FreeCalypso on Mot C139 back on the agenda

[Das Signal]

Hi all,

I believe David might be thinking of the fact that any phone needs
to perform regular location updates with the network in order to
receive phone calls, SMS and so forth. Therefore the network knows
which base station the phone last connected to and thus gains
knowledge of the user's whereabouts and travels, which could be more
or less detailed depending on the density of GSM cells. Not turning
the phone on, or leaving it in airplane mode, would be one way to
mitigation this privacy issue. Alternatively, the phone could sleep
for several hours at a time, and decide to way up to check on new
SMS. In this way the network has less information about the user's
travel history.

--DS

On Sun, May 10, 2020 at 05:12:45PM -0800, Mychaela Falconia wrote:
> Hi David,
> 
> > For me there is an elephant in this room.
> > [...]
> > the end result is still a spy in the user's pocket.
> 
> I fundamentally disagree.  Please explain how a GSM phone whose
> operation is controlled 100% by you is a spy in your pocket.  The only
> thing that outsiders can determine is your location when your phone is
> transmitting, based on the laws of physics - but when the phone
> firmware is controlled by you (or even with proprietary phones that
> are old enough to have no FOTA backdoors), there is absolutely no way
> for any outside attacker to surreptitiously turn on your microphone or
> anything along those lines.
> 
> > Under current conditions I no longer carry any sort of phone with me
> > when I leave the house
> 
> When you leave your house?  How are you able to do that in the first
> place, and how often?  I mean, I can *physically* leave my apartment
> because thankfully we don't have police cordons in the streets yet to
> enforce those tyrannical stay-at-home orders, but where would I go
> when absolutely all interesting places are closed?
> 
> Because I expect this lockdown to continue for longer than the very
> little remaining lifespan I have left, I suppose that from a purely
> practical standpoint, I don't really need a cellphone either - when
> GSM/2G gets shut down in USA, I will just have to use my plain old
> land line phone which I thankfully still have.  Obviously a land line
> phone only works when I am at home, but where else can I be under
> these current conditions?  My day job converted to 100% work-from-home
> like everyone else under govt orders, and not being reachable by phone
> during that once every couple of days 30 min trip to the grocery store
> isn't a very big deal.
> 
> But I still use my GSM phone every day just to make a point: my
> significant other and I talk on our phones every day to coordinate our
> comings and goings (mostly her comings and goings between my place and
> her other place), my S.O.'s phone is also GSM/2G, and unlike me she
> has a big extended family, so she gets a lot of calls and texts - so
> between the two of us we do generate a fair amount of traffic on the
> local 2G network, which to me is the whole point.
> 
> In any case, my core values in life are as follows:
> 
> 1) To *not* use any 3G or newer cellular phone under any circumstances.
> If we as a community can ever convince TI (has to be TI, not any other
> chip vendor) to release their abandoned 3G solution, then 3G would
> become acceptable to me, and I would revise my personal prohibition to
> not allowing 4G or newer - but until then, I won't use 3G either.
> 
> 2) To *not* ever-ever-ever use any kind of Android or iOS smartphone,
> not under any circumstances ever, no matter what radio it has, even if
> someone were to somehow produce a model with a 2G-only radio.
> 
> 3) To use a GSM/2G dumbphone as much as possible, and at this point
> *any* GSM/2G dumbphone is acceptable: a FreeCalypso phone is still the
> dream goal, but even proprietary GSM/2G dumbphones are acceptable as
> long as they are old enough to predate the introduction of truly
> offensive malfeatures like FOTA - and almost all GSM/2G dumbphones are
> old enough to predate that shit.
> 
> > I don't have the sort of development skills your project needs
> 
> I am not asking you or anyone else to do any development work, and
> given the development hardware situation (my inability to provide a
> Luna development kit to anyone other than me and Das Signal), it would
> not be reasonable for me to ask anyone else to be a developer.
> 
> > so I'd only be a tester and very occasional user.
> 
> Users are always appreciated, but I am concerned about the "very
> occasional" part - what the project really needs is users who would be
> willing to use FreeCalypso as their main personal phone and to generate
> heavy traffic on their local GSM/2G networks.
> 
> In any case, I think I made myself clear enough - *as of right now*,
> right this moment, I do have the motivation to produce FreeCalypso Lite
> firmware for C139 that will hopefully be practically usable unlike
> previous versions, albeit still extremely minimal, using my Luna
> development platform to make the code changes in such a way that won't
> break the other "big color" version.  But I have no way of predicting
> if this motivation will still be there next month, or if it will
> dissipate again.  In order to make this venture more of a sure thing,
> I would need a much greater level of emotional support than I am
> getting so far.
> 
> Right now I am waiting till May 13 when I can place the order with my
> PCB fab to produce one more piece of hardware (a keypad add-on for my
> Luna platform), and then I will need to wait for that PCB to be
> delivered - the last one (Luna LCD board) took almost a month from
> order to arrival, with the last two weeks spent in shipping from China
> to my mailbox in California, shipping which previously took 2-3 days.
> While I am waiting for this keypad PCB to arrive, I will try my hand
> at fixing a couple of bugs which should be fixable in the current
> Magnetite environment on current Luna hardware, using fc-shell to feed
> simulated keystrokes to the fw in the absence of a physical keypad.
> 
> Hasta la Victoria, Siempre,
> Mychaela aka The Mother
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