from mistermodal@lemmy.ml to privacy@lemmy.ml on 27 Mar 00:50
https://lemmy.ml/post/45066074
cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/45061709
There are at least a dozen people spending at least several hours attacking GrapheneOS across platforms on a daily basis. It’s a very strange situation. How do these people have so much time and dedication to keep making posts across platforms attacking us? It’s relentless.
Every day, dozens of new accounts join our chat rooms to spread the same fabrications about GrapheneOS including via direct messages.
On Hacker News, one of the accounts making personal attacks based on fabrications in most threads about GrapheneOS has been doing it for 8 years.
Y Combinator has a financial stake in numerous surveillance and exploit development companies. Hacker News is a platform they own and the moderators on it have permitted years of vile harassment towards our team which they’d normally remove if others were targeted.
Hacker News mods micromanage it enough to repeatedly ask us not to reuse a bit of text across our comments. Meanwhile, they do nothing about disgusting personal attacks and harassment content consistently being spread in threads about GrapheneOS on their heavily moderated site.
The largest privacy community on Reddit /r/privacy bans any discussion or mentions of GrapheneOS. A bot automatically removes any post mentioning GrapheneOS they’ll very actively ban people who evade their filters. The mods of the subreddit misrepresent this as something we want.
Many privacy subreddits have mods who are hostile towards GrapheneOS. We were banned from posting on /r/Android for multiple years. The mod who banned us said our official project account on Reddit was ban evading because they once unjustifiably banned one of our team members.
On Wikipedia, a company attacking GrapheneOS project made years of edits to the site pushing false narratives about us. They cited articles based on their own press releases. Other content was made paraphrasing Wikipedia which ended up being cited by it. It continues to this day.
Articles about GrapheneOS on most platforms often have comments engaging in baseless personal attacks towards our team, linking to harassment content and making many clearly inaccurate claims about it. We’ve found chat rooms coordinating this including attacks on the X platform.
Privacy projects are more vulnerable to these attacks because the userbase and supporters largely avoid social media and other platforms where it happens. Many people believe what they read on social media if it isn’t countered and it builds echo chambers hostile to GrapheneOS.
Many people think these must be state sponsored attacks. However, our experience is these attacks are primarily orchestrated by companies selling dubious products marketed as private and secure. We did get targeted by state sponsored smear campaigns in France and Spain though.
threaded - newest
I wonder if they spent less time on drama the OS would be available to more hardware models.
I’ve never found this dumb joke appropriate when talking about all but the tiniest projects. How do projects gain & lose support for their development?
This is not a joke. All this drama is what makes them lose support.
Yeah in your head where “civil discourse” is supposed to matter more than security standards. This is an operating system aimed at people who have high security standards. Once we clear this up, we can start talking about Graphene’s fundamental hardware privacy limitations & how far the chain of trust really goes. Responding to people who call you wrong actually improves your standing with those who view things rationally. The loudest voices on the internet are those who have the most time to waste. Like me at work!
When someone says “This is informative, and unfortunate.” and the response is “you’ll be banned if you don’t remove support for Techlore and there will be information published about your attacks on me in support of an abusive person, it is reality, you chose to attack the project this way, abusive people and their supporters aren’t welcome anymore, you’re complicit in the harassment and swatting attacks on me.” (basically confirming all the crap from the video the person reacted too), is your standing really “improving” among RATIONAL people?
Nope, it only increase the cult support.
I never seen a single person talking shit about GrapheneOS (although devs claim that all the time), what people can’t stand is that dev who is constantly attacking every other project around, and this is very well documented, and then playing the victim saying he is being persecuted, and constantly creating all this drama like a fucking child. GrapheneOS literally loses support because of it - right there two big channels that actively promoted and donated to GrapheneOS dropped it. And then there is you, a “rational” person fueling this fucking childish drama too? GrapheneOS is great when they are silent, the reason they are banned everywhere is because no RATIONAL person wants to deal with their crap. They aren’t against the project, but against this quarreling which the only constant is a single dev team, and why again are you bringing this drama here?
for other readers who want context, these are the “baseless” “defamatory” material they complain about: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dx7CZ-2Bajg www.youtube.com/watch?v=4To-F6W1NT0
You’re literally talking shit about them right now, and promoting a goddanged youtube channel like I’m going to actually switch my audio track away from music so that a guy can complain in my headphones, or something. I could not give a fuck about >86% of what you just typed if someone put a gun in my mouth. This is how people who wish they could be in court but would get smoked talk. Publishing information about people’s attacks on you is called a response, which is allowed IMO. I’ll permit it! People online aren’t your students hitting each other. Pretending it’s their problem because you made it your problem with them is mindboggling to me. Better listening material for you, while we’re posting You Tubes: Popol Vuh – In den Gärten Pharaos.
The optics of silence in the face of your critics is… what? In other words, I rebuke you demon
That’s exactly what those two videos are about, they are responses. If you could not give a fuck, then why again are you posting the drama here?
Watch responses*
That unlike Micay claims, are full of screenshots showing the real conversations and what that guy that accuses everyone of persecuting him actually does (there is even a hilarious screenshot of a dev acc on their matrix chat telling people to use voip to create Twitter accs to harass another project and if they don’t they would get banned from the chat… shit they accuse other projects of doing lol), all their claims of persecution by techlore was because they did one benchmark video where they recommended GrapheneOS over CalyxOS despite CalyxOS performing better for not being so hardened, but somehow they went mental and called the video slander campaign trying to destroy their project and shit… but it’s your choice to stay ignorant and bring the drama that guy causes for… I have no idea what for, probably just ignorance, because those familiar with his history know it’s all bullshit. Have a fun life.
Yeah have fun in Techlore’s Youtube comments. You should have more luck finding people who will sit through your heckin drama Youtube videos in their comments. You are a Keemstar iPad baby to me.
Had to check what’s Keemstar, you are trying to make fun of Youtube to the wrong person because I have never followed any channel and I don’t know any Youtube personalities, I was already a bit too old to care about trends when Youtube became mainstream, the only two videos of those two channels I posted I have watched are those exact two videos I posted here because they are RESPONSES to GrapheneOS’ drama people like you keep bringing to tech communities. It wasn’t me that made a post about GrapheneOS drama, you are the one bringing that bullshit here and then dismiss objective proof that it’s just bullshit drama and want to play the mature, you are pathetic, go fuck yourself - don’t bother replying because I already blocked you so I won’t see your shit anymore. Goodbye.
for mods: I already saved you the trouble and quit the communities I was following in this instance.
Men when you don’t watch their youtube video:
I bet you are even proud of this (lack of) discussion you just produced
With you or in general?
It has put put me off from using not for a long while, when he was fighting with calyx OS. The graphenOS community was toxic don’t know if it still is.
I don’t really get the “community toxicity” thing when ppl are talking about stuff that can land you in jail. If you think online arguments are stressful, imagine prison! Can’t log off from prison. Besides, arguments online are fun if you change your perspective on them.
That’s not a fair statement to make. As published in their FAQ, developer time is not what’s lacking in the effort to support more devices:
That is a much better point to make actually, imagine thinking they can just h4x0r2 their way into any phone
isn’t that y they have the drama in the first place? sUpPoRt MoRe DeViCeS. yeah that gonna happen w Moto cuz Moto actually gives a fuck, unlike the rest.
Not at all, the drama comes from stuff like a few months ago when one French reporter interviewed one French police officer who complained about not being able to crack GrapheneOS and they decided to scream they were being persecuted by the French government, and while doing that casually suggesting two other French Android distros were involved in this “government persecution” and they could have backdoored their systems for the government, and then going back to the routine of screaming to the world that they are the ones being slandered by other projects and blah blah blah
They also seem to have no comprehension of Threat Model and constantly call other distros fake/phoney, “dubious” privacy OS. If GrapheneOS was a Linux distro they would be saying Arch is not really secure because they don’t compartmentalize and sandbox every application and blah blah blah, none of the drama comes from GrapheneOS technical aspects, it’s all from their toxic community.
I’m pretty sure that if they saw my four comments here, they would dub me as “dozen people spending at least several hours attacking GrapheneOS across platforms on a daily basis” as well, “orchestrated by companies selling dubious products marketed as private and secure”.
Mentioning GrapheneOS is banned on r/privacy! Makes perfect sense.
Lmao that’s amazing, great insurance against getting banned! Smart!!
r/privacy is generally terrible from my experience.
I love how strcat never posts any links to these things and just goes on these multi post rants.
I see it as a good thing because he makes a very paranoid android.
These posts do more to make me not want to use GrapheneOS than any other person or entity. This has got to be a psyop. I refuse to believe any one can possibly be this much of a bitch.
Make your OS and rest on its merits instead of crying about it 🤷♂️
Daniel strcat the top dev is unfortunately super paranoid. He really thinks everyone is out to get him and he goes on long crusades on the net that drag on and on and that’s why he gets banned. People just get tired of it. There’s long videos of all his persecution claims being debunked.
Last year he took a step back when it got too much but he seems to be back in full swing lately. He’s a good developer and technically very strong but he really needs to chill. Even his strongest supporters like Louis Rossman had to drop him.
I think what caused it was his partner swindling him during the time of CopperheadOS but really this is not cool.
Having said that, grapheneos is the strongest on security and privacy by far. It’s just sad to see all the unnecessary drama around it and yes it does put people off.
If he kept his thoughts as private as his operating system, he’d be set. The paranoia might help development of a tool like this but all the drama is a bit off putting, yes.
I’m putting that first sentence in my back pocket lol
Don’t you want someone who is paranoid making a security focused OS?
Citation?
m.youtube.com/watch?v=4To-F6W1NT0
Strcat has some intense paranoia which is exactly what you want in a security focused Android phone os. I’m ok with him ranting about whatever he wants as long as it motivates him to keep making the only android that Israel can’t get into.
.
LineageOS is chill IDK why you think having extreme device security doesn’t matter to people, in many corporate settings it’s worthwhile. Probably undermined by Google anyways, but that can never be admitted in COURT. I run LineageOS on a Pixel with a bunch of shit changed for privacy, used to have GOS, the Pixel was the best option on Swappa! I take a lotta pics 👀. I find the GOS forums a useful resource and I hate everyone they hate so it works out dawg. Yeah, structurally bound to Google and the US chip infrastructure is bad. Get Chinese shit. I just need my FDroid shit to live, that’s what really binds me to Google’s ecosystem.
Don’t forget to mention GrapheneOS gets to keep all their fingers and ears because the feds use their stuff. Think they can’t get into a Google device? I just don’t believe it. Peace indeed
I do use a (modded) version of graphene as a daily driver and I do appreciate many of the features that it offer.
And I totally agree that some people seem to try to turn graphene into some rigid cult (especially on the philosophy of running root and “who decides how application backup should be made? The application developer or the device/data owner”)
That said:
There is actually a technical reason for this. Pixel phones are the only ones to support custom AvB keys.
Basically, this allows you (or graphene) to create a key, which can be used to sign your custom firmware. So, you can have a locked bootloader that will only allow OS updates signed with your key.
You can basically create your own OTA updates. It’s fantastic.
It’s amazing and disappointing that most phone manufacturers don’t allow custom AvB keys, but it’s a reflection of how they truly don’t care about people who like to tinker.
Now, should the lack of custom AvB keys be a barrier towards using graphene? Tbh, I don’t think so - but it does fit the graphene rigid MO of “root is bad”.
edit : fixed link
that’s not true. Fairphones and certain Motorolas have supported that for years. check the calyxos device support page. all of them supports it.
Part of me thinks the real reason they only support Pixels is that they really like pixels and have brand loyalty to them. It also could be that Google pays them to only support Pixels, although that’s a bit more conspiratorial.
without going too in depth:
Google and apple have the most money, they create the best hardware (relevant in this case for the hardware root of trust)
A privacy focused individual should also be concerned about security to some degree, making the hardware root of trust a high priority.
Apple locks down their boot process too rigidly to load a new OS without compromising that security.
that’s why we’re left with Pixels as the only option. Apparently Motorola will be on the table soon. I have no experience with their chip design so I’m curious to see what they release.
to some degree, which does not warrant mandating the highest known level of hardware security.
absolutely. we all have to individually decide our priorities in an era where our choices are incredibly limited.
my choice is to have as rock solid of a foundation as possible, so that every step afterwards is harder to compromise. that choice will not be the same for everybody depending on their starting motivations and end-goal posture.
simply sharing where my experience has informed my opinion.
grapheneos devs are making that choice instead of others, by having much stricter hardware requirements than necessary for being able to take advantage of other unique privacy features.
as I remember their strongest reason is google’s own hardware security module, because there is no comparable thing in other phones. but it’s silly because graphene has lots of unique privacy features that don’t depend on special hardware
Grapheneos is like voting democrat except the cops won’t be able to get into your phone
I love it how they don’t provide any proof at all /s, just: “Trust us bro”
I mean you could just go take a look at their other posts? It’s one statement about it. Maybe I could add hyperlinks to everything if I suddenly care more about that than making people mad in a kinda interesting way today. It’s unpredictable. Phone’s only fun at work. At home it becomes the bad screen.
I’ve read almost every drama-related post from the official GrapheneOS account since I researched this whole thing.
And they almost NEVER provide sources. The only exceptions I can think of right now were the cases with Rob Braxman and the French newsletter. That’s the only time they actually provided a source.
Well if that is the case it would be worthwhile to document it here tbqh, it may be easy for people in the forums to keep track but ppl do have jobs
@mistermodal wow, it's so important to call out bad actors and protect real projects like this.
These “phony companies” could in turn be operated by state actors: as there have been physical product launches in the past, which turned out to be honey pots. Perhaps state actors, can no longer convince privacy enthusiasts (unfortunately including criminals), to fall for their honey pots, and shift efforts to tarnishing reputation instead.