In the most recent post of Kyle Rankin, Chief Security Officer of Purism https://puri.sm/posts/snitching-on-phones-that-snitch-on-you/ is a pointer to an investigation about the facts what iOS or Android phones are doing when you think they do nothing: they are phoning home to Google or Apple with a lot of your sensitive data, details here: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/apple_google.pdf

The fact that our beloved Ubuntu phones are running an Android kernel and some other stuff behind the Ubuntu shell let me ask: Does the Android in our phones does the same, at least in parts?

I run a BQ E4.5 since March 2015 as my daily phone. Meanwhile, also my wife and my 11 years old son do. It has all the apps we need (Dekko, Telegram, browser, sms, phone calls, cam, uNav, ...) and, even more important, it is free of spy ware and phoning-home apps. I do not need FB and What's Ape and so I really do not miss them.

Matthias

@advocatux said in Porting in 2019 - a true journey:

@wgarcia we have mailing lists but nobody uses them

Yes, nobody uses them because they are not promoted by the UBports core team. In the times of UbuntuTouch (Canonical) we have had very successful communication over the list ubuntu-phone@lists.launchpad.net (the list is even still active and from time to time I get mails from it or ask there for help).
When Canonical closed the "shop" and we moved to UBports, started this idea "we don't need mailing lists, we need this ongoing gaggle in the tg groups" which is not archived and not searchable and full of posts which have nothing to do with technical problems, full of jpegs/gifs/emotions etc. When we (wgarcia and I) tried to subscribe in December 2017 the list has even been moderated and subscription was a mess.

The forum here is better, at least archived and searchable. But one needs a browser and to be online, while mails could be read offline. I.e. the forum is far away from being as useful as a mailing list.

Just my humble opinion on this.

Matthias

Please elaborate about the near future and milestones of Dekko2. I do not see any progress for weeks. During the day I use the MUA on my FreeBSD laptops (mutt), when I'm on "the road" I do (or try to) use Dekko2 in my BQ E4.5. Due to its ongoing crashes and other issues (see the tracker) I'm forced to return to my M10 FHD which still runs the latest UT version of Canonical with the old Dekko

This situation is, at least for me, really a showstopper.

Thanks

Matthias

@simplicissimax said in What are must have apps? Things you can do:

@guru Thank you for your reply! I'm afraid I don't have experience with chroot, but what I have read sounds promising Some questions remain, but I feel I should gain some experience before asking them here. I will experiment with this

Start reading here: https://gurucubano.gitbooks.io/bq-aquaris-e-4-5-ubuntu-phone/content/en/chapter27.html

@cheniek said in How to hide/show my ID on phone calls?:

@guru Your suggestion has helped when I entered and "called" *31# my number has started to appear on receivers screens- is not Private anymore. Thank You!

These codes are the so called GSM-codes. The exact implementation maybe provider specific. When other mobile systems have some GUI feature to control this kind of function, I think they just fire up the same GSM-code.

It seems on all my other BQ E4.5 which are still running the latest Canonical OTA-15 that there have been coming down this night an update to "Version37" and there is also some more rumor about this in the mailing-list ubuntu-phone@lists.launchpad.net

Ofc, this is nearly off-topic here, but maybe someone from Canonical or BQ is reading this and could shet a bit light on it...

Thx

matthias

Using GnuPG-card in the UbuntuPhone BQ E4.5:

Create a complete Linux system into ~phablet/myRoot/ :

phablet@ubuntu-phablet-bq:~$ mkdir myRoot 
phablet@ubuntu-phablet-bq:~$ cd myRoot 
phablet@ubuntu-phablet-bq:~$ sudo tar xzf ubports-touch.rootfs-xenial-armhf.tar.gz

phablet@ubuntu-phablet-bq:~$ sudo chroot myRoot/

Install additional packages into the Linux system:

root@ubuntu-phablet:/# apt-get install pinentry-curses
root@ubuntu-phablet:/# apt-get install pass
root@ubuntu-phablet:/# apt-get install libudev-dev
root@ubuntu-phablet:/# apt-get install gcc
root@ubuntu-phablet:/# apt-get install libc-dev
root@ubuntu-phablet:/# apt-get install make

compile in myRoot the following pieces (in the given order):

libgpg-error-1.33
libassuan-2.5.1
libksba-1.3.5
npth-1.6
libgcrypt-1.8.4
gnupg-2.2.12

always with ./configure && make && sudo make install; the software ends
up below /usr/local (which is /home/phablet/myRoot/usr/local when one looks from outside the chroot'ed phone system);

note: gpg2 is /usr/local/bin/gpg

Now from the phone system configure:

$ mkdir ~/.gnupg
$ chmod 0700 ~/.gnupg

$ cat .gnupg/gpg.conf
#
agent-program  /home/phablet/myRoot/usr/local/bin/gpg-agent

$ cat .gnupg/gpg-agent.conf 
pinentry-program /home/phablet/myRoot/usr/bin/pinentry-curses
scdaemon-program /home/phablet/myRoot/usr/local/libexec/scdaemon
log-file /home/phablet/gpg-agent.log
log-file /dev/null
debug-level guru
max-cache-ttl 10

Due to the nature of the installation in the chrooted system we
need small wrapper scripts to set PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, ... and
other stuff;

$ cat ~/gpg.sh
#!/bin/sh
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/phablet/myRoot/usr/local/lib export LD_LIBRARY_PATH
PATH=/home/phablet/myRoot/usr/local/bin:$PATH      export PATH
GNUPGHOME=/home/phablet/.gnupg    export GNUPGHOME
GPG_TTY=$(tty)                    export GPG_TTY
/home/phablet/myRoot/usr/local/bin/gpg-agent    \
            --homedir /home/phablet/.gnupg      \
            --daemon                            \
            --pinentry-program /home/phablet/myRoot/usr/bin/pinentry-curses
/home/phablet/myRoot/usr/local/bin/gpg-connect-agent /bye
/home/phablet/myRoot/usr/local/bin/gpg $*

run and create for test a keypair (later we want to use the GnuPG-card
for this)

$ ~/gpg.sh --full-generate-key
gpg-agent[2973]: enabled debug flags: mpi crypto memory cache memstat hashing ipc
gpg (GnuPG) 2.2.1; Copyright (C) 2017 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

Please select what kind of key you want:
   (1) RSA and RSA (default)
   (2) DSA and Elgamal
   (3) DSA (sign only)
   (4) RSA (sign only)
Your selection? 
...

This starts the gpg-agent as:

$ ps ax | grep gpg-a
 2974 ?        Ss     0:00 /home/phablet/myRoot/usr/local/bin/gpg-agent --homedir /home/phablet/.gnupg --daemon --pinentry-program /home/phablet/myRoot/usr/bin/pinentry-curses

Now we can use the the pass command we installed in the chroot'es system with

$ cat pass.sh
#!/bin/sh
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/phablet/myRoot/usr/local/lib export LD_LIBRARY_PATH
PATH=/home/phablet/myRoot/usr/local/bin:$PATH      export PATH
GNUPGHOME=/home/phablet/.gnupg    export GNUPGHOME
GPG_TTY=$(tty)                    export GPG_TTY
unset GPG_AGENT_INFO
/home/phablet/myRoot/usr/bin/pass $*

Init the pass storage as:

$ ./pass.sh init Matthias
Password store initialized for Matthias
web/bla: reencrypting to A62DCD2809AC14F6


$ find .password-store/
.password-store/
.password-store/.gpg-id

Insert some password for test:

$ ./pass.sh insert -m web/bla
Enter contents of web/bla and press Ctrl+D when finished:

password-bla
Username: guru

$ ./pass.sh web/bla

                 ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
                 │ Please enter the passphrase to unlock the OpenPGP secret key:  │
                 │ "Matthias Apitz (test) <guru@sisis.de>"                        │
                 │ 2048-bit RSA key, ID 93A6FBF52FA76DB0,                         │
                 │ created 2017-09-22 (main key ID 3FECB79DDDA409E4).             │
                 │                                                                │
                 │                                                                │
                 │ Passphrase: ***_______________________________________________ │
                 │                                                                │
                 │         <OK>                                    <Cancel>       │
                 └────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
password-bla
Username: guru

We now can use gpg2 and pass directly in the phone to have always our secrets, PIN's etc. with us.

I have here two screen-shots, taken of the terminal-app: In the 1st I have typed in the command ./pass.sh web/foo asking for the (cleartext) values of web/foo (which could be your bank account, login credentials or whatever you can think of). The result visible in this screen (xxx yyy) is only shown after entering the passphrase to unlock your GnuPG secret key, see screen 2. The key is 4096 bits RSA. The key store remains 10 seconds (configurable) unlocked, after which you're asked again for the passphrase.

Matthias

To answer my own question:

root@ubuntu-phablet:/# apt-get install gcc
root@ubuntu-phablet:/# apt-get install libc-dev
root@ubuntu-phablet:/# apt-get install make

HIH

Maybe someone could make a table of all the good proposals or feature requests and we can all vote up/down the requests and have at the end a list what matters most.

I've got a SMS from my provider here in Gemany, Fonic (I think O2 is behind it) saying that they move to 4G/LTE until the end of 2021. Does this mean I have to look for another provider?

What is "micro G"?

One could use an UNIX laptop as AP in station mode and monitore the connections the phone is doing in detail (as it was done in the mentioned investigation). Was this done with our Android kernel?

@cibersheep said in Is our phone phoning home to Google?:

@guru Ubuntu Tuoch doesn't use Android. Uses the Android kernel.

Hal blob libraries are loaded through Haliun (confined?)

This is what I said as well: running an Android kernel. So, what is new in your reply?

In the most recent post of Kyle Rankin, Chief Security Officer of Purism https://puri.sm/posts/snitching-on-phones-that-snitch-on-you/ is a pointer to an investigation about the facts what iOS or Android phones are doing when you think they do nothing: they are phoning home to Google or Apple with a lot of your sensitive data, details here: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/apple_google.pdf

The fact that our beloved Ubuntu phones are running an Android kernel and some other stuff behind the Ubuntu shell let me ask: Does the Android in our phones does the same, at least in parts?

Connection refused means that the TCP/IP port you're connecting to has either no LISTEN or a firewall blocks access to it returning this state in the R pkg. You should specify better, what you are doing and how this error occurs.

Hello,

I'm spammed with SCAM mails which want my money, of course. The mails are in HTML and TEXT and the HTML has an inline image, included in the mail. I've configured in Dekko that I prefer TEXT. Why is the HTML rendered and the image shown? The external content is not presented and blocked. But the image itself could already be malicious.

@domubpkm This is no water in the photo on the right side. It's plastic to let grow strawberry faster.

@jezek Yes. But I found ~150m.

I'm doing regular walks in my village area and there is a bank to do a break in around 900 meter distance of my house. One can "feel" the distance in the photo: the houses in the horizon are far away. The bank is around 10m over ground, because it's near a railway bridge over the road.

I was amazed when I discovered in my BQ my Wifi AP name tarara and first though in a bug, that the phone was still "thinking" being connected as when I left my home. But no, Wifi was really working. I could login into the admin interface of the router and the signal was shown with -50db. See the screens. How is this possible in such a distance?