My phone is my fortress

Will Librem 5 be banned in Russia - the first in the world absolutely open to the user and protected from surveillance of a smartphone?

The Librem 5 smartphone did not appear at the beginning of the year. Sorry, I was waiting for him.

The idea of ​​a safe, protected and completely belonging to the user of a smartphone arose with Purism two years ago. The company did not look for an investor, and it is hardly possible to find an investor for a project that contradicts the market and undermines the market. An announcement of fundraising was posted on Kickstarter. It was necessary to collect one and a half million dollars, raised $ 2,677,609. The development has begun.

Safe, convenient, protected - everything is clear with this. But belonging to the user? But are the smartphones that we use do not belong to us?

No, they do not belong to us, they belong to companies that have created and use them for their own purposes. Our possession of a smartphone is a fiction.

Having paid our money for a smartphone on Android or iOS, we do not get a thing at our full disposal. We do not receive the rights of the administrator and access to the Root, that is, to the system section. And it is there that the main possibilities are hidden.

The 2019 sample smartphone, a luxurious thing with a shining soft display, with buttons, icons and pictures, all glossy, like caramel, is actually a frank rudeness packed in a beautiful wrapper. In it, the programs that you cannot delete. These programs are whispering in your pocket, they openly follow you, report you and your actions where necessary, on an ongoing basis, they are threatening your contacts from an address book, listening to you, reading your SMS and doing many more similar things. That is, in your pocket you have a whisper, crawl and live their lives all the time. And you always carry a ball of reptiles with you.

You can’t even transfer the applications to the memory card, the manufacturer did not give you such an opportunity in your smartphone. And what if the memory is filled? Buy a new smartphone, it has even more candy wrappers and bows, and it will be even better to follow you.

Purism, the bald and bearded American Todd Weaver founded in 2014. Fine is not known about the Weaver - only the fact that he, looking at his daughter, thought about the world in which she has to live. This is not surprising for a person who decided to help people slip away from the web of universal political, commercial and some other non -inflated and quiet surveillance. Purism is known about Purism: over the four years of its existence, it has released several laptops working on a specially created free Pureos and give the user the possibility of physical disabling everything that is fraught with surveillance.

At the same time, the company's engineers climbed into such depths and jungle of computer iron, where no one was there except the Intel processors.

It was Purism that managed to disable the Intel Me mechanism in her laptops, something like the black box not controlled by the user. This was considered impossible, but they did. This approach - the user's full control over his thing and no secret bookmarks, probes, ears and eyes - was also based on the librem 5 smartphone.

Librem 5 is a smartphone returning to the user that it belongs to him by right, but that the state and business were taken from him with deceit and cunning. Once the naive natives of the New World gave the earth for beads and rings, today the equally naive natives of the digital world give personal information for cartoons and toys.

But what is personal information? This is not only your name, surname, address, postal address, income, payments, contacts, contacts, these are also your conversations, your correspondence, your photos, your videos that you shot only for your wife, your delicate words that you came up with only your children, your thoughts, which you recorded only for yourself, your purchases and trips, your routes on the Internet, which you are naive to naively, that no one knows that they are naively, that there are no nobody. But which are traced and recorded by offices with incomprehensible names.

Your personal information is your life in its entirety. And all this was taken from you, and you are facing the naked in front of a comrade major, and all your thoughts, desires and representations are known to the analysts of corporations who have grown together with the state in a double -headed monster, grazing and burning herd of people.

You can-if you are quite tempted in high-tech-to hack your smartphone yourself and get access to Root, manually cut down the tracking programs, block the trackers, chop the ears listening to you, throw it out of the phone and replace it with a clean, pumped from F-Droid, which contains only free and open programs. You can, if you can, but you have to spend many hours and days on this. And you will have to wage this struggle constantly, by hand, with artisanal means. Librem 5, created by engineers in San Francisco and programmers working in 15 countries, should free you from this exhausting struggle and give you a ready-made solution.

Librem 5, by default, includes all types of protection: protection against trackers, from surveillance, protection of your personal life, protection from all encroachments to trade information about you.

The smartphone works on PureOS, which has been auditing the Free Software Fund, which guarantees the absence of bookmarks in it. All communication on the Internet goes through Matrix - a decentralized, open and free protocol for communication on the network. You and his services, however, can use it without Librem 5.

And here, too, like in laptops, Purism engineers climb deep into iron, at such depths that we do not suspect about, pressing the cute icons, buttons and dials to our naive heart. We do not suspect what kind of intricate life and work is in the finest, flat, weighing 100 grams of device, equipped with a multi -core processor, two cameras, speakers, a gyroscope, a lill sensor, a lighting sensor, a GNSS sensor and several temperature sensors that constantly measure the temperature inside this working miracle. A few decades ago, in order to fit all this in one building, it would take something like a dog booth or even a house for a family of three, and today all this fits in your palm. But what is happening inside, what the processor nuclei say, what retains the memory, that one chip is whispering another and why, damn it, all this difficulty should constantly monitor you and drain your whole life of commercial and political gebn?

All this complexity is so complicated that some components do not even have names in Russian. About the processor called CPU, everything is clear to everyone. But you also have a certain BaseBand in your smartphone, and you don't even know about it. And this is a tiny computer, a computer in a computer that has its own memory and its own OS. This same BaseBand is responsible for radio communications and for contact with the network of a mobile operator, and possibly also for the connection of the phone in your pocket with a special room in the skyscraper of the manufacturer, where people who are able to enter your phone when they want.

We don't know. This is the secret part of the smartphone that lives its own life, even when you turned off the smartphone. What is she doing then, who is connected to, who sends what signals? Librem 5 has a unique opportunity, which is not in any smartphone of all thousands of models present in the market: you can disable this one for whom and who working BaseBand.

And not only. In Librem 5, you can, when you want, physically turn off cameras, microphones, wi-fi and bluetooth adapters. What will you do then, Comrade Major? It is clear what: Forbid the import of Librem 5 to Russia.

Because such a smartphone, if it gets into Russia in sufficient quantities, is able to break the universal surveillance system created by the FSB.

Librem 5, a pure creature, is almost ready to argue in our polluted surveillance, corruption and meanness of a thief world, is strangely correlated with Russia that goes into darkness and delirium archaic. He is all-the triumph of High-Tex, and here the police arrest a bunch of balloons, because he considers his brick brain that this is an unresolved aircraft.

But so far it is not. Purism promised that Librem 5 would release on sale at the beginning of this year. It didn't work out. At first, the developers changed the processor to a stronger one, and now they debug stable work on a new processor. Today there is a prototype, preliminary order and price $ 649. In the third quarter of this year, Librem 5 should appear.