The Freedom Phone is not great at privacy
mjg59.dreamwidth.org
mjg59.dreamwidth.org
I don’t think it’s accurate to describe Yeti coolers as USA made though: https://www.allamericanmade.com/where-are-yeti-coolers-made/
For USA made, I found Cordova, which I recommend especially because they use a denser foam, so you get more storage capacity for the same exterior dimensions: https://shop.cordovaoutdoors.com/48-qt-adventurer/
Hmmm, do you know what ... time to jump on that bandwagon!
They lost what they valued, their leaders are selling them out, everybody laugh.
Why even bother? You can't seriously run a project like this, add a load of bloatware, and expect to be trusted.
Even that misjudgment is enough to understand that the people running this have no genuine interest in user privacy. Talk about undercutting your own reason for existing.
Of course real solutions exist but the lay person can't easily discern.
Seriously though, blockchain is an interesting technology. It's a shame it has got such a bad rap because of its ties to cryptocurrency.
You can read at a speed I could only wish. Kudos.
And of course they don't "need" them. We don't necessarily "need" the cloud, Docker, or web frameworks either, yet here we are. Yes, there could be a new, completely open, distributed database that let multiple users monitor and inspect all historical changes, while allowing some others to make modifications in it.
We could just use Cassandra and build the whole distributed identity and storage infrastructure based on it.
I read the sensational headlines. They are as boring and as old as ever: it's the same "use-cases" over and over again, none of them require blockchains, and in none of them blockchain provided anything of value.
> Yes, there could be a new, completely open, distributed database that let multiple users monitor and inspect all historical changes, while allowing some others to make modifications in it.
You have just described a regular database with an open dataset.
> We could just use Cassandra and build the whole distributed identity and storage infrastructure based on it.
Yes. Yes, we could. And that's what all of those "researches" and "use cases" will inevitably end up doing: scraping "blockchain" and replacing it with MySQL, Postgres, BigQuery, Cassandra, MongoDB, sqlite etc.
I must admit that this right here was bait, because one of the storage backends used in enterprise blockchains is indeed Cassandra.
That’s part of the issue here. Blockchain technology is just something built on top of pre-existing tools, like Docker or Spring. My point is that if we were to scrap abstractions just because they could be done at a lower level already, why stop at blockchains?
This sentence reads like it was written by GPT-3. It makes sense on the surface level, but makes no sense when you try and understand it.
> I must admit that this right here was bait, because one of the storage backends used in enterprise blockchains is indeed Cassandra.
That's really interesting. So is one party responsible for hosting maintaining and running that cassandra data store?
Every single use case (I have yet to see a single one, and I am) has been a use case for an append only ledger, not a decentralised ledger, and in every one of those use cases the problems that a blockchain actually solved and the advantages of a blockchain are immaterial. Can you provide one example in the two lists (which you've claimed are good examples) where the properties of a blockchain are wanted, not the properties of an append only ledger? Because if you want an append only ledger, a SQL database (or even a nosql database) is a simpler solution that will perform orders of magnitude better than 500 transactions per second.
If referring to Session, nobody refers to it as "the other Signal", lol
https://www.wired.com/story/signal-mobilecoin-cryptocurrency...
Really not a bad business idea on his part, just highly unethical. I'd imagine you could just send the factory a custom ROM for the device, provide them with custom branding, and have them ship to the buyer's doorstep at a $380 markup. No warehouse or investment necessary, just a store website and a bunch of marketing $$$
(I'm sure if I went back to look at reviews of the Freedom Phone, I could point out another 10 open-source projects they blatantly copied and slapped their own name onto.)
On the point of social media influencers, I remember how one commentator asked if it was running iOS. This goes to show how much forethought and research went into the influencers' demos of this phone. IMO it casts a bad light over all of them (not that I saw them in a good light anyway).
That being said, it is quite curious how many people believed the marketing and bought the phone. It has to be said that not nearly enough overall research was done, and a lot of people suffered the consequences of that (and still don't realise to this day).
Their common points being do not roll your own and publish and check everything in your protocol model and codebase
The eternal vigilance of checking your security model. It's a cost.
What is that supposed to be?
In other words: BS.
Oo! Is it radioactive? : <https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=news: 'radioactive hologr...>
This part confuses me. If it matters who ends up with your backups that implies that the backups are not protected. Then wouldn't you be more concerned about access to your backups by the Freedom Phone people?
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0588/5385/1291/files/say-h...
Rererences 3G radios, but do any providers even support that anymore? No 5G mentioned. Of course. :p
After scrolling, and scrolling, and scrolling some more ("is this literally peddling clairvoyance?") I finally encounter a... DNA test kit at the bottom of the page. Oh. So this is either the internet equivalent of overnight infomercial TV (oversell oversell oversell) or they actually are doing Weird Stuff to the DNA that gets sent in.
Going further and checking out https://www.clearhealth.coach/ClearTUNE.html, the latter does seem to be the case: they've apparently come up with the idea that DNA is "quantum-entangled" and that when you send your DNA swab off to their lab, exposing that DNA swab to frequency (how?) transmits supposed benefits back to you via a "quantum link".
Congratulations, you giant acorns, you've just provided all the raw material to enable some unfortunate numpty with us-vs-them syndrome to come along and "discover" the conspiracy of But What Are All The Other Testing Companies Doing To DNA They Might Be Transmitting Harmful Frequencies Making People Stupid???
Please stay a niche. Please stay a niche. Oh, good, it's $500, hopefully that prevents it from scaling.
*Headdesk*
The unhinged/unbounded nature of the way this has been presented sadly only serves to weaponize the impact of any reactive conspiracy theories: the claims this makes about purported benefits (there's a list just above the price section, which includes such humdingers as "EMF protection", "essential nutrition", "GMO detox", and "injury regeneration", along quite a few more) are entirely vacuous and without substance (understandable and par the course) - but if you flip this sort of non-closed-ended mindset around in a what-if setting, no amount of substantiation and concrete data will fill the sort of false information vacuum (for want of a better way to put it) that gets created.
(On a side note, it's curious how everything in the aforementioned list fits reasonably comfortably into "can be influenced by the placebo effect". The bit about "Covid Care" neatly sidesteps claiming significant effect too. Really gives me the impression this was definitely sniff-tested by a lawyer or two - whoops, there go several bits of plausible deniability out the window...)
Poking around the little web of shell^Winterconnected organizations this setup has cobbled together, I noticed:
- MLM identified at https://www.clearcellular.org/ - down the bottom, "reward yourself": "...a robust rewards program for those who refer their friends and family."
- The little "made in china" stock image at the bottom of https://clearfoundation.co.nz/ is cute
- They really do appear to have registered co.com to get clear.co.com, but despite co.com having an A record the IP times out, nice
- After drowning in the word "decentralized" everywhere on all the cryptocurrency fluff, https://clearfoundation.co.nz/webwallet obtusely notes front-and-center that "This password encrypts your private key. This does not act as a seed to generate your keys." ...k
- While poking around https://www.clear.co.com/clearcenter I was curious about the VM offeri--oh it was shut down. Why is it the 2nd callout?
- Clicking around between different websites I cannot straightforwardly figure out what any of them do. Yes there are PDFs and value propositions and case studies and interconnections but there's so much information it's overwhelming and I cannot see straight. Oh. That's the strategy. Wait where did all my money go??? ...What business overheads? Consulting? Consulting for what? What have I actually gotten out of this?
I was wondering if HPE even realized what they were associating with. I now wouldn't be surprised if they don't realize themselves.
They didn't register co.com; someone else did and is running it as a "domain registry". That's a whole scam of its own, if you ask me. https://registry.co.com/
> - While poking around https://www.clear.co.com/clearcenter I was curious about the VM offeri--oh it was shut down. Why is it the 2nd callout?
It only gets weirder the more you look. ClearGlass (next icon over) is some pretty wild cloud technobabble (it's described simultaneously as a "secure and scalable hybrid Blockchain platform" and a "single dashboard to manage multi-cloud infrastructure"), and the ClearShare website (which looks like a rebranded FileCoin, or something similar) links to a PDF describing a battery-powered generator called "ClearPOWER".
A lot of the web sites look like they were made from templates. Some of them even still have Lorem Ipsum text on them.
It's not a stretch to say that the whole Blockchain industry IS MLM.
Surely I can't be the only one who finds it incredibly frustrating to see how many people think being republican associated is noteworthy when in the context of scary privacy violations. It would seem to me you're just encouraging republicans to buy this phone. Surely, the privacy conscious people in this community want privacy for everyone regardless of political affiliations, right?
I don't see anyone in this thread doing this.
As of this writing, no comments exist that match that description. One comment mentions that it's a phone marketed at conservatives, but does not describe that association as embarassing.
If you take making fun of the phone and the people dumb/gullible enough to buy the phone, “encouraging republicans to buy this phone,” well, I don’t know what to tell you. If someone is so full of spite for the evil leftists that they’ll run to anything some of those users make fun of, that’s on them.
But no one thus far has encouraged anyone to buy this piece of shit product.
And I think there's a legitimate use-case for people who feel that their favorite social networks are censored. Doesn't matter if the apps are full of garbage, that is what they want.
When a bunch of the comments are about how stupid the target demographic is, when there's tons of interesting technical meat to talk about, it's kind of embarrassing.
There is nothing technically interesting to talk about - its litterally big tech tech with an eagle, fighter jet and amaerican flag skinned on it.
> Surely I can't be the only one who finds it incredibly frustrating to see how many people think being republican associated is noteworthy when in the context of scary privacy violations. It would seem to me you're just encouraging republicans to buy this phone. Surely, the privacy conscious people in this community want privacy for everyone regardless of political affiliations, right?
It's frustrating when people unnecessarily politicize things— like when they express righteous indignation over their inaccurate accusation of political discrimination in a thread that's literally just pointing out its association with divisive partisan political groups.
I think a phone associated with a specific political party is noteworthy.
I think the point of the conversation is that this is a bad privacy product that is being heavily marketed towards (technically) unsophisticated people who subscribe to a specific brand of politics. Those two facts aren't unrelated. In other words: conservatives are the intended victim here, not the butt of anyone's joke.
it's being marketed towards gullible people, period.
as a conservative programmer, I saw the ad and laughed.
it was called out by people in conservative online communities as well.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that if there was some company doing the inverse of this -- marketing to the segment of the far left that believes tech companies are, if not explicitly conservative, explicitly uber-capitalist and willing to pander to conservatives at every turn to prove how "centrist" they are[1] -- and was doing the same thing that the FreedomPhone is, then the discussion on HN would be pretty similar: we'd be going, "Hey, this looks like it's basically a rebranded phone with dubious software that's being marketed to people with a political chip on their shoulder." The flavor of the chip isn't irrelevant, but it's not what's specifically curious and scammy about it.[2]
[1]: I am sure there are conservatives who are reading this and scoffing at the idea that leftists think social media companies are biased against them. All I can say is that I probably follow more leftists than you do, then, and you're gonna have to trust me on this one.
[2]: There is an interesting and weird history of marketing scams that specifically target conservatives, and evidence that there's more of that on the right than the left (although by no means is it exclusively right-leaning).
Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, etc., for better or worse really don’t represent a left or right ideology. They represent the mainstream. Now, you or I may find that mainstream too conservative or too progressive, but I do not believe that any of those platforms are ideologically driven one way or another (even Tumblr, where the userbase is historically younger and thus more leftist, banned porn (a distinctly anti-leftist move) and has historically had a much more laissez faire attitude towards banning users than many left-leaning people would like…). It’s important not to confuse the userbase that is most visible on a platform for the platform itself).
The Freedom Phone isn’t targeting run of the mill conservatives. Those users are just fine using their iPhone or Samsung. It’s targeting people who are zealots and convinced the world is against them. It’s targeting Q Anon believers (tho not exclusively) and people who think Fox News is too left of center. That’s why it’s a grift. It is targeting people who would rather adopt something that is a scam, just because it agrees with their idea that the system is rigged and everyone is against them.
As chipotle_coyote says, there are, for whatever reason, less scams aimed at leftists. I don’t think it’s b/c the group on the right is any less intelligent, but because the nature of this sort of culture tends to be that the left eats its own, so selling a specific grift to them is a lot harder.
As for whether Twitter, Tumblr and friends are canted to the left, here's why I'm doubtful of that. (Also doubtful of the inverse, to be clear.) It's fairly trivial to create a Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, etc., follow list which is curated to your favored sociopolitical bubbles -- that's basically going to happen if you use the sites as designed. The more you interact with those bubbles (e.g., what you like and what you retweet/reblog), the more focused they become.
Okay, so, that's all probably pretty obvious, but here's the thing. Once you're in your favorite bubbles, the problems you see on, say, Twitter are going to be the problems that bubble experiences. If most of the people you follow are deeply invested, either directly or indirectly, with far right activism, you're going to see and hear about far right activists that Twitter has flagged or suspended or banned. If most of the people you follow are deeply invested, either directly or indirectly, with LGBTQ activism, you're going to see and hear about LGBTQ activists that Twitter has flagged or suspended or banned. But those two streams are very, very rarely going to cross. And that makes it very easy to think it's your particular in-group that's bearing the brunt of Twitter's evil machinations.
No capitalist would steal the surplus labor value of the workers involved in making the phone.
It would be hard to get the entire supply chain to fit this model without first creating an organization like Mondragon. [1]
This is different. The Freedom Phone is another cash grab against some of the most vulnerable people in my country. Their susceptibility to manipulation has been laid bare and the wolves of the world have picked them over again and again. This is targeting marketing it is most cynical conclusions. The formula is well known: Push a high margin product and service to an addressable group. Speak to their fears and with their in-group language. Tell them exactly what they want to hear and make them scared to death to do anything but buy it. It matters not what substance is behind the product. In fact, in schemes like these, actually delivering real value is antithetical to the point: to become rich, by way of filth.
I’m not politically aligned with the group that is being targeted for The Freedom Phone. In fact, they as a group have repeatedly gone out of their way to hurt people that I care about. That said, they are people just like me and don’t deserve to be defrauded. This post did an excellent job of demonstrating how they are being lied to and that makes me mad as hell.
Based on the way they treat security and compliance from what we can see on the front end, I shudder to think what it is like on the backend. Unencrypted PII+payment methods, sloppy secrets, resale and abuse of customer data are all on the table, possibly more. The thing about these kinds of schemes is that they are almost never sustainable. Technical, social, legal, and/or financial debt will eventually cause their implosion. It’s just a matter of how many people they screw over in the process.
I’m going to spend part of my Easter Sunday sending this blog post and my thoughts to the FTC and some attorneys general. I would encourage you to do the same if you’re able and so inclined. Getting this in front of media is also valuable. Exploitation of this variety is cancerous and fully deserves to called out early and often.
I don't really have much to add other than saying thanks for being a good person.
When I was putting together my report I found some wild stuff. I had to share this gem from their terms:
>The relationship between Federal and State Agencies, the privacy of records, and non-participation in [medical insurance]: In addition, I understand that, since the Association is protected by the 1st, 7th, 9th, and 14th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, it is outside the [jurisdiction and authority of Federal and State Agencies and Authorities] concerning any and all complaints or grievances against the Association, and Trustee(s), members or other staff persons. All rights of complaints or grievances shall only be settled by an internal Association Committee. Therefore, for the benefit of the association and its members, I agree not to seek any remedy for relief in the [Public Domain]. I agree that my violation of any part of this membership contract would result in a [no contest legal proceeding] against me. The privacy and security of membership records maintained within the Association, which have been held to be inviolate by the U.S. Supreme Court, the undersigned member waives [HIPAA, ADA, FDA, FTC privacy rights and complaint process].
https://www.clear.software/pages/clear-companies-private-mem...
Grifters have found an easy target in leveraging outrage & persecution fetish, and for all their bluster - their privacy & security practices are typically laughable at best.
I am concerned when privacy and freedom have somehow turned into a right wing signal.
"Pre-Loaded Apps Some of the most popular banned & unbanned conservative sites & apps. Come pre-loaded directly on your Freedom phone."
It's basically "Conservative Phone"
He also says "we don't ban apps, period", and the website even calls it "truly uncensorable" – I wonder how that works, but there's no technical details. I also wonder how they'll deal with spam, scams, malware, and other stuff of, ehm, questionable value that will inevitably pop up.
I couldn't find much of this "truly uncensorable" app store on the Freedom Phone website, other than the name "ClearAPPS", so I assume it belongs to ClearOS. The ClearOS website is anything but clear though; even the corporate maze sites of HP, IBM, Lenovo, etc. are more clear than that ... thing. I eventually found https://www.clearos.app, and I assume that must be it(?) I installed it on Android Emulator, and it's installed as "ClearAPPS", so I guess so.
The thing bills itself as "The Marketplace Built On the security of Decentralized Storage", whatever that may mean. If I press "News" on the app's homepage there are exactly four apps: "Fox News", "Fox Nation: Celebrate America", "America's Voice", and "Just The News". Actually, that's not true: if I select an app and go back I have 8 apps: the app list gets duplicated. If I select "Categories" and go to "News" I see much more. As will surprise probably no one, the entire thing is a buggy piece of crap.
When you first start their app it downloads the repository list from their servers; this must be the "truly uncensorable decentralized storage" they're talking about shrug. I couldn't find any clear Terms of Service for this entire thing in either the app or on the website.
Source isn't available either as near as I can find; ClearOS has a GitHub, but last update is from 2019.
[1]: https://www.clear.software/pages/marketplace-terms-of-servic...
Is this guy a Libertechian?
Did they just take a screenshot from an unactivated Windows machine?
This whole project is a joke.
I honestly don't know what to do with this information. Is this an intentional message? It's extremely overt.
Or was it the credentials of "I bought $12 of Bitcoin when I was young and it increased in value" that didn't sell you?
It seems like a slam dunk from over here, so I'm confused as to what you didn't find convincing....
I wrote a messaging app based on one-time pad encryption but ended up not using it due to poor-quality random numbers available to me (you can buy external random devices but I don't trust any vendor).
Always remember Leidner's First Law: "Security is an illusion."
The problem has nothing to do with taking a "since you can't trust any company" approach is you avoid the reality of the situation -- which is that certain companies index lower than others.
The company making this phone seems a little dubious.