Thread: tracking and spying
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Hurrian is offline Hurrian
2012-12-18 , 22:22
Posts: 1,225 | Thanked: 1,905 times | Joined on Feb 2011 @ Quezon City, Philippines
#24
Originally Posted by norayr View Post
What do we know about Maemo/MeeGo? We know that both Fremantle and Harmattan contain non free software and free software.
Which parts are non-free? As far as I know this are GSM chip driver, GPS chip driver, GSM chip firmware. And as far as I know the same non-free software is used in Nemomobile hardware adaptations. So does this mean that we have the same security threats when using Nemo vs using Maemo?
So if we don't use free GSM firmware and drivers we don't know what can do carrier. And I wonder, what does this tablet mode, and this offline mode? What can do carrier when n900 is in tablet mode? Does it take the GSM chip to sleep mode? How GSM chip gets out of this mode? By signal from the board or by radio signal?
Can the carrier get stream from microphone when the tablet mode is used or when the phone is in offline mode?
The Fremantle list of closed source (and unreplaced) software is well-documented - the dialer UI, tklock (key lock daemon) and the browser UI.
Most of these have open replacements, actually I think the only large user-facing app that hasn't been replaced is the dialer UI (Not the dialer stack - it's exposed over the D-Bus CSD interface, so anyone can make an open dialer UI.)

As for the firmware that's non-free, practically all the blobs are. Camera firmware, bluetooth and WiFi firmware (WL1251 chip), GSM, GPS.

The SGX (GPU) driver is also closed. You can opt to use the OMAP framebuffer instead, however there is a performance penalty in doing so.

And the primary and secondary bootloader's closed (NOLO), but the secondary bootloader is possibly replaceable. IIRC Pali already tried running u-boot as secondary bootloader.

As for what the carrier can do in tablet mode (GSM radio off), they can't do jack. It's been verified that it is in fact turned off (by the OS), and cannot receive signals.

For Nemo, it communicates with the radios in exactly the same way. Except for the fact that there are less closed userland blobs. Over SSI, no shared memory, and definitely cannot execute binaries on the CPU (you can browse the Ofono code if you want to verify this)

IIRC, aside from the firmware, the only closed bits in Nemo is the SGX driver, without which performance would be more unusable than it already is.
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