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Hardware

The Strange Tale of the Freedom Phone (nytimes.com) 171

A 22-year-old Bitcoin millionaire wants Republicans to ditch their iPhones for a low-end handset that he hopes to turn into a political tool. From a report: It was a pitch tuned for a politically polarized audience. Erik Finman, a 22-year-old who called himself the world's youngest Bitcoin millionaire, posted a video on Twitter for a new kind of smartphone that he said would liberate Americans from their "Big Tech overlords." His splashy video, posted in July, had stirring music, American flags and references to former Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Donald J. Trump. Conservative pundits hawked Mr. Finman's Freedom Phone, and his video amassed 1.8 million views. Mr. Finman soon had thousands of orders for the $500 device. Then came the hard part: Building and delivering the phones. First, he received bad early reviews for a plan to simply put his software on a cheap Chinese phone. And then there was the unglamorous work of shipping phones, hiring customer-service agents, collecting sales taxes and dealing with regulators.

"I feel like practically I was prepared for anything," he said in a recent interview. "But I guess it's kind of like how you hope for world peace, in the sense you don't think it's going to happen." For even the most lavishly funded start-ups, it is hard to compete with tech industry giants that have a death grip on their markets and are valued in the trillions of dollars. Mr. Finman was part of a growing right-wing tech industry taking on the challenge nonetheless, relying more on their conservative customers' distaste for Silicon Valley than expertise or experience. [...] To make a smartphone, however, he had to rely on Google. The company's Android software already works with millions of apps, and Google makes a free, open version of the software for developers to modify. So Mr. Finman hired engineers to strip it of any sign of Google and load it with apps from conservative social networks and news outlets. Then he uploaded the software on phones he bought from China. To unveil the phone, he recorded an infomercial in which he cast the tech companies as enemies of the American way. "Imagine if Mark Zuckerberg banned MLK or Abraham Lincoln," he said in the video. "The course of history would have been altered forever."

[...] Thousands of people bought the $500 phone. Others, including some conservatives, quickly panned the animated pitch. Quickly, news outlets reported that the Freedom Phone was based on a low-cost handset from Umidigi, a Chinese manufacturer that had used chips shown to be vulnerable to hacks. Mr. Finman, who marketed the device as "the best phone in the world," was on the defensive. In an interview in July, Mr. Finman admitted that Umidigi made the phone but still said he was "100 percent" sure it was more secure than the latest iPhone. Apple has tens of thousands of engineers. Mr. Finman said he employed 15 people in Utah and Idaho.

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The Strange Tale of the Freedom Phone

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  • by infostern ( 109289 ) on Tuesday September 07, 2021 @09:57AM (#61771715) Homepage

    Spoiler — he ended up reselling phones from ClearCellular (https://www.clearcellular.org).

    • by Brain-Fu ( 1274756 ) on Tuesday September 07, 2021 @10:05AM (#61771735) Homepage Journal

      If you want an actual "freedom phone," get a Linux-based Librem 5 [puri.sm]. No Android, no Ios, and hardware switches so you can make the phone go dark at will.

      You can even get a model that has the chips built in the USA, so no China either. But....you pay for it. That model is two grand.

      If you want something cheap, well, you will get what you pay for. Freedom requires sacrifice.

      • by HiThere ( 15173 )

        But does it have systemd? (And is that a positive or a negative?)

      • The harder someone tries to 'sell me' that 'their thing' is about privacy, or uses trigger-word laden promotional crap like "...a phone built on PureOS, a fully free, ethical and open-source operating system that is not based on Android or iOS..." the more and more I see a worm dangling from a hook, the barb just *barely* poking out behind it.

        Sorry, it's 2021.
        That shit's trying so very hard to CONVINCE me that it's locked-in safe, I have to basically assume it ships in boxes out of the NSA basement. There

      • by Dusanyu ( 675778 )
        or you could just take your current phone and install GrapheneOS https://grapheneos.org/ [grapheneos.org] or any other ungoggled android distro.
      • by CRB9000 ( 647092 )
        Keep pushing the vaporware.
    • ok.
      i guess horse de-worming supplies were getting low

    • And stop accepting submissions with paywalled articles.
  • by Inglix the Mad ( 576601 ) on Tuesday September 07, 2021 @10:02AM (#61771729)
    He seen his target audience, and knows they are mindless sheep to be fleeced.

    Now the question is if he'll be smart enough to buy a couple of endorsements to make sure the faithful throw money at him to buy a lower quality product at a higher price.
    • by fermion ( 181285 )
      He gives people what they want, belief they can be free of the perceived oppressors that allow cheap, reliable, and constant communication. He then blames these villains for his failure.

      In fact dealing with these corporation. are not hard. In 1982 the US said that any approved device can be plugged to the phone socket, creating innovation and affordable phone. Of course you can now buy a number of phones to connect to the wireless network, and even Sat phones. But as now, there were a bunch of junk phone

    • But I thought the people who used iPhones or the Expensive Android phones were the mindless sheep?

      Or perhaps people are a complex animal with a wide range of needs and desires, so they may choose to buy and use a different product for a various sets of reasons.

      However the GOP has been working on concentrating their base, around the Under educated working class, and also the Elderly and trying to keep them fired up, to vote for them in high numbers. Having such a captive base, is easy for a person off for a

      • by Moryath ( 553296 )

        But I thought the people who used iPhones or the Expensive Android phones were the mindless sheep?

        Keep in mind, the same people buying this "freedumb phone" are the ones snorting Sheep Dip rather than get a vaccination...

        • Keep in mind those where were buying iPhone, were also eating tide-pods a few years prior.

          The political party that you join by checking a box on a form, without any other sort or requirement or agreement to set of standards. Is not an effective correlation to ones intellect or lack of such.

          • There's only one political party trying to politicize the mundanity of cellphone vendor choice.

          • And the ones buying the "Freedom Phone" were likely skateboarding off of roofs and into a cheap inflatable kids' pool because "I am so going to be on Jackass DUDE!".

              Ho hum, whatever. Kids do stupid things. We hope when they grow up they stop doing stupid things.

          • by Moryath ( 553296 )
            If you choose to join a white-supremacist party full of sheepdip-snorting dumbfucks like the Republicans... expect to be made fun of for joining a party full of cousinfucking KKK hickbags.
            • I believe you are missing the point.
              Stupid crosses many boundaries, if you assume the stupid stuff that a few people do is representative of the whole, you too are being part of the problem causing such divisive polarization.

              You may actually be surprised while a particular demographic may be more likely to be doing this thing, they will probably be a fair number who are in your demographic that may do it as well.

    • He seen his target audience, and knows they are mindless sheep to be fleeced.

      We've learned the past 5 years that the USA is full of gullible idiots. If you tell them what they want to hear, they'll line up for more. Ignoring or skipping critical thinking and cross-checking is a badge of honor to them. I've been kicking around ideas to use their gullibility for my own profit. This team is an inspiration.

      And no, I don't feel guilty for bilking these morons. They are putting us at infection risk, climate risk

      • I admit I was kicking myself after the whole Harold Camping rapture nonsense because I didn't go and aquire the things people were giving away because "I won't need them anymore".

  • Grifters... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by neilo_1701D ( 2765337 ) on Tuesday September 07, 2021 @10:05AM (#61771739)

    Grifters seem to have coalesced around 45, arguably the biggest grifter of them all. This guy is no different. Get something cheap and made in China, surround it with flags and market it to people. The fact that it is a phone which may (or may not) be relaying confidential data to China makes this kinda funny.

    That he promotes this phone as freeing the buyers from the reliance on Big Tech, and replacing wig tech with himself, is tragic.

    • People who will vote for such an obvious fraud as TFG are obviously a market for all kinds of scams. How many have we seen? I don't have a count but we will see many more.

      My prior favorite was Fund the Border Wall but this one is actually better because it delivered pennies on the dollar.

  • If you only care about what you "believe" and facts don't matter, it's easy to sell people anything...

  • Librem 5? (Score:4, Informative)

    by aglider ( 2435074 ) on Tuesday September 07, 2021 @10:21AM (#61771797) Homepage

    Have you ever heard about it [puri.sm]?

    • by ewhac ( 5844 )
      Yup, heard about it.

      Unfortunately, while their hearts seem to be in the right place, the phone itself seems really quite awful, even at half the price. Anemic quad-core CPU, a paltry 3GiB RAM, cameras of unknown quality, and an unforgivably low-res 720p display. And for this they want USD$900.00.

      For that money, you could buy three refurbished Samsung Galaxy S10s and re-flash them with LineageOS.

      Their laptop [puri.sm], OTOH, is far more competetive.

  • ... with asian malware, ROM-loaded onto it by some factory in a chinese province.

    Can't wait 'till some cheeky US 10th grader hacks these en-masse and uploads republican hooker and pr0n contacts to the interwebs. :-)

    • by HiThere ( 15173 )

      Well, it would be very hard for a very small company to write its own phone OS. Even Linux hasn't been that successful, unless you count Android, which is really a very separate beast. And you *know* that Apple wouldn't let them tamper with the Apple OS. So of course it's Android.

  • Just goes to show (Score:4, Insightful)

    by aerogems ( 339274 ) on Tuesday September 07, 2021 @10:41AM (#61771899)

    If someone is dumb enough to buy it, someone is smart enough to make it.

  • ... building your own 4G/5G network. Because the existing operators are not likely going to allow 'unknown' devices* to operate on their systems.

    *Devices with baseband processors that they can't leverage the DMA into reading/writing anything they want on your phone.

  • by shess ( 31691 ) on Tuesday September 07, 2021 @11:49AM (#61772201) Homepage

    It's taken 15 years for smartphones to get where they are, plus development time before they were released. In that time millions of people have come together to evolve the hardware and software to fit a particular outcome. Some newb with no experience in the industry bungies in with a sales pitch for a concept phone, having no hardware or software in place, and ... it turns out to be hard? What? MUST BE THE MONOPOLIES!

    Gonna be honest, with the entire might of an Apple or Google behind you, this shit is hard. For his next trick, he should do something easier, like DYI appendectomy kits.

    [Though the flip from trying to actually build to instead just throwing a custom wallpaper and app store on someone else's phone is totally on point for these guys. Maybe it should come with a multivitamin subscription?]

  • People get worked up over X, dude comes in to profit by selling Y, people find out Y isn't all that it's cracked up to be.

  • I'm shocked! Shocked I tell you!

  • ... that your first impression spidey-sense should be yelling "Don't buy a used car from this dude"

  • Typical GOP response: we will win by any means necessary, even if it requires cheating or violating laws, and then once we're in power, we'll govern accordingly: poorly, using whatever means we have to direct profits to us, and punishments to the nation. Fuck those guys.

  • "Mr. Finman admitted that Umidigi made the phone but still said he was "100 percent" sure it was more secure than the latest iPhone. Apple has tens of thousands of engineers. Mr. Finman said he employed 15 people in Utah and Idaho."

    Because bigger always means better. I have no idea what sort of phone this guy is putting out but 15 midwesterners could undoubtedly produce a more secure phone than Apple. Even if they weren't midwesterners, Apple phones are compromised by design and automatically backup to a de
  • It is not a strange tale if you remember that P.T. Barnum called it (there's a sucker born every minute.) The audience is the same type of people who listens to the fucking pillow guy for political advise.

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