Replicant

Future of NGI funding.

Fri, 02 May 2025 00:05:11 Z

Why we applied for NLnet funding

As you probably know already, since several years already, none of the smartphones currently supported by LineageOS could easily be supported in future versions of Replicant without ruinous compromises.

This is because to officially support a device in Replicant, we need it to:

Have a removable battery if it's a smartphone (users should be able to swap batteries while walking), or a replaceable battery if it's a Tablet (the tablet might be harder to open than the phone, but the battery should still be replaceable at home).
Have an isolated modem.
Not require any additional nonfree software either to install Replicant or to make Replicant work on the phone.

And while nowadays there are some devices supported by the latest version of LineageOS, that also support 5G networks, and that have removable batteries (like the Fairphones or the SHIFT6mq), making sure that the modem is isolated probably require too much work.

This looks doable in theory as there is some special hardware that is called IOMMU that can isolate the modem on modern smartphones. However this IOMMU needs to be configured properly and be active when the modem is powered on.

Since the configuration is not always easy to do or check, we would also need to rely on a community with expertise in this area, that is able to fix issues without relying on the hardware vendors, like the Linux kernel community. This would mean that the kernel we use would need to be based on upstream Linux, and as of today, this still requires more work than we did so far.

In addition, the smartphones currently supported by LineageOS all have long a list of nonfree software required to work, so the risk that we end up not finding a way to replace or avoid one of the nonfree firmware is higher than it was in the past.

So we came up with alternative plans. The first one was to add support for the Galaxy SIII in upstream Linux since a lot of the work was already done, people already had it, and that power management could work since it worked in Replicant 6.0 already.

Retrospectively a lot of work also remained and we didn't manage to finish it all, and we also failed to predict that the removal of 2G and 3G networks was going to happen so soon in Europe.

So we subsequently came up with a second plan: add support for the PinePhone (which supports 4G networks) instead, by reusing GloDroid, adding modem isolation, fixing usability issues, etc. How this plan turned out will be addressed in a subsequent blog post.

All these plans required a lot of work, and so funding was the natural way to be able to do it.

While the Replicant project has some money and in theory can use it to pay for development, we went to use the NLnet grants instead.

This is because to use Replicant's money we need to structure a bit better the project and the Replicant steering committee needs to decide how to spend the money: how do we verify that the work is done, what kind of work do we fund, etc. All that requires time and discussions.

What we know about NGI / NLnet

External funding often have conditions attached, and people or organizations who fund work typically have their own goals as well.

Since the NLnet conditions were really aligned with the Replicant project goals (release the work under free license, one time work with long term effects, upstream / reusability focus, etc) we applied twice for funding.

This also allowed us to spend Replicant's money on things NLnet would not be able to pay for (like hiring a manager to help structure the Replicant project and do things the developers can't do because they are too busy).

We had first hand experience with how funding from NLnet worked and to our knowledge the way it worked was really suited to free software, and we also discussed with people working at NLnet during various events so we could grasp a bit how it worked from within.

The way the funds were handled also enabled people with very diverse background to apply and get funded. For instance you didn't need to setup a company, or even to have a stable home to live in for applying.

You could also apply for a small project that you do on the side and still have a regular job, or another occupation, etc. Some people also managed to get funding from NLnet and with the help of some non-profit still get a regular salary out of it.

It also didn't discriminate people or projects with different political opinions and/or projects following these opinions as it funded sometimes people or projects with conflicting political opinions as long as the work is strategic for free software.

Once the work is done, NLnet verifies it and you get paid.

So while it didn't work for all cases (that would be difficult to achieve) the way it worked enabled people that can't use other existing funds to apply and in practice it managed to fund a lot of work.

This is also because the NLnet grant system was also designed to be extremely efficient: there was very few administrative overhead (for everybody involved). This was also made possible by relying on well established community practices and norms for accountability (the code is public, people do software releases, etc) and by getting help from people within the community that had very advanced knowledge on more specific areas of free software.

Being efficient is also important as this way we can fund more free software projects.

Origin of some of the funding NLnet manages

If you look at the list of projects being funded mentioned before the vast majority of them have "NGI" as the fund origin.

This is money that comes from the European Union as part of their (Framework Programmes for Research and Technological Development)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framework_Programmes_for_Research_and_Technological_Development] program.

Our hypothesis is that funding free software makes sense for the European Union as in practice it makes alternatives to technological domination from foreign companies producing nonfree software more viable. This also develop technological and free software competence in the European Union which in turn also helps the local economy.

Given the current political context in the United States and the relationship of its executive government with some of the Tech Giants that produce nonfree software and/or software as a service substitute, free software can also be seen as a way to potentially resist pressure by such alliance by both states and people.

The effect of this funding is also that in practice it increase people's freedom and autonomy, which also makes it easier to resist oppressive states.

Since free software does increase transparency, this can be beneficial to both states and people as it makes states more accountable and also prevent misinformation on what states actually do.

We have for instance an example with (COVID Tracing Applications)[https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-4411-lessons-learned-open-sourcing-the-uk-s-covid-tracing-app/] where people can actually understand what such applications really do, which in turn helps having an informed debate on what should be or have been done, and also provide information actionable information (should I install that application?).

While such funding, if kept, will probably not enable us to remove or replace all laws that are problematic for software freedom with ones that guarantee freedom (for instance banning DRMs, also known as Digital Restrictions Management, would be good, but this is probably outside of the scope of funding NLnet and people to work on free software), the fact that states fund socially useful work without too much strings attached and/or without being counter-productive is important as it can potentially help generalize this approach which is beneficial for everybody.

In contrast, going in the opposite direction will probably remove hope and in practice make the future look really bleak and violent as states that don't serve their people bring dissent and repression, and if the repression is too violent, it ends up hurting everybody, including the very people that are involved in such repression (this has for instance been shown in the (Truth Commission Special Report)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_and_Reconciliation_Commission_(South_Africa)#Media_coverage]).

Replicant signing the Open Letter to the European Commission.

The open letter Replicant has signed was initially published in French by the Petites Singularités association, which is involved in the organization of the OFFDEM, a free software event around the FOSDEM.

The letter is under the Free Art License 1.3 and the rest of the this blog post is under either (at your choosing), the Free Art License 1.3, the Creative Commons BY 3.0 or the Creative Commons BY 4.0.

If you also want to sign this letter, you need to publish it on your website in your preferred language, then add yourself to this table.

This is why we also included the letter below.

We found the English translation of the letter on the blog of the postmarketOS project, who we also collaborated with as part of our first NLnet grand for our work on the Galaxy SIII (GT-I9300).

The "The European Union must keep funding free software." letter

Open Letter to the European Commission.

Since 2020, Next Generation Internet (NGI) programmes, part of European Commission's Horizon programme, fund free software in Europe using a cascade funding mechanism (see for example NLnet's calls). This year, according to the Horizon Europe working draft detailing funding programmes for 2025, we notice that Next Generation Internet is not mentioned any more as part of Cluster 4.

NGI programmes have shown their strength and importance to supporting the European software infrastructure, as a generic funding instrument to fund digital commons and ensure their long-term sustainability. We find this transformation incomprehensible, moreover when NGI has proven efficient and economical to support free software as a whole, from the smallest to the most established initiatives. This ecosystem diversity backs the strength of European technological innovation, and maintaining the NGI initiative to provide structural support to software projects at the heart of worldwide innovation is key to enforce the sovereignty of a European infrastructure. Contrary to common perception, technical innovations often originate from European rather than North American programming communities, and are mostly initiated by small-scaled organizations.

Previous Cluster 4 allocated 27 million euros to:

"Human centric Internet aligned with values and principles
commonly shared in Europe" ;

"A flourishing internet, based on common building blocks created
within NGI, that enables better control of our digital life" ;

"A structured ecosystem of talented contributors driving the
creation of new internet commons and the evolution of existing
internet commons".

In the name of these challenges, more than 500 projects received NGI funding in the first 5 years, backed by 18 organisations managing these European funding consortia.

NGI contributes to a vast ecosystem, as most of its budget is allocated to fund third parties by the means of open calls, to structure commons that cover the whole Internet scope - from hardware to application, operating systems, digital identities or data traffic supervision. This third-party funding is not renewed in the current program, leaving many projects short on resources for research and innovation in Europe.

Moreover, NGI allows exchanges and collaborations across all the Euro zone countries as well as "widening countries" 1, currently both a success and an ongoing progress, likewise the Erasmus programme before us. NGI also contributes to opening and supporting longer relationships than strict project funding does. It encourages implementing projects funded as pilots, backing collaboration, identification and reuse of common elements across projects, interoperability in identification systems and beyond, and setting up development models that mix diverse scales and types of European funding schemes.

While the USA, China or Russia deploy huge public and private resources to develop software and infrastructure that massively capture private consumer data, the EU can't afford this renunciation. Free and open source software, as supported by NGI since 2020, is by design the opposite of potential vectors for foreign interference. It lets us keep our data local and favors a community-wide economy and know-how, while allowing an international collaboration. This is all the more essential in the current geopolitical context: the challenge of technological sovereignty is central, and free software allows addressing it while acting for peace and sovereignty in the digital world as a whole.

[1]As defined by Horizon Europe, widening Member States are Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lituania, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Widening associated countries (under condition of an association agreement) include Albania, Armenia, Bosnia, Feroe Islands, Georgia, Kosovo, Moldavia, Montenegro, Morocco, North Macedonia, Serbia, Tunisia, Turkeye, and Ukraine. Widening overseas regions are Guadeloupe, French Guyana, Martinique, Reunion Island, Mayotte, Saint-Martin, The Azores, Madeira, the Canary Islands.

First online Replicant meeting.

Wed, 12 Jun 2024 21:00:00 Z

Date and place

In the last blog post (Replicant status and report of the 37C3 and FOSDEM 2024 conferences) we mentioned that one of the things to do in the short term would be to:

Setup a Replicant meeting online at a fixed time, on IRC/Big blue button/Jitsi/Mumble. If new people come we would do a short introduction and people would present themselves (especially what they are interested in).

So this meeting will take place the 18 June 2024 at 19:00 CEST (Central European Summer Time).

You can run this command in a terminal to see at what time the meeting starts in your time zone:

date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 19:00 Jun 18'

It will take place on mumble on the mumble.replicant.us self hosted Mumble server. If for some reasons there are technical issues a backup mumble server will be used instead.

Mumble servers require a client: Mumble on GNU/Linux or Plumble or Mumla on Android.

And at least on GNU/Linux it requires a bit of time (about 10 minutes) for the first setup as on the first run it guides users toward configuring things to improve the audio quality.

So if you could try to configure and test it first, it will means that we'd have less people to help with configuration at the time of the meeting.

We will be available a bit before 19:00 both on mumble.replicant.us and on the #replicant IRC channels to help people having issues with their setups.

Topics

At the time of writing, the current plan for the meeting is to discuss the following:

Presentation of people (very short).
To have a summary of the current work with (short, ~10min):
- the conversion from WordPress to a static website (GNUtoo)
- other tiny infrastructure work (GNUtoo)
- the work on building 100% free Android SDKs (Wizzard)
- The status of NLnet work (GNUtoo, dllud)
- The status of the steering committee (steering committee(GNUtoo, Putti, Fil Bergamo?) and dllud), and adding dllud to Steering Committee.
Discussions / work about the call for the ("community") Manager.
How/when to setup the next meeting
Other discussions.

Updates

Some last minutes details like the topics or server address could change between now and the meeting, so make sure to re-check this blog post before the meeting.

Replicant status and report of the 37C3 and FOSDEM 2024 conferences.

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 17:55:10 Z

Replicant current status:

The last Replicant release is still based on Android 6.0.

In the previous years, a lot of work was done to make the Galaxy SIII (GT-I9300) usable with an upstream kernel, both on graphics and on the modem.

While working on this report we also found that the removal of 3G networks was more a serious problem than we originally understood.

As we understand from the Wikipedia article on 2G , GSM networks are also being removed in Europe as well (where most Replicant users probably reside). If somehow we understood it wrong please contact us on the Replicant mailing list as this has big implications for Replicant.

This means that none of the currently supported devices will continue to work on non-community networks in most areas of the world.

About a year ago, the current Replicant maintainer talked with someone that knows well European regulations and that person told him that there was no chance to stop 3G from being removed (for instance through legal activism) due to the low number of users still using 3G. Since we didn't ask about GSM at the time, we have no idea if that can be blocked or not or how much effort that requires.

In any case it means that the only way forward for Replicant is to make sure it (also) supports devices that work on 4G networks.

Furthermore such devices should also have VoLTE (Voice over 4G networks) ; otherwise, although they would be able to get Internet over 4G networks, they could not to make regular calls or send SMS.

Unfortunately even the Galaxy SIII 4G (GT-I9305) which is a Galaxy SIII (GT-I9300) with a different modem doesn't support VoLTE. So we cannot reuse most of the Replicant work we did.

Even if in some areas of the world (like some European countries), the devices currently supported will continue to work for very few years, and there was a big amount of work done to make these devices usable with more recent Android versions, a lot more work is needed to make that work usable daily (making power management work, debugging complex issues, etc).

The majority of recent devices (like newer Samsung smartphones) have too many freedom issues, making them unsuitable for Replicant.

Remains the PinePhone:

The hardware already works under GNU/Linux.
The battery life (in hours) is now almost good enough. Furthermore, it is possible to buy an additional keyboard that has a builtin battery to extend it more.
There is an Android distribution (GloDroid) that supports the PinePhone. It has some usability issues that need to be fixed: modem disappearing on some models, no cellular data, no modem isolation, etc.

The PinePhone Pro and Librem 5 could also be supported but they are not high priority right now due to incomplete power management (PinePhone Pro) and high cost (Librem 5).

In light of this, the current Replicant maintainer applied for funding through NLnet (again) to fix some of the PinePhone's issues and support it in Replicant. This application was accepted but he ended up being sidetracked by another project instead of working on that.

He got involved in what became GNU Boot and planned to have the project in good state by the end of the last summer, in the hope the work could be reused to ship a bootloader for the PinePhone in the next Replicant version.

See the GNU Boot 0.1 RC3 announcement and the NLnet funding application for more details.

Unfortunately the work on GNU Boot took way longer than anticipated, being unfinished yet. Because of that the work on the PinePhone didn't even start.

In addition to that, the main Replicant maintainer was also demotivated (he did a lot of work that turned out not to be that useful) and he thought that the project was poorly managed by him. He was trying to understand what went wrong and how to fix it. Going to the 37C3 to find help was part of the fixing plan.

Identified issues:

Discussions between GNUtoo, dllud (both Replicant contributors) and several people we met during the 37C3 or on the train going to it converged to the same points and together we identified several issues:

Replicant has not enough people:

A diversity of profiles helps solving issues and not be stuck. It also helps keeping the motivation as different people are good in different areas and thus people can more easily work on what they are good at and like to work on.
We cannot expect a single person to take care of the community, help new contributors, handle project management, keep relationships with other communities, keep track of what work is getting done elsewhere to improve collaboration, manage the infrastructure (servers) and modernize it a bit, and at the same time work on the code towards new releases. So far the current maintainer has been switching from a set of tasks to another but that didn't really work out.

It's too difficult to contribute to Replicant:

It requires computers that are not commonly available among people: to build Replicant you need a lot of free space (200+ GiB), a fast internet connection to download more than 50 GiB, 32 GiB of RAM or more (for recent Android versions), and sometimes run specific versions of distributions.
It requires specific hardware like a Galaxy SIII (GT-I9300). People can't help with commonly available emulators or single board computers.
There is extensive documentation but it's scattered around. Documentation is also lacking for the tasks that are the most important for Replicant (porting Replicant to newer Android versions). Though we can also have people helping new contributors again to compensate for documentation issues.
We have a list of tasks and required skills for them but we lack information about the importance of the tasks. We also need to organize a bit how to assign tasks to people according to their skills and will. We were also advised to break the important tasks in more details.

Plan forwards:

Very short terms plans:

Write this report: As we were not always discussing with the same people at the conference this should help us share information between ourselves and also with all the people that helped Replicant at the conference, to better organize the next steps.
Setup a Replicant meeting online at a fixed time, on IRC/Big blue button/Jitsi/Mumble. If new people come we would do a short introduction and people would present themselves (especially what they are interested in).
Re-run the call for the Community Manager. We will run almost the same call as before so the work will be less than last time. We will be looking for a candidate that can do a subset of the tasks in the call. As we were told multiple times that “Community Manager” was not describing the job well, we are also looking for a better term but so far no one found one that would feel right.
Amend the NLnet proposal to include GNU Boot work as well to solve our dilemma.

Medium term plans:

Find a way to get a build server. A KGPE-D16 would be a good idea. The FSF can probably buy it and host it for us.
Work on the PinePhone (and on GNU Boot as well).

Long term plans:

While discussing with NLnet we were also told that it might be useful to collaborate more with DivestOS as part of our goals are similar. So we will need to evaluate again if there is enough proximity in our code to collaborate.

In the past people from DivestOS were really helpful as they found nonfree software inside Replicant and reported it to us.

Apart from that we don't have long term plans yet. Once we have a Replicant release that supports the PinePhone, we will need to decide where to go next.

For instance we could support more devices, reduce the amount of work for adding support for newer Android versions, reduce the differences between GNU/Linux and Android, or simply keep Replicant up to date by supporting more recent Android versions with minimal work.

Right now we also didn't spend much of the Replicant money and beside paying for a “Community Manager” we don't have precise plans yet.

We have about $200 000 and so far we relied on funding from NLnet to bring Replicant back on track as it was easier not to mess up this way.

Money goes away fast and spending it all in the wrong direction would prevent Replicant from using it to become more sustainable. Very few projects have an opportunity to use money to grow or achieve more.

Instead most of the ones that want to grow and become (bigger) non-profits are stuck in a chicken and egg issue as they need more money (that they don't have) to achieve more, which in turn leads to a greater need for donations.

As such, getting the project back on track before even starting to evaluate how to use the money to do big changes to the project seems a good idea, as many projects were destroyed after getting too much money and failing to properly use it.

Other advices for medium/long term:

One person also told us that businesses have interesting methodologies like “tracer bullets” in Agile methodology, or “Business model canvas” or some emotional approaches to tasks that might be worth looking at as they can work for non-commercial projects as well and can be adapted to a wide variety of cases.
One of the people we talked to insisted on the importance of finding a good team and finding ways to divide tasks between people. For that person it was also important to find people that could work well together and that agreed on the same goal (to avoid infightings).
We could also delegate more sysadmin work to the FSF: It would require less time from our side without compromising on freedom and with minimal extra work for the FSF sysadmins if we don't require custom things.
We were also warned that delegating tasks among ourselves still require time to organize. According to that person, in many cases if a person delegates a task, only 50% of the time is saved.

Other area of work:

Android SDK:

The main advantage of Replicant over other GNU/Linux distributions certified by the FSF is that it can run Android applications, but that is only relevant if there are 100% free software Android applications.

Somewhat recently we found out that it was no longer possible to know if Android applications shipped by F-Droid are really free, as F-Droid now uses the nonfree Google SDK to build the applications. As such we don't know if they build with another SDK on FSF certified GNU/Linux distributions. We want to help fix that to make sure the solution really suits our needs.

If there were fully free drop-in replacement SDKs that also build on a 100% free distributions, that issue could be fixed for both F-Droid and Replicant. F-Droid may have further requirements as they probably have higher security demands than Replicant. For instance, they probably won't like to depend on the (free software) binaries shipped in the SDK source code that are used to build it, and would rather build everything from source.

In the times of Replicant 4.2 (based on Android 4.2) Replicant produced its own SDK. After that several GNU/Linux distributions (Debian and some Debian derivatives) started shipping a fully free SDK for Android 6.0 so Replicant stopped producing newer SDKs.

Nowadays Debian and PureOS still package an Android 6.0 SDK but don't support more recent versions of Android. They also don't support the NDK that supports languages like C. F-Droid probably used these SDKs for a while, specially because they are completely built from source from well known distribution(s), but many Android applications don't build anymore with these old SDKs.

After that, free SDKs for various Android versions started being released at https://android-rebuilds.beuc.net, but the main author of this work at some point moved on.

After that several people tried to continue that work somehow and published source code that can build SDKs but none published the SDK binaries.

In the GNU 40 conference in Switzerland, the current Replicant maintainer met the person behind SDK rebuilds (beuc.net) and also someone interested in giving resources (like server space) to build an SDK.

In the 37C3 we met additional people:

Starfish, that wrote potentially 100% free Android applications and that also publishes source code to build a free Android SDK. His applications build with this free SDK.

Starfish doesn't publish binaries in order to avoid dealing with license compliance in case something is wrong in the SDK binaries. Replicant is happy to do that.

Starfish can also accept contributions and bug reports for supporting FSF certified GNU/Linux distributions and for removing nonfree software from the SDK if any if found.

As a bonus we also reviewed the applications that Starfish wrote so if the SDK works on 100% free distributions we'll also have 100% free applications to promote to people without any freedom caveats.

Another person (wizzard) jumped in to automatize the builds, making them run unattended on each new release.

So thanks to all these people everything is now in motion to get the SDK problem fixed once for good and in a better way than before: one that makes sure people can actually build Android applications with 100% free software.

Conferences:

At the 37C3 we managed to understand Replicant issues and a way forward probably because we started discussing the project issues in advance, which allowed just enough understanding to be able to ask for help. If we didn't do that we probably would not have managed to get help that is that useful.

37C3 talks and interesting people:

While we (GNUtoo, dllud, and the people that helped us) did a lot at the congress (and even too much since we missed our own lightning talk due to too much cognitive load) at the end we managed to achieve the most important goal: finding a path forward for Replicant.

Alongside our main goal of putting the project back on track, we found time to host a variety of talks and events:

We had an official Replicant assembly where people could meet us.
We did a presentation named Smartphones freedom status in 2023 which looked at smartphone hardware and operating systems available in
1. It wasn't recorded. The slides are available as PDF and source code .

At the end of the presentation, after the questions, we also got some feedback:

We were told that there are more applications for GNU/Linux that work on smartphones than what we assumed. They are referenced in https://linuxphoneapps.org and they also list applications available in PureOS landing (a rolling release version of PureOS) and Guix . Still they probably have less applications available than on F-Droid but things are progressing in the right direction.
We also did a talk presenting the Replicant as part of the Critical Decentralization Cluster . Unfortunately it wasn't recorded due to a technical issue, but we re-did it again the day after on a longer format . The slides source code and PDF are available.
We did a presentation on the status of Replicant . It wasn't recorded so if you want to know what was said, the slides are available , but you also need to read the presentation.txt to understand it.
As a follow up to the presentation on the status of Replicant, we also had a meetup on the last day where we had discussions with the people attending the talk.
We met someone repurposing smartphones who told us that on some Samsung smartphones/tablets, erasing the PARAM partition (with dd if=/dev/zero) sometimes removes restrictions that prevent the phone from booting custom distributions.
Among those helping us, there was someone interested in using Replicant for education. The most problematic issue found is that the current requirements to work on Replicant are too much for students. Supporting single board computers or emulators would be a first step to help here. In general this would help finding new contributors.

OFFDEM / FOSDEM 2024:

The main maintainer of Replicant had already planned to go to an event of OFFDEM (an alternative conference to FOSDEM) on Friday night, and also to FOSDEM 2024 on Saturday and Sunday. Train tickets were already bought before Replicant took the decision to go to the 37C3, so he kept the plan.

As expected it was not as useful as the 37C3 for Replicant (it was way more useful for GNU Boot) but still some interesting things happened:

He met Hans-Christoph Steiner from F-Droid and explained the status on having a fully free Android SDK. He detailed our work to provide binaries by setting up an automated build system that reuses the maintained scripts to build the SDK and that runs on a FSF certified distribution (Trisquel) to make this solution also work for Replicant.
He was introduced to people working on CalyxOS by Michiel from NLnet.

Before that he thought that CalyxOS was deeply problematic because even if on paper CalyxOS had the same freedoms as LineageOS, its security system removed users control of the devices (users don't have root, etc) and didn't have access to their data.

But in reality CalyxOS uses SeedVault , a backup application that enables users to backup their data and restore it on any other distribution that may not have the same security model. SeedVault is also used by most Android distributions. It is therefore a good idea to see how it can be integrated into Replicant, as it seems to be made with user's empowerment in mind. It can backup data (encrypted) to an USB key, so users don't need a server or external services.

In addition he was told by a CalyxOS contributor that it is relatively simple for users to build CalyxOS with their own keys, and so be in full control of the device.

He was also told that newer Android versions don't need F-Droid privilege extension anymore due to the inclusion of an API for stores inside recent Android versions (thanks to some European regulations).

He met someone who is working on understanding the European regulations that aim to standardize digital identity papers and the way to store it. He already met that person at the 37C3 but this time there was more understanding and more time to discuss the issue more in depth. The regulation has requirements for smartphones so it will most likely affect smartphones distributions that use free software drivers (like Replicant, various GNU/Linux distributions, etc.). If done wrong, it would prevent free software users from storing their identity papers in their smartphones with free software (for instance because it could be stored “securely” in areas of the phone inaccessible to users and free software). One of the issue is that this person looks for help to understand the technical parts, and also for some associations to help in the fight to modify the laws to fit free software. Since Replicant has very little time to look at this now, he referred her to the Osmocom project that already analyzes somewhat similar designs like eSIM.
He also met with Tiberiu from Technoethical, a shop that sells FSF certified hardware and Replicant compatible smartphones (that aren't certified by the FSF due to nonfree bootloaders and other issues). Technoethical will be negatively affected by Replicant's decision to drop support for the current Samsung phones in future versions, as PinePhone will become the major focus.
The main maintainer of Replicant also met with Paul Kocialkowski. Before that meeting he thought that on GNU/Linux the eg25-manager program for the PinePhone only did simple things like setting up udev rules and had simple hacks to make the modem work fine. He thought that all stability issues were to be handled by Modem Manager. However the EC 25 Manager may also be monitoring the modem and restarting it when it crashes. This could explain modem stability issues with Android/GloDroid on PinePhones with 3GiB of RAM. The fix may be to port/reimplement that feature to make this model usable.

Edits:

Refrased Technoethical paragraph.

Replicant @ 37C3

Thu, 28 Dec 2023 22:40:17 Z

Since yesterday, December 27th, the 37th Chaos Communication Congress (37C3) is taking place in Hamburg. Replicant is present as part of the Critical Decentralization Cluster (CDC).

Replicant's assembly is the place to come by if need help installing Replicant or general advice regarding software freedom on smartphones and tablets. You can also take the opportunity to verify the release signing PGP.

Location: G5, Hall 3, Level 0
DECT: 8652

As Replicant is struggling with structural problems, first and foremost lack of contributors on key areas (development, sysadmining, communication, coordination, documentation), we are looking to onboard new people with fresh ideas. Please drop by if you feel keen to help on any of these field.

There will also be a few talks and gatherings about Replicant and related topics in several spots around the congress:

Short introduction to Replicant as part of the CDC – December 27 16:30, Saal E
Introduction to Replicant – December 28 10:00, Saal D
Replicant struggle: past and present successes and failures – December 28 14:00, Saal 3, CDC, Round Table
Smartphones freedom status in 2023 – December 30 12:30, Saal E
Replicant Meetup – December 30 14:00, Saal 3, CDC, Round Table

Replicant at FOSDEM 2023

Wed, 01 Feb 2023 15:17:31 Z

This year the FOSDEM will take place in Brussels the 4 and 5 February.

This year there will be a talk about Guix evaluation and usage for/by the Replicant project: How Replicant, a 100% free software Android distribution, uses (or doesn't use) Guix, by the current Replicant maintainer.

As not everybody is familiar with Replicant or free software on smartphones, it will also have some background information on hardware and software of freedom in smartphones with a focus on FSF certified distributions.

We hope to also use this occasion to build collaboration with other projects, especially other Android distributions that use kernels based on upstream Linux.

We may update this blog post if there are last minute changes (if the talk is moved) or if we have new interesting information (like interesting talk to attend, other events, etc).

New Replicant 6.0 0004 release and Replicant 11 status.

Fri, 03 Jun 2022 09:56:07 Z

Replicant 6.0 0004 is now officially released. If you want to upgrade from Replicant 6.0 version 0003 or earlier you need to follow the data migration procedure that is documented in the Release notes page on the Replicant wiki.

Even if we released the images back in January 2022, we didn't announce it officially at the time because the data migration procedure wasn't complete yet.

What is new in this release

Replicant is in the list of distributions that are recommended by the FSF. As such, Replicant needs to follow strict criteria that ensures that the distribution does its best not to violates its users' freedom.

However fixing the issues and making new releases can sometime take a long time. The last Replicant 6.0 release was from December 2017.

This new release fixes some very serious freedom and privacy issues:

We found an issue within the phone application: it was leaking the phone numbers of both inbound and outbound calls to third parties as part of a feature called phone lookup providers. More details are available in the bug report. Even if it was not trivial to reproduce and find the bug it's now fixed as the feature has been completely disabled with 3 patches (5, 6, 7).
F-Droid has been removed as many applications shipped in it are not compliant with the guidelines for distributions recommended by the FSF. It was kept so long because we expected to get it fixed upstream fast enough, but that didn't happen for various reasons. We have setup a wiki page and a forum section for more information about the issue and how to deal with it.
Several binary firmwares (without source code) related to the back and home “touch” buttons were found and removed with 4 patches (10, 11, 12,13). The firmwares seem to have only been used for factory testing, so the buttons should still work on the devices that have them.
The touchscreen firmware for the Galaxy Note 8.0 was also lacking any corresponding source code (bug #2194). That was fixed by removing it (15).
On all the currently supported devices with a modem, when users set the device in flight mode, the modem is only asked to go in low power mode. Because of that the modem is probably still on and its OS is probably still running. Because of that we fixed the wiki and added scripts to disable (and enable back) the modem to the new Replicant images. They work by preventing Replicant to load the modem OS.
We also got a report on the mailing list that a nonfree ambient SDK was added in CyanogenMod and was not removed either by LineageOS 13 or Replicant 6. So we removed it as well.

This release may also fix several bug(s) which made some SIM cards not recognizable by Replicant 6.0: we have now merged a fix for one of the bug (#1909) but as we don't know if all the “SIM card not recognized” bugs are related. We would highly appreciate if those that opened the original bug report could confirm if it also fixes their issues as well.

Several issues still need to be fixed, but we didn't want to delay even more this release, as that would prevent users from getting the fixes mentioned above:

It's still not possible to build Replicant 6.0 from a distribution that is recommended by the FSF (bug #1861).
While removing the firmware of the Galaxy Note 8.0 touchscreen driver, many more firmwares without corresponding source code were found in the driver/touchscreen directory in the kernel used by most of the devices supported by Replicant 6.0. However they weren't removed yet. Help is more than welcome to help with that.
While investigating if it was possible to upgrade WebView, the Android builtin web browser component (bug #1786) we also discovered that, because Android build system doesn't use a package manager, finding the license of each repository wasn't trivial (bug #1973).
More investigations are needed as well to replace WebView with a free software and up to date implementation (bug #1786).
The bug related to a bad sound quality during calls in some circumstances (bug #1773) is not fixed yet, but there is a workaround that works for some use cases.
The Let's Encrypt certificates probably stopped working in Replicant 6.0 the first September 2021. Some browsers like IceCat should normally continue to work fine. See the Standing on Our Own Two Feet blog post by letsencrypt for more details.

As the internal WiFi doesn't work with free software, some new network related features improving usability were merged :

RepWiFi has been removed as it's now possible to use the stock Android menus to handle the WiFi. This was done by patching Android to also accept external dongles. It is less reliable than with RepWiFi because in some cases reboots are needed for the WiFi to be recognized, and enabling the WiFi most probably also powers on the Internal WiFi chip as well, increasing the power consumption. However it should reduce the probability of applications like F-Droid being broken in the future, as it's better integrated in Android. In the event that Replicant 6.0 stops being maintained and that Replicant 11 doesn't get support for all the Replicant 6.0 devices, this patch should increase the lifetime of the affected devices.
Ethernet support has been added but it doesn't work on all the devices.
The USB networking scripts were also been added to the devices.
Support for some rt2500-usb dongles that don't need the OS to load a firmware has been added to the Galaxy SIII 4G (i9305), which is an uncompleted device. It wasn't added to the other devices to make the release happen a bit faster.

Other improvements were also made:

llvmpipe is now the default OpenGL renderer. On devices with an Exynos CPU / System on a chip, this allows running many applications that weren't working before. Unfortunately llvmpipe significantly slows down some system components used in the graphical interface. This has been catered for by patching Android to use the old libagl renderer for those system components.
Scripts to switch between OpenGL implementations globally have been added to the image as well. Thus, if you want to revert back to the old behaviour, just run “graphics.sh faster” in a root terminal. To switch back to the new behavior you can instead use “graphics.sh compatible”. Note that “graphics.sh compatible” will still keep the old OpenGL implementation for the system components mentioned above, so there is little risk in trying the scripts.
It's now easier to build Replicant as there is a new script that wraps part of the building process. It's also more convenient as it stores build logs. The script has been used to build the release, and the build instructions also use it now.
It has became easier to modify the installation instructions as they now apply to all devices, and were split into parts that are reusable. This way if the instructions needs to be modified, it requires a single modification instead of 10 or 30 modifications like before.
Instructions to backup the modem data partition have been added. The modem partition can become corrupted in some conditions. As it can be very difficult or impossible to recreate that partition, and that it's required for the modem to work, we very strongly advise users to do a backup.
A new wipe command has been added to wipe partitions, however it is not very well suited for wiping files. To efficiently wipe files another application or utility would need to be integrated.

Many of the improvements and fixes were also made possible thanks to the work of new contributors.

Replicant 11 status and policy changes for supported devices

Work on Replicant 9 has now shifted to Replicant 10 and then Replicant 11, and has been ongoing in parallel. As it will use a kernel closely based on upstream Linux, it has some implications:

The work on Replicant 11 is made with the Galaxy SIII (i9300), so it should be supported.
The Galaxy Note II (N7100) is very similar to the Galaxy SIII but requires a bit more work to be supported.
The Galaxy SIII 4G (I9305) and Galaxy Note II 4G (N7105) could also be added if work is done to add support for their modem in Replicant.
We don't know yet how much work is needed to add support for the other devices that are currently supported by Replicant 6.0, so we don't know yet if they will be compatible with Replicant 11 or not. We would need to find or get more information on the upstream status of theses devices before having a rough idea.
It will be easier to add support for devices using a mainline kernel.

We also take advantage of this release to announce some policies changes:

As Replicant 6 only supports devices with somewhat isolated modems, subsequent Replicant versions will also only support devices with isolated modems.
As Replicant 6 only supports devices with replaceable batteries, subsequent Replicant versions will also only support devices with replaceable batteries.

The Replicant developers chose not to support these devices officially in Replicant for good reasons.

Supporting devices with non removable batteries ourselves has a lot of challenges:

As Replicant 11 requires more work and working to upstream devices support in Linux takes more time than adding devices in Replicant 6:
- if we start adding support for a device, we want to be able to spend the time required to do it right and to work with upstream projects like Linux to add support for it in theses projects as well. The advantage is that it makes Replicant and the device being added more sustainable. However if the device has a battery that is not replaceable by experienced users, developers, repair shops, or repair café, the device would have a very short lifetime which is incompatible with making Replicant sustainable.
- Users would need to buy the device new in order to make sure that the battery lasts enough for a daily use. Buying the device second hand would be way more complicated as users would need to make sure that the battery last enough time. Developers would still be able to work on the device for a very long time, assuming that they are not users as well that want to use the device. But their work would not be very useful without usable devices.
- In addition, being able to remove the battery of a device increase trust: for devices with a single battery, it's easy to understand that without a battery, the device is really off. For devices with an additional backup battery, some background information on chip energy consumption is enough to understand what the device cannot do with such backup battery.

As for non isolated modems, if Replicant only support devices with isolated modems, it's way easier for users and developers to remember that the devices they are using have a somewhat isolated modem.

However, as Replicant 11 is using a kernel closely based on upstream Linux, there is already some interest in adding support for devices already supported by Linux which have a non-isolated modem and/or a non-replaceable battery, and it would be sad to not be able to leverage all the work done in Replicant with these devices.

So practically speaking we are willing to help people and/or projects that are willing to support such devices. We are also accepting contributions in the Replicant source code for such devices provided that we can maintain the code without too much effort without having the devices.

So while anybody could test if the code still compiles fine, It will then be up to the people that have such devices to test if the code is still working over time. The code quality of such contributions may also have to be high as we want to keep maintaining that code over time without having the devices. The Linux kernel is already using a similar approach to be able to maintain support a lot of devices (including devices that the maintainers don't have) without removing support for older devices.

We could even provide access to the Replicant infrastructure (for instance by creating Redmine sub-projects, opening new git repositories namespaces, and so on) to the people wanting to support such devices, but they would at least need to:

Find a name that is different from Replicant for the project (to not confuse both projects, else it defeats the point of having some separation).
Stay compatible with the strict FSF criteria as Replicant doesn't want to host projects that are incompatible with such criteria. Though we already collaborate with other projects (which we don't host) that aren't compatible with such criteria.
Take care of users support (as Replicant developers will probably not have these devices, so they won't be able to test things to properly support users).
Take care of the releases (as Replicant developers will probably not have these devices, they would not be able to test the releases).

As for the details on what constitute a “replaceable battery”, all the smartphones currently supported by Replicant 6.0 have removable batteries, so the batteries are very easy to replace. Compatible batteries can still be found in several cities and/or countries.

And for the tablets supported by Replicant 6.0:

They all have batteries that are not removable in the usual meaning, but they can still be replaced by opening the device.
It is easy enough for experienced users, developers, repair shops, and repair café to open the device and remove the battery, so it is probably possible to replace it as well.
It would be interesting to know more about the availability of compatible batteries.
It might also be possible to use tablets with batteries that last way less than when the device is new, as many people have them off most of the time. But even in that case it still shortens a lot the lifetime of the device, as they probably still needs a working battery to boot.

Replicant is looking for volunteers to add support for the “GSD4t” GPS chip.

Mon, 14 Jun 2021 16:09:32 Z

Over the years, none of the Replicant contributors have been able to find the time to add support for this chip,and at the time of writing this chip is still not supported by Replicant despite being relatively easy to add support for it compared with the Broadcom GPS chips that are present in the other supported devices.

Over time, contributions from other people and projects made it easier to add support for the GSD4t chip.

There is now some documentation of that protocol in the form of some Perl source that can probably decode the protocol, and there has also been some people doing research on it.

In addition it's also easier to do some tests on GNU/Linux: there is now some support in upstream Linux for the Galaxy SII (GT-I9100) thanks to the postmarketOS contributor(s) who worked on that. The nonfree bootloader of the Galaxy SII (GT-I9100) might requires some patches on top of that, but we also maintain patches for the Galaxy SIII (GT-I9300 and GT-I9305) bootloaders in our kernel_replicant_linux repository that might also work on the Galaxy SII (GT-I9100).

The Replicant developers are mostly available on the Replicant mailing and on IRC (#replicant on the hackint, libera.chat and OFTC networks). See the CommunityAndContacts wiki page for more details.

As for how to integrate the work, we already have an example of GPS library that was used in Replicant 4.2 for the GTA04.

As postmarketOS is also interested in making this chip work with free software, it might be a good strategy to also consult them to see how that work could also benefit GNU/Linux distributions.

edit1: removed duplicated title.

License: CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported

Presenting Replicant’s Community Manager

Wed, 05 May 2021 20:39:23 Z

The Replicant Steering Committee has concluded the second round of evaluations of the applications for the community manager role.

We would like to thank all the candidates that have applied for the role. It has been a greatly encouraging experience to receive so many valuable proposals and to observe such a responsiveness to our call.

Selecting one candidate among all participants has been no easy task, given the interesting variety of valuable profiles we had the pleasure to evaluate.

The key aspects that have been considered are, in no particular order:

the candidate having been actively participating in the community's activities and discussions, in the forum, the wiki, the mailing list and the official IRC channel, as well as in-person meetings
the candidate's experience in installing Replicant and in solving problems related to this activity
the candidate's overall confidence with the practical aspects of using Replicant and helping users with related issues, doubts and information requests
the candidate's involvement with other free-software projects similar to Replicant and/or with interesting points of contact with the work being done in Replicant
the candidate's ability to write useful and comprehensible periodical reports to keep the community informed about the project's activities
the candidate's ability to contribute to Replicant's technical documentation
the differences with typical free software backgrounds (to be able to bring more diverse perspectives to the project)

All these aspects considered, Kurtis Hanna emerged as the most suitable candidate for the role.

Kurtis has been a very active community member since at least 2016, successfully helping users in various occasions with different issues and enquiries.
He is well informed about various free-software projects and has often acted as a link between some of those projects and Replicant.
He participated in and/or helped organise many of the gatherings that have been held by Replicant members throughout the last 4 years, either in person or remotely, contributing his thoughts, impressions and valuable proposals.

In the next few weeks, we will be coordinating with Kurtis and the FSF to work out the applicable funding conditions and to define the contract that will regulate the Community Manager's duties.

Once again, we thank all applicants and the whole community in general.

Cordially,

The Replicant Steering Committee

Call for a community manager

Tue, 01 Dec 2020 16:15:39 Z

The Replicant project is looking for a community manager.

The role of the community manager is to fill the gap between Replicant developers and users, making sure that users' concerns are properly addressed while at the same time freeing the developers from the burden of running the community.
The community manager should also foster collaborations between
Replicant and other free software projects.

Tasks

The range of tasks will be very diverse. For instance:

Interact with users through our various channels: IRC, forum, mailing list, bug tracker and blog comments.
Help users fix common problems by pointing them to the relevant documentation.
Help users write proper bug reports.
Explain the design decisions that were taken during Replicant's development as well as the philosophical stand of the project.
Improve the wiki documentation, especially the end-user part.
Reach out to other free software projects in order to share work and reuse code between them and Replicant.
Keep an eye on work being done on other free software projects that may benefit Replicant.
Represent Replicant at conferences/events and coordinate the organization of such events.
Promote Replicant and free software both online and offline, through promotional material, blog posts and likes.
Supervise and promote fund-raising activities in collaboration with the FSF.
Manage applications for paid development work and help developers with paperwork and bureaucratic fullfilments.

It will be up to the community manager to decide which tasks to prioritize to best help the Replicant project.

Profile

In order to accomplish these tasks we believe that the community manager should be an individual with an extensive knowledge of Replicant and free software in general, probably acquired through years of usage and research. It should also be someone with good communication skills and ability to handle conflicts. Availability to travel long-distance in order to represent Replicant at events is also taken into account.

Accountability

Tracking each single action is not desirable nor an efficient use of time. Therefore, accountability will be mostly handled through a newsletter that should be prepared by the community manager. The content and periodicity of this newsletter will be up for the community manager to decide. It should not be focused on what the community manager has been doing, but rather on what is going on in the Replicant community and in other relevant free software projects.

In case any issues arise, the Steering Committee will decide on the continuation of the role by taking into account input from the developers, users and the community manager.

Funding

The community manager will engage in a contracting agreement with the FSF and be paid from the Replicant funds.

We expect that the workload will be around 80 hours per month. Although, it should be noted that this will be highly variable. Some months, like those when conferences take place, may require extra hours of work, while others may require much less.

How to apply

If you want act as the Replicant project's community manager please send your proposal to the public replicant@osuosl.org mailing list and tell us shortly (max ~300 words) why you would be the ideal fit for this role.

We can be contacted privately at the Replicant contact address but at the end of the day a formal proposal will need to be made publicly on the mailing list.

Please submit your proposal by latest 15th of December 2020, 21:00 UTC.

The Replicant Steering Committee (with help from dllud)

Late report from FOSDEM 2020

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 11:39:07 Z

On the 1st and 2nd of February 2020, 4 Replicant contributors (FilBerg, GNUtoo, GrimKriegor and dllud) attended FOSDEM 2020 in Brussels.

FOSDEM (Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting) is an annual conference organized by volunteers, to enable users and contributors to meet and promote the widespread use of free and open source software. This helps communities take decisions and also enables various communities and people to collaborate together.

Part of this comes from FOSDEM allowing projects to book rooms in order to have meetings and presentations (dubbed as a BoF, Birds of a Feather). Replicant contributors held such a BoF, and also gave a talk at another room and wandered around the exhibition's rooms talking to people at the stands of relevant projects.

As it is a conference, the FOSDEM also features talks by various members and contributors of the free software and open source communities which range across many different projects and areas. Listening to the talks (which are often recorded as well) is a way to get the latest news of what's happening in the free software world.

This is a (late, sorry for that) report with the relevant information that Replicant contributors leaned during the event, alongside with a summary of the discussions that took place during the BoF. This report is published both here in the blog and in the mailing list. Comments are gladly welcomed on both mediums.

Before Replicant BoF

Technoethical

Technoethical is a store that sells devices pre-installed withofficial versions of Replicant and also Replicant merchandise. It is featured at Replicant's website and donates a percentage of its sales to Replicant.

We went to the Technoethical stand to discuss the idea of only requiring a percentage of the sales for bigger companies, which wouldn't include Technoethical. According to Tiberiu from Technoethical, Technoethical didn't agree toformally give any percentages of the sales to Replicant, but they instead do it voluntarily.

Wikidata

We had a discussion with someone involved in Wikidata about how to describe hardware like smartphones in Wikidata.

For instance there is an entry for Replicant in Wikidata, and we want to be able to more precisely express that a given software, like Replicant 6.0 0004, or the Lima Linux driver, is compatible with a given smartphone or GPU.

Right now this seems to be done through the Platform property. Unfortunately, this property by itself cannot tell precisely which version of Replicant is compatible with say the Galaxy Nexus (GT-I9250). We were told to look into the qualifier to see if we can find a way to express that.

After looking at it we found that it's possible to add a platform qualifier for a given version, for instance to tell that Replicant 6.0 is compatible with the Galaxy SII (GT-I9100). However, after this, it is not possible to add an extra layer of qualifiers to tell for instance that the Galaxy SIII 4G (GT-I9305) is compatible with Replicant 6.0 except for its modem.

The goal here is to be able to use Wikidata as a database for storing information about hardware and software. This way we could reuse that information easily in various tools and/or in MediaWiki after having migrated to it. We already have a very rough tool to experiment with that and print some information about Replicant versions and the devices they support.

Replicant BoF

Like last year we also had a Replicant BoF this year.

Organization

This year we improved the organization of the Replicant BoF:

Most of the people in the room seemed really engaged and interested in it, whereas last year we got the impressions that people were less engaged and interested.
While things were more organized than last year we still need to improve on it. For instance we lacked a precise schedule for the BoF in order to properly cover all the topics we needed to. The consequence is that we usually try to rush at the end in order to cover some topics we didn't have covered yet.
We also had the ability to remotely listen to the BoF through Mumble and participate through IRC. At the beginning we tried a setup that was too complex, with speakers, to enable remote participants to speak. This setup took too much time, so when enough people were in the room, we started without that and fell back on IRC for participation instead. As we were late to start, and were rushing to make the more complex setup work, we also forgot to record the meeting.
Properly organizing a BoF is not that easy as we typically are short on time and also need to organize many other things in parallel such as the talks we give in other rooms.
For next year, we need to decide on weather or not we could fund or reimburse travel costs for someone from the Replicant community, like Kurtis Hanna, that has a deep enough knowledge of what is going on in Replicant, to help us with the organization of the BoF.

Build system

During the BoF, we did a quick presentation of the issues we were having with the Android build system. More details on the issues are available on the “Android's build system is messier than your distro's” talk that was presented at 36C3.

GeckoView

We also did a quick presentation of the freedom issues we were having with WebView. As with the build system, more details are also available in a presentation (“The Chromium mess meets Android”) that was held at 36C3.

We then got questions and ideas on how to solve that issue.

One of the ideas was to go for the lowest hanging fruit and implement the easiest part of the WebView API with GeckoView, which should suffice for some applications.

Once this is done we would still have the problem of making the F-Droid applications use it: the application developers will probably not include GeckoView in their applications as it would increase the size of the package by around 20M (which is a lot).

But even if they do, it would still be an issue as each package using WebView (and there are many) would have its own GeckoView, which would probably increase RAM consumption.

There are kernel features like CONFIG_KSM which reduce the RAM usage by finding duplicate regions and making the duplicated pages point to the same region until the data is modified. However, this may not be a proper solution, especially if the GeckoView builds shipped with each app are not exactly the same. It may also increase CPU consumption as CONFIG_KSM has to scan the RAM for duplicated pages.

Several solutions were proposed by Replicant contributors and people attending the BoF:

Make Replicant ship a GeckoView that is ABI compatible with WebView (even if not all of the WebView is implemented).
Use F-Droid to build and distribute GeckoView.
Develop software that would automatically recompile all the F-Droid applications that link against WebView to link against GeckoView instead, and automatically publish the result in a dedicated F-Droid repository.
Applications could potentially be tagged with supporting or not supporting a given incomplete WebView implementation implemented through GeckoView.

Upstream

Replicant only wants to supports devices that reduce the amount of harm for users freedom, privacy and security. For instance all device supported by Replicant 6.0 and onward have some form of modem isolation.

However some people might still want to support devices that attack users freedom, privacy, and security more than the ones already supported by the current Replicant release. So we explained that while such devices could not be supported by Replicant, the Replicant project is open to collaboration with other projects like LineageOS to add support for such devices.

This is relevant to Replicant because Replicant 9 uses a Linux kernel that has very few patches on top of the upstream Linux. So while Replicant 9 is not ready yet, when it will be, most of the Replicant 9 code will probably be reused to support smartphones and tablets that have good support in upstream Linux. So, even if for smartphones with different modems, more work would be needed to support the modem, there will probably be some people interested in reusing the Replicant 9 code.

This means that we would need to work with other upstreams to find the best ways to deal with it and share the maintenance of the code. Unfortunately there weren't any contributors from other Android distribution in the room.

Galaxy SIII (GT-I9300), Replicant 9 and LineageOS

As ChronoMonochrome is also working on porting the Galaxy SIII to LineageOS, we collaborated together when it was possible, as we were both trying different approaches.

On Replicant 9 we were focusing more on the 2D graphics, and on the modem, which doesn't work yet with LineageOS.

Once we have something usable on Replicant 9, it would also be very interesting to find time to work on upstreaming the modem driver as well:

In several cases the kernel maintainers refused patches for drivers lacking free software userspace for using them.
As Replicant has a free software implementation, it shouldn't be a problem.
Similar modems are already supported by the Linux kernel, like the N900 modem, but the kernel interface is different from the one exposed by the kernel shipped by Samsung.
As LineageOS functional requirements to support a device are more strict than Replicant, if the Galaxy SIII modem driver is merged upstream, and LineageOs wants to use libsamsung-ipc (and libsamsung-ril) to use that driver, they would probably have some interest in helping to complete the libsamsung-ipc implementation as well.

F-Droid

We have already removed F-Droid from Replicant 6.0 after the 0003 version. This is due to the F-Droid repository not being compliant with the Free System Distributions Guidelines, because of applications like Yalp.

If there were no means for users to collaborate on workarounds, each user would need to review by themselves each application they are considering to install.

So we created the F-DroidAndApplications wiki page to share the work on reviewing F-Droid applications that meet or don't meet the Free System Distributions Guidelines.

We started reviewing some applications. Unfortunately, even when the source code should be fully free, we are not sure if the resulting builds meet the guidelines, as we would need to make sure that it's possible to compile the same application with a distribution that meets the FSDG guidelines.

We need to look more into it and/or to write to the licensing team at the FSF.

Documentation and migration to MediaWiki

We briefly talked about the rationale of migrating the wiki from Redmine to MediaWiki. The main advantage is that it will avoid duplication of information. For instance, the fact that the Galaxy SIII has a MAX6673 chip is mentioned in many different wiki pages such as:

This happens because that chip is involved in many different things, ranging from power management to managing the switch behind the USB connector which enables to get access to the serial port.

It is therefore relevant to know about that chip in many different contexts.

MediaWiki has ways to avoid the duplication of some information through templates, and it's also possible to interface it with Wikidata in various ways.

Someone mentioned that Sphinx handles such requirements. However, as not everyone that contributes to the wiki knows how to program, and as the contributions of such people are quite substantial (many edits, creation of pages, etc), and that we do want to enable people not knowing programming to edit the wiki, we will probably consider switching to MediaWiki instead of tools like Sphinx.

Release schemes

Someone pointed out that upstream Android continuously gets security updates. To keep up with that, we would need to do Replicant 9 releases very often.

While some people pointed issues with rebasing our work, it's probably still achievable to do that, as porting our work forward from Android 9 to the next Android versions is supposed to be easier.

Someone also pointed out that, for a given Android version, LineageOS was backporting security fixes longer than the Android Open Source Project (AOSP).

This information made us reconsider some design choices in Replicant: once Replicant 9 has been released, the fact that LineageOS doesn't have stable tags for releases becomes less relevant as we will need to find ways to rebase and release often, in order to have the latest security fixes.

Vulkan

Someone mentioned that the Vulkan graphics API will become mandatory after Android 10. This would mean that the graphics stack we're developing for Replicant 9 would no longer suffice. Both Lima, the free software driver for the Mali GPU present on the Galaxy SIII (GT-I9300), and llvmpipe, the software rasterizer planned to be used as fallback on all other devices, only support OpenGL ES.

A possible workaround would be switching the fallback software rasterizer from llvmpipe to SwiftShader, or using it just for apps that need Vulkan support. We are actively making sure that SwiftShader works on Replicant 9, therefore this should be doable without much effort.

Note: someone suggested using a translation layer that runs Vulkan on top of OpenGL ES, but that does not exist and probably never will. Vulkan is a lower-level API than OpenGL, with finer-grained control of the GPU memory and likes, making it really hard to implement OpenGL on top of it.

A nice tip we got is to keep using a compositor (SurfaceFlinger) that works with OpenGL ES. Current SurfaceFlinger still doesn't have Vulkan support. Acceleration is still done through OpenGL ES or an hardware composer. As such, compositor performance and compatibility won't bean issue for the time being.

After the Replicant BoF

Replicant contact address

We found that Fil Bergamo, who is part of the Replicant Steering Committee, didn't receive emails from the Replicant contact address.

We need to setup a new email infrastructure in order to properly address this issue. Currently the contact address is hosted at PaulK's personal email server. Paul no longer has time to maintain it and thus we must transition to a new server, hosted in a VM at the FSF servers, that can be administered by several Replicant contributors, in order to avoid a single point of failure.

Legal advice

The FSFE is helping NLnet by giving legal advice to the people beingfunded by NLnet to work on free software.

After the Replicant BoF, we met Lucas Lasota from the FSFE who offered legal advice, probably through the ifrOSS institute, to the people being funded by NLnet to work on Replicant (or the Replicantproject at large?).

The Replicant project is already getting legal advice through the FSF, and the FSF also has a very big expertise on compliance with certifications like the Free Software Distribution Guidelines, but the FSFE legal team and/or ifrOSS legal team probably also have some very interesting knowledge about European law.

For instance Till Jaeger who is/was involved in the ifrOSS institute made a very interesting talk years ago on what constituted derivative work under the European laws and directives.

Necuno

After the the Replicant BoF, we discussed a bit with someone from Necuno. They were supposed to make a device that could be used with only free software. The hardware only had the following issues:

On the I.MX6 System-On-a-Chip they chose, the firmware for the audio/video decoding offload is nonfree, but in many cases that can simply be ignored as that kind of thing is done by default on the main CPU.
The I.MX6 DMA engine probably had a nonfree firmware but it was completely optional, as the Linux kernel knows how to use the builtin DMA engine ROM instead.

So the device would have been completely usable with fully free software. They also stated in several places on their website that it would have been possible to run fully free software on the device.

This was also made possible because the device wasn't a smartphone and would not have any modem or WiFi chip.

But they are now are planning to add a WiFi chip, and to ourknowledge, all the WiFi chips made for smartphones and tablets require a nonfree firmware.

While Replicant is not redistributing any nonfree software, it still loads the modem firmware into the modem. In addition, all the devices currently supported have many more freedom issues, from forcing users to run nonfree software at boot, to having their location tracked by the network, at all times, with a precision of 10 or 20 meters.

In the long run, for the WiFi firmwares, it would be a good idea to have people working to get free WiFi firmwares and really solve the issue for good, instead of finding workarounds that don't solve the problem.

In the mean time, the workarounds still have the benefit of making clear what is free software and what is not; this clear separation enables us to claim at the same time that Replicant itself is fully free software while the devices it currently supports do not respect users freedom, and do run nonfree software as well.

Necunos also told us that they had some underlying issues because their devices would be “dual use” devices. This is related to the fact that they are also targeting some markets like the Finish defense or secret services, but we didn't understood what it meant practically speaking.

NLnet and the Android build system

We discussed with Michiel from NLnet the issues we were having with the Android build system. He pointed again to us that NixOS is working on being able to build Android components.

At some point we would need to look more into it as we want to mix Android and GNU/Linux components together. If we want Replicant to scale and be able to support more devices, it would be a good idea to be able to reuse some GNU/Linux userspace components that make hardware work, like oFono, BlueZ, etc. This would also allow us to share more work with GNU/Linux.

There are more details on the Replicant wiki about issues GNU/Linux distributions are having for packaging Android components like adb, which depend on the Android build system and libc.

Maemo Leste

On the last day we also met someone from Maemo Leste. At first when hearing of Maemo Leste, we feared that nonfree components from Maemo would be reused, as Maemo had a lot of nonfree components. However, according to the people we met, only the free software ones werere used. Still, nonfree software not coming from Maemo, like thenonfree WiFi firmwares or nonfree GPU drivers for some phones, were still used.

We also saw Maemo Leste on a PinePhone. On this device, the graphics stack was using the free software Lima driver and the graphics were fast enough. We can't remember if Lima was stable enough for daily use but it looks really promising at least, because the whole graphical interface used it, and we saw no rendering artifacts while briefly testing it.

GitLab

GitLab was first built upon a framework that did most of the work on the server side, but at some point they switched to a framework thatdoes client- side rendering with JavaScript.

As we had an opportunity to talk with people from the GitLab team, weasked them whether they would be open to accept patches that fix this. They explained us that such would require to double the UI work for everything, but that it might be possible to do server side rendering with the same JavaScript that's used on the client. The issue is that it cannot make requests from buttons like that, so in addition to the page rendering that could happen through server-side JavaScript, introspection could be used to rewrite the buttons.

Batteries report

In Paris (France), last year, batteries for phones compatible with Replicant could easily be found in second hand shops, and in a chain of shops specialized in replacement batteries. But we got a more recent report that it was not the case in similar shops in a smaller city.

Talks

Extending the lifetime of smartphones with Replicant

This talk was held at the Hardware Enablement devroom.

It quickly introduced Replicant and the smartphones ecosystem, and then proceed to look at what affects smartphones' and tablets' lifetime and how to increase it by making Replicant more sustainable.

There was also a small, satirical play in the middle this talk. Its goal was to show how the current market trends in smartphone design and construction severely impair those that look for privacy, software freedom, and reduction of electronic waste.

Video and slides are available at the talk's page in FOSDEM's website.

Extra

Fun

Fil Bergamo started making a song about Replicant.

Previous conferences

If you enjoyed reading this report, you may wish to take a look at the reports from previous conferences that were (only) published on the mailing list:

There's also a wiki page that lists all talks about Replicant that happened in several conferences throughout the years.

Edit1: Fixed “ssupported” typo

Edit2: Fixed the “onthe” typo

GNUtoo and dllud

What could go wrong with devices that have non replaceable batteries ?

Wed, 01 Apr 2020 01:00:00 Z

Edit1: Added forgotten link for rooting devices

Edit 2: Fixed wrong link location for rooting devices

Edit 3: Added Epilogue

In the summer 2019, in the Replicant contributors conference in Paris, the people present were all in favor of not supporting devices with battery that can't easily be replaced, because it would make the use and development of Replicant for these devices too complicated.

In subsequent conference like the FOSDEM 2020, and in discussions with other Replicant users and/or contributors, people didn't have objections to the decision.

Even if we don't want to support such devices in Replicant, we are still open to collaborate with people wanting to add support for such devices in other projects. For instance we still support the Galaxy S and the Nexus S in libsamsung-ipc while the devices are not supported anymore in Replicant, and we also do accept patches for devices we don't want to support in Repliant.

So in practice, some tablets like the Galaxy Tab 2 have battery that are not removable in the usual sense as you cannot remove the battery, without any tools, while walking, but the battery can still be replaced with the help of basic tools like tweezers and screwdrivers. In addition people don't necessarily expect tablets to last one full day. So we still intend to support such devices.

However some smartphones, which are typically used during a full day without necessarily having the ability to recharge, cannot be opened with regular tools. For such smartphones you need a heat gun, and using that also damage the device along
the way. When the battery is glued with very strong glue, it makes it even more complicated and even more dangerous to change the battery as you need to use very dangerous chemicals to remove the glue. So we decided to not support devices like that.

Given the impact of the decision (most newer phones don't have non removable batteries), even if that decision seem sound in theory, we also wanted to test it in practice, to be really sure it was the right decision.

To do that we decided to do a very quick experiment and see what would happen when adding support for a smartphone that has a non replaceable battery.

We also wanted to measure how much time was needed to add support for a device as fast as possible, because if we supported devices without a replaceable battery, we would need to rush to add support for the device while it's still being sold new in order to maximize the lifetime of the device under Replicant. Otherwise, people would need to buy the device second hand, where the battery would potentially not last a full day anymore.

Choosing a device

We didn't want to spend too much time on that experiment, so we didn't do much research and choose the first phone that would match what we were looking for.

We wanted the most recent device device with:

A non replaceable battery
An Exynos system on a chip
Android 6
A stylus and a big display
A lot of RAM

The device also had to be very similar to the ones we already support to spend the least amount of time possible on that experiment, so we also wanted the device to be made by Samsung, and to have a similar bootloader that is compatible with Heimdall.

So we choose a Samsung SM-N930F which meets all the requirements above. It also has an Exynos 8890, 4GiB of RAM, a stylus and runs Android 6. We wanted to have a stylus and a lot of RAM because as we didn't really intend to add official support for it in Replicant, we still wanted the work to also be potentially useful for GNU/Linux distributions that might be interested in supporting this device or similar devices:

The amount of RAM and the stylus makes it more easy to run GNU/Linux
on the device:
- As the stylus is more precise than big fingers, you can more easily use software that is less well adapted to the very small display, the very high pixel density, and big fingers.
- Having 4GB of RAM should be good enough to run many common applications and desktops. It also means that the phone could be supported for a longer time if there weren't other factors like the non-removable battery that would prevent that.

As for Replicant, the software support for this device is very similar to the Galaxy S7 which is supported by LineageOS.

Unfortunately, the device we chose has shared memory between the modem and the system on a chip1 but as this was just for a quick experiment and that we didn't intend to add support for it in libsamsung-ipc, we just ignored that issue in order to spend the last amount of time possible.

References:

1https://github.com/RegaliaEzz/Hexa-N930F/blob/master/arch/arm64/configs/exynos8890-gracelte_defconfig

Getting the device

The first problem we had was finding the device. We started looking locally, including in second hand websites, but we didn't manage to find any. So after that we started looking in international second hand websites, and we found one.

The strange thing is that, while the device is very hard to find, there were many many offers for accessories for that device. At this stage we suspected that this was somewhat related to the non-replaceable battery, though some Galaxy S7 could still be found.

However for some reasons, even if the device was shipped, as we have proof that it was sent to the post office, we didn't receive it. We are still investigating why, but we didn't manage to get a conclusive answer yet from the shipping company as we were redirected from service to service and no one seem to know why the device didn't reach its destination. The issue is also unrelated to COVID-19 as it was shipped by the person many months before it was declared a pandemic.

So we started again to look for a device and finally found a second device. The offer was really strange. It tell that they disguised the device to look like another one to make shipping work.

This didn't surprise us, as some customs are already actively fighting against the right to repair devices1. So at the time we though it was because they decided to fight against the second hand market as well.

In that offer, the person giving the device away also had a strange request: she would not charge for the phone but she wanted us to get the data out of the phone. The person explained to us that she didn't trust nor Google nor Samsung with her data, which included private pictures but didn't manage to get her data out of the device. As the request seemed legitimate we agreed to try but as we are not expert in rooting that it might have failed. The data was not encrypted so it also would have made things easier.

References:

1https://boingboing.net/2018/10/20/louis-rossman.html

Working on the device

Working with that device was not easy. The first issue we got was that the battery would not charge at all, and the battery indication was at 0%.

This explained why the person wasn't able to extract her data from the device.

We found on XDA that it was possible to get the battery charge again if we managed to downgrade the phone OS. This looked very strange. We also learned that the phone was fusing the OS versions somewhere. This was probably in the RPMB (Replay Protected Memory Block) partition of the eMMC.

As the device was on fuse version 1, we managed to downgrade it. All that was very strange. The 0% battery charging problem seemed to be a well known issue that is supposed to only affect the the devices fused with the version 2. Maybe it was because the battery was already very discharged that it did that, and that the bootloader and OS refused to charge it.

As we didn't have a lot of time to spent on all that, we didn't want to investigate more and proceeded to download OS images for older versions of the devices. We are also not sure if this was legal or not as the images weren't hosted by Samsung, and so we don't know
if the website we downloaded them from had some arrangement with Samsung or not.

As official repair shops need to have the images, we assumed that there might be a way for websites to get the images through legal means, especially in countries that have laws that are meant to guarantee the right to repair in practice.

Extracting the data

Before downgrading the images we still wanted to try to extract the data for the person that sent us the device. So as we were unsure if installing a recovery would erase the user data, we tried to find free software root exploits for the device.

We have summarized our attempts in the RootingDevices1 page of the Replicant wiki. We still need to update it to add information about our attempts with the SM-N930F.

As we didn't find any rooting application in F-Droid, and that we didn't want to use nonfree applications to root the device, we instead started looking at vulnerabilities that enabled us to get root. For each vulnerability we looked if the kernel version of the device was affected, and if so we looked for free software versions of the exploits, that were often published without any license.

At the end we failed to find something that worked quickly so we resorted to just flashing a recovery and hoping that it would not erase the user data. According to the find command, the user files seemed to have been intact.

We then sent the ex-owner all the data, strongly encrypted with GPG, and when we got the confirmation that everything was fine we proceeded to erase all the data.

References:

1https://redmine.replicant.us/projects/replicant/wiki/RootingDevices

Working on Replicant

At this point, we found that the battery was just very old, this is why it was reporting a 0% capacity.

Each time we wanted to flash an image with Heimdall, we had to wait for hours for the device to charge a tiny bit.

The stress of the developer working on the device increased a lot because the device was potentially always on, and we didn't know when it had the ability to record conversations or not, as we didn't do a review of its freedom, privacy and security issues.

The developer's passwords could be revealed as well, by recording the noise of his keyboard, and even GPG keys can be reconstructed through noise if they are used intensively.

In order to preserve the developer's sanity and the security of the Replicant project, the device was kept in the fridge most of the time.

This was very weird for the people visiting that developer as he had to put the device in the fridge each time people came by.

Sometimes he forgot to put the device in the fridge and started to have political and/or intimate conversation and at some point he remembered the device and had to go put it in the fridge in the middle of the conversations. That was very weird. Especially the “Can you wait a second? I've to put the phone in the fridge.” part.

In addition to all these issues, we also had the device crash during development, however we couldn't wait until the battery was fully depleted as the battery didn't charge. We had to hope that the device wound not go in some mode where we were stuck. However it didn't happen, and we always managed to recover.

Then one day, around when the COVID-19 confinement started, when he was away doing some sports outside, the neighbors heard an explosion. Apparently, besides the table where it was charging and and the wall around it, nothing was damaged.

As some of the neighbors called the police, that developer was then arrested and all his equipment was seized.

He was charged with:

the possession of an explosive device
reverse engineering
theft
counterfeiting
violation of trade secrets
refusing to give encryption key of his hard disks
refusing to hand over his account details
refusing to give his fingerprint and his DNA
resisting arrest and insulting police officers
destroying evidence

He plead innocent for all of the charges, and most of the charges were dismissed:

The “explosive device” was in fact the Samsung SM-N930F, which is best known as Galaxy Note 7. As many other people also had one at some point, the court dismissed that charge, especially because this wasn't done on purpose. The judge also said that they couldn't condemn people for being stupid, not remembering about the issue, and relying on the outdated offline version of Wikipedia through Kiwix to do research on hardware.
The reverse engineering charges were also dismissed as it was done for interoperability, and that the developer never agreed to any user license agreement that prevented that.
Theft was quickly dismissed as it did not apply to the violation of copyright.
The violation of trade secrets was also dismissed, even if printed schematics were found on the developer's table. As the schematics were published online in many forums like XDA, they were also considered as fair use. Various leaked documents like the Snowden documents, or Wikileaks revelations were also used during the case to prove that some leaked documents could be considered as fair use. The fact that the documents had “proprietary” markings was also not sufficient as many public documents also still bear markings that were just not removed.
Counterfeiting was also dismissed because no proof of violation of copyright could ever be found, and that the use of leaked schematics was considered as fair use.
Refusing to give encryption key of his hard disks: with a lot of pressure from many associations, this was dismissed as it was merely an excuse to get access to the developer's data and it was not relevant to the case. The same applied with his refusal of handling any of this account data (which also includes the passwords giving access to the Replicant infrastructure).
Destroying evidence by erasing the data of most of his computers was also dismissed. First only the boot partitions were erased and it was again not relevant to the case.
Resisting arrest and insulting police officers: there were no proofs that this ever occurred, and rambling against non-removable battery was not deemed strong enough to constitute resisting arrest and/or insulting police officers.

Sentences

However he was still charged with the following:

Refusing to give his fingerprints.
Refusing to give his DNA: the police still got his DNA even if he refused.

Subpoena and other declarations:

The court also gave him a subpoena “Be more careful next time and work on more constructive things like adding support for phones with a removable battery only.” to which the developer agreed.
He also declared that rushing to add support for a phone wasn't a good idea either, as because of that, he didn't realize that the device was a Galaxy Note 7.

He got a suspended sentence of 3 months for all that.

Getting the equipment back

As the court was very friendly he also got all his equipment back which usually never happens. Getting it back was still very challenging but it also turned out to be very fun.

As the developer had to sign a document with all the hardware on it, to get it back, the following conversations occurred when filling the list of hardware:

Employee: What's this thing?
Developer: It's a UART adapter for smartphone, you know behind the USB connector there is [very long technical explanations].
Employee: Let's write “UART adapter for smartphone”.
Developer: It also probably works on tablets you know, and it can also do many other things other than UART, like power on the phone and switch modes [very long technical explanations].
Employee: Let's write “complicated computer hardware”.

Or:

Employee: What's this thing?
Developer: It's a hardware to trace the protocol between the SIM card and the phone modem, there is a standard called terminal profile which has many privacy implications like [very long explanations].
Employee: Let's write “SIM card tracker”.
Developer: It can't track SIM cards at all, but it can trace the protocol [very long explanation again].
Employee: Sigh, let's write “complicated computer hardware” again.

Or:

Employee: What's this laptop? It's a laptop, right?
Developer: It's a Thinkpad X200, which is a computer capable of running Libreboot, this has many freedom implications like [very long explanations].
Employee: Let's write “vintage computer”.
Developer: But I use that computer you know [very long explanations].
Employee: Sigh, let's write “complicated computer hardware” again.

Or:

Employee: What's that? Is it a very complicated smartphone?
Developer: It's just a usual Galaxy S II (GT-I9100G).
Employee: Let's write “Galaxy S II”.
Developer: I've also a Galaxy S II (GT-I9100) which has a very different system on a chip [very long explanations].
Employee: Sigh, let's write “complicated computer hardware” again.

Or even:

Employee: What's that?
Developer: I don't know
Employee: You don't know? Is it yours?
Developer: Yes, but I don't know how to describe what it is, you can think of it like an Arduino running GNU/Linux, back in the days before any of the single board computer had systems to automatically detect hardware [very long explanations].
Employee: What's an Arduino [interrupting the developer]?
Developer: [very long explanations starting].
Employee: Sorry [interrupting the developer], bad idea, forget about my question, let's again write “complicated computer hardware”.

At the end the developer got it all back, and the staff said it was the strangest set of seized equipment they ever seen.

He then was unavailable during a full week, as he was reflashing all the “complicated computer hardware” for security reasons. That meant that in practice he had to reinstall Libreboot1 or other fully free versions of Coreboot that he used, Parabola2 on all the desktops, laptops, servers, single board computers and smartphones that weren't fully encrypted, reinstalling Replicant on some other smartphones and tablets, reinstalling LibreCMC3 on various devices like WiFi access points, reinstalling various microcontroller projects like frser-duino4 on his flasher, ralim/ts1005 on his soldering iron, PedRom6 on his calculator, Simrtace 1.06 on his SIM card tracer 1.07, etc

At least he could still trust his hardware and continue to use it after reinstalling everything. If the hardware had to run nonfree software, it would have been a different story.

Besides about 1 month of Apache logs, and the phone number of his contacts,
not much was exposed. We also hope that Android “Factory erase” worked fine on the SM-N930F but we can't know as we didn't try to recover any data.

The only device he didn't got back was the Samsung SM-N930F, as it was probably kept or disposed by the Justice Department.

About the lost of the device, the developer commented: “I lost weeks [of work] because of that shitty phone”, “I don't want that phone anywhere near me.”.

It turned out that, in addition to his allergy to nonfree software, freedom and privacy violations, that developer now became allergic to non-replaceable batteries as well. “Deciding to make devices with non-repleacable batteries is completely insane, it would be very important to ask ourselves how we got there.” that developer commented.

References:

1https://libreboot.org
2https://parabola.nu/
3https://librecmc.org/
4https://github.com/urjaman/frser-duino
5https://github.com/Ralim/ts100
6https://git.osmocom.org/simtrace/
7https://osmocom.org/projects/simtrace/wiki/SIMtrace

Epilogue

This blog post is a fictional political satire written by a Replicant developer for the first of April 2020. It may or may not represent the positions of the Replicant project. The story has been very strongly inspired by several real events.

It contains several logic flaws that might have been spotted by attentive readers or people used to the zététique techniques. For instance the device was chosen to enable sharing work with GNU/Linux, yet, support for Replicant 6 is added in a way that doesn't benefit at all code sharing with GNU/Linux at all as no support for that device is added in libsamsung-ipc. The fact that it was not clearly marked as a fiction was intended to help people test their critical thinking.
It's meant to criticize the systemic causes that resulted in the issue with the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 smartphone. The Wikipedia article on the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 has very interesting information on the impacts of the issue.
It's interesting to see how Samsung used the control it had on such devices, to remotely disable them. That control could be abused. This could also be an issue if people have important private data in it, that they weren't willing to share with companies with huge track record of users abuse. So instead of having to adapt to every design choice of the smartphone industry, like non-replaceable battery, it's sometimes better to start from limiting as much as possible the damage to users freedom and the environment, and try to adapt that to various uses cases instead. Here, having user removable batteries would be way more efficient than control over users devices for avoiding such issues or dealing with batteries that explodes or catch fire. Many manufacturers had to recall batteries over the years, and the impact weren't as bad as with the Galaxy Note 7.
As far as we know, that event didn't make smartphone manufacturers switch back to user removable batteries. Samsung didn't even add back non- removable batteries to the Galaxy Note 8 , which is the next model in the Galaxy Note series. If software or hardware that was threatening some economic or political power was the cause of issues that big, the reaction would most probably have been very different.
In general, giving too much power to the manufacturers over the users is a very bad idea. For instance in the Volkswagen emissions scandal, if users had more control over their cars, an issue of that scale could have been avoided. In contrast, if users had total control over their cars, more users would probably do various modifications, including polluting more to gain more performance or tune their cars to pollute even less. It would have preserved users freedom and probably have a positive impact than with such scandal. The same reasoning apply to the radio lockdown directive, which Replicant took position against.

Copyrights

CC-BY-SA 4.0

Replicant at FOSDEM 2020

Mon, 06 Jan 2020 17:42:55 Z

As happens every year, FOSDEM is taking place on the first weekend of February. Several Replicant contributors will be at the event, eager to meet with other people interested in the project.

During Saturday Replicant will share a little corner on Technoethical's stand. There will be flyers, stickers and some phones running demo versions of Replicant 9.

Later that day, Replicant is having a Birds of a Feather (BoF) meeting:

Location: room J.1.106, ULB, Brussels, Belgium
Date: Saturday, February 1st 2020, between 16:00 and 17:00 CET
Event page: https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/bof_replicant/

The meeting is open for everyone interested in the Replicant project (users, developers, devices vendors, etc.). Access is public and free as in beer.

Here's a non-exhaustive list of the topics that will be up for debate:

Replicant 9 status on the i9300/i9305: bootloader, modem, LCD, audio, graphics.
Future targets: PinePhone, Librem5.
WebView dependency on non-free Chromium.
Android build system.
Replicant infrastructure: servers, test benches, build machines.
Long term project sustainability.
Supported mainline kernel phones, what kernel versions brought what support and what is upcomming in the next kernel versions.
How the endorsement of stores selling Replicant devices should work.
Wiki migration from Redmine to MediaWiki.
Upstream and maintainership of the code of Replicant 9 that enables to use an upstream kernel.
Relationship with LineageOS on supporting the Galaxy SIII.

If there's any other topic you deem as relevant please let us know in the comment section, mailing list or IRC. Everyone's point of view is welcomed.

On Sunday's afternoon, there will be a talk at the Hardware Enablement devroom on the topic of “Extending the lifetime of smartphones with Replicant”:

Location: room K.4.401, ULB, Brussels, Belgium
Date: Sunday, February 2nd 2020, between 16:00 and 16:55 CET
Event page: https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/replicant/

Replicant @ 36C3

Thu, 26 Dec 2019 23:01:20 Z

Starting on December 27th, the 36th Chaos Communication Congress (36C3) is taking place in Leipzig. Replicant will be there as part of the Critical Decentralization Cluster.

Replicant's assembly will feature demos of the current Replicant 6 as well as the upcoming Replicant 9. It is the place to come by if you need some help installing Replicant or general advice regarding software freedom on smartphones and tablets. You can also take the opportunity to verify the release signing PGP key.

Location: L4, Exhibition Hall 2, Level 0
DECT: 6506

There will also be a few talks about Replicant and related topics in several spots around the congress:

Introduction to Replicant – December 27 19:15, Central Decentralization Cluster (CDC) stage
Android's build system is messier than your distro's – December 28 20:30, Lecture Room M1
Extending the lifetime of smartphones with Replicant – December 28 20:50, Open Infrastructure Orbit (OIO) stage
The chromium mess meets Android – December 29 21:00, Lecture Room M1

Graphics support for Replicant 9

Sun, 21 Jul 2019 21:42:05 Z

Thanks to volunteer effort and NLnet funding we have had developers working hard the past couple weeks on making graphics work on the Samsung Galaxy S3 for the upcoming Replicant 9 release. Three different software renderers have been successfully used with the current Replicant 9 development version: softpipe (Mesa), llvmpipe (Mesa), and SwiftShader.

The Linux kernel and Mesa required some small tweaks to allow using the Exynos DRM driver for software rendering. For the Linux kernel we had to allow in the DRM subsystem the creation of dumb buffers for render nodes as discussed previously on LKML. The devfreq module was also disabled as a workaround for graphics corruption issue that happened due to too low clock speeds. Mesa on the other hand required us to whitelist Exynos DRM driver to be used with a software rendering driver called kms_swrast. After these tiny changes we were already able to use the Mesa's software rendering backend called softpipe! Unfortunately, softpipe turned out to be unusably slow even after using HW overlay planes to offload some of the buffer compositions to the Exynos 4412 display controller found on the Samsung Galaxy S3.

Next the community members Putti, dllud and GrimKriegor worked on a new revision for a patch originally used in the Android-x86 project for enabling llvmpipe support in Mesa. When the compilation fixes and slight adjustments for the rebased original patch were done we had yet another software renderer to use. The new revision of the patch enabling llvmpipe is now submitted again to Mesa and hopefully this time around it will go through.

The rendering speed with llvmpipe turned out to be only slightly faster than softpipe and still unusable for everyday usage. There are plans optimize llvmpipe for the ARM Cortex-A9 processor in Exynos 4412 so hopefully soon it will be usable for everyday usage.

Before diving into the world of NEON optimization for llvmpipe and so forth, we decided to give SwiftShader software renderer a go together with hwcomposer.ranchu and gralloc.default. Other than having to add support for UDIV and SDIV instruction emulation in the Linux kernel, we got it running by simply setting some system properties and adding the SwiftShader and hwcomposer.ranchu modules to the system image. The speed of SwiftShader felt like it was at least twice as fast compared to llvmpipe and softpipe but still just a tiny bit too slow to be enjoyable for everyday usage. We are now hoping to find people that could work with us to replace hwcomposer.ranchu with drm_hwcomposer. Using drm_hwcomposer with SwiftShader would allow us to take advantage of HW overlay planes to speed up the compositions.

If you are interested in helping or want to learn more you can get in touch with us on IRC on the #replicant channel on Freenode, or via our mailing list.

Replicant contributors meeting the 27,28 July in France

Tue, 18 Jun 2019 16:12:34 Z

A Replicant contributors meeting will take place in or near Paris in France the 27 and 28 July 2019.

As we are still looking for a place to host the meeting, we don't have a definitive address yet.

It will be open to anyone who contributes or wants to contribute to the Replicant project.

The meeting will most likely be in English as not all the Replicant contributors who plan to attend speak French.

More details will be posted on the wiki page dedicated to this event over time.

Last minute information, if any, will also be posted on that wiki page.

Meeting Point at FOSDEM

Wed, 30 Jan 2019 09:20:20 Z

The Replicant Community Meeting will take place on Sunday, the 3rd of February at 11:00 AM in room J.1.106 at ULB, Brussels Belgium.
We have successfully booked a BoF room at FOSDEM, so we will have a quiet, heated and comfortable place where we can all sit together.

Access is public and free as in beer.
We encourage everyone to participate and contribute their opinion.
This meeting will be essential to the future arrangement of Replicant as a structured Project.

Any schedule update or other info can be tracked on the event's dedicated page on FOSDEM's website.
Replicant's blog will also be updated accordingly.

IMPORTANT NOTICE : This announcement is about the community meeting. The time schedule for the workshop hasn't been decided yet.
Interested people are encouraged to write to the mailing list to help organize it.
Also, the related poll is still open.

The Replicant project will receive a mobile device from Necuno Solutions

Sun, 20 Jan 2019 21:40:19 Z

The Replicant project has been looking forward to support devices with free software bootloaders. While Replicant is a fully free software Android distribution, many freedom, privacy and security issues are orthogonal to the operating system. The hardware design of each computer (smartphone, tablet, laptop, etc.) people use, and the architecture of the cellular network also have their set of issues. For more information on these issues, the Replicant project has some documentation on the topic.

So far all the devices that are (or have been) supported by Replicant use a nonfree boot software (the bootloader). These devices also use hardware restrictions to deny users the freedom to replace them completely with free software, effectively forcing them to run nonfree software. This is a very serious freedom issue that prevents users from being in control of their devices.

There were several attempts to add support for devices with free software bootloaders in Replicant:

The LG Optimus black: this smartphone doesn't prevent users from replacing the bootloader. Paul Kocialkowsky did a lot of work to add support for this device in upstream u-boot (a free software bootloader) and added minimal support for it in the upstream Linux kernel. However support for some of its most important hardware components like the display are still missing in the Linux kernel. This device can probably still be found second hand
The GTA04 smartphone from Golden Delicious: this smartphone has a free software bootloader which is based on u-boot. The smartphone was designed to run GNU/Linux and has almost complete support in upstream Linux. There were attempts to add support for it in Replicant 6.0, however a lot of time was spent to try to make suspend to RAM work with Android. However older Replicant 4.2 images are available. Several hardware revisions of the GTA04 have been made and shipped to customers and developers over the years. However this has stopped due to manufacturing issues. Another issue is that the revisions before A5 only have 512M of RAM and a high DPI display: This combination makes running Android 9 potentially challenging. Fortunately the A5 revision has 1G of RAM, but not a lot of working units were produced.

There is also some ongoing work to specifically add support for smartphones that are currently supported by Replicant like the Galaxy SIII (i9300), the Galaxy Note 2 (n7100) and their 4G versions (i9305 and n7105). The 4G versions could also be supported by Replicant if the work to support their modem (through QMI-RIL) is resumed.

The Replicant project will receive a mobile device, the NC_1 (formerly called Necuno Mobile) from its manufacturer (Necuno Solutions), which will have a free software bootloader

This device has the size of a smartphone, but doesn't have a broadband modem: while users will not be able to use a built-in modem for phone calls, SMS or to access the Internet, it is still the best way to be completely sure of avoiding any freedom privacy and security issues related to broadband modems and the cellular network. It will also require less work to add support for this device in Replicant.

Even if it's possible to disable the modem on some of the mobile devices currently supported by Replicant by not loading the modem's code, some nonfree software still run on these mobile devices. This includes the bootloader and potentially any other nonfree software that it may load. Because of that we cannot be 100% sure that the modem is completely disabled.

The Necuno Mobile will use an I.MX6 Quad system on a chip(which is a chip that contains the main CPU, the microSD card controller, the GPU, etc.). Its free software support is better than for many other system on a chip: the only functionality of the I.MX6 Quad that requires nonfree software is the video decoding acceleration. The article on single board computers has more details on freedom issues affecting various system on a chip and by extension the single board computers that use such components.

A Replicant developer (Joonas Kylmälä) will receive a Necuno Mobile to work on it.

The Necuno Mobile should have a Linux kernel that is very close to upstream: this is a good opportunity for a new attempt to enable Replicant to use upstream kernels. This has many advantages. One of them is that in the long run, it should decrease the amount of work required to maintain the devices and potentially increase their lifetime.

This should also enable the Replicant project to more easily add support for other devices that can use an upstream kernel, like the GTA04, or devices like the Galaxy SIII (i9300) and the Galaxy Note 2 (n7100) that are starting to have good support in upstream Linux.

It is also very interesting in the long run as we could share some of the work with other smartphones projects like postmarketOS who are also trying to support mobile devices with upstream kernels. It could also enable the Replicant project to more easily support future mobile devices that will have free software bootloaders, as some of them will also use kernels that are meant to run GNU/Linux.

Replicant meeting at FOSDEM 2019

Sat, 19 Jan 2019 13:32:55 Z

Call for participants

Like every year, FOSDEM will take place the first weekend of february in Brussels, Belgium.

Replicant is organizing a community meeting and a workshop that will take place alongside FOSDEM events.
The main intention behind this is to gather Replicant enthusiasts and contributors together in order to share ideas and discuss Replicant-related key topics.
This is a call for the community to participate and propose arguments to discuss.
A wiki page has been prepared, to collect proposals and schedules.
Proposals and questions can be presented to the mailing list.

Examples topics that have been proposed are:

What directions should the project take, what work to prioritize
How to fix f-droid to keep Replicant FSDG compliant

Together with the following workshop arguments :

How to setup the build environment
Hands on libsamsung-ipc and samsung-ril
Answer various questions about contributing to Replicant
Help contributors who are stuck with specific issues

Two free-software-powered polls have been published, to help us chose the best day and time :

We invite whoever might be interested, to indicate their preferred schedule for the events, in order to help us set up a sensible timetable.

The official meeting point and timetables will be published on this blog and on the mailing list.

Stay tuned!

EDIT :
The meeting report is available: https://redmine.replicant.us/attachments/download/1597/formatted-report.pdf

Final days for the upstream Linux Allwinner VPU support crowdfunding campaign

Wed, 07 Mar 2018 21:24:03 Z

A crowdfunding campaign was launched over a month ago by Bootlin in order to fund the development of an upstream Linux kernel driver for the Allwinner CedarX VPU. The VPU (Video Processing Unit) is in charge of offloading video decoding and encoding to a dedicated hardware block, relieving the main CPU. While Replicant does not support Allwinner devices at this point, the project has acquired a number of Allwinner tablets a few years ago, that helped with the advancements of Allwinner platforms support in upstream projects such as the U-Boot bootloader and the Linux kernel.

Recently, Replicant was a candidate for the Google Summer of Code program and we came up with a list of tasks for the occasion. Although our application was not accepted, we are still interested in completing the tasks that we picked up. We put a deliberate focus on supporting mobile devices in mainline U-Boot and Linux, with a particular emphasis on Allwinner devices, the Optimus Black and the Kindle Fire (first generation). We believe that supporting mobile devices and using standard driver interfaces in the upstream Linux kernel is the only sustainable way for freedom on mobile devices. Instead of writing device-specific code specifically for Android for each of the supported devices, this would allow using generic Hardware Abstraction layers (HALs), reducing the amount of work for hardware support on the Replicant side in the long run. This also allows running other operating systems that integrate the upstream Linux kernel interfaces, such as standard GNU/Linux distributions.

In spite of this, I have been dedicating more and more time to contributing to upstream projects such as coreboot, U-Boot and Linux for supporting devices of various form factors, including mobile devices, laptops and single-board computers. Thus, I became less and less active on the technical side for Replicant, where Wolfgang and others have picked-up the work. There is still a lot of room for contributions and everyone is warmly encouraged to join-in and help with the upstreaming effort for devices, especially regarding the Optimus Black, Kindle Fire (first generation) and Allwinner devices.

As a student approaching graduation, I have joined Bootlin (formerly Free Electrons) in Toulouse, France for an internship focused on supporting the Allwinner VPU in upstream Linux and userspace. It definitely fits perfectly with the logic behind focusing Replicant towards upstream Linux support. In order to accelerate the development of the driver, Bootlin has decided to start a crowdfunding campaign in order to fund Maxime Ripard, who has been working for the company and maintaining Allwinner platforms in the Linux kernel for a while.

As the main goal of the campaign was reached within its first week, Maxime will be able to work with me on the VPU. His in-depth understanding of the sun4i DRM video driver's innards will also reveal very useful for accelerating the processing of the frames coming from the VPU (without unneeded copies of buffers) and implementing scaling in hardware. In order to support the VPU hardware efficiently, a number of changes have to be introduced to the Linux kernel. It currently lacks an interface to provide coherency between setting specific controls for the media stream and the input/output buffers that these controls are related to and should apply to. This API has been implemented by Alexandre Courbot (who's working at Google on the Chromium OS project) as the V4L2 request API, that fits the requirements for the Allwinner VPU driver. Other VPU drivers, such as the tegra-vde driver that supports the Tegra 20 video decoder engine, also require this API in order to implement a proper V4L2 mem2mem driver.

The crowdfunding campaign still has 10 days to go and two stretch goals to meet (while the first stretch goal, about supporting newer Allwinner SoCs was already met):

H265 video decoding support
H264 encoding support

As I am not directly impacted by the funding received through the crowdfunding campaign, we believe that there is no direct conflict of interest writing this blog post on the Replicant blog.

Les terminaux sont ils le maillon faible de l’ouverture d’internet ?

Wed, 10 Jan 2018 18:12:47 Z

Les terminaux font aujourd'hui partie de la vie quotidienne de millions d'utilisateurs, au travers d'appareils de différents formats et en particulier d'appareils mobiles de type smartphone, tablette ou d'ordinateurs portables. Ces appareils ont permis de numériser bon nombre d'aspects de la vie, qu'il s'agisse des communications entre les individus ou la capture, le stockage et l'échange d'informations. Ces appareils disposent en effet de nombreuses entrées/sorties permettant de capter et d'interagir avec l'environnement, en récoltant et en stockant une très grande quantité de données tout au long de chaque journée. Ces données sont très largement stockées au sein d'infrastructures de stockage de différentes entreprises, le plus souvent des multinationales Américaines.

Ces appareils se caractérisent donc par une grande capacité à interagir avec les différents aspects du quotidien et une connectivité accrue permettant la communication et le partage de données, mais également par l'accès à de nombreux contenus et services en ligne. En effet, ces terminaux sont les passerelles d'accès pour l'accès rapide au web et à différents types de services, qui génèrent un grand nombre de méta-données et forment en cela une empreinte numérique de l'utilisateur, qui permettra son identification fine. Ces procédés d'identification sont par ailleurs connus pour être mis en œuvre par de nombreuses agences de renseignement.

Les utilisateurs peuvent donc légitimement se poser la question de la confiance qu'ils peuvent accorder à ces terminaux, en particulier du point de vue de leur fonctionnement et agissements réels vis-à-vis des données qu'ils traitent, mais également de leur sécurité, afin de s'assurer que ces données ne sont pas vulnérables et restent effectivement privées. Le contrôle de ces appareils apparaît ainsi comme un élément clef, en ce qu'il permet à l'utilisateur de s'assurer du bon fonctionnement de l'appareil tout au long de son utilisation. Il s'agit pour cela dans un premier temps d'être en mesure d'effectuer des audits du code utilisé sur l'appareil et de pouvoir le modifier et l'exécuter par la suite. Il devient alors possible pour l'utilisateur d'y apporter ses modifications personnelles ou celles de la communauté, de supprimer toute restriction volontaire de fonctionnalité mais aussi d'effectuer des audits de sécurité pour identifier les vulnérabilités et les portes dérobées et d'apporter des corrections indépendamment des constructeurs des appareils qui prennent rarement en charge les appareils de nombreuses années. Il s'agit également par là de garantir l'accès à la connaissance du fonctionnement des appareils, présentant ainsi une opportunité pour étudiants, curieux et passionnés d'étudier et de modifier des logiciels largement utilisés. De plus, la préservation de cette connaissance reste un enjeu pour assurer un certain contrôle à long terme de la technologie, toujours plus présente, de la part de la société toute entière.

Le règlement Européen 2015/2120 prévoit pour les utilisateurs « le droit d'accéder aux informations et aux contenus et de les diffuser, d'utiliser et de fournir des applications et des services et d'utiliser les équipements terminaux de leur choix, ». La question du libre choix du terminal ouvre la porte à la possibilité pour l'utilisateur de pouvoir choisir des terminaux en lesquels ils peuvent avoir confiance, sur lesquels ils ont le contrôle et dont le fonctionnement est connu et largement diffusé. Le projet Replicant s'inscrit tout particulièrement dans cette démarche, en développant un système d'exploitation entièrement composé de logiciels libres, basé sur le code libre d'Android, diffusé par Google. Il s'agit, à partir de cette base libre, de développer les logiciels nécessaires à la prise en charge matérielle de différents appareils mobiles, de manière plus ou moins complète mais avec un minimum de fonctionnalités disponible. Replicant s'inscrit donc au niveau du système d'exploitation, mais les problématiques de la confiance, du contrôle et de la connaissance des appareils concernent plus largement l'ensemble des composants des appareils mobiles. S'il est en général aujourd'hui possible de remplacer le système d'exploitation de ces appareils, la tâche est autrement moins aisée pour d'autres composants critiques tels que les logiciels de démarrage, qui s'exécutent avant le système d'exploitation, mais également les environnements d'exécution de confiance qui s'exécutent pendant toute la durée d'utilisation des appareils avec les privilèges les plus élevés sur l'appareil. Les appareils qui, en plus de présenter une connectivité TCP/IP à l'Internet sont également connectés au réseau GSM disposent d'un composant dédié à cette communication mobile, le baseband ou modem. Tout comme les logiciels cités précédemment, le logiciel qui s'exécute sur ce modem est bien souvent protégé par une signature numérique qui rend impossible sa modification par quiconque ne possède pas la clef privée du fabricant, qu'il ne divulgue pas. Il est ainsi impossible d'exécuter du logiciel libre dans ces cas de figure, n'offrant ainsi jamais à l'utilisateur une véritable confiance, ni de véritable contrôle ou une connaissance complète de son fonctionnement.

De cette façon, on retire du pouvoir aux utilisateurs finaux, qu'il s'agisse d'individus ou d'entreprises intermédiaires qui utilisent et intègrent ces appareils, qui est alors dans les mains du fabricant des appareils. Il s'agit ainsi de consacrer l'union entre le matériel d'une part et le logiciel qui s'exécute sur celui-ci d'autre part. Pour autant, le logiciel se caractérisant comme des instructions pouvant être modifiées, il est une utilisation tout à fait légitime pour l'utilisateur de pouvoir modifier le logiciel s'exécutant sur chacun de ses appareils, qui est par nature dissocié de l'aspect matériel qui permet son exécution. On souhaite donc particulièrement insister sur cette distinction fondamentale, de l'appareil d'une part et du logiciel qu'il exécute d'autre part.

Cette capacité de modifier les logiciels présente par sa nature de nombreuses opportunités d'innovation par la très grande flexibilité qu'elle offre, qui permet l'élaboration d'applications et de services innovants qui sont tout à fait de nature à favoriser l'ouverture d'Internet et le développement de l'activité qui lui est associée.

Third Replicant 6.0 release

Sat, 30 Dec 2017 18:14:59 Z

A new version (0003) of Replicant 6.0 has been released a few weeks ago.

It fixes an important issue that makes devices end up in a boot loop (the devices were crashing during boot, endlessly) when installing certain applications.

It also fixes a security issue that enables attackers to decrypt and/or modify WiFi traffic.
This can be problematic if your security is relying on the WiFi encryption. This can be the case if you are using WiFi to connect to your device to use applications like Remote Keyboard over telnet. This can also be problematic if you share your Internet connection through WiFi and some services of the phone operator you use are available without authentication.

Because of the above, updating to this new version is strongly recommended.
See the update instructions on the wiki for that.

If your device is affected by the boot loop issue mentioned above, the update instructions won't work, as they expect you to be able to easily reboot to recovery.
In that case, to reboot to the recovery you have to first boot in safe mode, and then to follow the update instructions to reboot to recovery.

Contributions to ARCEP work on terminal devices and public consultation

Fri, 29 Dec 2017 15:32:58 Z

While Replicant is mainly backed by Wolfgang in terms of technical contributions nowadays, Denis and Paul are still active in the project, in other ways.

Over the past few months, we have been working with ARCEP, the independent French governmental agency in charge of regulating telecommunications. The agency is working on evaluating the influence of terminal devices in achieving an open Internet, with a particular focus on mobile device. A first report on this topic was issued at the end of may 2017, based on consultations with various members of the industry as well as non-profits such as FFDN, the federation of non-profit ISPs. This first document presents ARCEP's approach to the application of EU regulation 2015/2120, that gives users specific rights regarding their choice of terminal devices. It provides an analysis of the various actors involved with terminal devices, making clear distinctions between the hardware, operating system, applications and services.

The EU regulation is however less specific and the articles related to terminals can be interpreted with different scopes:

When accessing the internet, end-users should be free to choose between various types of terminal equipment [...].

End-users shall have the right to access and distribute information and content, use and provide applications and services, and use terminal equipment of their choice [...].

A narrow understanding would associate the choice of the terminal witch choices made available from the industry, while a broader understanding, that ARCEP is pursuing, also takes in account all the actors involved at every level, including actors from the free software community such as Replicant. This lead the authority to get in touch with us, after members of FFDN kindly put-in a word of recommendation for Replicant.

We attended an initial meeting in Paris in September, where we explained our action at Replicant, the problems we are facing and key elements to shape their understanding. We mentioned that not only the operating system should be considered separately in terms of choice, but also other software components such as the boot software, the privileged execution environment and the modem system, that are also crucial parts of a terminal device that can (and often do) restrict the user.

In November, we attended a workshop with members of the industry, that included Microsoft and Qualcomm among others. We took the occasion to directly question them regarding deliberate choices that are detrimental to users in terms of freedom. It seemed agreed and understood that the ability to load an alternative operating system is a necessity for users and that mistakes were made in the past in that area. However, many of the perspectives presented by the industry were not satisfactory in terms of freedom and privacy/security for end users, especially when it comes to IoT and ISP-provided routers that keep embedding more functionalities. We did not always get answers to our questions, as the representatives that were sitting at the table did not share our technical background and thus sometimes did not fully grasp the reality of the situations at hand.

ARCEP is now organizing a public consultation on the influence of terminal devices on an open Internet, that is presented in a dedicated document. Anyone is welcome to submit a contribution, to share their understanding of what the free choice of terminal devices should entail, either in French or in English. This is an opportunity to send a strong message in favor of free software at all the levels involved in mobile devices: boot software, privileged execution environment (often called TrustZone), operating system, applications and modem system. ARCEP is now organizing a public consultation on the influence of terminal devices on an open Internet, that is presented in a dedicated document. Anyone is welcome to submit a contribution, to share their understanding of what the free choice of terminal devices should entail, either in French or in English. This is an opportunity to send a strong message in favor of free software at all the levels involved in mobile devices: boot software, privileged execution environment (often called TrustZone), operating system, applications and modem system. Replicant will also submit a contribution in this direction, that will be published on the Replicant blog soon.

The consultation is open until the 10th of January 2018 and submissions can be sent to: terminaux@arcep.fr.

A new Replicant 6.0 release

Sun, 17 Sep 2017 21:45:58 Z

A few months have passed since the initial Replicant 6.0 release and it's time for another one. This release more than doubles the number of supported devices and contains a few important fixes and improvements. The latest changes from LineageOS 13.0 are included. They are mostly security fixes, so updating is recommended!

Up to 12 devices now supported by Replicant 6.0

This release makes Replicant 6.0 available to a lot more devices that were already supported by Replicant 4.2. These include the Galaxy Note, Galaxy Nexus, the Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 and Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 models.

There are also two new tablet models that weren't yet supported by Replicant: the GSM and Wi-Fi-only version of the Galaxy Note 8.0. The hardware is very similar to the Galaxy Note 2 and thus it was quite straightforward to add them as new devices. Furthermore, the tablets are not known to have bad modem isolation, as the other supported devices. And the working front and back camera makes them the currently best supported tablets.

Support for the GTA04 was a goal for this release as well. Some work has been done to achieve this goal, but it's unfortunately not yet ready. It will hopefully be ready when the next release comes around.

Improvements and fixes

USSD

You can now use USSD messages with Replicant (again). USSD messages are the codes you enter to check your available balance, to refill it or to select a certain data plan. Depending on your provider, there may be more codes for other functionality available. Before Paul's rewrite of Samsung-RIL in 2014, this type of messages could be used, but support for them wasn't added again after the rewrite, until now. The new implementation features improved decoding, most notably for special characters.

USB Wi-Fi adapters

The initial Replicant 6.0 release already included the RepWifi app that provides a nice interface to use USB Wi-Fi adapters with libre firmware. The app is developed by Fil Bergamo and he added quite a few new features and a graphical restyling for the next version that is shipped with this release. It is now possible to connect to hidden networks, to manually set DNS servers and to auto-connect to a Wi-Fi network, once the adapter is plugged in.

Fil also submitted a patch that provides a fix for a very annoying issue with the Wi-Fi adapters or with reverse tethering. So far, network connections, that were established using a Wi-Fi adapter or reverse tethering, weren't properly reported to apps. For example, F-Droid wasn't usable because of this. Thanks to Fil's patch, this issue is now fixed.

It was possible to make all devices that are supported by Replicant 6.0, including the newly added ones, usable with certain Wi-Fi adapters. Despite the improvements that were made with this release, be advised that connection issues or other instabilities are still possible. Their severity mostly depends on the device you use and the level of battery charge (see the wiki for more details).

Recovery

Another goal for this release was to make the usage of the recovery less error-prone and more intuitive. Devices with touch keys (like the Galaxy S 2 and Galaxy S 3) now have the key backlight enabled at all times which makes it easier to identify the back key. And the buttons are generally bigger to allow better navigation via the touchscreen. Some previously failing installations from internal or external storage (e.g. due to the file system used on the SD card) should now work.

A new Setup Wizard based on the Setup Wizard from LineageOS was added, too. When the device is started for the first time, the Setup Wizard helps with the configuration.

See the changelog for a complete list of all the notable changes and detailed support status of newly added devices.

Replicant 6.0 released

Sat, 13 May 2017 19:25:55 Z

Over the last one and a half years, a lot of work has been done to move Replicant to a new version and to add new features. Everything started with a (now archived) forum post in January 2016 that documented the initial efforts to get Replicant 6.0 somehow working on a Galaxy S3. Development continued through the first half of 2016, however by far most of the work was done from September 2016 onwards.

Replicant 4.2, the last release, was based on CyanogenMod 10.1 and Android 4.2 respectively. Replicant 6.0 is based on LineageOS 13.0 which is based on Android 6.0. Replicant 6.0 includes all the improvements that were made since CyanogenMod 10.1. Have a look at the changelog for an overview of the new features and changes that were additionally made on our side.

This initial release supports the Galaxy S2, Galaxy S3 and Galaxy Note 2. The Galaxy S3 4G was added as an incomplete device for now as support for telephony and mobile data is missing. The status page shows which functionalities are supported on the individual devices. The previous blog post details the reasons why no SDK is provided as part of the release.

Unfortunately, this release only supports a subset of the devices that were previously supported by Replicant 4.2. So adding support for more devices has the highest priority for the next update. Thanks to device donations from the community, it will be possible to get Replicant 6.0 working on the GTA04, Galaxy Nexus, Galaxy Tab 2 7.0, Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 and Galaxy Note. Please consider donating to Replicant to help development.

As an additional release goal, a complete wiki overhaul was completed over the last two months. Besides updating outdated pages and a general cleanup, a lot of new documentation is now available for users and developers alike. We hope the new release will attract more developers, so that we can tackle some of the tasks we have been facing for a long time.

There won’t be a Replicant 6.0 SDK because there is already something better

Fri, 28 Apr 2017 19:02:44 Z

And you can help making it accessible to more GNU/Linux users!

We have decided not to create a Replicant 6.0 SDK as part of the upcoming Replicant 6.0 release. For three previous Replicant versions (2.2, 4.0 and 4.2), a SDK was provided.

Replicant offered its own SDK because the Android SDK released by Google is distributed under a non-free license and suggests installing non-free plug-ins such as the Google APIs. For a long time, Replicant has provided the only Android SDK that is available under a free license and that doesn't offer to install non-free software.

Android SDK in Debian

However, for some time, the Android SDK is available in Debian and it will be possible to build Android apps in Debian Stretch, the upcoming release. The Debian packages suffice to build an app that only has a minimal set of dependencies. Not all libraries that might be needed for building an app are already packaged, but it seems that nothing is missing that would otherwise be available in a Replicant SDK. The packaged Android SDK in Stretch even has the same target API as a Replicant 6.0 SDK would have.

The packaged Android SDK in Debian has many advantages over a Replicant SDK. Build tools should be installable from the package manager of the distribution you are using and not be distributed in a binary archive outside of it. Android SDK packages are provided in Debian alongside other Android build tools like Gradle. The packages can be built reproducibly. We only have very limited time and resources to work on the SDK. Debian has its own team, the Debian Android Tools team, that focuses on packaging more libraries and target APIs, among other things.

Packaging for more distributions

For these reasons, rather than spending time and development efforts on a Replicant 6.0 SDK, we encourage you to work with maintainers to get the Debian Android packages included in more distributions. As Replicant itself is a fully free software distribution, we would be especially happy to see the packages included in fully-free GNU/Linux distributions, like Parabola or Trisquel.

The Debian Android Tools team is available to answer questions and they are interested in having cross-distro collaboration to solve remaining issues. They can be reached via their mailing listor in the IRC channel #debian-mobile. Their wiki pageprovides useful documentation.

Of course, we are available as well to answer questions and to coordinate these efforts.

Replicant 6.0 development updates

Wed, 01 Feb 2017 18:18:27 Z

Replicant 6.0 is moving forward and quite some work has been done over the last months.

Galaxy S2

Only the Galaxy S3 was supported for a very long time. Recently, support for the Galaxy S2 was added. This was made possible because two community members, Grim Kriegor and dllud, sent me a device. The initial work on the device by another community member, Jookia, also gave me a head start for the port.

GTA04

In December, I attended the 8th Open Hard- and Software Workshop which was a great opportunity to discuss and work on various topics related to the GTA04. I assisted Lukas Märdian from Goldelico with porting Replicant 6.0 to the GTA04 and at the end of the workshop, we were able to boot Replicant 6.0 and had basic functionality working. Lukas continues to work on the port and I'm planning to integrate his changes and get Replicant 6.0 ready for the GTA04.

Support for external WiFi dongles with the AR9271 chipset

After you have installed Replicant on one of the supported devices, you will notice that WiFi doesn't work. The reason is that the WiFi chips on all supported devices need a proprietary firmware to be loaded onto the chip. As Replicant only ships free software, this firmware is not included in an image.
An alternative is to use an external WiFi dongle with an USB OTG cable. A free firmware exists for the AR9271 chipset and various WiFi adapters use this chipset. Tehnoetic provided patches for initial support in Replicant 4.2. For Replicant 6.0, I went a different way and backported the necessary changes from the 3.4 Linux kernel to the kernel for the Galaxy S2 and S3. Such dongles are now operable with these two devices. Fil Bergamo is working on scripts to make it easy to use WiFi adapters. You can find more information in this forum thread.

Graphics rendering

The previous blog postalready metioned that I'm working on the graphics acceleration. Mesa llvmpipe can now be used as an alternative to the Android software renderer. Unfortunately, llvmpipe is still too slow and the Android software renderer stays the default graphics renderer for now. But it's possible to use some more apps like Firefox-based browsers with llvmpipe that wouldn't work with the Android software renderer. Llvmpipe also makes it possible to use a recent webview. For now, Replicant 6.0 is stuck with the last webview version that worked with the Android software renderer. Optimizing llvmpipe for ARM likely would make it fast enough. Any help in this regard would be greatly appreciated!
Another long-standing issue is related to the software rendering: QR code scanning or in general barcode scanning didn't work with Replicant because the software renderer requires a camera preview format that is incompatible with barcode scanner apps. I was able to fix it by doing the neccessary conversions of preview frames that are requested by barcode scanner apps.

Toolchain

I moved the build system from Debian Jessie to the upcoming Debian release with the codename Stretch. The Debian Android Tools team has packaged quite a few more build tools in Stretch which can now be used instead of prebuilt binaries from the default Android toolchain. The whole effort makes the Replicant build process more trustworthy and ensures that all build tools are verifiable and built using only free software.

Security/privacy enhancements

Besides fixing various bugs, I'm especially committed to making Replicant more secure. Originally, I started contributing to Replicant by submitting patches for known security issues in Replicant 4.2. Security updates for the kernel and the Android system are included in Replicant 6.0 as quickly as possible, but delays can always happen due to various reasons. Furthermore, I started to include some security/privacy enhancements from CopperheadOS.

Current work and future plans

Porting Replicant 6.0 to more devices is a priority right now. Besides devices that are already supported by Replicant 4.2, some new targets are evaluated. An interesting target is the LTE variant of the Galaxy S3 (GT-I9305). Currently, only the non-LTE variant (GT-I9300) is supported by Replicant and Replicant doesn't support any 4G-enabled phone yet. It's possible to build a Replicant 6.0 image for the LTE variant, but it lacks support for the modem. The main task of the port will be to write a free implementation of the modem interface for telephony, SMS and mobile data.
I also played with the mainline kernel on the Galaxy S3 and I was able to boot Replicant 6.0 on top of the Linux 4.8 kernel with a few patches so that it was usable with very limited functionality. I will share more results from this endeavor in the future.
Replicant is based on CyanogenMod 13.0. As the CyanogenMod project was discontinued, future Replicant 6.0 versions will be based on its successor, LineageOS 13.0.

Replicant 6.0 early work, upstream work and F-Droid issue

Mon, 08 Aug 2016 17:39:16 Z

Replicant 6.0 early work and associated efforts: At Replicant, things are moving again: Replicant is being updated from Android 4.2 to Android 6.0 by Wolfgang Wiedmeyer. The status and feedback takes place in the forums before it is reviewed and integrated in the official Replicant repositories. This work is currently being done for the Galaxy S 3 (I9300).

At the same time, Wolfgang Wiedmeyer is also working on the following for Replicant 6.0:

Graphics acceleration with mesa and llvmpipe: while this still uses the CPU, it should be faster and more feature-complete than the default implementation. This will hopefully fix some of the previously non-working applications in F-Droid.
Building the toolchains: Replicant has always used some pre-built toolchains and utilities. Building such tools and/or using the ones from GNU/Linux distributions will make Replicant more trustworthy.

Replicant 6.0 should also bring full device encryption and SELinux support.

Future directions: In the future we also want to be able to support the upstream Linux kernel for devices with a minimal amount of effort. This was made possible thanks to:

Android becoming more standard: it now requires very few changes to the upstream Linux to work. Linux also received changes that made it possible.
The fact that the amount of work required to mainline a device in Linux has drastically been reduced, for some of the devices we target.

Devices such as the GTA04 and the Optimus Black are good targets for upstream Linux kernel support. They also allow running free bootloaders.

In a similar fashion, we also want to be able to support upstream bootloaders, such as U-Boot.

We hope that this will allow us to have longer term support for such devices. Even if Replicant is unable to continue to support such devices in the future, having them supported by upstream software will potentially enable users to use them with other free software distributions.

We have thus started the work to support devices such as the Optimus Black and the Kindle Fire (first generation) in upstream Linux and U-Boot. Other projects and individuals are also very actively adding support for other devices, such as Allwinner tablets, that will benefit Replicant eventually.

Helping Replicant by contributing to F-Droid: Replicant is supported, recommended by the FSF and listed as a fully free software distribution that respects the GNU Free System Distribution Guidelines, along with other GNU/Linux distributions such as Trisquel or Parabola. Replicant
ships the F-Droid package manager in its images.

F-droid is committed to distributing only free software, and it does. However some of it does not comply with the GNU Free System Distribution Guidelines.

Practically speaking some of the applications F-Droid distributes:

While the list of such anti-features is displayed in red when selecting an application in F-Droid, applications with anti-features are still listed aside compliant ones. This is also quite confusing since free software isn't expected to contain
such anti-features in the first place.

It took Replicant a long time to realize the issue, this is due
to its developers being very busy, to the fact that the anti-feature
display is confusing and that there was no clear smoking gun.

After an investigation, that was delayed due to the lack of time, a
smoking gun was finally found, and a bug report was opened on the Replicant side.

At FOSDEM 2016, the issue was discussed with F-Droid developers in order to find a way to fix it. On their side, F-Droid developers also opened a bug report. Due to various reasons, progress was very slow and we recently learned that efforts to fix this issue came to a stall.

Replicant developers are more dedicated and used to working on system programming than writing or modifying Android applications. They are also really busy doing so. However, some individuals wanting to help Replicant may be able to work on Android applications, with some time to do so. This is exactly the kind of skills required to solve this issue in F-Droid. Getting it fixed is crucially important for Replicant.

If you're interested to jump-in and help resolve this issue, please get in touch with us or with F-Droid developers directly to get directions on how to get started.

Media from 2016 Replicant talks

Sat, 09 Jul 2016 13:03:56 Z

Various media, including slides and video recordings, from recent talks about Replicant are available on the Replicant wiki Conferences page, including :

FOSDEM 2016 (slides and video)
Coliberator 2016 (slides)
PSESHSF 2016 (slides and video)

Some of these presentations are great ways to get an overview of the freedom and privacy/security issues associated with mobile devices, either in English or French. They also offer an introduction to Replicant within that context. Other presentations cover specific technical aspects related to liberating devices at the lower levels.

Replicant at PSESHSF 2016

Sat, 02 Jul 2016 08:54:43 Z

Replicant will take part in PSESHSF on Saturday July 2 near Paris, France for both a talk (in French), entitled Replicant : appareils mobiles, logiciels libres et vie privée and a workshop focused on Replicant (but possibly other aspects related to freedom at the lower levels).

The talk will be a great opportunity to learn about freedom and privacy/security in mobile devices. The Replicant workshop will showcase devices running Replicant and will be the occasion to get help installing Replicant, verify the project's release key or just come by and have a chat!

As usual, we are looking forward to meeting you there!

Coliberator 2016: keynotes and workshops

Tue, 31 May 2016 09:47:50 Z

Replicant will take part in Coliberator, the free software conference organized by Fundația Ceata in Bucharest, Romania on June 4-5 2016. Fundația Ceata is the Romanian foundation for Free Software and Free Culture, that proposed to host both a keynote and a workshop about Replicant at Coliberator this year. The keynote will be a great opportunity to learn about freedom and privacy/security in mobile devices. The Replicant workshop will showcase devices running Replicant and will be the occasion to get help installing Replicant, verify the project's release key or just come by and have a chat! The Tehnoetic team will also take part in the workshop, with Replicant devices available for sale and more!

Scheduling details are still being worked out by the organization team and will be available soon. Either way, note that a GNU Libreboot keynote and workshop will be held as well during Coliberator. This year's edition of the conference will thus highlight freedom at the lower levels in various ways! Note that Coliberator is organized by the Ceata team from small individual donations, so any contribution to fund the conference is welcome!

As usual, we are looking forward to meeting you there!

Replicant at FOSDEM 2016

Tue, 12 Jan 2016 16:12:03 Z

Just like previous years, Replicant will be at FOSDEM, during the last weekend of January in Brussels, Belgium.

A lightning talk about the road to liberating software at the lower levels will be given at 18:40 on Saturday, in room H.2215 (Ferrer). This talk will be broader than the scope of Replicant. It will detail how liberating the software running at the lower levels can prove to be quite challenging. Those considerations will be made not only regarding the main processor, but also regarding controllers, peripherals and auxiliary processors.

As usual, there will also be plenty of other interesting things to see and nice people to meet!

This year, devices from Tehnoetic with Replicant preinstalled will be available for sale on the FSFE booth, as well as other Replicant goodies, such as 3D-printed keychains! Remember that part of the sales will go to Replicant.

We will also organize an informal Replicant developer meeting at some point during the event, so people interested in contributing to the project are welcome to join in!

In addition, note that Richard M. Stallman, launcher of the GNU project and founder of the Free Software Foundation, will be giving a talk about Free/Libre/Vrije Software: The Goal and the Path on Friday evening (the day before FOSDEM), at Brussels Campus Etterbeek, VUB.

Shops selling devices pre-installed with Replicant

Thu, 03 Dec 2015 14:19:58 Z

A few months ago, we were contacted to discuss the endorsement of an online shop selling mobile devices pre-installed with Replicant: Qibre Computer Hardware. While we're very happy to see such initiatives being developed, we asked for some conditions to be met before endorsing the shop, especially conditions that have to do with informing final users:

Users should not be mislead into believing that the devices are fine for freedom and privacy/security. There are plenty of issues remaining, that are explained in general on the Freedom and privacy/security issues page of the website and in greater details on each device's wiki page (when documented). Those are out of the scope of free software support in Replicant, but it is crucial to mention them when selling a full device. Linking to these resources is a fine way to ensure that customers have access to that information.
The devices should ship with the official version of Replicant, not a version that was built from source and signed with different keys. However, it is fine to pre-install free applications originating from F-Droid on top of the system, as long as users are made aware of it.

Qibre has now stopped its activity until further notice.

A few weeks ago, Tehnoetic started selling devices pre-installed with Replicant and was featured on the FSF's Ethical Tech Giving Guide and FSFE's Free Your Android campaign. At this point, the following devices can be bought pre-installed with Replicant from Tehnoetic:

Tehnoetic donates a part of the phone sales profits to Replicant and F-Droid projects. In December, Tehnoetic donated Replicant $101 USD.

Thus, buying devices actually helps Replicant move forward! Buying from these shops rather than third-party resellers also helps them secure money to get stocks of Replicant-supported devices in large quantities, so that it remains possible to buy them for a long time!

Upcoming events for Replicant in October/November 2015

Wed, 30 Sep 2015 20:46:27 Z

Even though development on Replicant is still moving forward at a pretty slow pace, we believe it is crucial to spread the word about the project in order to encourage more people to get involved but also to teach people about the underlying problems for freedom and privacy/security on mobile devices.

During the next two months, Replicant will take part in various free software conferences and events in France. A talk about Replicant, freedom and privacy/security will be given at each event, sometimes with a workshop or some form of public discussion, such as participation in a round table.

Starting next week-end, Replicant will be at the following events:

Brest en Biens Communs, October 3, Brest: Internet aujourd'hui, défendre les libertés round table
Brest en Biens Communs, October 17, Brest: Replicant, système d'exploitation libre pour smartphones talk and workshop
Capitole du Libre, November 21-22, Toulouse: Libérer son mobile avec Replicant : politique, technique talk
JM2L, November 28, Sophia Antipolis: Libérer son mobile avec Replicant : politique, technique talk

Those talks will be opened by Benjamin Bayart, iconic figure in the French free software community and long time activist for electronic liberties and net neutrality.

We hope to see as many of you as possible, to help spread the word about Replicant, freedom and privacy/security on mobile devices! As usual, each event will be an occasion to verify the Replicant release key and get some help installing the system on your device! Donations are also welcome, as they make it possible for me to attend such events at all.

See you soon!

November update: Due to the recent attacks in Paris, Capitole du Libre was canceled and Bazar du Libre is taking place in Toulouse on November 21-22. The talk about Replicant was rescheduled in Mix'art Myrys, room 2 at 3:00 pm.

Replicant 4.2 0004 images release

Wed, 02 Sep 2015 11:07:02 Z

Even though things are moving slowly at Replicant, we figured it was time to release another batch of Replicant 4.2 images. This release doesn't add support for any new device, but has a focus on security instead, thanks to an active member of the community: Moritz (also known as My Self on the forums). For months, Moritz has been evaluating whether Replicant is affected by various vulnerabilities, retrofitting patches to close those vulnerabilities and submitting these for inclusion in Replicant. Thanks to his great work, this release includes fixes for security issues such as the Stagefright vulnerability or the Installer Hijacking vulnerability.

Since the previous release, all the Replicant-specific source code was moved over to git.replicant.us, that is gracefully hosted by the FSF. We are planning on moving all the Replicant source code over to that new server, so that we don't have to rely on third parties such as CyanogenMod and AOSP to provide the full source code for Replicant. In the meantime, we have started tagging the commits used for each release and signing those tags with the Replicant release key, so that it's possible to reliably retrieve the source code for a given Replicant release. Those tags are also combined in the release metadata's git-tags.

For a complete list of changes, you can take a look at the changelog. Installation instructions are available for each device, as well as build guides.

You're welcome to join-in and contribute code to Replicant! Resources to get started on development are available on the wiki, as well as a list of tasks to improve Replicant.

Replicant and friends at Chaos Communication Camp 2015

Wed, 12 Aug 2015 18:02:41 Z

As advertised in the previous blog post, I'll be at CCCamp 2015 to talk about Replicant (as well as other things that I'm working on, like porting Libreboot to the C201 Chromebook), starting tomorrow.

Formally, I'll be giving a 45 minute long talk at the Neo village tent on Sunday, about Replicant, software freedom and privacy/security on mobile devices. In addition, I have asked to give a lightning talk to highlight the necessity to have more developers involved in Replicant on Saturday at 17:05. The project is still mostly a one-man-effort and this situation cannot ensure the growth the project deserves.

People from the Neo900 project will organize the Neo village, where I'll have my tent at, next to Osmocom. As usual, you're welcome to come and say hi (and possibly verify the Replicant release public key as well)! I may just as well hang around the Quadrature village, where they have a nice tea house set up!

Neo900 folks also plan on giving presentations, starting with a lightning talk about Neo900 on Friday and a full talk about the project on Saturday, at the BER village.

See you there! By the way, my GSM network at camp is 5198, feel free to send me a message if you require my presence!

Update: The talks have been added to the Conferences wiki page. Unfortunately, the longer talk on Sunday had to be interrupted because of the lightning storm and couldn't be resumed later. The slides are however available and hold the main elements of the talk.

RMLL feedback, Optimus Black advancement and CCCamp

Mon, 20 Jul 2015 23:13:06 Z

Two weeks ago, I took part in RMLL as advertised on the Replicant blog shortly before the event. This year again, it was a really nice event to be a part of. Lots of people showed interest for Replicant and some even came specifically to see my talks about the project: what a pleasant surprise! The videos of my talks are already available on the RMLL website and they were also added to the Conferences page of the Replicant wiki.

Back from the event, the development effort was focused on cleaning up the bits and pieces laying around for Optimus Black support in U-Boot, now that the merge window is open. A patch series was sent for review earlier today and despite being incomplete as of now, it will serve as a solid base for future additions. Some more work is indeed required to have all the necessary features supported, but those patches will be written in a non- upstreamable way for Replicant at first. The current status of those dirty patches allows booting CyanogenMod without too much trouble, except for the occasional random reboot and other oddities that still have to be sorted out before it can seriously be used for daily use.

Thus, with basic bootloader support out of the way, it's time to start the Replicant port to the device. Communication with the modem will require some heavy work on Hayes-RIL, our implementation of the AT protocol radio interface layer, that is supposed to be more modern and robust than other implementations. Other fundamental parts required to have Replicant running with sufficient features to make the device useful should be less trouble.

In a month or so, the Chaos Communication Camp will take place in Germany, organized by the almost mythical Chaos Computer Club. Replicant is going to take part in the event, hopefully with a lightning talk and/or less formal self-organized events. The camp will be a great occasion to chat a bit about the current state of the art of software freedom on mobile devices, and more! Various other interesting projects will be there as well: members of the Neo900 project will hold the Neo village, where I'll be likely to be found. As usual, I'll also be available to verify the Replicant release key fingerprint, help newcomers install Replicant on their device and basically anything else that I can help with!

Replicant source code hosting and RMLL 2015

Wed, 01 Jul 2015 08:43:06 Z

As mentioned a few months ago, Gitorious is closing down and even though the Replicant project page can still be reached there, cloning the repositories has been broken for some time. After thoroughly evaluating all the hosting possibilities for Replicant (thanks to the many suggestions from the community!), we have finally reached a decision. We didn't want to be affiliated with a hosting provider that doesn't match Replicant's core values, that are all about software freedom. In addition, it seemed better not to be hosted by a third party, to ensure the security of the source code. These criteria left us with very little choice available, but thankfully, we were able to comply with them, as the Replicant source code is now hosted by the Free Software Foundaton, at git.replicant.us!

We are very thankful to the FSF for providing us with that solution and the hardware required for our needs (the Replicant source code is very large). Eventually, we will move all the Replicant source there, as opposed to only the parts of CyanogenMod and AOSP that we modified, so that we don't have to rely on any third party at all.

With all those discussions going on, I almost forgot to mention that I will be taking part in RMLL/LSM again this summer. The event takes place in Beauvais, France (near Paris) from July 6th to 10th (sorry for the short notice). I will be presenting two talks there, one about the overall state of the Replicant project, in French, and one about liberating mobile devices from the ground up, in English. In addition, I will be taking part in a workshop on free embedded devices in room 219, were I will show a few embedded devices running free software.

As usual, everyone is welcome to come, say hi and have a nice chat. It's also possible to verify the Replicant release GPG key in person to trust the verification of our images releases. And of course, I'll be available to help install Replicant on supported devices!

What’s happening (or not) at Replicant

Mon, 06 Apr 2015 21:59:16 Z

Two months ago, I (Paul Kocialkowski) gave a talk about reached milestones and ongoing development on Replicant at FOSDEM, one of the biggest yearly European gatherings of free software developers. I was thrilled to meet people interested in Replicant there and pleased to chat with many other free software developers, working on various fields. As usual, talks were recorded and most of those recordings are now available on the FOSDEM website, with no exception for the embedded devroom, where I gave my talk and joined an embedded freedom roundtable with Carsten Munk from Jolla and the attendance. A WebM version of the talk is available on the Conferences page of the wiki.

Back from FOSDEM, most of my work was focused on U-Boot (the universal bootloader) for the LG Optimus Black and Sunxi (Allwinner) devices. Things are starting to look good on the LG Optimus Black, which now correctly boots Android without random run-time faults. As usual, things are moving very slowly due to the lack of time. The next step there will be to submit the first batch of LG Optimus Black support for inclusion in upstream U-Boot.

The Replicant code itself hasn't changed much in the past months, since I am focusing on bootloaders development at this point. In addition, Gitorious is now closing down and while we have all the source code uploaded there backed up, we're looking for an alternative solution that doesn't compromise on the core values behind Replicant and offers significant guarantees. Because of this situation, nothing is to be committed to the repositories before they are moved to a new location, that we are yet to find.
However, some security updates were kindly submitted by the community and those will be reviewed and integrated as soon as everything is back up and running.

So hopefully, things will start moving faster in a bit!

Replicant at FOSDEM 2015

Sun, 25 Jan 2015 09:29:48 Z

This year's edition of FOSDEM, one of the major free software conferences in Europe, is just around the corner! Among the various talks that mention the state of free software on embedded devices, I (Paul Kocialkowski) will be presenting a talk entitled “Reached milestones and ongoing development on Replicant” on Sunday afternoon, that will first highlight the various achievements that were accomplished within the Replicant project to handle the numerous devices it supports today, only to explain how the majority of those devices are fatally flawed when it comes to freedom and privacy/security. Thus, the second part of the talk will put the emphasis on the new focus of the development effort, on devices that can take freedom to the next level. In particular, the current status of the Goldelico GTA04, LG Optimus Black (P970) and Allwinner (Sunxi) devices ports will be mentioned in detail, along with a description of the various plans for the work that is left to be done.

FOSDEM is also a great opportunity to meet members of the community, so do not hesitate to say hi if you bump into me in the embedded devroom or around the place! Remember that face-to-face meetings also allow for verifying the Replicant project's release key‘s fingerprint and creating a chain of trust for verifying the software released by the Replicant project.

Replicant 4.2 0003 images release

Sun, 07 Dec 2014 12:49:54 Z

It has been about 6 months since we last released a batch of images. A few things of interest were completed in the meantime, so we are rolling out new images today.

This release doesn't bring support for any new device: instead, it mostly contains stability fixes for the devices we already support. The most considerable change in this release is the inclusion of the Samsung-RIL rewrite, that was developed this summer. Samsung-RIL is the component in charge of dealing with the modem, the hardware chip that communicates with the mobile telephony network. The code that was used since then didn't have a good structure and didn't meet the code quality standards required to call it stable or reliable. The rewrite should be more robust and fail-proof: it has been tested daily on a couple of devices for the past few months, with no major incident to report. The Samsung-RIL rewrite has about as many features supported as the previous version, with the exception of a few ones that were broken anyway (mainly, USSD and STK).
The new code establishes a sane basis for external contributions, so everyone is welcome to dig in and add support for what's missing.

Another big achievement in that release is the inclusion of about a dozen security fixes, covering issues such as Shellshock, Master key, Fake ID and much more, thanks to reports by community members.

As usual, you can checkout the complete changelog, download the images from the ReplicantImages page and find installation instructions as well as build guides on the Replicant wiki.

Even though this release doesn't introduce support for any new device, I have been at work regarding devices that make the best candidates for freedom and privacy/security. As mentioned in an earlier post, we are going to focus the development effort on a few devices that allow running free bootloaders and are either likely to have good modem isolation or don't have a modem at all.

Recently, I have been working on adding Replicant support for Sunxi devices. There is a lot of work to do in that area and while nothing was released yet, it looks promising. I also spent a considerable amount of time working on the LG Optimus Black (P970)'s bootloader. I will be posting a series of articles about what an incredible journey it has been so far on my personal blog over the next few days. Eventually, the device will be properly documented in our wiki and as soon as U-Boot reaches feature completeness, it will be time to start porting Replicant to the device!

December 20th update: The full series of articles about freeing the LG Optimus Black (P970) is now available:

Replicant homepage and roadmap for the future

Tue, 02 Sep 2014 17:38:21 Z

For a long time, the entry point for Replicant on the web was our blog, which holds status reports and news about the project. However, it did not fit well for providing easy access to relevant material about the project, nor did it give our (growing) community the attention it deserves. This is why we decided to launch a new homepage for the project, highlighting what really matters, in style.
We believe it is a good thing to have, in order to clearly spread the word about Replicant and ease the understanding of our message. The new homepage provides a clear explanation of what Replicant is about, provides answers to some common questions about the project and most importantly, holds a detailed overview of the core freedom and privacy/security issues that we face on mobile devices today, as well as recommendations regarding these topics.

Regarding progress in development, a few things happened recently and a lot more is on the way: time to take a step back, look at what's in the works and what is next on our roadmap.
After attending RMLL/LSMin Montpellier, France, most of the development time was spent on completing a full rewrite of Samsung-RIL, the software in charge of the various aspects of telephony and mobile data on the Samsung devices we support. This rewrite brings many advantages in terms of stability, features support and also provides a sane and clear base to make external contributions easier. While this is an important contribution to achieve software freedom on mobile devices, these Samsung devices are severely flawed as they don't allow running free bootloaders.

For some time already, we have decided to focus our development effort on better devices, that can run free bootloaders, in addition to a free system such as Replicant. First, we decided to bring Replicant 4.2 support to the Goldelico GTA04 and have already made good progress since the start. It is not currently usable as a daily phone, but we are confident about the future. The next step in the process is to work on supporting Allwinner devices, starting with cheap Chinese tablets. We are proud to be collaborating with the free software community built around the Allwinner Sunxi platforms: linux- sunxi. Our goal is to provide generic Replicant support for these platforms, so that as many devices as possible can be supported, with little effort required to support a new device. Thanks to the work of the linux-sunxi community, many of these devices can already run a free bootloader and have a community-maintained kernel available, providing a solid base for Replicant on Sunxi devices. In addition, we have spotted a few widely-spread devices that would also be good candidates for running a free bootloader and a free system: stay tuned as we will start documenting these devices soon!

In the meantime, we are more than ever willing to make Replicant as privacy/security-oriented as we can, especially by targeting devices that either don't have a modem at all (Wi-Fi-only tablets, such as the many Sunxi ones) or are not proven to have bad modem isolation.

As of today, Replicant is still a one-man effort and while all these new directions are very exciting, it takes a lot of time to actually turn them into reality. Since we prefer to focus on these new directions, Replicant will stay based on version 4.2 of Android, even though newer versions are available upstream. Porting Replicant to a newer version requires a lot of effort and doesn't bring any significant advantage when it comes to freedom.

Regarding the devices we already support that do not match the free bootloaders criteria, we are not going to drop development for them, but the majority of what was possible to achieve on them is already there and while we could keep adding support for more and more of these devices, we believe that development time is better spent on these new exciting directions!

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Replicant 4.2 0002 images release

Tue, 08 Jul 2014 14:02:22 Z

As we announced a few weeks ago, we've been working hard on Goldelico GTA04 support over the past months, so we thought it was time to make a new batch of images. Moreover, the time couldn't be better as we are presenting Replicant at the LSM/RMLL, another reason to have something new to show!

Aside from GTA04 support, serious issues have been fixed regarding the Galaxy Nexus (I9250), that prevented entering suspend and the Galaxy S (I9100), where the RIL (telephony) was not reliable. In addition, more or less important fixes have also been introduced for other devices. Some more new features have been added as well, as we reduced out dependency toward Google in the Browser and the home screen. The Replicant logo also got a new typeface, that is now used on the boot screens and our websites.

Note that the SSL certificate for the Replicant websites was updated a few day ago, correcting an error about alternative valid names and using a new private key, the previous one having been subject to the Heartbleed vulnerability.

As usual, you can checkout the complete changelog, download the images from the ReplicantImages page and find installation instructions as well as build guides on the Replicant wiki.

Replicant 4.2 on the Goldelico GTA04

Thu, 26 Jun 2014 17:49:33 Z

We started the work on the Goldelico GTA04 about 2 years ago, back in the Replicant 2.3 days. While we were able to release images at this point, they were far from being functional as key components were missing from the kernel, especially regarding power management. About 2 years later, the situation was finally unlocked thanks to the efforts of Golden Delicious and various members of the OpenPhoenux community, bringing GTA04 support to a newer kernel version that holds all the necessary pieces for proper Android support. More details on some technical aspects related to this are available at Paul Kocialkowski's coding blog.

Work on the device resumed months ago and we've been working hard ever since to improve the status of the Replicant port. While it is not yet usable as a daily phone, we have reached numerous milestones over the past months and many key parts of the device are already handled correctly, already allowing many use cases, such as digital audio player or GPS navigation system. A dedicated wiki page holds the details of the Replicant status on GTA04.

As we're very enthusiastic about the future, we've decided to shoot a video highlighting various aspects of Replicant on the GTA04! Installable images for the GTA04 will be released along with the next batch of Replicant 4.2 images, including all the features shown in the video:

The video is also available for download:

To this day, the GTA04 remains the best phone out there regarding software freedom: bootloaders are free software and Replicant will eventually be able to run with most of the device's features supported, the only exceptions being graphics acceleration, hardware media encoding/decoding and Wi-Fi (due to a proprietary firmware). Regarding security and privacy, the Goldelico GTA04 is also very good as it can run without proprietary software, but also because its modem is clearly separated from the rest of the device.

You are very much encouraged to get your own device out of the next batch of GTA04 production by placing a preorder on the next revision! As it is often the case, devices that are particularly designed to be a good fit with free software don't get much mainstream attention, which makes it especially hard for Golden Delicious to run production batches. Unlike in software development, having hardware produced costs a lot of money, especially in small batches. It is up to you to change that by showing your interest toward the Goldelico GTA04. Donations to Golden Delicious or Replicant are also welcome to help push the project forward!

Replicant at the 15th Libre Software Meeting in Montpellier, France this July

Thu, 19 Jun 2014 13:51:21 Z

[]2

Replicant will take part in the 15th edition of the Libre Software Meeting (Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre - RMLL in French) that takes place from July 5th to 11th 2014 in Montpellier, France. We'll be there during the week at the university to present Replicant through a few talks as well as a workshop, organized jointly with members of FSFE's Free Your Android program and the F-Droid project. You're welcome to come and say hi, ask for help about freeing your mobile device, see devices actually running with Replicant or just have a chat with us!

There will be two conferences about the Replicant project, both delivered in English: Replicant: software freedom on mobile devices and An overview of Replicant development. But there are plenty more talks dedicated to software freedom and Android: FSFE's member Erik Albers will present a conference about Freedom on Android devices while F-Droid developer Daniel Martí will talk about Free Software on Android via F-Droid.
In addition, Replicant developer Paul Kocialkowski will present a conference about various freedom issues on ARM devices: ARM devices and your freedom.

Moreover, Richard M. Stallman, long time free software activist, founder of the GNU project and president of the Free Software Foundation will be attending the event and will deliver a speech about a Free digital society (in French).

We're looking forward to seeing you there!

Unveiling the Samsung Galaxy back-door

Thu, 13 Mar 2014 18:43:22 Z

Yesterday, we disclosed our findings about the Samsung Galaxy back-door, an anti-feature found in Samsung Galaxy devices that lets the modem access the files stored on the device. For a complete statement about the issue, you can refer to the article we published at the Free Software Foundation's website. A technical description of the issue is available on a dedicated page of the Replicant wiki, along with more information regarding the back-door.

The information spread out very quickly and we're glad the press is finding interest in such matters as privacy and unjust control over one's computing. This demonstrates yet another time why free software is essential and how a single piece of proprietary software can compromise a whole device.

We have yet to hear from Samsung about this issue, as we are hoping that the reason for the presence of this back-door will be clarified. In that regard, we'd be very glad to work with Samsung in order to make things right, for instance through releasing free software or documentation that would make it easy for community Android versions to get rid of the incriminated blob.

Update: Several sources, including Samsung, claim this is a non-issue. A complementary statement to address these claims was issued at Paul Kocialkowski's personal blog.

Replicant 4.2 kicks out!

Wed, 22 Jan 2014 19:15:36 Z

We've been working very hard over the past few months to push Replicant to a newer Android version: the work started when CyanogenMod released version 10.1.3, based on the latest Android 4.2 code, back in September 2013. Bringing Replicant to a new Android version is a really big piece of work, especially given that the project only counts one active developer (however, we have hopes to see more people getting involved in the future)! The biggest motivation for the new version is to allow us to port Replicant to newer devices, that were not supported by Android 4.0, upon which Replicant 4.0 is based. Aside of that, Replicant 4.2 also brings the various improvements that come along with Android 4.2 and CyanogenMod 10.1.

All the devices that were supported by Replicant 4.0 were successfully ported to version 4.2, but some devices encounter serious slowness issues that are yet to be resolved. On the bright side of things, support for a new device was added, the Galaxy Note 2 N7100, which is mostly similar to the already supported Galaxy S 3. That was only made possible thanks to the generous donations that were made to the project, which enable us to buy devices for the current developer to work on. We are looking forward to adding support for even more devices in the future as well! Our wiki was updated to reflect the status of the supported devices as of the Replicant 4.2 release and features updated installation and usage guides. The Replicant SDK was also updated and is available for download.

The Replicant website and wiki were also cleaned up a bit during the preparation of this release. Our blog shall now only be used for posting updated on the project while our wiki holds the core informations about Replicant. As a reminder, please do not use the comment section of this blog to ask general-purpose questions, but use our forums or mailing-list instead!

This release also puts the emphasis on security: given the recent concerns that raised up concerning wide-scale surveillance from governments and certain companies, we though it would be good to make Replicant more bullet-proof. The Replicant 4.2 images for devices are now built in the userdebug fashion, which ensures a better level of security, the shipped system applications are signed with our own private keys, for which we provide the certificates and the releases are signed with our very own GPG release key. It is encouraged that you check the authenticity of the Replicant images or binaries before installing anything you downloaded!

As usual, you can checkout the complete changelog, download the images from the ReplicantImages page and find installation instructions as well as build guides on the Replicant wiki.

About the Fairphone

Mon, 25 Nov 2013 15:45:16 Z

Over the past months, we have been asked a lot whether Replicant is going to be running on the Fairphone. The goal behind Fairphone, as its name suggests, is to build a phone that is “fair”. This covers a lot of different aspects that the Fairphone company took care of: such topics as using fair and conflict-free resources, ensuring that all workers along the supply chain get a fair wage, improving the handling of electronic waste, being transparent about the cost of each part of the device, its technical specifications and encouraging open and flexible designs.
We are really glad to see a company producing electronic devices taking care of such many important aspects as social conditions of workers, ecology and handling of e-waste as well as transparency and being “technically open”.

What we are especially interested in, at the Replicant project, is how good the device will be when it comes to software freedom. Hence, we have spent some time investigating the device, even though it is not out yet. Thanks to the cooperation of Fairphone, we were able to draw a quite complete picture of it.

The Fairphone will ship with a modified Android 4.2 version. An overlay interface was developed for the device and should be released as free software, but what we are really interested in is the parts that deal with the hardware. First, the Linux kernel source code for the device will be released (it is copyleft software so this is an obligation). It will also be possible to build the kernel from source and install it on the device without the need to sign the kernel with the manufacturer's key. Actually, there should be no signature check on the Fairphone for the kernel or the bootloaders. Some of the bootloaders (maybe all of them; we cannot tell for sure at this point) are free software and it should be able to replace them with a free build. We are a bit worried that the tools to flash the Fairphone may be proprietary, but if the bootloaders are free and/or there is root access out of the box, there will be ways to work around this problem. On the system side, some of the libraries that deal with the hardware have been released as free software for devices that use the same platform (Mediatek 6589), so the basic required features such as audio will likely work. We are also confident we will be able to handle the modem with free software (that means telephony and such will work).
Fairphone is really trying hard to get Mediatek to release as many components as free software as possible, but they don't have the source in their own hands and nor can they decide to make it free software themselves, so it may take some time to arrive or eventually not succeed.

However, things are not looking so good when it comes to evaluating the platform that was chosen for the Fairphone: the modem is embedded in the System on a Chip (SoC) which leads us to believe that it is poorly isolated from the rest of the platform and could access critical components such as storage, RAM, GPS and audio (microphone) of the device. If this was to be the case (we can only speculate about what the truth actually is), it would mean that the Fairphone is fatally flawed for security as it makes it possible for the phone to be converted to a remote spying device.

In conclusion, we think it will be possible to have Replicant working on the Fairphone and the bootloaders (that are not part of the operating system) may even be free software, but we believe it is seriously compromised security-wise because of the poor modem isolation.
However, Fairphone seems definitely interested in doing things right on the software freedom side and helping us get Replicant running on the device!

Replicant 4.0 0005 images release

Tue, 01 Oct 2013 17:57:44 Z

Another couple of months passed by, bringing its share of improvements to Replicant 4.0, so we felt it was time to release a new batch of images. First thing's first, let's talk a bit about the fundraising program we launched thanks to the Free Software Foundation: it was a huge success! Over $20,000 were collected over the past two months, thanks to your help. We really didn't expect that much money and it will greatly cover for our needs, which include buying new devices and covering for travel-related expenses, allowing us to attend events such as FOSDEM. On a sad note, we are more and more looking for new developers to get involved in the project: both GNUtoo and I are very busy and cannot contribute to the project as much as we'd like to, so things will keep moving a bit slowly, compared to what it used to be.

However, this new batch comes with a good share of improvements: the Galaxy Note (first generation, international GSM model) was added to the list of supported devices with this release (thanks to your financial support that enabled us to buy the device), which brings that list up to 10 devices. Camera support was added to the Galaxy S3 and other smaller improvements were made as well. As usual, you can checkout the complete changelog, download the images from the ReplicantImages page and find installation instructions as well as build guides on the Replicant wiki.

Since we received complaints about the Replicant installation process, all the guides were rewritten to be device-specific and include clear and step-by-step instructions, which should make it easier for everyone to install Replicant on their device. Moreover, the newly-launched forums and our mailing list make it possible to get help from our community, about the installation or anything else you want to talk about!

Opening the Replicant Forums

Fri, 09 Aug 2013 19:42:37 Z

It seems that we are asked way too many questions in the comment section of each page/post we write. Most of the time, the question is not relevant to the page and/or was already answered somewhere else.

Thus, we decided it would be better to open forums so that anyone can find answers both from us and from the community. Please, direct your inquiries to the forums if there is no particular reason to contact us privately via our contact e-mail address or to use the comment sections of our blog. The mailing-list and IRC are also good places for general- purpose questions since they are public, but it appears that many prefer to use web-based interfaces.

Registration was also made easier, since new accounts activation doesn't require a manual confirmation from us anymore.

We hope the forums will help bring help and support, from and to the community.

Announcing the Free Software Foundation fundraising program for Replicant

Fri, 26 Jul 2013 16:53:25 Z

Over the last few years, we have been asked countless times how one could make a donation to the project. Until very recently, it was not at all possible but thanks to the hard work of the Free Software Foundation team, especially John Sullivan and Zak Rogoff, it is now possible for the FSF to accept donations on the behalf of the Replicant project.

Donations will help us buy new devices and port Replicant to them as well as help us attend free software events to promote Replicant at. Devices donations can be accepted as well but we carefully select the devices we want to work on, based on how much they respect freedom, so we might decline some offers.

You might want to consider making a donation to our project, any amount will help, from the FSF directed donations page for Replicant.
Bitcoin donations are also accepted, at the following address: 13tgjejUJ6NtQVX9HvKz8svdcuWPNwgr5T

We also badly need new developers to help us bring Replicant to more and more devices as well as improve the status of the currently-supported devices. As a group effort, Replicant has better chances to succeed and bring freedom to mobile phone users. We are currently a team of two developers with less and less time to get involved in the project and bring new features. Becoming a developer is not even that hard: we have developer and porting guides available to make it easier for you to get started and we'll be there to guide you all along. Even non-technical people can help to some extent, covering tasks such as building up documentation or writing announcements for the project if they're good enough at it.

Please get in touch with us if you're interested. The best way to start is most likely to get a Replicant-supported device and start hacking on it and if you prove serious enough, we might even use some of the donations money to provide you with a new device to port Replicant to!

Replicant 4.0 0004 images release

Mon, 22 Jul 2013 08:40:34 Z

The last months have been rather calm for Replicant development, no big changes or improvements were made. That doesn't mean the project stalled: instead, we added support for some new devices. The previous set of images added support for the Galaxy Tab 2 10.1/7.0 in their 3G versions and we were requested to provide images for the WiFi-only flavors of these tablets as well. Since it only requires very little work, we were able to quickly fulfill that request, even though we couldn't test it ourselves (you're more than welcome to spot and report issues about these devices).

However, the biggest part of what motivated us to build and release new images is the support for the Galaxy S3 device in its international GT-I9300 GSM version (not the LTE one or any other country-specific variant). Currently, only graphics acceleration, camera and GPS support are missing (some other features may need non-free firmwares that run on separate chips). A couple of other things are also missing due to technical limitations (NFC, FM radio).

We are still trying hard to bring Replicant to the Goldelico GTA04, but it couldn't make it to that release either as we still need help bringing a reliable Android kernel to that platform (DM37x).

A more complete changelog is also available, highlighting in details what was changed. Special thanks to the team at CyanogenMod who fixed EXIF in the free Galaxy S2 camera module implementation I wrote but was too lazy to correctly implement EXIF into.

You can download the images from the ReplicantImages page and find installation instructions as well as build guides on the Replicant wiki.

Replicant 4.0 0003 images release

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 17:31:21 Z

It has been two months since the last images release and we decided that it was time to release another batch of images. These are still based on Android 4.0. First, it comes with support for the Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 & 7.0 tablets, both in GSM/3G versions: these tablets are pretty much phones with bigger screens. There is still room for improvement regarding these tablets in Replicant, but they have reached a state of usability, even though they are particularly slow in portrait mode.

Other minor fixes for other devices are included in this release, especially stability fixes regarding the Radio Interface Layer. The full changelog is available for more details.

We are now working to bring Replicant support to other devices such as the Goldelico GTA04.

You can download the images from the ReplicantImages page and find installation instructions as well as build guides on the Replicant wiki.

Replicant 4.0 0002 images release

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 22:19:14 Z

Since some progress was made lately, we decided to release a new set of images.

The new features available in this release are mostly camera support for the Galaxy S2, accelerometers support for the Nexus S and Galaxy S2 and RIL (telephony) improvements for all devices. A more detailed changelog is also available.

We are working to bring Replicant 4.0 support to more devices, such as the Goldelico GTA04 and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 (both 7.0 and 10.1 GSM versions).

You can download the images from the ReplicantImages page and find installation instructions as well as build guides on the Replicant wiki.

Replicant 4.0 SDK release

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 16:22:00 Z

It was brought to our attention that the Android SDK is now being released under an overall proprietary software license. In the past, we already had to release a free software SDK, back in Replicant 2.2 times, because the Android SDK was shipping with the non-free Google APIs. More recent SDK updates made these APIs only plug-ins that weren't shipped with the SDK and it was made clear that these components were non-free while all the license files we could find on the Android SDK package were free software licenses.

However now Google decided to put an overall non-free license for the SDK, which brings back the need of having a fully free Replicant SDK. Since our only SDK release is getting old (it was API level 8), we built an SDK package from Replicant 4.0 sources, that is API level 15.

You can download the SDK from the ReplicantSDK page, find an installation and usage guide as well as the build instructions on the wiki.

Replicant 4.0 0001 images release

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 15:26:22 Z

After months of working hard to bring Replicant to the next upstream release, we are proud to announce the release of the Replicant 4.0 0001 images. This new release comes with support for both new devices, such as the Galaxy Nexus or the Galaxy S2 and devices that were already there in Replicant 2.3, like the Nexus S and the Galaxy S.

Aside from the new Ice Cream Sandwich user experience, that we tried to make as good as possible without any non-free blob, most devices have better hardware support than before, such as Galaxy S which now has working camera, or the global improvements that were made to make telephony more stable and reliable. Even though it's not perfect yet, we are proud of the result, that many of us use daily. If you encounter a particular problem with our software, do not hesitate to report the issue via our tracker, or give feedback when a problem was resolved.

We are indeed writing hundreds of lines of code to have more hardware supported and with a better state, replacing non-free components, step by step. Keep in mind that Replicant has a very small core team, we're just two people doing this on our free time: that means we can't work on every side of the project at the same time and have to make choices. This is why we will always welcome serious new contributors who'd like to get involved in the project.

You can download the images from the ReplicantImages page and find installation instructions as well as build guides on the Replicant wiki.

Replicant 2.3 0005 images, fixing the USSD vulnerability

Sun, 30 Sep 2012 10:55:20 Z

Earlier this week, we were noticed that an USSD vulnerability was discovered in Android. After doing a bit of research, we came to understand the nature of the vulnerability: intents can basically dial a number and start a call without asking confirmation to the user. That could seem harmless at first sight, but it turns out it also works with USSD codes, and some of them are very powerful. This is mostly the case of vendor-specific USSD codes (that are not included in Replicant), which could erase the phone's user data.

What's also problematic about this is that web pages can trigger such intents (through an iframe with the tel: prefix for instance).
Since this vulnerability was present in our Replicant images (although the damage was reduced as we don't include vendor-specific USSD codes), we decided to include the fix in our code base and release new images. That's nearly the only new feature of these images (Galaxy S also got a nasty graphic bug fixed).

You can download the images from the ReplicantImages page and find installation instructions as well as build guides on the Replicant wiki.

Replicant 2.3 0004 images release

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 20:17:30 Z

Even though we didn't update the homepage for a long time, we are still actively working!
Lately, a big part of the work was focused on adding support for the upcoming Goldelico GTA04. We strongly encourage the use of the GTA04 since it features nearly-zero known freedom issues (the only exception being that the WiFi chip needs a loaded firmware). Porting Replicant to the GTA04 helps making the device more usable for everyone, thanks to the Android user experience.

Not so much changes were added for other devices, though Samsung devices now have stable data (3G/GPRS, etc). We are also working to reach a state of completeness on these devices. On the other hand, we are also starting the port to Replicant 4.0, based on CyanogenMod 9, introducing newly-supported devices such as the Galaxy S2 and the Galaxy Nexus.

Regarding the new Replicant 2.3 0004 images, you can download them from the ReplicantImages page, find installation instructions as well as build guides on the Replicant wiki.

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Nexus S/Galaxy S privacy issues

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 20:22:12 Z

We found out that on the Nexus S and the Galaxy S the modem could possibly spy the main CPU(where Replicant runs).
We are currently trying to see if that can be fixed(by loosing about 80M of ram) or not.

More details are available on our wiki

New set of Replicant 2.3 images, including Galaxy S support

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 17:53:19 Z

As it was announced a few weeks ago, we are now releasing a new set of Replicant 2.3 images including Galaxy S support. Nexus S support was also improved, mainly on the modem part (there is now basic data support). Data should also be fixed on Nexus One with this release. More details are available in the detailed changelog.

You can download the new set of images:

Via the Download page
Via the new ReplicantImages wiki page

Our Wiki was also updated with new pages regarding Galaxy S:

Device page: GalaxyS
Device status: ReplicantStatus
Installation instructions: GalaxySInstallation
Build instructions: GalaxySBuild

Galaxy S support is upcoming

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 13:42:29 Z

[]2Back when we were just getting started with Nexus S, a lot of people asked us to add support for Galaxy S, which is a very popular Samsung device running Android. It was quite hard to handle porting multiple devices at the same time. Though, now, a lot of work for Nexus S is over: we fixed graphics to make it usable, we wrote software to support the accelerometer chip, fixed camera (there is still work to do there) and, improved the very first fully free and usable implementation of the Samsung IPC modem protocol in order to successfully place calls, send text messages and connect to data via 3G (among other things we implemented). That was a lot of work and by now, many of us are using Nexus S as a stable daily-phone.

So, what's the good news for Galaxy S owners? Well, most of the work we've done for Nexus S works as well on Galaxy S! Of course, there are still low- level adjustments to make to have it working as well, but it's doable. A few weeks ago, I bought a Galaxy S device and slowly started the work. I was able to get the following features to work: graphics (as good as Nexus S),

sound , calls , SMS , FM radio and accelerometers. The main problem I faced is installation: flashing the images via heimdall doesn't work but it goes fine with CWM recovery, with all the correct image formats.

I think we will be able to release a new set of images for Nexus S, Galaxy S and Nexus One (hopefully with fixed data) and then, it'll be time to start the work on GTA04 the amazing new replacement for the GTA02/Neo Freerunner board. Having Replicant running on GTA04 is the goal we'll try to reach as hard as possible. We encourage you to help the GTA04 project with donations to fund the effort or by subscribing to the group tour to get your device at a lower price.

Wiki and tracker are now powered by Redmine

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 19:58:51 Z

Replicant web services are kindly hosted by the Oregon State University Open Source Lab.
Recently, they asked us to consider switching from trac, which was powering our wiki and tracker, to redmine, another engine providing the same services. The reason is that redmine is easier to manage for them than trac. As a result, a few weeks ago, Replicant devs agreed and we started the migration process.

Bug reports, wiki pages and user accounts were migrated successfully, but it wasn't be the case of the users passwords, which are in a different format from trac to redmine. As a result, if you had an account on trac and want to be able to use it on redmine, you'll have to leave a mail at:

contact@replicant.us in order to let us know and reset your password so that you can set the password you want.

From now on, use the following addresses:

Redmine instance: http://redmine.replicant.us/
Wiki: http://redmine.replicant.us/projects/replicant/wiki
Tracker: http://redmine.replicant.us/projects/replicant/issues

Nexus S status update, with new images

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 21:46:15 Z

The work on the Nexus S was started in July 2011. At the time, we just discovered that the modem uses a Samsung-specific protocol.

On the Android architecture, communication with the modem is done via the RIL (Radio Interface Layer). While the modem runs its own non-free software on a separate CPU, the RIL runs on the main CPU in Android userspace.

The only free RILs we know of are for the well-documented and widely-used AT command set. Back in July 2011, we were desperate to see that there was no free implementation for the Nexus S modem protocol. Fortunately, we weren't alone on this one. After asking around on IRC, we met a talented developer who owns a Samsung H1 device, which originally runs LiMo, a mobile operating system with parts of free software, at least with the Linux kernel. The developer (who's known on IRC as ius) was part of the effort to port Android to the Samsung H1, but he didn't stop there. He also investigated the modem protocol used in the device. And the most incredible is that he did find out most of the protocol messages and data structures. We together investigated on Nexus S as well, and, thanks to this incredible luck we had, the protocol is the same for nexus s. We managed to boot the modem and obtained the first messages quickly. Then, we decided to push Nexus S support to ius' lib, renaming it libsamsung-ipc for the occasion.

But the adventure didn't stop there. Another talented developer known as morphis, who works on the SHR project, free GNU/Linux system for smartphones and who accomplished a huge amount of work to add support for the Palm Pre devices modem protocol in FSO (the middleware used in SHR that is in charge of communication with hardware interfaces, including the modem) decided to get a Nexus S and joined the effort to achieve a working implementation of the Samsung IPC modem protocol.

Several months of work later, here we are, the free RIL we wrote for Android/Replicant has grown enough to deserve the release of a new set of images.

On this release, here is a quick summary of which major components are working and which are not:

Telephony is stable enough, there is working in-call volume change and audio routing, though we miss some features like conferencing
SMS are working nicely, including multi-part messages, both on sending and receiving
Data has a minimal implementation that is far from being ready (but can be set up manually), so this will be for next time
Some other minimal features are there (SIM I/O, DTMF, SIM unlock, etc)
Some are missing (USSD, working airplane mode for instance)

There has been no major improvement for other components nor devices, even though we release images for Nexus One as well.

The images are located, at usual, at our OSUOSL-hosted ftp.

Download Replicant-2.3 0002 preview images for Nexus S and Nexus One

Replicant on Nexus S preview

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 10:04:01 Z

As we already mentioned it, we have started the work to support the Nexus S on Replicant. We are now releasing preview images, the first set for the Nexus S! You can now download the preview images: replicant-2.3 for crespo.

This images includes the ipc-modemctrl tool (from libsamsung-ipc ) that implements minimal telephony support. Please test this tool and give us feedback: http://trac.osuosl.org/trac/replicant/wiki/libsamsung-ipc.

Here is a list of what's not ready yet in this preview image (but may be done in the future):

RIL: this is the crucial library used to handle telephony and data connectivity (3G). This is being worked on very hard and will be there in some time
GPS: we haven't worked at all on the GPS side: it might be possible to have it working (needs work)
Compass: it's the same as in Nexus One (which works) but the kernel driver is different (needs work)
Full Camera: Camera works but in Black & White preview mode and isn't very stable

Here's a list of what doesn't work in Replicant and is probably not going to be achieved:

3D acceleration
Whatever needs the non-free firmwares we don't include (NFC, MFC, WiFi, Bluetooth...)

We are indeed not including any non-free firmware (100% free is our goal) and are not going to provide any free replacement for these as we are not skilled to write such replacement. Though, the kernel we use won't prevent loading these firmwares if in place.

We also thought of porting u-boot to the Nexus S in order to have a free bootloader replacement but it's apparently not possible as primary bootloader (perhaps possible chainloaded).

Anyway, we made a video of Replicant 2.3 running on the Nexus S:

And also made a gallery of Screenshots showing Replicant on the Nexus S:

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Replicant 2.3 preview images for Nexus One released!

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 20:07:31 Z

We are pleased to announce that Replicant 2.3 images are now available for the Nexus One!

This new Replicant version is based on the latest CyanogenMod stable release, 7.1.0, that is based on Android 2.3.7 and contains, as usual, only free software.

You can download these new images at http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/replicant/images/replicant-2.3/preview/0001/

Nexus One status under Replicant 2.3 should be the same as Replicant 2.2: what was working with FroYo should still work in Gingerbread.

Even though Nexus One is supported in Replicant, it doesn't mean it's a device we can totally recommend for freedom:

It has a non-free bootloader
The devices requires non-free firmware for making phone call and working audio
The modem (that runs non-free software) controls the sound (including mic), the GPS and can read/write the main CPU memory (it also handle data connectivity and can send/receive data on its own)

New Replicant 2.2 preview images (0009) released

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 21:26:35 Z

New Replicant 2.2 images are now ready and available to download. This new set of images (0009) is available for the following devices:

HTC Dream/Magic
Nexus One

This new release features the following:

Switched to the Android launcher on HTC Dream/Magic (should be faster)
We have a newer RIL that should fix some issues on HTC Dream/Magic/Nexus One
We added 2 wallpapers that Jan-Christoph Borchardt submitted (thanks a lot!)

Note that Replicant 2.3 images for Nexus One and Nexus S are on their way (you can already build Replicant 2.3 images if you want)!

We are still looking forward Hackers to help us bring some more freedom to the mobile word: there are many ways to contribute to the project!

Introducing Replicant on HTC Dream video

Sat, 17 Sep 2011 19:26:20 Z

A video showing Replicant running has been asked several times since now. We thought it would be a really a nice idea to make such a video available. The video is ready now and it shows the HTC Dream running a Replicant 2.2 pre-0009 preview image, featuring various aspects of the system (booting, Android User Interface, incoming and outgoing calls with the free RIL, Android apps, USB Networking, FDroid and GPS among other things).

This video itself is available under the Creative Commons BY-SA license, but other licenses may apply to the audio tracks (see on the video).

The audio doesn't include any voice comment but the video comes along with subtitles that could easily be translated. The video is available in the free WebM video format on a 360p resolution, both with subtitles hardcoded (for English only) or with subtitles on a separate file.

See the video online (embedded player with subtitles):

Download the video:

Download subtitles:

The video is now subtitles in many languages, thanks to the translators!

Happy Software Freedom Day and happy mobile hacking!

Nexus S support in Replicant being worked on

Sun, 14 Aug 2011 15:18:16 Z

A few month ago, we (Replicant developers) decided to start the work on the new Google Nexus S.

This device seemed an interesting target at first since it doesn't have any technical restriction to flash a non-official operating system and kernel but also as it comes with the latest (free) version of Android, Gingerbread. Of course, even if Android Gingerbread is free, the device requires non-free bits (libraries, binaries, firmwares, etc) to actually use the full potential of the hardware.

The work was started at the end of July and the 100% free images of Replicant 2.3 that run on the device already contain a set of supported features. You can get a detailed state of the Nexus S support in Replicant at http://trac.osuosl.org/trac/replicant/wiki/ReplicantStatus#nexuss. All the source code is, as usual, available in Replicant's gitorious repos. Though, we still miss a big part: the RIL, that is necessary for telephony.

We soon discovered that the hardware of the Nexus S was made in a way that gives better freedom guarantees than other Replicant-supported phones. You can read a rational concerning this aspect of the phone, along with a technical overview of the device at http://trac.osuosl.org/trac/replicant/wiki/NexusSTechnicalOverview.

Also, whereas the bootloaders for the other Replicant-supported devices are all non-free, it may be possible to port a free bootloader (u-boot for instance) to the Nexus S. A wiki page that comes with all the infos we have about this is at: http://trac.osuosl.org/trac/replicant/wiki/NexusSBootloader.

The next important steps in the Nexus S support are the following (in no particular order):

find out if a free bootloader is possible for Nexus S and start the work on it
write a free RIL so that we can use the telephony functions

and, when that is achieved:

release official preview images
replace the last replaceable non-free bits (GPS and compass for instance)

As usual, we are looking for new hackers to join the effort to bring some more bits of freedom to the mobile phone world.

Replicant 2.2 preview 008 is out!

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 16:11:26 Z

We are pleased to announced Replicant 2.2 preview 008.

What's new in this version (since 0007):

Bug #22 (http://trac.osuosl.org/trac/replicant/ticket/22) should (hopefully) be fixed
Data is disabled by default
Non-market apps are allowed by default
*FDroid, the free software market app is installed by default
CMWallpapers, CMStats and CMUpdateNotify are not installed anymore
Replicant has its own wallpapers and a Wallpaper selection app
There are Replicant boot splashes for all devices (including Dream)
There is a changelog for Replicant on the system
Switched to replicant vendor (Mod version is now Replicant)

As usual we would like to thank everybody involved. We are looking for new maintainers and hackers to join us and bring innovation in the libre mobile world.

Help us testing this new preview release on your favourite device and come to say hi on our irc channel

Happy mobile hacking.

Replicant 2.2 preview 007

Sun, 29 May 2011 10:02:43 Z

We are pleased to announced Replicant 2.2 preview 007.

What's new in this version:

We are using a new ril (hycs-hardware_xdandroid-ril), which fixes telephony in the USA. Data should also work.
libhtc-acoustic has been fully replaced for HTC Dream, it fixes:
in-call volume adjustment
no mic wired headset support

As usual we would like to thank everybody involved. We are looking for new maintainers and hackers to join us and bring innovation in the libre mobile world.

Happy mobile hacking.

Replicant lacks tracking antifeatures

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 10:35:55 Z

Recently there was a lot of hype about mobile operating systems spying the users: [Apple iOS][1], Palm WebOS, Google Android.

Since Replicant is based on Android someone could be concerned about our operating system too.

According to Magnus Eriksson on github:

The files are named cache.cell & cache.wifi and is located in /data/data/com.google.android.location/files on the Android device.

Well we are proud to confirm that on Replicant (tested both on htc dream and nexus one) those files are missing , even with "Settings -> Location & Security -> Use wireless networks" enabled.

The directory that should contain those files( /data/data/com.google.android.location/files ) doesn't even exist in Replicant.

But beware: even if Replicant itself doesn't track its users' position, this doesn't mean that the phone can't spy on you.

A smartphone usually has two components that talk to each other: a cpu and a modem. If the modem gets a call, it tells the CPU about it and viceversa for outbound calls, the CPU will order the modem to make a call (if you are curious about how it works there is a paper about how mobile phones work).

The modem and the CPU running Replicant are separated, and while we are trying to do our best to ship a fully free mobile os, the code running on the modem is proprietary software and can't be changed. Since we don't know what it does, we have no way to be sure that it doesn't spy.

Also note that on the HTC Dream and the nexus one mobile phones, GPS and audio parts are controlled by the modem.

The cellphone network can also spy, in fact in order to work it has to know your location.

This is just to remind you that every mobile phone is a tracking device and if you don't want to be spied at all you should not use one.

So why do people invest time on Replicant?

Here are some reasons:

The modem or the network has no access to the CPU where replicant is running. That opens up some possibilities such as VPN, TOR,SSH, etc...
If mobile phones become the computers of the future we want to run free software on them.

Edit: I learned that the Modem's CPU has access to the memory(the RAM chips) of the CPU running replicant, in other words the modem CPU can spy replicant's CPU.

That will force us to port replicant to some devices that don't have this problem, such as the nokia n900 for instance.

[1]: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/apr/20/iphone-tracking-prompts-privacy-fears (IOS(iphone/ipad OS) spying its users)

Replicant 2.2 SDK available

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 06:25:07 Z

Thanks to the huge amount of work by paulk (Paul Kocialkowski) we now have an SDK.
It should be functional enough to write android applications for Replicant 2.2 or any other Android 2.2 device.

As usual the main difference compared to the Android SDK is that Replicant SDK should be fully free software. (Android SDK includes proprietary API like Google maps but we don't want proprietary Google maps at all).

The Replicant SDK also includes an emulator like the Android one to allow developers to write their apps even without having a phone.

Please download the Replicant 2.2 SDK and help us building a better libre Replicant.

We wait for your suggestions and comments.

Again thanks a lot to paulk for the great work.

new Replicant test images available

Thu, 03 Mar 2011 08:52:12 Z

Hello Replicants!

We have new Replicant test images.
We would like to know if phone calls work in the USA on the Nexus One and the HTC Dream. Help us testing!

Use the fastboot utility to install but remember: it will erase all the installed data and applications in order to prevent proprietary libraries from being used.

We are please to remind you that, as usual, Replicant is fully free software and doesn't include any proprietary firmwares.

The Nexus One mobile phone needs some audio database files (located at /system/etc/firmware/*.acdb) to make sound and phone calls work which are not included either.

We need your help also to write some documentation about how to install Replicant.

JOIN US!

FDroid: a free software alternative to Google Market

Fri, 26 Nov 2010 08:00:44 Z

Finally we have an alternative to Google Market, the proprietary application that comes preinstalled in many Android phones to download and manage applications.

Now, thanks to CiaranG, everyone with an Android or Replicant phone can install a fully free software gpl client called Fdroid.

It comes preconfigured to connect to the FDroid repository that contains ONLY applications released under a free software licenses.

In the future we hope to have a system that will allow everyone to upload their favourite free software application.

Help us!

Volunteers are key to the success of Replicant. This is a community effort - we do not have the support of corporations behind us like many other projects do, and so it depends on YOU to make things happen.

Join the Replicant mailing list.

Join our microblogging group on Identi.ca

Join us on IRC:

Server: irc.freenode.net

Channel: #replicant

Introducing Replicant

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 16:46:48 Z

Welcome to the website of the Replicant Project!

Replicant is a mobile operating system based upon Android that aims to be 100% free software.

It is developed in collaboration between activist from LibrePlanet Italia and the Software Freedom Conservancy.