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Comment by ekidd | Hacker News Reader

> I can just imagine waking up, looking at my phone which has been working perfectly well up until that point, and being told it now has been bricked for some licensing issue.

If I were to buy a Blackphone, I would do it because I wanted security, and because I trusted the manufacturer to provide it. The problem with security is that just because my phone appears to be "working perfectly" doesn't mean that somebody isn't eavesdropping on everything I say.

A counterfeit Blackphone, in other words, is completely defective and untrustworthy, no matter how well it appears to work, because my trust in the manufacturer is broken.

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But how does that lead to the logic of turning the hardware into a piece of trash, instead of just informing the user?

If you don't turn the counterfeit phones into trash, there is no incentive for people to buy the real thing. This hurts the sales of Blackphones and the revenues and profits of the company which invested cash into developing the product - and harming their ability to provide security for genuine customers.

So, protect the profit first, protect the customers second?

I don't exactly see how it bumps up the profit though. You have a bunch of obviously interested customers, who want your product, and then the company has come out with "Actually, we expect you to buy the phone twice, because of a mistake that may or may not of been your fault"

The customers didn't buy a first blackphone, they bought something vaguely similar, but counterfeit. They literally bought a backdoor.

Remember the hassle WhatsApp got for failing open?

The Blackphone+SilentOS is an actual crypto device for people who believe they need crypto. It needs to fail closed. This may cost some people $100, but save their lives.

This also gives the customers the ability to sue the sellers, or at least push for refunds via the sales platforms.

WhatsApp got that hassle because it failed open and didn't clearly inform the user that it was doing so.

If the user is informed they have a non genuine device that is not safe or secure (e.g. like Windows' nag notification), then they can't expect it to work like a secure device, but more like an ordinary phone.

Then both normal consumers (who will continue to use the phone since they didn't really care too much in the first place about safety) and security conscious consumers (who will re-buy asap) would be more inclined to use the same brand in the future

I can't imagine that anyone worldwide was going to buy their first and only smartphone, but decided to spend more to get a special high-security black phone, and is then without a phone because of this. And even if they were, I'd rate the safety of even one user who'd accidentally click through the warnings and make a call that should have been secure but wasn't, as paramount.

If my smoke/heat/etc detector starts to fails I don't want it silently dropping back to a smoke-only detector. I want it to start beeping loudly and refuse to stop.

> If the user is informed they have a non genuine device that is not safe or secure

Having to flash a new OS onto it is an appropriately sized clickthrough for a warning of that magnitude. Like being woken in the night to change a smoke-detector battery.

It's still no worse than any other China manufactured off-brand phone. Which might be exactly what the owner wants, what they bought, and what just got turned into a brick.

They why would you go to the trouble of getting a counterfeit Blackphone...as opposed to other cheap Chinese devices?

Or something like a Moto G?

Also - they're protecting their own image here - can you image the PR s*itstorm that would unfold if somebody bought a counterfeit Blackphone, got hacked or had their details siphoned off to China, then wrote a blogpost about it? We on HN are often quite quick to judge - so I can certainly see why Silent Circle are taking the careful approach here.

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