alt Hacker NewsYou can't have that with phones. You are always at the mercy of the hardware supplier and their trusted boot chain that starts with the actual phone processor (the one running GSM stuff, not user interface stuff). That one is always locked down and decides to boot you fancy android stuff.
The fact that it's locked down and remotely killable is a feature that people pay for and regulators enforce from their side too.
At the very best, the supplier plays nice and allows you to run your own applications, remove whatever crap they preinstalled and change to font face. If you are really lucky, you can choose to run practically useless linux distribution instead of practically useful linux distribution with their blessing. Blessing is a transient thing that can be revoked any time.
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> You can't have that with phones.
Why not?
Obviously we don't have that. But what stops an open firmware (or even open hardware) GSM modem being built?
The GSM processor is often a separate chip. You may have read an article about the super spooky NSA backdoor processor that really controls your phone, but it's just a GSM processor. Connecting via PCIe may allow it to compromise the application processor if compromised itself, but so can a broadcom WiFi chip.
Of course you can have that.
The governments can ban this feature and ban companies from selling devices with that.
Not true on the pinephone, the modem is a peripheral module, so the boot chain does not start with it.