Anyone with experience buying them in smaller quantities?
A part of it is just how involved the manufacturing of those camera modules is. The sensor chips ships as bare silicon dies. They're precisely placed, glued and wire bonded to the substrate PCB, then adorned with a focus/OIS voice coil frame and a lens assembly. Absolutely nothing about this process is hobbyist friendly.
The other part is that corporations are incredibly stupid about how "valuable" their precious proprietary data is, and would rather jump into a volcano than give a sensor datasheet to someone who doesn't look like they have at least 20 lawyers employed and can take a MOQ of 100000 units. And how would one use a sensor without a datasheet, or a bring-up register sequence, or anything at all?
Vendor buying agreements and NDAs often prevent hobbyist-grade sensor boards from even existing. Especially for cutting edge high performance sensors, like the ones found in flagship smartphones.
You'd buy instead an "industrial/automation/automotive" sensor - one that has a fraction of the raw resolution, but maybe spots some other perks. Like a global shutter with no rolling shutter distortions, a "no RGGB Bayer" option that lets you set up your own filters and pick what wavelengths you care about, a package that's amenable to low volume manufacturing, longevity guarantees, availability in quantities of tens instead of tens of thousands, or actual documentation that you can get without 3-6 months of salesman and lawyer negotiations.
Or you'd buy a ready-made "scientific instrument" camera from someone else. Which probably has another "industrial" sensor - maybe worse, maybe better than one you could get directly, depending on how up to date the catalog is and how good of a working relationship does the instrument company have with the sensor vendors. And a price tag in 4-5 digits range. Then you would integrate that thing as a subsystem into whatever science hardware you wanted to make.
But if you truly want the "flagship smartphone" mix of small sensor size, low cost and high resolution? There are no good options! Clearly, the tech just hasn't advanced far enough for that!
Google has set the bar high with their security features.
It's now probably the most modern well-supported pmOS phone.
Some parts that stood out to me: > A phone camera is not a single device. On Qualcomm SoCs, the capture path is a chain: > The bus register base moved from 0xa00 to 0x1800, and encapsulating that offset shift accounted for most of the work. > It gated the AHB register bus used by the whole camera complex, including the CCI. Without it, register accesses silently returned zero. > With the wrong numbering, CSIPHY programmed a lane mask with lane 0 missing, and the PHY never locked. > This was the main bug. Frames arrived at the right rate and size, and buf_done fired, but every pixel was zero. [...] The data path delivered frame timing, but not pixel data. > Changing the register value from PLAIN64 (0xa) to 0x0 turned the all-zero frames into real images: the maximum pixel value was 255, the full colour-bar pattern appeared, and the violations stopped.
Sorry if not, but it seems like so much uses AI nowadays.
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Modern LLMs kick ass, but they aren't magic.
Fully vibe coding a driver for things more complex than, perhaps, a well documented CMOS sensor (that's a small part of what's covered in the article) is still a no-no.
But an LLM does wonders at emitting boilerplate, "vibe checking" your implementations, suggesting how to implement certain things, helping debug some of the things, etc. You can get the LLM to do a lot, but you still need a lot of understanding, and a lot of applied handholding.
For example this one:
https://mm.digikey.com/Volume0/opasdata/d220001/medias/docus...
It's not CMOS. It doesn't even have a digital interface. It has basically nothing in common with the kind of image sensors you'd find in a flagship smartphone, like Samsung ISOCELL. It's a very specialized device made for a very short list of uses, none of which are in consumer electronics.
Most sensors you'll see there are similar. Not all of them are as hideously exotic as the one you linked, but very few of them are the SKUs you'd find in a smartphone. The closest thing to a smartphone camera sensor would probably be STMicroelectronics VD56G3, which is similar to VD56G0 that Apple uses in iPhone FaceID. And even that is a specialized structured light NIR piece.
The contact data is real, but you'd have to at least look like a decent sized company to get anywhere with it.
I'm asking for details
I think the short answer of what they'd need to do in a practical way is to release a phone that uses one of the latest Qualcomm processors (those have the required hardware security features), make sure they have at least 5 years of driver support and commit to keeping the phone up to date, allow for relocking the bootloater (they might already do that). And I think that's basically it, the Graphene project would be able to take things from there.
Realistically given that they tend to source older/weaker processors for reasons related to their goals it's unlikely they would source a processor with the required security features for their next model, but that's just a guess.
I wish all smartphones were as easily repairable as Fairphone. The entire battery care stack would become unnecessary.
Fairphone hardware and software is developed/maintained by a Chinese ODM (T2Mobile).
They also do firmware updates very irregularly even though Qualcomm does monthly bulletins and Fairphone's firmware is known to be full of CVEs. They also have a bad history of updating Linux kernels, e.g. Fairphone 4 is on an ancient Linux kernel. Fairphones also miss modern security mitigation techniques like MTE.
To be fair, this applies to many Android phones outside Google Pixel and Samsung flagships.
Aside from that, repairability is nice, but the most common early failures on the Fairphone 6 seem to be broken volume buttons, for which Fairphone does not offer a replacement and an issue where the logic board dies during charging, which is also not user-replaceable.
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Ps. perhaps you could use substantive arguments the next time? E.g. which points of the GrapheneOS lists of requirements do you think are irrelevant and why are they irrelevant?
I don't have any insider info though, just speculating.
Since this post has a lot of terms in bold and enumerates filenames, yes, it seems at least ai-assisted.
Phones have literally never been open. Historically telecommunications has kept a tight, tight grip on everything, hardware and software included.
Even android, which is open source and based on Linux, cannot boot on any devices on earth without propriety blobs for the hardware. There is not UEFI or ACPI for phones, it doesn’t exist.
The entire history of IBM PCs and phones are just very different. This isn’t a Linux versus the rest thing. We already HAVE Linux on phones, for decades. That’s not the problem. The problem is the hardware manufactures and firmware. They absolutely will not let it go.
We saw this when Qualcomm entered the PC market. They wouldn’t upstream fuck all, and surprise surprise those chips were destined for the trash bin due to low support. That just doesn’t fly on PC, even on Windows. Say what you will about x86, intel and amd. But at least it’s an open and interoperable ecosystem.
Obviously this work was mainly porting downstream code and information so the scope was fairly limited but the diagnostics it could do were very impressive.
One of the underlying reasons is probably that the Fairphone hardware and software is developed/maintained by a Chinese ODM (T2Mobile), so the question is if Fairphone even has the know-how to make such a phone. Heck, they have failed to fix bugs that have been plaguing people for months (e.g. regular dropping of all connections when using IPv6 on certain routers).
Motorola is going to make devices that fulfill the requirements and GrapheneOS is cooperating with them.
This is a direct quote from the graphenOS Twitter[1] (you can see it in the thread above) and this is a completely misleading reading of the interview of Murena's founder that is being quoted. The actual quote is instead: «il n'y a pas des trucs de sécu vraiment durcis qui pourraient être utiles, clairement, pour des dirigeants, dans les services secrets ou que sais-je. C'est pas notre but».
So you see, the quote says the opposite of how grapheneOS is framing it, it's not “just for pedophiles and spies”, it's “clearly useful” («utiles, clairement,») for some category of people, including security agencies but also executives or other activities, but it's not their goal to offer such a high level of security regardless of other implications (the goal being usable by the mass, having lower security guarantees is a tradeoff that allows running on more hardware).
The personal crusade from GraphenOS's lead against another open source project that simply have different goal is frankly off-putting.
[1]: https://nitter.net/GrapheneOS/status/2040887784253141142#m
GrapheneOS would love to support more devices, that "smearing" is explaining that a company doesn't make secure devices, which is completely correct criticism.
Fairphone for various reasons is not able to or willing to achieve the hardware requirements. It's not easy to create some of the worlds most secure devices.
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It actually depends on what are you about to protect yourself against. You don't need exceptional security preventing LE from unlocking your device if your adversary are commercial entities craving for your data to sell.
GrapheneOS believes it's nothing or everything, while the privacy is not binary.
If it's all-or-nothing then it's always going to be nothing with a phone, because the position and activity of your device are perfectly transparent to the phone carrier you're using, by mere design of being a mobile phone. They know when you're awake, when you sleep, where you are at all time, when you use a VPN and when you don't, etc, etc.
You can never hide everything, so the question is where you set the bar. GrapheneOS and /e/ have a different bar, making different trade-offs for different user base, and that's absolutely fine.
- Old kernel versions with many known CVEs (applies to both stock an /e/OS).
- Old firmware bundles with many known CVEs (applies to both stock an /e/OS).
- Old major Android version, so missing fixes for vulnerabilities not marked high/critical (applies to both stock an /e/OS).
- Chinese firmware blobs, TCL image processing firmware (applies to both stock an /e/OS).
- When using the App Lounge, F-Droid installs go through a proxy (CleanAPK), that Murena does not want to reveal the purpose or owner of. Given Android's trust on first use policy, this could be used to intercept installs and install malicious packages. (/e/OS)
- Runs microG privileged. When an app does Google Play Integrity checks, Google's obfuscated DroidGuard blobs run privileged (/e/OS).
- Runs many Google apps (e.g. Google Maps) with higher privileges (/e/OS).
"Par contre, on a pas une approche "sécurité durcie", on développe pas un téléphone pour les pédo(bip) pour qu'ils puissent échapper à la justice."
"However, we do not have a "hardened security" approach, we are not developing a phone for pedophiles so that they can escape justice."
Also see: https://infosec.exchange/@Xtreix/116356764298456420
That's just plain bad faith.
It is very clear what he is implying here, namely what I said in my original message.
He has repeatedly done so in various publications. E.g.:
https://www.clubic.com/actualite-604786-murena-e-os-intervie...
Mais surtout, il ne faut pas se tromper de combat : /e/OS permet à ses utilisateurs d’échapper à la collecte massive de données personnelles qui s’opère dans les smartphones du marché, pas d’aider les pédocriminels à passer sous les radars de la justice.
Translation:
But above all, we must not fight the wrong battle: /e/OS allows its users to escape the massive collection of personal data that takes place in smartphones on the market, not to help pedophiles to slip under the radar of justice.
He repeatedly implicaties that only sex offenders need a security-hardened phone.
If we wasn't trying to throw a shade at GrapheneOS and other more secure systems, why does he continuously associate device security with pedophiles?
On he doesn't! You trying to read implicit things when there's an explicit rebuttal of your interpretation just a few seconds later in littetaly the same extract!
You can be upset that he talks about pedophiles at all, but you can't claim he said it's ONLY for pedo when he said right after that it's REALLY USEFUL FOR EXECUTIVES.
Listen, I, unlike you who seem deeply invested in GrapheneOS's crusade against this dude, have zero skin in this game, I didn't know this guy before a few hours ago when I stumbled on this thread. But here you're literally making things up from a short video that literally says the opposite of what you're arguing against, and it's painful to watch.
The whole point of his argument is “we're not addressing the most security sensitive segment”. And while I can understand that you don't like that he talks about pedophiles at all, I'm pretty sure talking about “our phone isn't for pedophiles” is mostly to avoid adverse customers reaction against how they “aren't criminal and don't need a device to go to the darknet”.
As for the rest of your comment, thank you for giving your point of view. Although I don't agree, I appreciate that you took the time to explain how you came to your position.
Cheers.
Everybody needs a security-hardened phone. Apple has been hardening iPhone for almost 20 years. Google has hardened Pixel from the start. This isn't specifically about GrapheneOS. Everybody should be worried, this is the kind of narrative is what drives Chat Control, etc. Security hardening (in reality) protects us against malicious apps, attackers, (to some extend) against privacy-invading apps, etc.
So, I ask you: what is the point of raising pedophiles in more than one interview when talking about security hardening?
By the way, I don't expect an answer. It's a rhetorical question. This discussion has been beaten to death. I think at this point we have to agree to disagree.