this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2026
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If you read what I originally wrote I mentioned that Motorola had done most of the work in porting GOS to their hardware. To me that sounds like Motorola/Lenovo having oversight of both hardware and software. I'm not an expert in the capabilities of the Chinese state but I'd put money on them using their influence to give them an advantage on GOS.
Again, I'm not a fan of US or Chinese tech. I'm not a fan of either regime. I don't know what the alternatives are. I'm on an older Pixel running GOS but I won't be upgrading to Motorola - once this phone dies I'll probably get a dumb phone or give up mobiles entirely.
Good luck, dumb phone means no encryption, SMS and MMS are stored plaintext and freely shared with US three letters and phone convos have been spied on en masse since the 80s.
For that to be effective you'd have to give up phones, smart, dumb, even carphones and landlines. Not only that, you'd have to reliably know your contacts are never contacting you through their phones, windows PCs, etc, that all themselves have that compromised HW as well. Realistically you'd need to fall back on the postal service, but people can steam open letters, so you'll need directly employed couriers, but can you really trust anyone else? So you need to hand deliver it, but can you really trust your contact to burn after reading? Better say it face to face, if you can be sure they (or third parties) aren't recording, but then Flock knows they were with you and they could be tortured later.
That wouldn't be an issue, if say, the dumb phone existed for emergencies only.
I did mention that as a possibility
Well there's always carrier pigeons and jungle drums.
Even jungle drums, you'd need your own drum-language. If the rest of the tribe knows it..
You could book cypher all of your comms, I guess.
I think you've overestimated how much I want to communicate with other people 😅