The Un-Smartphone

[freebeard]

Some of my objections to a pocketable personal surveillance device are answered -- a real bell ringer and a rotary dial.

New (LTE) Rotary Cell Phone

An Open Source kit, so it goes in DIY/How-to. I like the external antenna/stand.

[redpoint5]

Well, you might be the wise one realizing that convenience might be very inconvenient at times.

Yesterday my RDP session to a headless PC dropped while I was on it. I almost dismissed it as nothing except that both are hardwired to the same network switch. I checked the Security event logs and found about 2 failed login attempts per second from a handful of IPs using Admin and Administrator as the login. Something was trying to brute force my PC. I'm a dummy for having port-forwarded 3389 out of laziness.

My router occasionally locked up and had to be rebooted. Stranger yet, I could log into the webGUI, but couldn't change the login name or password. The dang thing accepted my password to log in but rejected the same one to change it. Factory reset and firmware upgrade time.

IP lookup didn't tell me who owned them, but they trace back to Germany, which might just be a proxy.

Now I'm getting serious about changing passwords and enforcing 2FA.

Then again, Man In the Middle attacks started with phone lines. Keeping secrets among people has been an issue going back to the whisper.

[freebeard]

No illusions about the pants-around-the-ankles nature of even having a device.

Did you look at the feature set? It has a USB-C port for charging and access all the features of the LTE modem. That sounds to me like tethering, IDK.

And there is a physical switch to disconnect the microphone!

[redpoint5]

We've got differing paranoia.

I'm less concerned about folks eavesdropping on all the brilliant things I say, and more concerned about German hackers (or are they Russian using a German proxy) trying to find exploits.

People these days are afraid of getting "doxed", as if that's a thing. You can find my address and phone number in the White Pages, the original dox document.

Call me xenophobic, homophobic, racist, sexist and massageanist (see what I did there) on social media if you want. I have contempt for big corporate social censorship platforms anyhow.

Then again, I don't have high value state secrets. Knowing everything I think would just be enlightening.

[jakobnev]

I see this more as a solution to addiction to time-wasting apps, than to spying.

[Piotrsko]

Not sure it's spy proof other than the spy-able features are limited because of limited software. The modem is hackable, I am not sure about the security of the OS and wonder about upgrades and bug fixing. Definitely won't work on google fi network I use.

Spins the dial way too fast for me but does look like one could strap it to a linear bi-directional amp for way out in the boonies useage, along with yagi antennas.

[freebeard]

jakobnev gets it.

I think I like it becasue it instantiates this:


thenextweb.com/news/what-would-an-apple-smartphone-have-looked-like-in-1984

But it adds the gold or silver bell and the antenna/stand.