cross-posted from: https://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.
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 read almost every drama related post of 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 case with Rob Braxman and the French newsletter. That’s the only time they actually provided a source.
I am a grapheneOS hater. I carry a deep seated resentment towards them and use every opportunity to shit on the project. as far as I know, nobody’s paying me to hate on them nor have I received any instructions on how to be a better hater and whatnot, I do alla that shit for free.
the idea that the only way I can not get assraped on the reg is to give a shitload of money to google and then use this elitist OS is something I have a gigantic problem with.
my whole infra - desktopS, laptopS, phoneS, tablet - doesn’t break $200 in total. 10-20 years old tech, running the latest software, as secure and feature-rich as I want it to be. gibson’s “street finds its own uses for things” in vivo, that’s what democratizing tech should be like.
instituting an artificial entry barrier of multiples of that for one device is fucking preposterous. the “refurbished” route advocated for poor folks is a) phantasm, no such thing exists, them is used phones and b) for stuff that someone rubbed, spat on, took to the shitter, dogknows what else, the price is $50, not fucking multiples of that.
if they made a non-TPM-hardware-backed gos-lite, I’d shut the fuck about it. if the only users for gos were people liberating their pixels, I’d shut the fuck up about it. if it was some jason bournes that need alla that evil-maid & friends shit, I’d shut the fuck up about it.
but clueless influenzos push this idiotic narrative that that’s the only possible way to escape google’s clutches because it makes for an easy video and so this crap persists.
gos verily has more privacy protections than lineageOS. but the latter is more than enough for the 99% of users that ain’t got fucking 5eyes after them - a lost or stolen device don’t compromise you and you’re free from the apple/google duopoly, not to mention, you’re repurposing shit meant for the landfill.
if you thing gos is a such an awesome idea, that’d be like if linux could run only on thinkpads and only on the most recent models. would you be into it?
this diatribe in OP don’t make me reconsider any of my positions, and as denpok singh wisely stated “hate in the hands of the enlightened can be a tool for great change”
in conclusion, gos hater for life, peace.
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:
the idea that the only way I can not get assraped on the reg is to give a shitload of money to google and then use this elitist OS is something I have a gigantic problem with.
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
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
Mentioning GrapheneOS is banned on r/privacy! Makes perfect sense.
r/privacy is generally terrible from my experience.
Lmao that’s amazing, great insurance against getting banned! Smart!!
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 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.
I wonder if they spent less time on drama the OS would be available to more hardware models.
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:
For most [unsupported] devices, the hardware and firmware will prevent providing a reasonably secure device, regardless of the work put into device support.
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.
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!
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 ifnit still is.
Responding to people who call you wrong actually improves your standing with those who view things rationally.
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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dx7CZ-2Bajg https://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
