Re: Privacy Concerns with UbuntuPhone

On Fri, 25 Apr 2014 10:42:56 Alex wrote:
> Unfortunately, despite the current cell phone industry being based on
> proprietary basebands, is not safe from the types of risks I mention above
> anyway.  If they really want to, people can get or construct software
> controlled radios.  I know of several old 2g phones that have been reverse
> engineered, you can mod them to allow complete software control of the
> radio.  I'm sure the same is true of some 3g devices. I don't believe the
> companies have systems in place to deal with devices that don't play by
> the
> rules.  The consequence is that the whole system is very
> fragile.  Allowing
> open source and associated policing can only improve that situation.

While I mostly agree with what you suggest (in fact I particularly like the 
idea of cell networks that can fall back to some form of open source mesh 
networking when the cell towers drop out during emergencies) we're pretty much 
at the mercy of the phone companies who own the keys to the kingdom. 

More specifically they own the private keys that match the public keys they put 
in your sim cards, without which you can't access their networks. It's fairly 
easy for a carrier to refuse to bind sims to a particular range of IMEIs 
(phone's unique MAC addresses on the cell network) which would normally 
correspond to a particular phone manufacturer

	Paul

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