But look at cold fjords karma. Simply unbelievable. And so many enthusiasts following him. So there are enough people here with his agenda to get random mod points and mod him up.

See next post in thread. The european reference is about the need to unlock the device and install a firmware remotely trustable and tighten security from there on.

While you are correct, I was referring to the necessity to do it in the first place. As an european, civilian liberties from the US do not apply to me. So doing ANYTHING to me is even less of a problem for your agencies than it is for US citizens. And the rights of american citizens today are already inacceptable low. And for you government, europeans have NO rights whatsoever. So the need to avoid american clouds and products has increased dramatically.

That is what I meant. But yeah, I could unlock any device not sponsored by a telephone company, this is not forbidden or illegal.

You are absolutely right. It's funny that the same country that overturned my government and gave us democracy nowadays has fewer democracy and freedom than we do.

As a German who is absolutely thankful that wearing black and skulls does mean I am a Goth instead of a SS murderer, this is a shame. Shame on your country for spitting on the graves of everyone that died for freedom in the second world war to stop my ancestors from destroying the earth.

In every thread you are defending the techniques Mr. Snowden revealed. You did not read or did not understand George Orwells dystopia. Shame on you. You are a traitor to everything the USA stood for in former times. Your country encouraged German newspapers to criticize both our Government and yours alike. Now you are relentlessly trying to shut down the freedom of the press in the USA and europe alike.

You have repeatedly defended every action the NSA was taking without any hint of criticism, I followed your comments for quite a while. Shame on you.

As an european, to me the update-policy nowadays, while they were a major factor in previous decisions, are insignificant.

I only care if the bootloader could be opened with tools provided by the manufacturer, not by exploiting a vulnerability.

Android by default prefers weak encryption algorhythms over secure ones. Google is an american company. The NSA tried to weaken open source and closed source products alike on a big scale, but failed on some open source products. Nuff said.

I would not use any standard firmware on any phone that is also sold in america or maintained by an american company. I do not care if my next phone is supported with new firmware by the manufacturer. The only thing I care about is if there is a firmware maintainer in the community I remotely trust and if I could apply that more trustable firmware to my device without too much of a hassle.

LG seems to have some unlockable devices and some that are somehow unlockable. If the new one is the former, I might consider buying.

What I will never ever buy again is a mobile device were I am forced to use a closed source system. Not because I am an OSS evangelist, but because I refuse to pay american companies to spy on me by bringing me to buy the spying device myself.

So to me the support period for the firmware no longer is of any importance. I just want to make shure that I stay as far away from american clouds and NSA-controlled encryption as I could without loosing too much convenience.

Those are strange times.

Amen to that. It's not a Snowden scandal, it's a NSA/GCHQ scandal!

Please consider opportunity costs. I doubt that it would be affordable to actually use those backdoors on joe average. The US approach was different:

- make encryption weak by forcing US based companies to weaken the enryption so that the sent data could be considered to be transparent

- store and analyse the information sent and received from customers of every american company on a regular basis so that those analyses tell them more about these people than they know about themselves

I tend to trust opportunity costs to make it possible for me to keep more information secret when huawei open sources its drivers and software even if a backdoor is installed on the hardware level than currently.

Slowly moving away from any US closed source products in my opinion increases my privacy even if I assume that huawei built in a backdoor on the hardware level.

+1. No mod points today, so I might as well add a comment:

As a German, this is an insane situation:

You brought as democracy and freedom of the press. Now my country is less of a police state than the US. Yes, despite what you hear in ghe US media, this is the case, even though the collaboration between German intelligence services and yours try to circumvent the boundaries we have in place.

And while your freedom is trashed by overly broad laws that allow sexting teenagers or pissing men to be marked for life as sex offenders, au pairs denied entry and pooping dogs prosecuted using anti terrorist laws, we learn that using any US IT product eaquals handing ALL OF OUR DATA to the NSA.

Some slashdotters here find that perfectly all right, missing the point that we have the choice to use ownclowd or transfer the cloud to a more trustworthy place, like Germany itself. Yes, I know, not ideal, but better and not on the same scale than the atrocities done by the US. Look at posteo.de, for instance. My next phone might be a nexus were I flash a more trustworthy version of android, leaving all google services out. I could use a european map service with lesser chance for the agencies to track me everywere.

And if I have the choice between huawei and US products, were one states they were not building back doors and the other states that they can not speak about it, well... And even in paranoid mode, great-parent is right: The chance of obtained information to be used against me as a critic of the actual western society is smaller when the information is in the hands of western agencies than in the hands of the chinese agencies.

On a rational level it makes sense to prefer the chinese surveillance state over the american one.

Going back to the beginning of my post.

To be more afraid of the american government than of the chinese government is a really bad joke. It betrays the honor of the armed forces that saved the world from us and the soldiers that saved us from being taken over by stalinists.

This absurd situation should not stay.

Clever. Chapeau!

Sorry for accidently attacking parent, it was targeted at grand-parent.

Exactly. storing data in the US is equal to sending it to every policeman, spy and secret agent in Oceania. Using closed source encryption from any US company is equal to using encryption with a widely open backdoor, ready for the good and always nice people mentioned before AND other criminals.

You should learn how capitalism is supposed to work: The free market needs absolutely symmetric information about all the products on the market in order to work. And as a citizen of the capitalism-as- religion-fanatic-Unites-States you complain about non-US-people chosing less snooping countries to store data or buy encryption from?

If I enter the US, I have two choices if I do not want my privacy on the laptop intruded:

Use bitlocker or similar, so that the people at the borders could easily access my privacy. Or I could use truecrypt and give the friendly guy the wrong key. The one that BOOTS a legit LOOKING OS. Plausible denyability, I am not even sent back for failing to provide the key, but my privacy is safe. Which product would you prefer?

Just doing my job as a good member of the free market

You are not following the German politics and news too closely, are you? To cut things short: No. We. Do. Not. Have. A. Robust spying network. They are trying to build one, but at the moment the balance of power does work in general at the moment, actually limiting the legilative power by our constitution.

Before you make such bold claims, you should actually read some news. I read slate, huffington post, washington post, fox, the guardian, the times from time to time when I want to know something about oceania, I do not only rely on german news sources.

Unlike the american intelligence they mostly keep within the bounderies of the law, restricting them quite a bit (not enough for my taste, but I am propably talking to an oceanian citizen, so to you they would be best described as to having no powers at all and are absolutely law-abiding).

For a start, google for "NSU scandal". Our robust surveillance state is a weak and clumsy one. Given, they try to circumvent their boundaries by collaborating with the roothless realy spies from oceania, but that is because they are limited and want all the funny powers your real spies have.

But as the powers that be follow Orwells manual to the letter, I am quite shure that those collaborations will come to an end, because oceania was always at war with eurasia, as we all will now.

No. You just did not get the reference. They were using anti-terrorist-laws and tools to actually get the pooping dog. So the analogy with the sex offender stands. Sexting teens and pissing man are no pedophiles. Pooping Dogs are no terrorists. Critics of the american governemnt and the surveillancestate, that are sent back and denied entry to the US are no terrorists, either. Or the au pairs that are sent back because they intend to work in the US, an information obtained by anti terrorist laws from facebook - they are no terrorists, either.

You just outed yourself as a clueless and uninformed believer in the good of the government. Is it really so hard to read the news from time to time BEFORE making political comments?

Despicable.

"Which is a big if.

There is a huge incentive to find some, ANY justification to continue the war on drugs. There is little incentive to simply tell the truth."

I do not think that the alternative to fact-ignoring drugwarfarers are fact-ignoring cannabispropagandist.

Cannabis is less bad than alcohol, so politicians need to get the f.ck off our lawn. There is NO need for us to prove that it it is healthy to state that it should be legal.

Most people here agree that it should not be sold to minors except for medical treatments. What would you suggest?

And do you REALLY believe that smoking 5 grams a day as a 13 year old over years won't effect their brains in an unwanted physical way?