131–140 of 160 posts
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Apologies—when I mentioned the insincerity and indulgence before, I should have said tediously insincere indulgence.
I mean, do you want the realpolitik version? If you're doing something to be controversial/oppositional then you need people to feel troubled by it. Labeling Reddit as NSFW is something many of them want , which is the opposite.
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AFAIK every popular Android phone uses a qualcomm modem chip with a separate OS that has complete access to ram. NSA most certainly has a backdoor there and such complete access to any Android phone. This was common knowledge after the Snowden stuff. I don't think this has changed at all since. Only few niche phones (pinephone) separate these systems or have a hardware switch to disable the cellular system.
> NSA most certainly has a backdoor there and such complete access to any Android phone. Citation needed? > This was common knowledge after the Snowden stuff. Not to me, it isn't? As far as I'm aware, most of the Snowden stuff were centered around PRISM, which allowed widescale wiretapping of internet backbone, as well as agreements with big cloud providers to allow tapping into their data. I haven't seen anything in…
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This https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_customer_authentication
Thank you! I kind of jumped at the "biometric" part of your original comment. Now I understand what you mean better and I'm not worried about my setup (although I question how it complies, but that is another matter).
Credit cards, which are US companies, use 3D secure. It's a 6 digits PIN plus a code sent to me by SMS. Amazon stores the card data and very seldom asks me for those PINs.
One bank gave me a hardware OTP generator. I type in the code, plus the bank PIN, plus a random number they show on screen.
Other banks send a push notification to their app on my authorized device (only one of my devices can be authorized at a given time). I must confirm the operation with my fingerprint or with the bank PIN. The fingerprint is easier, no password manager to open.
The result is that I can do online banking anywhere around the world but I can't use credit cards online unless I am in my home country, because for some reasons SMSes don't reach me abroad. There might be something wrong in my contract but I've not been able to sort it out.
The last time I've been in Australia I put a local SIM in slot 2 of my phone and used it for local communications and data. I could receive calls on my home SIM but no SMS. I even contacted the customer service of a credit card to attempt to make SMSes reach me on the Australian number. Fat chance.
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The point of GrapheneOS isn't improving a generic device's security, it's about setting an example for a highly private and secure OS. It's a FOSS project, so nothing stops a committed individual or community from using other device targets, but the main project chooses specifically to use their smaller resources to pursue excellence rather than mediocrity.
I've had people tell me that nobody should use anything but GrapheneOS and stop supporting alternatives to throw all support into that because the others are "less secure", and now that GrapheneOS isn't for everyone and anyone -- the majority of people -- without a specific narrow selection of hardware should get lost. We need the people who buy $100 phones to have the ability to put a better OS on them than the burn…
Without having an kind of authoritative knowledge or experience on the topic, those people are wrong and please ignore them. The argument has generally been that if you are specifically after privacy and security in your personal device then GrapheneOS or post-MIE iOS will be your most sensible choices. You CAN choose devices for other reasons, as has always been your prerogative.
The question of whether to support 'alternatives' is fraught. It used to be that there were two other OS projects that happened to be collaborating and adopting features from GrapheneOS and that would have been reasonable. The main argument (from GrapheneOS) in that case has been for people to please invest in alternatives with approaches to privacy and security that stand up to threat-model driven design and real world attacker/defender experience.
GrapheneOS was never meant to be alone in pushing for things like hardened secure element-based protection of secrets and side-channel resistant rate-limiting of unlock attempts, memory tagging/hardened memory allocators/secure application spawning/dynamic code loading control, anti-persistence hardening, prompt security patching, network/sensor permissions, contact/storage scopes, PIN scrambling, auto reboot etc. Unfortunately very few other projects that I am aware of are looking into doing things like this to give the device owner control and mastery over their data.
>and now that GrapheneOS isn't for everyone and anyone -- the majority of people -- without a specific narrow selection of hardware should get lost.
GrapheneOS tries to make most of their hardening transparent and non-intrusive by default. They also spend a lot of time and resources working on usability (sandboxed-Google-play and the web installer) and now accessibility (upcoming text-to-speech implementation?). The idea is that if you have a Pixel and choose to use GrapheneOS then it should be as easy to use as they can manage without compromising their efforts improving privacy/security. In that sense, GrapheneOS is for anyone and not just security nerds or tinfoil hats.
The exclusivity to Pixels is an unfortunate consequence of being the only platform equipped to provide what they need to achieve their goals. If multiple devices supported what they needed from the beginning, they would have probably supported three or four models from different brands as targets (for example you could imagine a couple Pixel lines + one Samsung line (Europe/North America/Oceania), one Xiaomi line (East Asia/South East Asia/South Asia/South America), one Tecno line (Africa). This is speculation on my part, but the main point is that the Android OEMs have been seriously slacking on basic privacy/security leading to this kind of situation.
>We need the people who buy $100 phones to have the ability to put a better OS on them than the burning mudslide that comes with them, is all I'm saying.
No disagreement here. This relies on AOSP adopting improvements and also on Google tightening their certification (for Play Store) requirements to include stronger privacy and security guarantees.
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In Biblical times, yeah? There was no such thing as birth control. If you get pregnant and are unmarried, your life might as well get over.
The act of abortion has existed since 1000 BCE with the earliest being 1550 BCE. Around the estimated time of the mythical Moses. Obviously not as effective, but the practice existed. Not to mention sex isn't one specific act. There are many ways to have sex, even by biblical standards, that do not involve the possibility of getting pregnant.
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That "major OEM" seems to be Motorola, i.e. Lenovo.
I hope HMD reach out next: https://www.hmdsecure.com/
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Imagine if the Linux project had this same mentality. Thank goodness they don't.
Which leads to things like laptop sleep working inconsistently. Instead of having a good reputation, Linux's reputation gets hurt by all the random devices it allegedly supports.
And while some machines have problems like that, there are plenty of manufacturers who will sell you Linux devices with better support.
Also I don't think Linux's reputation is as problamatic as you make it seem. It is astoundingly popular and continues to grow - owing in no small part to its accessibility.
Were any of the current directors or new nominees involved in the incident where F-Droid marked Bible and Quran apps as NSFW, hid them from search by default, and expressed the intent to remove them completely ( https://gitlab.com/fdroid/admin/-/issues/252#note_2578531026 )? (Discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45638096 ) If I’m charitable, I could assume they intended to make a controversial move t…
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The act of abortion has existed since 1000 BCE with the earliest being 1550 BCE. Around the estimated time of the mythical Moses. Obviously not as effective, but the practice existed. Not to mention sex isn't one specific act. There are many ways to have sex, even by biblical standards, that do not involve the possibility of getting pregnant.
You do know that 1550 bce is before 1000 bce, right?