In my opinion, you've made a couple of assumptions which aren’t practical.
This isn’t a criticism of your enthusiasm and technical knowledge, but my
personal experience and the reality for many folks I know. Like so many
things in this world of ours, things that seem technically simple can be
practically very difficult, which is not ideal but I am resigned to this
being a fact of life.
Firstly, there is an implicit assumption that people have a computer. This
is certainly not borne out by reality; many people do not own a computer,
or it is shared between their family, or they are old, or children, or not
able to use one. So even if they could
redirect SIP calls to their computer, it may not be practical as they may
not have constant access to it (hence missing the whole point of being able
to receive calls). Then it may not be a portable computer, so they can’t
take it to work or when they’re out and about which is a big problem. I
speak to university students all the time who are shocked that some of
their fellow students might not have access to a computer.
Secondly, even if they have a computer, mobile phones (and smartphones) are
essential for one’s job and not provided by the employer - think Deliveroo,
Uber, etc where you pick up jobs from the mobile phone app. Many people
also need a smartphone to search for jobs when they inevitably get laid off
by their employer. Of course, they also get calls/texts/messages via apps
from family and friends.
Thirdly, even if it’s technically easy, many people simply won’t be able to
afford to use a SIP service, which can be significantly more expensive than
their mobile phone use - pay as you go mobile phone SIMs are inexpensive
and the reality for many people. €3/month is much more than I spend on my
mobile phone, for instance. Of course there are caveats, the actual cost
overall can be higher especially for mobile data usage, but circumstances
mean that contract mobile phone services either are not available at all or
are much too expensive initially or overall.
In my experience, I cannot do something like this myself in a few days. I
don’t own a computer powerful enough to run any Android emulators, nor do I
have time to set it up, and nor do I have a portable computer at the moment
(it broke and I am not willing to spend money on it at the moment). I am
certainly not technically incompitent either.
I think that ‘crazy’ is definitely not the right word, but certainly given
the above, in my experience it is certainly difficult for people who
require their mobile phone not to see it that way.
In the meantime, I’m excited about the future of PostmarketOS and
maemo-leste. The latter is reviving the absolutely awesome and very usable
Maemo OS (I miss my N900) and adapting it to work on modern Debian (well,
Devuan, but anyway), with a view to support devices that can work with
modern technologies like ofono, and modern Linux kernel etc. It’s truly
impressive what they’ve accomplished so far. This, I think is most
promising.
I hope that is something to think about. Thanks a lot for sharing your setup!
Naqiao <naq...@naqiao.hk> wrote:
The idea of being able to run Debian on a phone is nice, but I think it
misses
the main point of the problem, this is, that mobile networks and phones are
basically designed to control people, it's a political issue more than a
technical one.
I think the way to go is just stop using them, at least for a while: "no
phone"
can be better than a "bad phone".
It may sound crazy at first, but technically is much easier than most
people
imagine, you can do it yourself in a few days:
- Get some virtual SIP numbers, both mobile and land-line, according to
your needs.
- Redirect the SMS to your email and voice calls to your SIP account.
- Get Android emulator configured on your desktop/laptop computers, for the
occasional app not available for PC.
- Switch off your mobile phone and forget about it.
That's all, it just works, if enough people do that phone makers and
politicians
will begin to change their policies, it's just a matter of how many
people will
stop using their phones.
You may think very few people will stop using them, but I'm not so sure,
there
are many people that would like to stop using their mobile phones for very
different reasons if they had a good, socially acceptable, reason/excuse
to do so.
The fact is that trying to make a current smartphone "free and non
controlling"
is a lost battle, you can get better than average, but still very far
from real
freedom, it's an asymmetric "war" where a few weak people try to defeat a
few
very powerful ones, and the outcome is clear.
But the other way around, stop using mobile phones until makers provide the
means to use them in a free and non-controlling way, is much more easy to
do and
more likely to be successful, eventually they will prefer to lose some
control
over people and devices than to lose too many users, it's just a matter of
numbers.
In the near future it could well become fashionable to stop using mobile
phones,
if you look around you, there are much more crazy "fashionable" things
happening
all the time, and anyway you look at it most people could live without a
mobile
phone, it's just a matter of changing your way of life and/or thinking ;-)
On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 02:12:30AM +1000, Zenaan Harkness wrote:
With respect to "smart" phones, it can be reasonably claimed that we
don't control our lives.
At the hardware level, the baseband (radio) computer in almost all cases
has access to RAM, thus access to your passwords and keys for any open
wallet or encrypted filesystem, etc.
Notwithstanding, we owe it to ourselves to run an operating system which
at least does not deny to us, our right to install and run any software
of our choosing.
The average Android and iOS Apple phone, is a strict walled garden into
which only authorised software may be installed.
Software "Apps" which are not authorised (or have been banned) by either
Google or Apple respectively, are not available in the respective "Play
Store".
This is abhorrent, a centralisation of power, a blatant censorship
vector, financially burdensome to those of meagre means, and
fundamentally unethical in principle wrt the suppression of the basic
rights of the end user (refer to Richard Stallman's GNU General Public
License for details of fundamental human rights in relation to software/
apps/ computing).
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