get a Trump, you need more irrelevant asides:

      There is no feature, and we have lots of great features, features like you'd see in other operating systems, but our features are the most secure you've ever seen. And sometimes you see features like in Windows where the files, the files are important, you need the files and sometimes a hacker will go after the files and you don't know where the hacker came from so you need it to be secure and the hacker is from China or Iran and the hacker is a bad guy. So we want to keep the hacker out so we only make a new feature, well sometimes you have a different operating system like Linux where they want the feature too, so they pay someone like Russia to make them the feature, but they don't think about the hackers. We do think about the hackers right here in the USA, which is why we have the most beautiful, most beautiful hackers and they spend all day finding problems where we need to be more secure...

      1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge
        Pint

        See Icon. That was entirely believable :-)

      2. John Smith 19 Gold badge
        Thumb Up

        "There is no feature, and we have lots of great features,...."

        Well played sir.

        Next time, can you try to work "Bigly" into the ramble?

      3. newspuppy

        The only 'problem' with your post.. is that it was largely on topic..

        If you could have moved from secure OS to hacker , to anatomical aspects of a Golf Pro... then.. it would be 'PERFECT', Trumpian.. in all its glory.

  12. James Anderson Silver badge

    Off Topic

    But if you want a "very hard to hack" but usable phone check out the offerings from Nitrokey.

    I have no association with the company apart from being a customer for Thier excellent HSM products.

  13. Ian Johnston Silver badge

    Absolutely secure mobile phones are around. A company called "Encrochat" leases them out ...

    1. gnasher729 Silver badge

      Don’t remember which one this is, but the phone that was created on order of the NSA was supposedly quite secure - after sending the unencrypted message to the authorities.

  14. O'Reg Inalsin

    "like trying to win the TdF on a trike"

    As a cyclist I appreciate that. I don't want to see worse than human performance in low viz conditions. Bad decision of Musk not to hedge his bets from the start, and worse now to consider it a matter of "principle" to use cameras only - it's a matter of "cost", not "principle", and there is a very large cost to worse than human performance.

  15. Lars
    Happy

    Left or right

    Lots of funny stuff about left or right from people living in two party systems in the USA and Britain. In a two party system there can in a way not exist anything else than left or right

    Consequently also the far left or right is housed in either of those parties. Very annoying and stupid.

    In a many party system (most of countries) the ultra this or that form their own parties.

    What a sad system you Americans came to copy from the English.

    And now in a few weeks American Republicans who perhaps have voted Republican all their life feel perhaps that they have to vote for Trump although they should by now know what a hopeless bastard and idiot he is.

    Democrats have it a lot easier.

    PS. Americans don't really have any experience of far left or far right. The great majority represent the center if they ever thought about it. And then there are those who have no idea of what they represent.

    I hope you think and vote. And I hope you will eventually choose the president according to who got the popular vote like in other democracies.

    1. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

      Re: Left or right

      I always wondered how republicans win, thaat is get enough votes when its wrong to vote because the gov forces you to vote...

      1. John Smith 19 Gold badge
        Unhappy

        " always wondered how republicans win"

        Oh. You're not an American?

        Well a popular Republican tactic is disenfranchising voters who they think are black unsympathetic to the Republican platform. This has worked real well in Florida and other states. Wiping them off the electoral role and Gerrymandering districts based on past support rather than evening out population changes has been effective as well. The Supreme Court has ruled that there should be a presumption of fairness during this process IOW that the officials are trying to do the right thing, even when it's racially biased.*

        The key is the "Electoral College" set up when slavery was still a thing and the states were about even in wealth but not in eligible (IE free White men) voter sizes. As the number of people farming has shrunk to miniscule numbers due to machinery the relative importance of a small group of voters has risen to astronomical importance so that the views of < 50 000 voters decide the future of a country of about 346 million people. The voters in the states are voting for the members of this college. It only takes a few of them to not vote the way their state did (which is actually allowed, unless the state passes a law itself to forbid it) to swing the election. This is basically what happened in 2016. The count of the actual voters (not the "Electors") is called the "Popular Vote" and the FOCF has never won this (although since he got in in 2016 he never talks about election fraud or interference in that election).

        This thing is a fu**er to change as it needs both 2/3 of the senate and 2/3s of the state Governors to agree. However there is a hack to fix it which basically forces the "Electors" from a state to vote the way of the nationwide count. It's called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact So far it'll guantee about 209 of the 270 needed except it won't go into effect until it hits 270 EC votes.

        *Leonard Leo's running of the Federal Society since 1982 to systematically place barking-mad Swivel Eyed Loons "sympathetic" Judges, including on SCOTUS, on the bench. Some might almost call them "The enemy within."

    2. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

      Re: Left or right

      "Lots of funny stuff about left or right from people living in two party systems in the USA and Britain. In a two party system there can in a way not exist anything else than left or right"

      For reference, the UK is not fully a two party system. There's been a coalition government involving the "third" party recently and, also in my lifetime, the "Lib/Lab Pact" which was pretty close to being a coalition. There are usually a number of MPs who are not in one of the two main parties. Not enough that even all banded together they could swing things except in a very close vote, but there'soften enough to have some notable influence (Tories hanging on by the skin of their teeth thanks to the Irish support from the DUP. In the US, it's fairly rare for there to be more than a handful of non-Dem/Rep in either House and never enough to have any significant power unless some vote or other is near as dammit tied when they could swing it one way of the other.

      The UK system is far from ideal, but then what system is?

      1. werdsmith Silver badge

        Re: Left or right

        UK has two parties that bounce between government and opposition and loads of other parties that haven’t been anywhere near government since 2015 when Clegg and the LibDems were involved in the coalition. Recently the Reform party made a surge in votes if not actual government seats and effectively created the current landslide Labour majority.

        But there are loads of other parties and if I wanted to declare a new party tomorrow in the UK and campaign and stand for election then I can do that.

        I don’t know how if it’s the same in USA so I’m not go to be a fucking idiot like Lars and smugly comment about it.

        1. Lars
          Happy

          Re: Left or right

          @werdsmith

          Of course I know there are other parties both in Britain and the USA.

          But now do try to find out when one of those two parties did not represent the government.

          And it's the same in the USA.

          So as a matter of fact both countries are two party countries and also of course one party governments too although the Americans have the advantage of the fact that both "houses" have power which is not the case in Britain,

          John Brown (no body) wrote this "The UK system is far from ideal, but then what system is?".

          I could however mention many countries with much better parliamentary systems, and I think he could too.

        2. John Smith 19 Gold badge
          Unhappy

          "Recently the Reform party made a surge in votes"

          Actually the Reform party has now got 4 MP's in Parliament, including the "Man of the PayPal" Farage (8th time lucky, eh Nige?)

          Let's see what they actually do for their constituents in the next 4 years.

          Actually there are several other parties running for US President, only a couple of them are running in enough states to have any kind of shot at being President.

          However this is OT for this thread.

  16. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

    Whatever happened to the Musk phone ?

  17. Snarkmonster

    Hackability

    Vendor: "This software is unhackable".

    Kevin Mitnick: "Hold my beer".

    1. newspuppy

      Re: Hackability

      Kevin was a master of social engineering...

  18. StargateSg7 Bronze badge

    Utter BILGE! Just because a 10,000 line Operating System has been gone through with a fine-toothed analytical comb, UNLESS the chip it's running on is a TRULY MATHEMATICALLY PROVEN (i.e. all possible states and pathways have been algorithmically evaluated ...AND ONLY A VERY FEW CHIPS have been done to that level of a MATHEMATICAL CHIP PROOFING evaluation!_ .... then the claim that Trump's phone is unhackable is COMPLETE HOGWASH!

    Anyways, I just have to use a nanometre and less wavelengths imaging system that RECORDS the chip's EM-FIELD eminations that disturb the ATMOSPHERE itself! I am NOT recording RF frequency emissions but rather the atmospheric absorption patterns that get disturbed from the broad-spectrum emissions that NOT EVEN A TEMPEST-rated secure communications platform can shield itself from!

    From there, I can GRAPHICALLY PLOT a general pattern of EM field-based atmospheric absorption patterns that can then be mapped to the basic BIT-FIELD patterns used within any CPU system that then get corresponded to basic CPU instruction sets and basic ASCII, UNICODE, Boolean, Signed/Unsigned Integer and various Floating Point values that I can interpret and search on an automated basis! AND since I am PASSIVELY imaging bitfield patterns, it doesn't matter if the OS files or comms are encrypted! I can record ALL bit patterns including the keys and the hardware-based OR software-based algorithms that use them! NOTHING would be safe AND I can do that imaging from tens of KM away!

    V

    1. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

      Look at the bible full of contradictions, studied by millions, believed by billions and yet they still believe...

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    So much talk about an OS, and no hint about what hardware it runs on? Or what are its features ? Odd.

    1. Roland6 Silver badge

      https://www.ghs.com/products/rtos/integrity.html

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrity_(operating_system)

      Might answer some of your questions.

      Given the number of platforms supported, I would suggest most of the code is a high-level language, Ada would be natural choice given the main target market. However, I note the Green Hills Mutli IDE comes in two flavours: Ada and C/C++ and would guess the Multi IDE owns much to the UCSD p-System.

      Thus I would not be surprised if the initial work was done in C and subsequently reworked in Ada for the circa 2006 release, which went on to be certified.

      1. John Smith 19 Gold badge
        Coat

        "most of the code is a high-level language"

        As has been the case for any OS of any reasonable size since the original Unix was written in C (or rather C was written to enable the writing of Unix) in the early 70's.

        DOS was probably the last sizeable OS that was written primarily (AFAIK) in assembler. Even the embedded systems on Rockwell-Collins navigation systems uses a proprietary stack based language, while the shuttle ran on HAL/S

        For those of you interested in this get a copy of Andrew Tannenbaum's books on OS design, especially the one with a listing of Mimix OS. 95% of an OS is about creating,updating and deleting structures and how to read and write them to a "storage system," ranging from a block of RAM up to an array of spinning rust scattered across the planet linked by a WAN.

        Ada is indeed a good OS choice, while Glenford Myers books on structuring large SW systems provide sound advice on how those structures should be accessed*

        *Windows uses some of the poorest level coupling by this metric.

  20. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Make the OS generally available, and then we'll talk about how unhackable it really is.

    Like other Trump supporting morons, put-up, or shut-up.

  21. Lord Elpuss Silver badge

    "It is the most dangerous, stupid product I've ever seen on the market," O'Dowd argued."

    Almost Trumpian levels of hyperbole.

  22. Screwed

    If the servers that the phone communicates with are hackable, even a totally unhackable phone doesn't protect your traffic from being hacked.

    And no functional phone can ever be untrackable - in case location is what is being kept secret.

    1. MachDiamond Silver badge

      "And no functional phone can ever be untrackable - in case location is what is being kept secret."

      The location of the US President is hard to hide. You may not see them, but the security detail tramples a wide path that can be seen from space.

  23. CJ Hinke

    Hope he got payment upfront. This is Trump, after all...

  24. arachnoid2

    Hackers be like

    (Cracks knuckles): "Right lets avit"

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