FSF announces Librephone project • Hacker News Board

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#611

Post by raverbashing » Thu, Oct 16, 2025, 6:10 AM UTC

t43562 wrote: post #391

raverbashing wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can't have single-vision-central control and freedom But that's how a lot of projects do: Apache for instance, nginx, or llvm. The problem is not being OSS, it is the lack of focus, and a game where everybody brings their ball and are playing the way they want instead of an unified game

To take LLVM as a convenient example ... why does it exist? Why didn't Apple pour its money into GCC? Why does nginx exist? They could simply have found that config bug in Apache that made Apache slower and we wouldn't have needed another web server...?

Licensing reasons apart it's exactly because governance, even of these big projects like GCC suck

Every project should have some competition, in the same way there are several commercial DBs available

At the same time we have several linux distros that suck in different ways

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#612

Post by munchlax » Thu, Oct 16, 2025, 6:34 AM UTC

Arainach wrote: post #559

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You trust hardware and software by establishing boundaries. We figured this out long ago with the kernel mode/user mode privilege check and other things. You want apps to be heavily locked down/sandboxed, and you want the OS to enforce it, but every time you do you go up against the principles of open source absolutists like the FSF. "What do you mean my app can't dig into the storage layer and read the raw image f…

Users can't be trusted. They don't read. You can put a popup that flashes in all caps saying "THIS WILL GIVE ACCESS TO YOUR BANK ACCOUNT" and users will blindly click OK to get to whatever they think they want, be that an Instagram feed, a game, or whatever. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030901-00/?p=42... It was true 22 years ago and is even more true today.

That's not a good example. My bank issued a token device which scans their code, asks me my pin, prompts me what's going to happen and asks for confirmation. Then I can enter the digits to proceed.

This is reasonably secure. If you hijack my account, you still don't have the hardware device and the random secret that was set up between the device and the bank.

You need to actually hack into the bank itself to transfer my money elsewhere.

Meanwhile, I only access the bank with my own computers. That means I installed them and have root. Not a problem at all.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#613

Post by t43562 » Thu, Oct 16, 2025, 6:37 AM UTC

raverbashing wrote: post #611

t43562 wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To take LLVM as a convenient example ... why does it exist? Why didn't Apple pour its money into GCC? Why does nginx exist? They could simply have found that config bug in Apache that made Apache slower and we wouldn't have needed another web server...?

Licensing reasons apart it's exactly because governance, even of these big projects like GCC suck Every project should have some competition, in the same way there are several commercial DBs available At the same time we have several linux distros that suck in different ways

I found a distro I love. I was a Fedora user but it just ended up being far too complicated with selinux. It is a miserable job to try to create RPM packages that work and also miserable to try to build anything out of git where the dependencies offered by fedora were too old - and then it wouldn't work without some kind of selinux config anyhow.

Ubuntu went down the weird GUI route but Linux Mint is OK - it's just nearly as complicated as Fedora.

Now I'm using Artix. The install was a bit old school but that's a one off effort. It's a rolling distribution so I almost never need to build dependencies to get something from git to work. There's never a "big upgrade". No selinux. The packaging system is extremely easy to use so I can often install the very latest e.g. chromium from git by building it myself and installing the package rather than a messy self-install in /usr/local.

In Artix all packages install with the dev component - no separation between dev and binary. For me this is vastly less hassle.

You can use Arch Linux (Artix is an arch derivative), with systemd if you want but I like Artix with dinit - it has all the ease of use of systemd but with an architecture that I prefer.

It's probable that none of this appeals to you, but I just wanted to point out that in an odd way I tumbled through lots of distros (including ones that I haven't mentioned) and found a little heavenly one that I love using every day because it suits my personality - perhaps you will too.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#614

Post by strcat » Thu, Oct 16, 2025, 6:37 AM UTC

ForHackernews wrote: post #594

strcat wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

/e/ has extraordinarily poor privacy and security. Extremely delayed privacy and security patches including years of delays for kernel, driver and firmware updates or complete AOSP patches is not compatible with privacy. /e/ rolls back privacy and security far more than LineageOS and /e/ includes their own invasive services. Murena services even send data to OpenAI without user consent. https://discuss.grapheneos.org…

You post something similar almost every time /e/OS is mentioned. I recognize that GrapheneOS has a different threat model in mind (journalists, activists, etc.), but /e/OS is a big improvement over OEM Android for most regular people. I tend to agree with your linked article that for users happy to live in Apple's locked-down glass box, iOS is a more secure, more usable system than either Graphene or /e/OS.

/e/ isn't a safe option for regular people. It doesn't provide the most basic privacy and security patches or protections. Multiple years of important privacy and security patches being missing is terrible for a personal computer with tons of sensitive data. Replacing the stock OS on a Pixel 7 with an OS multiple years behind on important privacy/security patches and protections with different service privacy issues is not an overall privacy upgrade. /e/ has their own privacy invasive services including sending sensitive user data to third parties without consent and user tracking via unique identifiers.

/e/ claiming a voice-to-text service is private while it actually sends the audio data to OpenAI is not the approach of a privacy project. Falsely claiming the data sent to OpenAI is anonymized when it's brought up makes it worse. That's one representative example.

I didn't mention GrapheneOS in my reply above, but it's not aimed at a niche audience or specifically for people who need advanced protections as your claiming. It provides much broader app compatibility, stability and usability than /e/ despite their inaccurate claims about it. GrapheneOS is a privacy project providing both privacy protections and also security protections to avoid exploits compromising privacy. iOS is certainly far more private and secure than /e/. It's definitely less secure than GrapheneOS against remote attacks on browsers, messaging apps, etc. iOS having a more secure kernel than the current status quo of hardened Linux doesn't mean it's more secure overall.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#615

Post by thomasdeleeuw » Thu, Oct 16, 2025, 6:44 AM UTC

NoGravitas wrote: post #526

bogwog wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you are swapping Google Android for GrapheneOS Android No? You're adding support for Graphene's keys, not replacing Google's. Obviously, the main barrier is convincing developers of these apps to add support for Graphene's keys. However, this is only a problem for apps that opted to implement the Play Integrity API at all, which doesn't seem to be very common. All the recent monopoly rulings against Google may be d…

Android has a hardware attestation API that is compatible with GrapheneOS (if the app accepts GOS's keys), but nobody uses it. Everyone uses the Play Integrity API; GrapheneOS can't pass the "strong" (hardware-backed) level of Play Integrity, though it passes the weaker ones.

The Dutch electronic identification app, DigiD, uses the Android-native attestation API.

Also good to make a distinction between the different things you can do in an attestation procedure: bootloader/boot integrity checks, attest a specific key, and ID (imei etc) attestation.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#616

Post by MrDrMcCoy » Thu, Oct 16, 2025, 6:51 AM UTC

SchemaLoad wrote: post #586

qingcharles wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you access the camera, though? I thought full access to the camera sensor was locked down only to awful Samsung apps?

It's been many years since I did android rom stuff but how it was back then was that yes you can access the camera, but you lose the proprietary image processing pipeline which exists just as software. So your photos come out looking much worse since phone cameras rely heavily on software to look good.

On the other hand, you can take DNG RAW images and do the software processing later, except exactly the way you want. I rather like that flexibility, myself.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#617

Post by MrDrMcCoy » Thu, Oct 16, 2025, 6:57 AM UTC

demaga wrote: post #293

rcarmo wrote: post #260

Well… mixed feelings here. I spent a lot of time dealing with early smartphones and hacking away at Android, Tizen, FirefoxOS (remember that?) and several variations on that theme back when manufacturers were vying for differentiation, and I get that the FSF has a mission, but I don’t see this panning out. Like many folk who’ve been watching Google’s gradual shutdown of AOSP and alignment with Apple in terms of platf…

> you can do that with web apps And this is not even always possible. In Ukraine, government app is released as an app, not a web service. Same goes for banking app. You just can't do these things from other devices, you must have (mainstream) Android or Apple phone. I've been looking into projects like GrapheneOS for a while now, but it is just impossible to use in Ukraine.

Genuinely curious: why can't you use GrapheneOS in Ukraine? Most Android apps work perfectly. In my case, the only ones that don't are the ones made by lazy developers who rely on location data that I deny. They claim to work without it, but obviously never tested.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#618

Post by MrDrMcCoy » Thu, Oct 16, 2025, 7:07 AM UTC

lambertsimnel wrote: post #371

varispeed wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny that bank software needs approved phone, but runs absolutely fine in the browser. That to me sounds like collusion - something that regulators should look at. There is absolutely no need for banking app to require "legitimate" Android or other operating system.

Increasingly, browser-based online banking requires authentication with a proprietary smartphone app, where it used to accept other forms of 2FA

As terrible as proprietary app 2fa is, it still beats the tar out of SMS or email 2fa, security-wise. I don't get why my bank, who used to be pretty cutting edge, never implemented TOTP or passkeys...

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#619

Post by cookiengineer » Thu, Oct 16, 2025, 7:52 AM UTC

fsflover wrote: post #474

supermatt wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is false You can install postmarketOS on it (just as you can install lineageOS, etc on a Samsung galaxy, etc), but it ships with PureOS. "The Librem 5 is a phone built on PureOS" - https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ The project is to reverse engineer proprietary blobs - so it makes sense to go where those blobs are and reverse to match the functionality that is exposed commercially instead of guessing at a sub…

> but it ships with PureOS Why does it matter? Yes, I would prefer that FSF collaborated with PureOS directly, but collaborating with postmarketOS also seems possible. There are enough blobs in Librem 5, which don't depend on the OS. > which is ironic given your name Indeed I'm quite surprised about the FSF actions lately.

I wanted to mention that back then when Mozilla announced its FirefoxOS based devices with the "ZTE Open" as a developer device, I realized how broken the ecosystem actually is. The ZTE Open wasn't actually open source and you weren't even able to compile FirefoxOS completely, and only the Gaia (UI) parts could be flashed or changed. So much for open source as a branding, it was a pretty useless device in terms of development.

I realized that there will never be a vendor that actually open sources their firmware blobs. We need better legislation or a complete rewrite of our judicative system to fix this, which realistically is never going to happen.

It's an anti-model in their business world, given how contracts and licensing works from upstream ARM or NXP or MediaTek. It doesn't matter really where the vendor sources their chips from. They all have similar NDAs and contracts and royalty fees.

That's why I was so disappointed by my Librem phone, again, because they, again, promised that the NXP related firmware blobs were open sourced, which honestly was a very overpriced lie to begin with in comparison to the Pinephone devices that were sold at self-cost.

I have no idea how the FSF could recommend Librem devices, because they are literally just as free as every next door Qualcomm or Snapdragon chipset.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#620

Post by ForHackernews » Thu, Oct 16, 2025, 9:17 AM UTC

strcat wrote: post #614

ForHackernews wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You post something similar almost every time /e/OS is mentioned. I recognize that GrapheneOS has a different threat model in mind (journalists, activists, etc.), but /e/OS is a big improvement over OEM Android for most regular people. I tend to agree with your linked article that for users happy to live in Apple's locked-down glass box, iOS is a more secure, more usable system than either Graphene or /e/OS.

/e/ isn't a safe option for regular people. It doesn't provide the most basic privacy and security patches or protections. Multiple years of important privacy and security patches being missing is terrible for a personal computer with tons of sensitive data. Replacing the stock OS on a Pixel 7 with an OS multiple years behind on important privacy/security patches and protections with different service privacy issues…

I think your threat model is wildly backwards if you believe that average users are concerned about threats from bugs in old kernel versions. In all of your posts, you carelessly (or deliberately?) conflate privacy and security. This is the same shell game that Google themselves play in their marketing https://www.tomsguide.com/phones/google-pixel-phones/the-pix...

Your idea of a super-secure phone is a modern kernel with all the security patches running trusted, official signed Google Play spyware in a sandbox and all the apps collecting personal data in the same sandbox. There's an XKCD meme about this: https://xkcd.com/1200/ You are worrying about the printer drivers.