Open Source Mobile Phone?

Syth

I, like lots of people out there, have a mobile phone. However I like poking, tweaking and hacking. But most mobile phones run non-free closed software. Is there any phones out there that allow one to tweak it? Or anyway of installing new software/OS on an existing phone?

JC 2K3

Nah, it'd be too easy to avoid paying for calls.

Syth

JC 2K3 wrote:

Nah, it'd be too easy to avoid paying for calls.

In america it used to be against the rules for a customer of the phone lines to use their own phone (this was in the 60s AFAIR), they had to buy a phone from the phone company. The phone companies claimed that non-standard phones would damage the phone network. Eventually those rules were over tunred and the phone networks didn't collapse.

I think it's similar here.

It's up to the mobile phone compaines to verify that calls are being paid for and that the network is not being abused. I think it's very possible for them to ensure this. I really want to be able to hack my phone.

Capt'n Midnight

at a guess it's like the red book standard for CD drives
- you've to pay an absolute bloody fortune and sign lots of stuff before they give you the book. Other similar closed shops are DVD drives and regions, and SKY Digiboxes.

http://www.cellular.co.za/cdma.htm

QUALCOMM owns a substantial portfolio of CDMA patents, including many ``essential'' patents that are necessary for the deployment of any proposed 3G CDMA system, such as Multi-Carrier, Direct Spread, and another system referred to as TD-SCDMA.

Gavin

Syth wrote:

I, like lots of people out there, have a mobile phone. However I like poking, tweaking and hacking. But most mobile phones run non-free closed software. Is there any phones out there that allow one to tweak it? Or anyway of installing new software/OS on an existing phone?

Symbian phones are quite programmable.

Gav

Syth

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

at a guess it's like the red book standard for CD drives
- you've to pay an absolute bloody fortune and sign lots of stuff before they give you the book. Other similar closed shops are DVD drives and regions, and SKY Digiboxes.

http://www.cellular.co.za/cdma.htm

So one company has a lot of control of mobile phone. That sucks. Some people have reverse engineered DVD regiosn encoding though. (The DVD drive in my PC is region encoded AFAIK, but my Linux intall has never had any difficulty).

Verb wrote:

Symbian phones are quite programmable.

That's interesting. But I'd really want a true open source phone so I can hack that whole lot.

Capt'n Midnight

Syth wrote:

So one company has a lot of control of mobile phone.

The Chinese developed thier own system and if they had done it a decade ago we'd be using it instead of the Qualcomm one ! I think they are using GPS but paying a lot less to the yanks because of the threat of going it alone.

Not sure how much control you would be allowed to get. Many of the WiFi cards and commercial transceivers use programmable synthetic frequency generation (or something - can't remember the exact buzzwords) rather than a tuned circuit. This means the hardware can be programmed to go way out of band and that's one reason why they don't let the details out. For the manufacturers it means one size fits all for many of thier RF products, or so I've been led to believe

Rambo

Syth wrote:

So one company has a lot of control of mobile phone. That sucks. Some people have reverse engineered DVD regiosn encoding though. (The DVD drive in my PC is region encoded AFAIK, but my Linux intall has never had any difficulty).


That's interesting. But I'd really want a true open source phone so I can hack that whole lot.

you would have to write code for a new kernel which can boot phone up
and then some kind of interface

yea it would be cool something like the ipod project for linux..

I would say the networks would not support your phone with a strange OS
on it

superhoops1973

Syth wrote:

I, like lots of people out there, have a mobile phone. However I like poking, tweaking and hacking. But most mobile phones run non-free closed software. Is there any phones out there that allow one to tweak it? Or anyway of installing new software/OS on an existing phone?

used to work for a company developing infrastructure for mobile networks. unfortunetly vodafones and o2 of this world don't really seem to open up there networks. but hopefully with VOIP, wi-max and wi-fi becoming a serious thread to mobile networks, i suspect they will have to become more open very very soon.

Zombrex

JC 2K3 wrote:

Nah, it'd be too easy to avoid paying for calls.

The information about calls and such is handled by the GSM Network and the SIM card in your phone. The software on the phone has very little to do with it.

I can see no reason why there couldn't be an Open Source phone, GSM is an open standard. Some people have been working on just such a product

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/07/31/red_hat_pitches_open_source/

damnyanks

Some phones come with windows installed. Not sur which ones exactly but they have the .Net framework installed. Perhaps you can do something worth while with that.

superhoops1973

Wicknight wrote:

The information about calls and such is handled by the GSM Network and the SIM card in your phone. The software on the phone has very little to do with it.

I can see no reason why there couldn't be an Open Source phone, GSM is an open standard. Some people have been working on just such a product

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/07/31/red_hat_pitches_open_source/

think mobile operators carefully pick phones they sell. imagine if wi-max takes off and people can wander into a hot spot and make a call over broadband and bypass the mobile network and large call charges, it'd be like turkey voting for christmas if they didn't have ways and means of controlling what type of applications ran on there networks.. don't know much about the area. you are right wicknight that GSM is an open standard, but getting access to the network isn't so easy. The internet is a free for all, unfortunaelty mobile networks aren't

rsynnott

You can write software for most phones (both through Java and manufacturer-supplied C toolkits; Nokia has a free one) but modifying thee underlying software prob'ly isn't possible on most current phones.

Zombrex

superhoops1973 wrote:

you are right wicknight that GSM is an open standard, but getting access to the network isn't so easy. The internet is a free for all, unfortunaelty mobile networks aren't

True, but that is handled by the software on the SIM card, which is really the heart of the mobile phone, and the bit that is controlled by the network operator. Once you have a valid network SIM card you can use it in pretty much any GSM phone, even one running completely FLOSS software. Making an open source SIM card, now that is something that would be near impossible to do I would imagine.

Syth

superhoops1973 wrote:

imagine if wi-max takes off and people can wander into a hot spot and make a call over broadband and bypass the mobile network and large call charges, it'd be like turkey voting for christmas

Which I think is one of the best reasons for developing an open source mobile phone. Most big companies in an industries don't like the industry to change, even if technology changes. Open Source code gives the people the power.

I though a SIM card only had details about your account with the phone company? It looks like a bit of flash memory, there seem to be no moving parts or rocessing capabilites, so the phrase 'open souce SIM card' doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

Gavin

It's a smart card. It does processing, challenge response authentication & also the A3 & A8 encryption algorithms used for GSM. The phone itself does the A5 algo. The encryption algorithm which is meant to be secret, but isn't and isn't secure either.

http://www.gsm-security.net/faq/gsm-encryption.shtml

Gav

Syth

I found this site which has a list of a bunch of phones with Linux on them. They all seem to be smartphone/miniPDAs from China. Interesting though.

nadir

very interesting topic, I wonder if you could reverse engineer a phone, i fuigure it would be viciously difficult, but with a bit of cash ... maybe.

Quangle

http://wiki.xda-developers.com/ - Porting linux to the "XDA" and "XDA-2" etc.

A lot of phones have a diagnostic mode that gives you lots of information you don't need. (e.g. nokia netmonitor). Search.

http://martinri.freeshell.org/gsm-access-codes.html

Mobber(GNU GPL is a jabber client written in java for mobiles. (Jabber Overview)

Software Radio:
It's possible to do most of the phone in software, but unlikely to be portable.
GNU Radio is a software radio project, but I don't know of any efforts to do GSM (but then I haven't looked..)
A proprietry Software Radio Basestation

tck

for pure hacking purposes, the OKI 900 was a legend, go look up defcon and blackhat media archives for some great talks.

these days i find alot of my friends and i playing with siemens phones , great with linux (has AT command set on most models).