Remove microphone, camera, gps module, install PGP and sell of to drug cartels… I can’t believe anyone involved in organized crime would use a phone with a blackbox baseband. All those countermeasures won’t help if you have a black box with direct RAM access to the device.
I figure they’d use disposable, unencrypted phones and radios for the same reason Id never do in-country business with them in the first place. Even if I had no morals. Id have to be anonymous even from people they might bribe for info. These folks are simply too rich, violent, and crazy to try to work with.
An unscrupulous me would probably stick with the Wall St types, the “married but on Tinder” segment, escorts, Alex Jones’ followers, and other shady markets for privacy tech that are still pretty safe. ;)
I don’t really know if that’s true about it being clickbait. The allegedly is because they have been arrested for that but they haven’t been convicted so ostensibly the Feds still have to prove criminal conspiracy. If you read the article the RCMP and Feds ran a sting in which they were specifically marketed the phone for use in drug activities by the company.
I think there’s probably a more interesting/in depth article on the company from a privacy perspective, but I still don’t think it’s spam (though that’s much more subjective). If the article went into greater depth about the privacy concerns and what this means for other privacy focused hardware manufacturers I think it would be more solidly lobste.rs worthy.
Remove microphone, camera, gps module, install PGP and sell of to drug cartels… I can’t believe anyone involved in organized crime would use a phone with a blackbox baseband. All those countermeasures won’t help if you have a black box with direct RAM access to the device.
OTOH are there any open usable basebands?
Maybe not, but you could try not giving one total DMA access. (This is why IOMMUs exist.)
IOMMUs barely exist on ARM.
I figure they’d use disposable, unencrypted phones and radios for the same reason Id never do in-country business with them in the first place. Even if I had no morals. Id have to be anonymous even from people they might bribe for info. These folks are simply too rich, violent, and crazy to try to work with.
An unscrupulous me would probably stick with the Wall St types, the “married but on Tinder” segment, escorts, Alex Jones’ followers, and other shady markets for privacy tech that are still pretty safe. ;)
This is news spam and clickbait. Title even says “allegedly”.
I don’t really know if that’s true about it being clickbait. The allegedly is because they have been arrested for that but they haven’t been convicted so ostensibly the Feds still have to prove criminal conspiracy. If you read the article the RCMP and Feds ran a sting in which they were specifically marketed the phone for use in drug activities by the company.
I think there’s probably a more interesting/in depth article on the company from a privacy perspective, but I still don’t think it’s spam (though that’s much more subjective). If the article went into greater depth about the privacy concerns and what this means for other privacy focused hardware manufacturers I think it would be more solidly lobste.rs worthy.