SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., September 5, 2019 — Purism begins its iterative shipping schedule for the much anticipated Librem 5 phone running PureOS.
The Librem 5 phone is built from the ground up to respect the privacy, security, and freedoms of society. It is a revolutionary approach to solving the issues that people face today around data exploitation — putting people in control of their own digital lives.
Due to the high volume, growing demand for the Librem 5, and in the interest of openness and transparency, Purism is publishing its full, detailed, iterative shipping schedule. This expands on the existing commitment to start shipping in Q3 by defining specific batches, their features, and their corresponding ship dates.
Most companies keep their release and product plans secret right up until mass production launch, so they can avoid publicizing any setbacks or delays; but we have decided to bring our community and customers along with us for the Librem 5 journey, and have been transparent about our progress from the beginning. This means you have been able to celebrate along with us as we have reached milestones like shipping our devkit in 2018, the NXP CPU silicon issues we had to overcome, placing our first call in early 2019, sending our first SMS. You have been able to track our software progress directly from our public code repositories and watch live updates to libhandy, Phosh, Chatty, and the rest of our software. And we are compliant with, and submitting for, the "Respects Your Freedom" certification from the Free Software Foundation.
The iteration schedule starts in September, 2019, and the Librem 5 will be shipping in batches with incrementing code names. Each iteration improves upon the prior in a rapid rolling release throughout the entire first version of the phone, including the public plans for the second revision of the phone for context.
https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-shipping-announcement/
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 08 2019, @01:24AM (2 children)
While Librem5 is a commercial endeavor, I disagree that this is no different that an advertisement for a typical commercial product.
This phone, and this company is not going to stalk you, following your every move. You don't have to simply trust this is true, the phone runs free (as in freedom) software that you can audit. Since it is mostly Debian, the reproducible builds project of Debian will likely aid in making this a tractable task (if you trust Debian, but not Librem).
The hardware is designed to defend against untrustworthy silicon like the baseband.
The project is open, and upstreams as much as they can.
This is a project that is of interest to many techies within my circle, including me. I can't see spending $600 on a phone, but I've been following the projects development because it is interesting. It is also a positive development in this world of treacherous products by scummy companies.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 08 2019, @07:36AM (1 child)
There have already been major dissections of design decisions in this hardware.
The HDMI port requires untrustable binary firmware loaded before CPU management bringup to operate, even in unencrypted mode.
The switches on the device are soft-switches, meaning none of the devices are truly off any better than a piece of cotton and tape allows.
The software is bog standard with some 'value added privacy enhancements', meaning existing security flaws and methods of spying work against it.
Librem 5 is just like their laptops, big on hype to the privacy stooges, small on real privacy features for the people concerned about it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 08 2019, @12:00PM
False, they are hard kill switches:
https://puri.sm/posts/hard-not-soft-kill-switches/ [puri.sm]
But actually I dont mind some disinformation here because it will make the phone sound less threatening to anti-privacy advocates.