Blackphone - secure Android fork

Trojan wrote: »

First generation looks a bit rough but I can see this one improving rapidly as they learn more about putting a phone together, more software is developed, and they get real world user feedback.

Factory production hasn't started yet - the test models supplied to journalists to review didn't have LTE for example. Reports suggest that they have had a lot of pre-orders from sight unseen buyers, so one suspects that there will be a "Blackphone 2" to follow shortly.

It would be useful if they had their own app store, to enable developers to sell particularly security related apps. How they would keep the handiwork of the 50,000 odd NSAbots in Ft Meade, MD from infiltration of the system is another question, and which I suspect is a non-trivial task.

They could have come up with a better name than "Blackphone", as it suggests something sinister. There is nothing sinister about keeping Android app developers from capturing and collecting your personal data and selling it etc.

Tow wrote: »

Is this a rip-off of Boeing's Black Smartphone or are they one and the same?

http://www.boeing.com/boeing/defense-space/ic/black/index.page

They might have "ripped off" the word "black", and done some creative swiping with a few product ideas. One could think of a better brand name. The idea of an American secure phone (or any other software based device) is an oxymoron in my books.

While I am using Microsoft Windows to post this, I suspect there will be no shortage of replacement software/devices from organisations based in continental Europe or Asia in the not too distant future.

The US used to be the "land of the free" - now it is a police state, slowly expanding its grip elsewhere, like a frightening monster that kept growing, in a movie I saw when I was about five years old, back in the day. The more people that use high security features like encryption, the more it will be impossible for those who wish to conduct mass surveillance to get away with it. Of course one doesn't want bank robbers or whatever to benefit from the same technology. But the cost to society of a few extra bank robberies would be miniscule compared with nation states abusing personal privacy, journalism privacy, regulatory organisation privacy, political choice privacy etc. It would be back to the times of the Stazi when there was somebody on each street paid to observe and file reports on what individuals and doing, who their friends were, etc. Only now it is automated thanks to a bug in your pocket that follows you everywhere.