Nokia successor HMD spawns secure device biz with Euro-made smartphone Finnish phone maker HMD Global is launching a business unit called HMD Secure to target governments and other security-critical customers, and has its first device ready to go. feature phone Feature phones all the rage as parents try to shield kids from harm READ MORE HMD, or Human Mobile Devices, is the biz started by …
So (unless its really AOSP as another comment suggested) it will be controlled by an American company - the entire OS will be supplied by an American company, and . It does sound as though they are rebuilding from source and I assume updates will come from HMD rather than Google (that would make it entirely pointless) so some auditing of source will be possible (although not necessarily practical).
If its not AOSP what about app installs? If it is Google Android then only apps from Google approved developers will be installable from year after next.
If it is AOSP its a very narrow market - people with jobs sensitive enough to make it work carrying a separate work phone for security. Graphene etc. already have issues with getting apps to work on non-Google controlled phones and that is only going to get worse once they block installs of non-approved apps altogether. That means one phone for work, and another for personal things like banking if you use these.
That is effectively what happens when you install applications and email accounts via profiles in iOS: you create a separate secure container for it. It would be good if Android got that feature too, provided it is supported by the same secure chipset approach.
I suspect that's where their development is heading.
'The phone features a specialized connector, the Fusion 3.1 modularity system with a 16-pin (USB 3.1) connection, to add extra hardware including radios, batteries, and sensors as part of an optional "Tactical Outfit."'
No mention (that I can see in the article) of an EU mandated USB-C connection - or are EU manufacturers exempt?
One is to mittigtate by diversifying. Use an USoAn SoC, a korean SoC and a taiwanese SoC and let the customer agencies pick their poison. I guess the hungarians will NOT go for the USoAn SoC.
In the longer term, develop an european SoC, probably based in RISC-V (ARM is essentialy Japanese at this point) suitable for cellphone usage. Probably that will require a broad consortia of european academia, govt, and industry, with subsidies galore.
JM2C
YMMV
Be as it may, you can be a vassal, but you do not need to ask the barron for every little detail of your life, and as a vassal you can even do some small rebellions.
Discovering via Snowden/manninng/Wikileaks that the USoA was spying suppoed "Allies" like merkel did not sit too well with the europeans.
So, a "soverign phone with android but easily flasheable to Graphene" is a small rebellion against the barron.
PS: I was born AND live in LatAm, so I do not care one way or the other. This is just an intellectual excercise for me.
Latin America? Hopefully far away from Venezuela because that's the next country set to receive the regime change treatment from Uncle Sam. Apparently they've already got a compliant puppet waiting in the wings to take over.
The motivation? Ensuring stability in the oil markets once the West has been fully disconnected from Russian supplies. Without such action, the Europeans in particular are going to get extremely cold this winter!
Actualy, is not a secret (if you read my past comments on ElReg, as I say the exact contry from time to time), so I am not doxing myself or anything, but I DO live in Venezuela.
The Strike force the USoA sent is too big to just hunt for narcos, but too small for an invasion. And probably too small to support military coup d'état as well.
¿What's the purpose of the strike force then? Only time will tell.
And I do not subcribe the "Is about the oil" hypotesis. Currently, only chevron has a sanctions exception to extract oil from Venezuela. If the USoA wanted to lend a hand to their european "vassals" to wane themselves from russian oil, they would give similar exceptions to Eni (Italy), Repsol (Spain) and Maurel & Prom (france), like they had until may this year. But so far, nothing. So no, is not about oil. Is some other thing. But again, only time will tell. And that time will be meassured in several lustres.
I don't know you.
I don't know who you're beholden to.
I don't know your people.
I don't know your processes.
Your "trusted partners" are not my trusted partners.
I have no cost-effective way to verify the thing inside your little plastic box does only what you claim it does.
Now, what was that "secure" thing you are trying to sell me?
If you don't control EVERYTHING in the device, including baseband, you never know which backdoors may be hidden in the proprietary HW and code. Qualcomm is a US-firm that has gotten a NSL for sure. Qualcomm has a record of security holes suspected to be backdoors. I for one wouldn't put money on this device.
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