The founder of /e/os is anti-security

Anyone telling you the list isn’t graphene -> ios -> good custom android -> aosp-> google stock -> samsung stock is lying to you.

Well, that’ll be another 100€ December donation to GrapheneOS.

Sadly FUD as ANYTHING that is NOT increasing profit for surveillance capitalism, i.e Google, Meta, etc is a win for privacy!

Of course /e/OS could be better, GrapheneOS could also be better (including on security) but the big picture is that still ANY of those solutions is making surveillance capitalism, the loss of privacy for profit and power, less efficient. That’s good for all of us who, being on Lemmy or other federated instance, believe we do benefit from having more privacy, or at least not trading it away.

TL;DR: be inclusive, bring others up, don’t be exclusive aiming for perfection none of us can attain.

Years ago as I started research I literally laughed at loud at the thought of buying a google phone to… Degoogle!

Talk about an instant compromise of values! Haha!

Then I saw the toxicity of the GOS devs & their fanz & that sealed the deal

Best decision ever to run away from that group of nasties

Ahhhhhh, the zen life

I’m running e/OS in my old Poco F3 right now.

I switched from LineageOS because I though, e/OS would be easier to ungoogle.

In the end, it just defaults to way more compromises than I would have made on LineageOS.

Over all, it’s actually just LineageOS with MicroG preinstalled, a really bad launcher, an ugly 2015-ish iPhone icon theme, and a few mediocre apps preinstallex, that usw these ‘Murena’ services that claim to be an alternative to Google services, but they are neither more secure/foss nor reliable.

Their appstore is rather Bad. Yes, it essentially combines something like APKMirror and F-Droid in one app, but it requests a Google account to access PlayStore Apps.

Imho, LineageOS with MicroG, no GApps, F-Droid and APKMirror and a few foss apps is the Vetter solution.

I have my sync services selfhosted through a NAS and simply use WebDAV (backups), CardDAV and CalDAV. This was harder to set up in e/OS than in basic LineageOS, because e/OS is trying to push their own Murena services for that. And if I didn’t have all of these selfhosted, I’d rather use Proton services instead of Murena.

Over all, really sketchy. It’s like a custom Rom that claims privacy but actually just wants you to möge to their own service.

I can see how one can interpret it like that, but it’s not how I read what he said. I think the point he’s trying to make is that hardened security protects the user from attacks, yes, but their focus is to provide services that can be trusted not to attack the user. He said: “really hardened security stuff that could clearly be useful for executives, in the secret service, or whatever. That’s not our goal”

I mean, I use GrapheneOS on my phone, but do I personally need all the hardened security? Not really. It’s nice theoretically, but mainly I’m just happy the OS itself isn’t spying on me. I’m personally not very worried about an evil maid attack or state level spying.

Someone on Reddit made an interesting comment relevant to this discussion:

https://old.reddit.com/r/BuyFromEU/comments/1rn5qiw/fairphone_grew_83_last_quarter_tried_it_for_a/o94f706/

Take this with a grain of salt: GrapheneOS is always stirring shit with other players in the privacy space and they try to paint them in the worst light possible.

You did not need to censor anything this is not Reddit

The full translation of the clip of Gaël Duval provided by GrapheneOS:

There’s the attack surface, on that front we’re not security specialists here, so I couldn’t answer you precisely, but from the discussions I’ve had, it seems that everything we do reduces attack surface.

However, we don’t have a “hardened security” approach, we aren’t developing a phone for pedo(censored) so they can evade justice. So there aren’t difficult things to check if the memory is corrupted, really hardened security stuff that could clearly be useful for executives, in the secret service, or whatever.

That’s not our goal, our goal is to start from an observation: today our personal data is constantly being plundered and that wouldn’t be legal in real life with the mail or the telephone, we want to change that. So we are making you a product that changes that by default for anyone.

As a french speaker, I can attest that the translation is fairly accurate.

While I don’t agree with the characterisation Gaël Duval makes here, I believe the statement from GrapheneOS here:

Duval and his organizations have consistently taken a stance against protecting users from exploits. In this video, he once again claims protecting against exploits is for only useful pedophiles and spies.

Is a bit disingenuous. It sounds like they do make some efforts to secure their device, but it’s not their main focus. Theirs is to improve privacy first and foremost.

I would take anything GrapheneOS devs says with a grain of salt, as we all know that they have quite an adversarial relationship with… well… everyone. But especially other OS makers.

We’ve known that /e/os is anti security/privacy look at all their attacks on grapheneos

I don’t think he’s actually making the parallelism with pedophiles and security per se, but rather he’s making the case that his OS’ mission isn’t by default focused on that level of security or anonymity, but rather privacy and disengagement from companies who profit from your data being mined.

He mentioned pedophiles, as well as the secret service, right after, as examples of either criminals who need to be obscured from detection (maybe because it’s easy for the Epstein class to pop in someone’s head, nowadays?) or government agents that need to protect themselves from data breaches, and said his type of OS isn’t made with that level of airtight security in mind, which is understandable and reasonable, and something we probably all knew already. It could’ve just as well been terrorists and investigative journalists mentioned.

One could take his stance and engage in discussion on whether we need that level of security by default as ordinary citizens, or that even without exceptional circumstances, it becomes necessary in an increasingly hypervigilant society/government, but that’s a separate discussion.

We should have a little nuance in interpreting speeches like these rather than taking things this literally, especially when it’s coming from a direct competitor in the degoogling sphere, who would naturally gain from holding it up in the most unflattering light.

Interesting conversation with GrapheneOS. Didn’t know they essentially hate each other. I’m using e/os but just because I cannot run graphene on my device.

For context, for those in the anglosphere, Graphene OS had some troubles in France because the government portrayed the users of the OS as majority criminals, like narcos and including pedos. They left the French market.

Occam’s razor would lead one to believe Gael is not talking to users but to shareholders and the government, where he mentions pedos, which is the soup du jour to go after privacy.

Now, why is this being spread by GOS without context? Easy, they just entered a deal with Motorola, and creating an environment where people hate the competition is a very profitable endeavour for GOS. Finally, Mikay should get help, he’s impossibly technically endowed but also facing some demons that push GOS into unsavoury practices.

Finally, Motorola produces a panoply of devices for LEA, if you think a for profit company will not leverage their deal with GOS to sell a bypass device to law enforcement agencies and have the monopoly on that market you are out of your goddamn mind. The truth is /e/ doesn’t purport to sell a private OS, they sell an OS with less tracking. Graphene advertises a fully “private” OS but then enters a deal with one of biggest cop suppliers in the world and not a word on how that compromises their promise of security for users.

There’s only one way to be really safe, a 0 trust model where you don’t use your phone as a reliable communicator.