I’m honestly okay with binary blobs as long as I can be relatively sure they’re not doing anything nefarious.
It’s a complicated issue. Almost all proprietary firmware today is proprietary because it contains encryption keys.
Video drivers for instance… they won’t be fully libre until HDCP is removed, because they gotta hide their keys for DRM to work.
I don’t want DRM, so I’m still staunchly anti-blob… but…
Since drinking the OpenBSD Kool Aid, I’m a less zealotous about it. I’d rather have libre userland that allows me to initialize a device with firmware, regardless of it’s license, than hardware that puts the same firmware on a physical chip and is entirely useless to a libre userland.
That said…
Anything capable of broadcasting to other networks concerns me. When it comes to phones, proprietary basebands are scary as hell. Now that the options exist, hardware killswitches for basebands are now mandatory for me on any device I own. Hardware killswitches + libre firmware is the goal.
Yeah, I see where that’s coming from, but I think the thing that makes it okay to me is that I’m not sending anything over a network that I’d be worried if someone else saw.
I know this is the “nothing to hide” fallacy and isn’t the point, but it’s my reasoning. I never said my reasoning was without flaw.
For me, it’s not so much a matter of being tracked. You’re tracked when you use a phone - period. The E911 system in the US pretty effectively mandates that.
It’s about control. When I tell my computer to do something and it doesn’t, it’s broken. When I tell it do stop doing something and it still does, it’s broken. I’m willing to accept bugs in software, but not lies.
I want to maybe offer another side to this discussion.
While it’s fine to talk about openness or privacy of the platform itself, i’m in the camp of “I want to tinker with my phone”. Early Android allowed that. We rooted our phones, made custom roms and i even spend some time making my own kernel for the HTC Desire.
With new smartphones, the capability to do this is getting taken away from us. Manufacturers lock their phones down more and more.
For me, the pinephone (and the librem 5 for that matter) promise a hardware platform i can just buy that allows me to get back into actually playing with the core of my experience. That’s also why i choose Linux over WIndows where possible. Not because it’s strictly better, but because it doesn’t limit me in how i want to break it.
A discussion about manufacturing standards, binary blobs and security/privacy is certainly a good thing. But we also need to recognize movement in the right direction and support that, even if it might not be 100% there yet.
any idea of the pixel layout (i didn’t look ) 720p is ok for full rgb layout, but most phone use some kind of green doubling, dividing the real pixel count by 2 …
It comes and goes the note 2 was 720p full RGB subpixel, the note 3 is 1080p pentile and I prefer the Note 2s screen more.
Though yes Samsung OLED are commonly and more often than not, pentile. And for.OLED samsung are the main provider to almost everyone. There is some sense to it but I am not a big fan, depends how well it is done, some times you see it others you don’t. And anything 1080p or above it should never be an issue really.
I want to buy Fairphone because what you said is a thing that actually happens and exist. But they do not deliver to my tiny corner of the world. Pricing-wise is also in the hard-to-swallow range.
Yeah I’m doing my best to support the “China-alternative” countries like South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and other production areas in the Southeast Asia (although I am more wary of this region). Maybe wife and I should put a more concious effort to choosing where our devices are manufactured.
EDIT: With that I am beginning to conclude that Samsung, LG (Both South Korea), and Sony (Japan) as well as Asus and Gigabyte (Taiwan) are the ones freedom respecting (or realistically speaking, US-Allied) and avoid the big Nopes (Huawei and ZTE).
) 720p is ok for full rgb layout, but most phone use some kind of green doubling, dividing the real pixel count by 2 …