Projects / Read and costed
The brick
Horizon An idea with sources behind it and nothing built. Published so it can be argued with.
A Linux phone with one USB-C port and nothing else: no microphone, no speaker, no camera. Strong compute inside, enough to run a local model. A headset with a mic on a cord that does not fray, in the box. A camera or a speaker added over USB-C if you decide you want one. A LoRa antenna for when there is no network.
Jo's own words about it: "this is just an idea right now". The survey has a chapter on how to speculate carefully, and this idea is graded by its rules.
Drawn from Jo's survey, Parts X and XI.
How to argue with an idea properly
The survey's speculation chapter puts every guess on a tier. A tier states what kind of risk a guess carries and says nothing about how likely it is. Tier 1 is recombination: engineering risk only, a competent group could attempt it this year. Tier 2 is extrapolation. Tier 3 is discontinuity. Tier 4 is unbounded.
Most of the brick is tier 1: the parts exist and someone has to assemble them. Whether anybody wants a phone without a microphone is a different kind of question, and it is open.
The connectivity half
For a device meant to be private, identity on the network matters more than the radio. The survey's last part covers programmable SIMs and pySim, where that question is decided.
What is not known here
The open items for this project. Work on it starts here.
- No hardware has been chosen, no board has been costed and nothing has been built.
- Whether a phone without a microphone still suits someone who wants to answer a call.