$200 PinePhone Linux smartphone comes with physical kill switch | Hacker News Reader

$200 PinePhone Linux smartphone comes with physical kill switch

androidrookies.com

36 pointsvvpvijay13 comments

Steve Bellovin asked a good question in twitter: is it a real kill switch which breaks a line or is it a DIP switch which sets a flag the kernel is meant to honour?

On mobile currently, but http://files.pine64.org/doc/PinePhone/PinePhone%20v1.2a%20Re... exists if someone wants to take a look.

I skimmed over it: for WiFi there’s a switch on the chip enable pin. The modem looks like there’s a switch controlling the power supply.

Yep they are marked SW1-[A-F] for anyone interested.

Assuming all the switches actually turn off the chips (CE lines?), it means the drivers have to be written in order to be able to find that a chip was enabled or disabled out of their control, and not bomb because of that. Would this mean that all device drivers for these hardware subsystems are FOSS?

If that's the case so we have a real hardware kill switch, then ladies and gentlemen the above image is the best possible ad for the PinePhone. Forget stock photos of pretty models, athletes or busy professionals, that is what privacy sensitive people want to see on the back of their phone.

I'm not sure I follow. Why does the drivers been written to handle chip disablement imply that they are FOSS?

I assume that being the PinePhone the first phone whose sections can be disabled by turning off chips, and not telling a driver to do that, the driver should be agnostic wrt the chip status, and not panic especially if the chip is being switched off during work. That would hopefully require the drivers to be rewritten by Pine64 devs to manage an event that as of today would happen only on the PinePhone.

I didn't look at the phone architecture yet, so I was referring to chips mapped on the MCU bus lines since the chip enable was mentioned. USB peripherals would be very different, still interesting if they both used USB for ease of support and directly drive the CE lines to be sure the chip is being disabled.

Badly written article and bad comments here. Apple never warned to not tape over the camera. They warned against using a too-thick third party device that physically wrecks your hardware if you are a moron. Kill switches do not kill for good...have you never heard of kill switches in cars?

It is NOT a kill switch. Kill mean never come back again. Not like that kind. Sometimes you need it in Hong Kong to as all phones are hacked (except Pixel strangely). Hence, you have to kill your phone not to expose (just friends to be harassed by useless popo). But you need real kill switch.

I'd like to know more about "all phones are hacked" in Hong Kong. I believe you, I just want to read about the details because I've been thinking about this lately.

(For instance: this includes Apple phones, or you would have mentioned them, the way you did Pixel, right?)

Stop the FUD. Facts or please go away. This isn't Reddit.

What you need is a sledgehammer.

“Kill switches” on equipment are switches that shut the equipment down abruptly and reliably, but usually are not expected to damage the equipment. They're common on things with engines, motorcycles, boat outboards, etc.

It's also a common phrase to say “kill the engine” even if that means just turning the ignition off in the usual way, and again, it doesn't imply damaging the engine.

The kind of switch you're describing would be useful but calling it a kill switch would be confusing to US-English speakers.

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