[blihp]

While a completely open device is the ideal, to many there's nothing inherently wrong with making a few pragmatic compromises as long as they are well thought through. In the case of the radios, they appear to be well isolated from the CPU/system memory on the PinePhone. So if you want to be paranoid and ensure that every byte sent through them is encrypted before they see it, even if some malicious / snooping code is in those blobs, you can do that and they won't be able to accomplish very much. If that's not good enough, you can cut power to the radios entirely if you can live without them. So that's Pine64's approach.

We have two devices coming to market that take ideologically different approaches to choose from: the PinePhone (pragmatic compromise) and the Librem 5 (no compromise). So just pick where on the libre spectrum you want to live and enjoy 2020... it should be a fun year!