You can but it kind of sucks and you would only normally do it on a very temporary hacky basis. Otherwise use OpenVPN or Wireguard or whatever. If you want to do it with ssh, see the VPN instructions on the man page. But I mean it’s janky.

Please go on. I’m not sure I understand you fully.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA

There are significant features being added too. Like satellite messaging in areas with no cell coverage can be pretty worthwhile. You’re right though, most other stuff is meh. I’d like wireless charging for my current phone but can do without it. I have a $250 phone from 2023 and don’t understand why anyone buys a flagship.

New PC hardware is mostly compatible with the old stuff or at least somewhat standardized except at the lowest end. Phone stuff is much worse about that. Idk what a Linux phone would mean anyway.

Yes the HW isn’t comparable to a modern phone though.

It’s worse. Linux desktop is only possible because of the relative consistency and openness of x86 PC hardware. Phones are nothing like that. At best we will have retro Linux handhelds with phone functionality.

Good luck, phone hardware changes very fast though.

For high value accounts, use 2fa with hardware tokens if you can, and maybe use a dedicated computer (old laptop) with a bare bones software installation to minimize the likelihood of malware.

The usual answer for programmable voip is Twilio. I’ve been using vitelity since I’ve been there for a long time, and their support is quite good, but they’re less flexible than Twilio and cost a bit more. A DID (direct inward dial) number from them is $1.50/month instead of $1.

These numbers all terminate in data centers, and some particularly obnoxous websites check for that and won’t do 2FA verification through them. Worst case, you could get a real cellphone and leave it in a drawer and also have it as a useful burner. There are some very cheap ones with 1 year plans on qvc.com (search for tracfone). QVC seems cringy as hell but I’m a bit tempted anyway. There are also some on tracfone.com but QVC has more choices.

You can bridge it through e.g. Twilio but it will add latency that makes the voice calls less pleasant. You’re better off with a phone that has a microphone kill switch, or physically remove the microphones (hack the hardware) and only use an external mic. Or power down the phone altogether.

With very large SSD systems, these high throughputs mostly come from parallel chip accesses and transfers. Very low latency is more interesting. I’d like to see the numbers at queue depth 1 instead of 512.

KitKat (Android 4), If only. I still have an Archos 43 media player that runs Android 2.3.

Nice I guess, it adds 4g to the older T-deck. I guess with a SIP client app you could use it as a voice phone. The processor is an ESP32-S3 which has wifi and BLE though the Lilygo article doesn’t mention either of those. I almost bought a used T-deck last year but figured it was another thing I didn’t have a real use for.

I’d like to see a receive-only POCSAG pager built into a thing like this. I don’t know to what extent 1-way pager services still exist in the US, but the idea is that it’s a system that sends text messages in the SCA subcarrier of FM broadcast radio stations or sometimes other classes of transmitter. It has mostly been displaced now by cellular phones, but some people like doctors on call still use it, as it is supposed to be more reliable, plus the FM signal penetrates buildings better than cell signals do.

For me though, the main idea is privacy. It is receive-only, so there is no always-on connection sending your location anywhere. People can send you a text and if you’re in the coverage area of the FM station, you receive it and can call the person back (in the old days, by finding a landline phone) or whatever. Some of the more expensive plans had regional or nationwide coverage, by broadcasting the message on a whole network of FM stations.

POCSAG itself is a digital protocol for which many software implementations exist, and it doesn’t look too hard to write one. So the main challenge is having an RF receiver in the T-deck that gets a frequency where there is a pager service operating in your area.

I don’t understand the attraction of small slow epaper displays. I’m fine with regular displays in a thing this size. I’d like to have a 13+ inch epaper tablet but no FOSS ones exist right now afaik.

“Study war no more” was supposed to mean something entirely different.

Yes they have different stuff now, but same idea.

Government secure phones are special hardware made by the NSA. They are nothing like civilian phones. Obama got the NSA to lock down his Blackberry but I doubt that is doable with today’s mainstream smartphones.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STU-III

Military gear generally has tons of anti-moron safeguards. Unfortunately, Signal is for civilians.

“And that b*tch Anne Murray…” (Blame Canada)

I thought about doing that to protect against evil firmware in the phone’s baseband radio, but meh.

Multifunction copier printer scanners are usually consumer crap. The good stuff is generally single function. Monochrome is more of a solved problem than color, I think.