> If you re going to be paranoid, because you attack children or sell drugs, why the hell do you buy phones in the first place !?

While the rest of your comment is accurate, this is disingenuous. There are plenty of valid reasons to have concerns over this besides those drilled by the powers that be.

Besides, it's still reasonable to want to reduce your potential attack surface. Sure, federal agencies may root you if they really want but that doesn't mean it's pointless to avoid OS-level preinstalled backdoors from the manufacturer.

IMO, the risk of a hardware backdoor is always there and perhaps less damaging if the country is across the world, depending on the threat model and damage model.

realistically you're right, and I probably would deeply consider my options before thinking about it. But we can go down the list of lower and lower firmware that we cant verify (hell, I just reread Reflections on Trusting Trust this morning). Every device has Chinese-made chips. I suppose it's more risky than an American company but to me it seems like rearranging chairs on a sinking ship, which is why I never keep anything sensitive on my phone.

> If you re going to be paranoid, because you attack children or sell drugs, why the hell do you buy phones in the first place !?

If you are going to joke, kindly mark it, so we do not misunderstand you, and so you do not cause internal damages to those who are not trained to always keep neurovegetative and limbic on guard while reading - you know, that occasional moment in which you trust what you read and the physiological reactions start, before the prefrontal goes "wait a moment, that may be not serious".

People have

-- a privacy to defend as a principle («privacy to defend», what times!),

-- absurdity to keep at bay (interrobangs have a cost - the paragraph above is relevant),

-- security to ensure (information which ends up in weakly protected repositories is basically public),

-- safety to strengthen (sociopolitical systems can make people pay for any minor trait)

and more?

One of the most absurd things I’ve read recently. Not being able to understand a joke is hardly on joker.

/If/ it was meant to be a joke. It can easily have not been one: it can easily have been unaware and/or insensitive of the expressed four points and more - many people are (see the diffusion of the "nothing to hide" stance). The content you called "absurd" is pretty literal.

The unawareness of the importance of privacy even as a cautionary stance is spread even in the learned, some convinced that we live in a riskless fair world of free thought and expression without consequence - there are people of prominent intellectual profile vocal against online pseudonyms, for example. There are political representatives proponents of the end of online anonymity.

So, no, when somebody makes those statements about child abuse and drug trafficking, they may not be joking.

Build yourself intellectually in a similar way, and you will reason in a similar way, and consequently express yourself in a similar way. Do not restrict your work to technical matters, which not only would be like training one leg and leaving the rest of the body to atrophy: good intellectual keys come from everywhere, and especially from good creative literature. The earlier the better for the plasticity.

For the rest: do not abuse the assumption of good faith. There are other places than HN to abuse informal attitude.

Edit: for both cases, replies to secondaryacct and yourself: you do have the rule about assumption of good faith in the guidelines present, don't you?

In that case: it was not swallowing but digesting, and it was not one dictionary but very many, in many languages. But it is not the dictionaries to change the linguistic use: the literature and the intellectual keys acquired from all areas form the capacity for complexity, shape that complexity and its expression (so, for example, more mathematics than philology). The "dictionaries" (the research about language) come later in the process of verification of what you absorbed initially less consciously.

Now, this thread was about computing devices, branching towards security, privacy and its importance - not linguistics -, and your comments may be interpreted as intellectual curiosity as per the rules, but can more easily be interpreted as a mockery - as already mentioned. I am open to questions, but I think it proper for that to happen in a different context.

Sometimes that is felt, but abilities compensate the friction - emotions settle on trust, which is good coin.

> If you re going to be paranoid, because you attack children or sell drugs, why the hell do you buy phones in the first place !?

Because innocent people can be persecuted too. Just ask many of the ethnic groups across the globe, or other abuse victims.

Privacy protects innocent people from criminals, more than it protects criminals from the good guys.

What firewall do you use?