Hacker News Reader

> Haven't heard of this happening with later models. Baseband sourcecode firmware is really rare.

You know what they say. "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear"

So I wonder what they're trying to hide from all of us. Probably all the backdoors and glaring security issues.

https://hackaday.com/2022/07/12/open-firmware-for-pinephone-...

> With the PinePhone modem.. It was quickly found that the Quectel modem ran a stripped down version of Android on its ARM core, with adb shell available over the modem’s USB interface. When a few adventurous hackers started probing it and got shell access, they found tools like ffmpeg, vim, gdb and sendmail compiled in – certainly not something you’d need on a cellular modem, but hey.

EG25 is an IoT modem and those tend to expose some extra functionality such as HTTP clients or TTS synthesis over AT commands. Some even document how to compile and run software on them - though of course it's only about the application CPU and not the actual modemy stuff that runs on separate DSPs with proprietary signed Qualcomm firmware.

Most (all?) standalone modems are basically screenless smartphones/SBCs with integrated modem these days.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com