kadu

openWRT is fantastic and does indeed give you full control over your router… but not your modem. Modems are a complete mess of patents and proprietary software that nobody can control but a select number of companies.

I love WebKit exploits because they suddenly open up several gaming consoles to homebrew, almost all of them have browsers based on WebKit too.

The only Organic Maps controversy I’m aware of was the presence of certain closed-source elements on what they claim to be a FOSS app, and that the main developer refused to open up, then partially did, then backtracked and never fully released.

Maybe that’s what that user is referring to? Not sure.

Even if you fixed the issue with drivers…

…your modem runs it’s own firmware with a lot of extremely shady behavior, and you can’t touch that regardless of which OS you install. Even your SIM card can arbitrarily execute Java applets and fetch from the network without your command, but at least it’s somewhat contained. Your modem though, it can do a lot without your control and people like Qualcomm have been caught doing nasty stuff with it (plus, of course, giving the US the data whenever they ask for it).

This is why people like Stallman and Snowden often talk about teaching users how to use libre software on their computers, but rather than pushing for the same with smartphones, they tell you to not touch these at all instead. They’re fundamentally anti-privacy devices, built this way.

Of course I carry one, it’s fairly hard to live without a phone nowadays, but we must be aware of the impossibility of fully containing the data harvesting they do.