How About Pine64?

Community Grants
1

I take the Arti project/grant as a successful example of ZOMG operation.

The Arti project was characterized as necessary to fill a a “missing piece” of the Zcash privacy story.

I think the community is widely in agreement with that perspective.

I wonder if there’re characteristics of that success we can learn from?

It’s been mentioned elsewhere that some folks’ concept of the ZOMG is as a body that allocates resources to established projects that generally already have the infrastructure necessary to handle reallocation to specific recipients (think Tor Foundation to Tor developers).

It seems to me that a trustworthy mobile device is a similar missing piece.

So superficially, the Pine64 organization seems to check many of the same boxes as the successful Arti project:

  • fills a missing piece
  • has an existing infrastructure
  • is concerned about User privacy (given that the PinePhone ships with hardware kill switches)

https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php?title=PinePhone

Have we (the ZOMG) considered reaching out to the Pine64 community? Are there competitors in that space that we might approach?

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2

When it comes to privacy and security, I think that GrapheneOS does the best job in the mobile space currently. They have upstreamed quite a bit back to AOSP, Linux kernel, LLVM, OpenBSD, etc. Linux phones seem to be quite weak when it comes to security, at least in their current state: Linux Phones | Madaidan's Insecurities since they lack verified boot, good sandboxing, OS hardening.

Pine64 is interesting, especially with the hardware and RISC-V work they’re doing, but I’m a bit worried around their reliance on China and Alibaba, especially with the recent “crackdown”/partial takeover of Alipay/Ant Group, and the chip provider, Allwinner, has been accused of violating GPL.

Edit
Just to add, to my knowledge, Google Pixel phones seem to the absolute best for security and privacy. They’re pretty much the only phones in the market that have a fully open-source operating system together with drivers, together with having verified boot that is compatible with third party operating systems. The secure enclave is proprietary though, and it would be great to have a 100% open hardware system, together with the kind of OS hardening that can be found in GrapheneOS; cellular modems will likely remain closed in the near future due to worldwide regulations, so there’s a big need for solid modem isolation. Expanding this to a dual boot cold storage wallet on a smartphone would be really cool, paired with a hardware switch, or LED indicator to turn off networking.

2 Likes