People struggling to pay their bills don't have the means to donate to political candidates, so their voice is ignored. This must end.

So you're proposing a scheme in which people struggling to pay their bills are forced to donate to political candidates? That is, after all, how taxes work. Oh wait, let me guess: raise taxes on the rich! That'll solve it!

It seems like it should be possible for reality to extend beyond whatever is defined by law, yet this seems to be the litmus in most people's minds. If I have a name which literally everyone in my life since childhood has known me by, it seems to me that this should be the definition of "reality," not whether the government (who, by contrast, has a pretty cold and distant relationship with me as far as acquaintances go) agrees.

I'm guessing you'd find out rather quickly what the distinction is if (for example) a deceased relative willed part of their estate to "Moxie Marlinspike" and the government (regardless of how cold or distant) has no record of such a name. "Oh they really meant me, everyone knows that" may not hold up in probate. Why not just have your name legally changed?

This is modded Funny but let's be honest with ourselves here: 95% of us thought the exact same thing when we saw "retina implant" in the headline and then were bummed to learn it's just some stupid medical procedure for blind people.

I guess we are talking different languages. I said nothing about installing another OS on the iPhone nor do I believe that all that can be accomplished requires me to insert custom code into the kernel.

I guess the reason I make the distinction in this case is that, when we're talking about something like Carrier IQ that is buried deep into many libraries throughout the system (see this post from March in XDA: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=11763089&postcount=3 ), performing a complete OS wipe and installing an open-source OS from the ground up gives me a much better assurance that no one is tracking what I'm doing. (Yes, aside from the issues you mention such as chipset and firmware code).

But yes, for many/most cases that users actually care about, gaining root privileges is "enough".

So yes the "android is open mantra" is a pretty big deal to myself and many others, it's not just lip service.

This is where we really differ. I support open source (professionally on occasion) yet my support doesn't rise to the level of zealotry. I do not disqualify any product solely on the basis that it's less open then other options.

Thanks for your contributions to the kernel. But please don't assume that support of openness is "zealotry". Myself and many others are very pragmatic about this and realize there are many places where it doesn't make sense or isn't feasible. If you read comments from the CM devs they aren't on some Free Software crusade, they just enjoy hacking their phones and having a (more) open platform to do that on makes a big difference. I don't care that the GPS or 4G drivers on my Nexus are proprietary binary blobs as long as they're supported by Google and they work well.

But when this is a device that basically holds all the most personal details of my life, and we see stories every day about Carrier IQ and shopping malls tracking cell phone users and everyone else who wants to know more about me than I want them to, you bet I'm gonna support more open devices and support the companies that promote them. Yes there's a lot of zealotry out there but in this particular case it's very relevant.

BTW, my iPhone friends say that there is a thriving jail break community on the iPhone and supposedly you can do things on a jail broken phone that can't be done on a locked iPhone. One being installing GPL licensed software as binaries from a third party software provider. I remember seeing him use his jail broken phone as a WiFi hotspot before it was sanctioned on both iOS and Android.

Honestly you could Google the iPhone jail break community and know about as much as I do, since I don't know much myself.

There's a HUGE difference between the iPhone "jailbreak community" and the Android custom ROM community. Yes I assumed you knew the Android option existed but if you think jailbreaking an iPhone and loading custom apps is any comparison then I guess we're not speaking the same language.

I'm sure someone has managed to get some open source OS running on the iPhone but it's nowhere near the community or user base of CM and other custom ROMs. And I know that CM running on my Nexus S (or even stock Nexus S ROM for that matter) isn't running CarrierIQ because all of the relevant user-land apps are open source.

I'd say yes. Only because the iPhone is the most scrutinized (and vilified) device on the web and it hasn't been discovered so far. Also if you RTFA you'd see that the author reported that it's off by default.

Yes I did RTFA and it's peppered with words like "may only be active when the iPhone is in diagnostic mode" and "does not appear to actually send any information" and "the local logs on iOS seem to store much less information". So no the author isn't sure of anything either since he's just getting started and the fact that this was just discovered on iPhone and the scope of what it does is just now coming to light (custom Android ROM devs first discovered CIQ about a year ago) means you can't say with any certainty that it's not doing anything nefarious.

Option 3 wasn't really that appealing of an option. I had the opportunity to by a Google phone when I upgraded. Google dropped the ball and couldn't decide if they would really support it. I really don't know if I could depend on Google to support their current Nexus phone for long. My reasoning being that if I had to pay full unsubsidized price for a phone then the manufacturer could at least humor me and pretend that they would support the phone.

You do raise good points about Google's less-than-ideal support so I can't really argue with that statement except to say again it's a matter of priorities. I bought an unsubsidized Nexus S with over a year left on my Epic 4G contract and a big part of that decision was the discovery of Carrier IQ by the Epic custom ROM devs. I decided then and there I'd never buy any device that wasn't a pure "Google Experience" device. I'm not faulting anyone for having different priorities than I do, but I'm really glad that Google has given me that choice by the way of a first class open source mobile operating system. So yes the "android is open mantra" is a pretty big deal to myself and many others, it's not just lip service.

I don't have an iPhone but if I did I could easily say I can do [insert special neat trick] with my iPhone after jail breaking it. There really isn't much of a real difference for people with the initiative. Especially if you depend on other people to do the real work for you.

Um, please define "special neat trick". If you think there "isn't much of a real difference for people with the initiative" then you obviously haven't participated in the Android custom ROM community. iPhone has nothing like it, and the reason for that is that Android is open-source.

Is it a perfect, fully open community driven hacker's utopia? No, but I blame the carriers for that much more than Google. Sure they keep their crown jewels (Gmail, Maps etc.) closed and proprietary but they've certainly raised the bar for openness on mass-market consumer devices and they deserve credit for that.

Now take a deep breath and rationally think this through. Which is easier (for anyone)?

1. Turning off the settings using the menus within the iPhone, or

2. Downloading a rom image from CynamodGen, rooting your Android phone, and reinstalling Google binaries and reseting all your user settings.

Can you tell me with any certainty that Option 1 absolutely prevents any such data from being sent to the carriers or CarrierIQ?

And you forgot Option 3, which is to vote with your wallet and buy a Nexus device, which doesn't have Carrier IQ, which Google releases the source code for (including all binary drivers where source isn't available) as soon as, or (with 4.0) before the device launches, and is the most open, hacker friendly mass-market consumer mobile device in the US today.

Because as you already described, if enough people choose to use a closed, proprietary product it can become a de facto standard and that does affect all of us. When 90-something percent of web surfers used IE6, I still had a choice to use any browser I wanted, but because IE6 was the de facto standard, it made it pretty unusable.

And now we're seeing the exact same thing: the iDock is becoming a de facto standard and those of us who don't want to use Apple are being relegated to second-class status. So that's why we care what type of device others use. Sounds like you're pretty set in your choice but I have actually swayed people from using Apple products based on these arguments so I'll keep right on making them.