Thread: Neo900 - finally a successor of N900
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joerg_rw is offline joerg_rw
2013-12-14 , 16:42
Posts: 2,222 | Thanked: 12,651 times | Joined on Mar 2010 @ SOL 3
#1489
Originally Posted by wicket View Post
I would be interested to know what the FSF thinks of these differences. FSF approval could boost this project and I think it would be a good idea to work together with them. Saying that your concept for user privacy is better than the FSF's won't do you any favours in getting FSF approval. Remember that user privacy is one of their main goals too.

With regards to modifiable modem firmware, I agree with you that the user should have control and be able to upgrade it. Given the nature of closed firmware, it would be difficult to tell if there is anything in there already that would allow an OTA update by an external source. Perhaps we could have a daemon or cron job that periodically reads firmware ROM to check to see if it has been modified.
So what's the question? You answered it yourself. And actually there IS NO hardware concept to have a modem with firmware that's not modifiable, the chip manufacturers won't use fuse ROM to store their firmware, and as soon as it's flash it CAN get modified. And you can't make sure that what you "read out from ROM" is the actual content and not some fake that the malware delivers to you. Regarding FSF approval: we are not interested in getting THAT approval, we take pride in our own concept being better than what FSF defines. The idea of immutable firmware is based on a flawed concept, it doesn't help for anything.
Last edited by joerg_rw; 2013-12-14 at 16:49.
 

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