[Arm-netbook] 2 ideas

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

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crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68


On Sat, Jul 30, 2016 at 7:02 PM, Christopher Havel
<laserhawk64 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Almost all non-iPhone phones come with what I would argue as a pretty
> effective such 'kill switch' device -- a removable battery.

 that doesn't allow you to write messages or prepare responses or
access the calendar or anything else.

 the scenario that such a phone covers is one that was covered by Dr
Stallman at Hope2016: i attended his talk.  he explained that by
having a hard kill-switch on the radio part of the phone you can
prepare some communications using the device such that when *you* are
ready to move to a location where *you* feel comfortable sending and
receiving a pre-arranged batch of messages and calls, you may do so.

 this covers the scenario where you know from experience that there is
a high probability that your activities could result in death or
imprisonment for yourself or others.  under such circumstances you
want to ABSOLUTELY minimise the time spent online.  the actual sending
and receiving may only take seconds or minutes - you may not feel
comfortable being in the open even amongst a large crowd of people
doing that.  but if you have to SIT THERE writing the communications,
the chances of being arrested or murdered go up with every second
spent in one place.

 under such persecuted circumstances where terrorists are after you
(we don't call them "government authorities" - we call them by what
they are: individuals operating outside of all known ethical and
humanitarian frameworks, whose actions are DESIGNED to terrorise
others), a device on which you could write messages with the radio
switched off could actually save your life.


> Or am I seeing an insufficient number of daggers in the shadows...? I mean,
> I figure Google and the NSA already know me better than I do, and I don't
> really care, because I've nothing to hide and I don't feel like being afraid
> all the time. Oh -- and I think that "having nothing to hide" is a very good
> security policy.

 yeahh... i've heard this argument before.  then when mafia
organisations start to work out how to use the same backdoors, or the
police start to get bribes from criminals to allow access to the
database, or you just get people with access to the devices
downloading people's private pictures and having a laugh at them, or
start selling pictures of your children to child pornography groups,
or when you do the research and find that minority groups STOP TALKING
TO EACH OTHER even if they SUSPECT that their conversations could be
listened into and they could be killed or jailed for expressing their
opinion...

 so the bottom line is, chris, *you* don't have anything to hide...
*at the moment*.

l.