Just wondering if anyone knows anything about the soon to be released UP Phone (see unplugged dot com)? I never heard about it till today when a friend sent me an interview with Erik Prince (one of the founders and former Navy Seal and founder of Blackwater… yikes) on Shawn Ryan’s YouTube channel. In doing a quick search I can find very little about it (one article at MIT Technology Review from a year ago), but Erik claims the hardware is in-house (and not made in China and from the looks of it resembles an iPhone), with a physical kill switch, crazy camera specs, microSD slot, running a custom version of Android called LibertOS with its own supposedly secure messenger, VPN, and antivirus, its own app store (which carries Signal Messenger), and a way to instantly wipe the phone when inputting an alternate login pass code. One preliminary audit was conducted by some firm call PwC Technologies out of Israel and all checked out okay, but unless the OS is fully open source and more thoroughly audited though I would never trust it. Anyone have any thoughts?
Please no. We have a fu**load of “”“secure phones”“” already. Use GrapheneOS.
Big no for a litany of reasons.
Their Anti-Virus is a GPL violating fork of my Hypatia and they even still download databases from my server: VirusTotal
See also the questionable apps they have: list of apps on the unplugged "app store" returned from /api/store/app?size=10000 · GitHub
Yeah, and there a lot of other red flags I’ve found.
Appreciate the clarification! And thanks for Hypatia and VirusTotal… I’ve made especially good use of the latter.
Yep, been using a GOS for about 3 years now. Far and away the best mobile OS there is!
Wow. If I may, are you in touch with sfconservancy.org or fsf.org or similar orgs that help developers / FOSS projects enforce xGPL compliance?
Can you explain what those links mean for the uninitiated?
They stole other people’s work (in this case, forking FOSS apps without attribution) is the allegation.
Looks like these folks pulling a “Purism”, their messenger is just a skinned version of element.
Both links point to the same tweet 
.
I blame Twitter.
Mastodon links:
Summary
GrapheneOS: "Unplugged uses an older Android release. They do …" - GrapheneOS Mastodon
GrapheneOS: "Unplugged has tried to misrepresent these improve…" - GrapheneOS Mastodon
GrapheneOS: "Unplugged has tried to spread fear, uncertainty a…" - GrapheneOS Mastodon
GrapheneOS: "Unplugged was founded by Erik Prince, the same pe…" - GrapheneOS Mastodon
GrapheneOS: "Unplugged in also infringing on the open source l…" - GrapheneOS Mastodon
(now there’s 5 recent posts about Unplugged)
So good to see this inferior, problematic, deceptive UP Phone project going DOWN through GrapheneOS’s public shaming.
How did this get alive again. Didnt we conclude this project is BS before? Just use grapheneOS.
I am pretty confident that, this is indeed honeypot.
https://discuss.techlore.tech/t/up-smartphone-a-potential-honeypot/
