While this is a laudable product and price point, it is only a partial success. What people don't realize is that in these markets internet is prohibitively expensive for many people when accessed over cellular networks. This means people have to use wifi, which is typically sporadic, shared and unrealiable.
Cheap smartphones in the really developing parts of the world will be revolutionary precisely when they have real ad-hoc and mesh networking over wifi and code that is built to take advantage: thus making distribution of content and applications far more seemless for the sporadically poorly connected masses, censorship impossible, news distribution democratic and non state-issued digital currencies viable. Imagine if someone can close-enough hack the identity problem (eg. using a signup delay, public/private keys, time (proof of work), rough geolocation, and unique email address as a mix) then political polls can be made this way.
I don't think this is a pipe dream, because people in a lot of these areas do have shared, extremely pressing social concerns. Sexism (~50% of people), hatred for the corrupt local institutions (~95% of people), that sort of thing.
Think of the Chinese child being run over video effect... meets ad-hoc virtually unmonitorable wifi meets irrefutable evidence of official corruption. Look at for instance the status of women in parts of south India, it's extremely oppressive. I think we're going to see riots, political change, new social models emerge as a result of the true application of these devices... but not just yet, because the features are missing!
Apple and Google will probably never prioritize these features. Unfortunately, Firefox OS has not prioritized them either.* This is saddening. The door is open for motivated hacking!
Exactly! We are very interested in privacy, mesh networks, etc. (look for instance at the tor integration done by a moz employee on his free time at https://github.com/OrFoxOS)
But we have limited resources, and to be successful and get enough leverage we have to balance features that are market driven with our dream pipeline. Ultimately this is a good thing, because a purely hacker driven phone would probably not be the best one either ;)
While this is a laudable product and price point, it is only a partial success. What people don't realize is that in these markets internet is prohibitively expensive for many people when accessed over cellular networks. This means people have to use wifi, which is typically sporadic, shared and unrealiable.
Cheap smartphones in the really developing parts of the world will be revolutionary precisely when they have real ad-hoc and mesh networking over wifi and code that is built to take advantage: thus making distribution of content and applications far more seemless for the sporadically poorly connected masses, censorship impossible, news distribution democratic and non state-issued digital currencies viable. Imagine if someone can close-enough hack the identity problem (eg. using a signup delay, public/private keys, time (proof of work), rough geolocation, and unique email address as a mix) then political polls can be made this way.
I don't think this is a pipe dream, because people in a lot of these areas do have shared, extremely pressing social concerns. Sexism (~50% of people), hatred for the corrupt local institutions (~95% of people), that sort of thing.
Think of the Chinese child being run over video effect... meets ad-hoc virtually unmonitorable wifi meets irrefutable evidence of official corruption. Look at for instance the status of women in parts of south India, it's extremely oppressive. I think we're going to see riots, political change, new social models emerge as a result of the true application of these devices... but not just yet, because the features are missing!
Apple and Google will probably never prioritize these features. Unfortunately, Firefox OS has not prioritized them either.* This is saddening. The door is open for motivated hacking!
* https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=945047