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GrapheneOS – Break Free from Google and Apple

blog.tomaszdunia.pl

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Re: GrapheneOS – Break Free from Google and Apple

#411

Post by perching_aix »

neelc wrote: post #379
microtonal wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pixels are really great despite being from Google. I hope they will continue to make them unlockable/relockable. As you say they are also surprisingly hard to brick. Here is someone trying to break it intentionally during the GrapheneOS install: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ik0AiO0WtuU If you don't like giving money to Google, plenty of companies offer refurbished Pixel phones.

In the US, many refurbished Pixel phones are Verizon variants which disallow OEM unlocking. When was in college and had Sprint this was a nightmare since then I wanted root for unlimited hotspot (Sprint made it easy that way), but most refurbished Pixels were Verizon variants. And I couldn't just use OnePlus because they were only designed GSM networks or later Verizon CDMA-less. Then, new Pixels were unaffordable fo…

Is it not possible to buy a phone in the US without any cellular providers involved? I thought that kind of lock-in was a thing of the past.

Re: GrapheneOS – Break Free from Google and Apple

#412

Post by notpushkin »

6LLvveMx2koXfwn wrote: post #246
bergheim wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially with how things are currently, I whole heartedly agree - you cannot operate as a human being in Europe without having a good standing with either Alphabet or Apple. Absolute madness.

Absolute madness or complete nonsense - I have neither an Apple account or device, nor a Google account or mandated device (e/os on Fairphone 3+) and operate perfectly successfully in the UK with (almost [1.]) zero friction. 1. Revolut app stopped working so I emptied my account and opened a Wise account which is fully administer-able from their website. Revolut has subsequently started working again after a couple o…

> Revolut app stopped working so I emptied my account and opened a Wise account

Same, though I’ve never returned to Revolut.

Wise does have some quirks (e.g. they’ve blocked me from unfreezing or reissuing my cards recently for no apparent reason), but still they’re way way closer to zero-bullshit than any other neobanks I’ve tried.

Re: GrapheneOS – Break Free from Google and Apple

#413

Post by shadowgovt »

After reading this blog post, going to grapheneos's site, and browsing a half-dozen or so pages that I thought might show me what it looked like... I cannot find a single image of it.

GrapheneOS team, I'm begging you... Hire or recruit one person with advertising or copy-for-public-consumption experience. Just one.

Re: GrapheneOS – Break Free from Google and Apple

#414

Post by aloisdg »

microtonal wrote: post #300
pmontra wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can use my bank on some linux distro, Yes, I've been doing that since 2009 on Ubuntu and Debian but there are several caveats. One of those banks has its own TOTP device and they won't replace it when the battery dies. It's almost 20 years old now. Then it's the fingerprint sensor on my phone. The other banks authenticate accesses and many operations with either their app + fingerprint (all of them) or SMS (some…

GrapheneOS requirement of Pixel devices is a dependency on Google too. They are currently working with an OEM to release a non-Pixel GrapheneOS phone in the future.

as long as it is not fairphone. I am out. I don't want to have to choose between privacy and sustainability.

Re: GrapheneOS – Break Free from Google and Apple

#415

Post by Zak »

lejalv wrote: post #397
72deluxe wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like Organic Maps because it isn't full of the social things. Every time I open Google Maps it shows that card at the bottom with "what's popular in your area", full of pictures of people's breakfasts and other nonsense. Organic Maps is free of this noise. Also, the desktop client on Linux is quite useful. Alternatives for Windows etc. are Cruiser Maps, a Java application (and also available as an Android app).

> I like Organic Maps Does anybody know of a project that offers public transport routing? Ideally with real time information, but I can live with only using schedules or even just average passage interval. The other general sticking point for me is the reviews, but I could invite more serendipity to my restaurant search.

Öffi, if it has coverage for the areas relevant to you: https://oeffi.schildbach.de/index.html

Re: GrapheneOS – Break Free from Google and Apple

#416

Post by gib444 »

danielmartins wrote: post #376

I had a Pixel 6a with Graphene OS for a year before the phone started to glitch and eventually die. It ran pretty hot; sometimes it was hard to even hold the phone in my hands without burning myself. I could not get a replacement as I bought the phone in a foreign country (Google doesn’t sell Pixels here in Brazil). So as much as I love the idea of running a more private phone, I found the hardware extremely fragile…

Yeah Pixels are poor quality. Mine developed the common pink vertical line display issue after 18 months

The flag ship should not be more than $500

Re: GrapheneOS – Break Free from Google and Apple

#417

Post by delta_p_delta_x »

empyrrhicist wrote: post #374
ACCount37 wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh how I fucking wish "security" wasn't a stupid cargo cult checkbox list 3/4 of the times. Unfortunately, the rot runs too deep.

Your password must be between 8 and 12 characters, and must have lowercase, uppercase, numbers, and punctuation. Pick up the can!

Having more than just alphanumeric characters widens the domain of the password hash function, and this directly increases the difficulty of brute-force cracking. But having a such a small maximum password length is... puzzling, to say the least. I would accept passwords of up to 1 KiB in length.

With rainbow tables, even 11-character simple passwords like 'password123' can be trivially cracked, and as the number of password leaks show, not everyone is great at managing secrets and credentials.

Re: GrapheneOS – Break Free from Google and Apple

#418

Post by ktm5j »

microtonal wrote: post #362
ktm5j wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously. Especially if you're someone who wants to cut ties with Google.

So, buy it refurbished? Google doesn't directly profit from it, you create less pollution, and once you have GrapheneOS on it you can leave Google out the door. The problem with nearly every other phone, except maybe Samsung flagships, is that they don't fulfill the security requirements. And Samsung is hostile against unlocking (even when it was still possible, it would burn a Knox eFuse).

Not a bad idea.

Re: GrapheneOS – Break Free from Google and Apple

#419

Post by ForHackernews »

palata wrote: post #368
ForHackernews wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the Tiktok app passes your data to Play Services (say, to support notifications with GCM) then it doesn't make any difference that Play Services is nominally "sandboxed". I agree there's some marginal benefit that sandboxed GApps need to prompt the user for permissions (rather than having privileged system level access) but at the end of the day, Google Maps will get GPS perms and Google will know everywhere your…

> If the Tiktok app passes your data to Play Services (say, to support notifications with GCM) then it doesn't make any difference that Play Services is nominally "sandboxed". Sure, but that's the same if you run TikTok with microG (which will relay your data to the Google servers just like the Play Services) or in waydroid on a Mobile Linux. But you can't blame the system for what the apps are allowed to do by the u…

I agree it's about trade-offs. I think MicroG - which provides dummy no-op implementations of Google Play tracking APIs, and allows you to select alternative Location Providers and notification backends - is a better option than running first-party Google software.

You're of course correct that we can't blame the system for choices made by users, but I do think GOS lulls users into complacency by focusing on the security angle only and encouraging users to install sandboxed GApps: https://grapheneos.org/usage#sandboxed-google-play

Re: GrapheneOS – Break Free from Google and Apple

#420

Post by danans »

> For me, it works like this: on the Owner user, because that’s the name of the main account created automatically with the system, I installed the Google Play Store along with Google Play services and GmsCompatConfig

Many people here might recoil at this: to go through the trouble of de-Googling your phone and then just install Google Play services and the Play Store, but the important part is that it is a choice they could make.

Pixels are arguably the best option for software choice among mainstream phones (and iPhones are the worst), but both are a huge regression of choice compared to traditional personal computing platforms.

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