Comment by plaguepilled | Hacker News Reader

Comment by plaguepilled | Hacker News Reader

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GrapheneOS is a very nice mobile OS - I use it on multiple devices and its my top pick for android ROMs. Some thoughts:

1. They're the only ROM project that actually focuses on improving application level safety. This is a bigger deal than a lot of people realise.

2. They offer installation remote attestation - again, worth using if you can.

3. Lots of drama with Calyx and GrapheneOS which is very hard to familiarise with. This is because the discourse is often deleted (this is the policy of the Graphene OS chatrooms) and so it is difficult to verify claims without pointing to another instance of deleted comments/purported harassment. If you can help it, I recommend to just try ignore the whole thing until they start screenshotting the actual harassment.

4. A lot of people talk about Graphene having worse performance than a lot of other ROMs but this is actually counter to my own experience. Graphene is consistently the fastest ROM I have used.

5. You may see people kick up a shit about how Graphene uses sandboxed play store and how that's a bad thing somehow. If you are worried, keep in mind you can still use Aurora if you want your install to be anonymised (but frankly I am not sure what the extent of the changes that Aurora makes). Similarly F-Droid is available, but is super weird about how they sign apps.

6. There are a LOT of updates. This is a good thing but it can throw you off if you're coming from another ROM.

Note: GrapheneOS is simply an OS. It's currently available as an aftermarket OS but will be available on devices built to run GrapheneOS eventually. It's not a ROM and we don't use that incorrect terminology. It's needlessly confusing to end users unfamiliar with that jargon from the Android modding community and it's also wrong. There are ROMs included on the supported devices such as the SoC boot ROM and other boot ROMs so it's important to use the terminology correctly due to the relevance to things we work on like verified boot and attestation.

> 3. Lots of drama with Calyx and GrapheneOS which is very hard to familiarise with. This is because the discourse is often deleted (this is the policy of the Graphene OS chatrooms) and so it is difficult to verify claims without pointing to another instance of deleted comments/purported harassment. If you can help it, I recommend to just try ignore the whole thing until they start screenshotting the actual harassment.

You can see the usual clearly inaccurate talking points from several of them in this thread including one of them making personal attacks and fabrications about me with their comment buried at the bottom. We've posted lots of information and proof including screenshots of harassment. Look at my personal @DanielMicay Twitter account where you can see blatant harassment from @maxtannahill, a Calyx reseller working with them and participating in their communities / private groups. He's openly a neo-nazi and I linked a post of his on Twitter where he openly engages in holocaust denial, but there's a lot more where that came from. You can look at what the Calyx devs/leadership were doing in their chat room yesterday, happily talking with someone who has repeatedly called for me to kill myself and spreading misinformation about myself and GrapheneOS with them. What proof is missing for you? We've posted screenshots / logs of their developers repeatedly calling me "crazy", "delusional", "schizophrenic", etc. as part of that consistent, pervasive bullying they've started across platforms.

> 5. You may see people kick up a shit about how Graphene uses sandboxed play store and how that's a bad thing somehow. If you are worried, keep in mind you can still use Aurora if you want your install to be anonymised (but frankly I am not sure what the extent of the changes that Aurora makes). Similarly F-Droid is available, but is super weird about how they sign apps.

It's an optional feature: the ability to run Google Play in the full standard app sandbox. It's the same sandbox used for every other user installed app and it's not clear why that would be concerned. The feature we provide is a compatibility layer which teaches Play services and the Play Store to work within the standard app sandbox by reimplementing all the privileged functionality they try to use with unprivileged implementations. Since they run as regular sandboxed apps, they simply get an exception / error if they try to use functionality that's not yet stubbed out or reimplemented. It's not a special sandbox, and we give them absolutely zero special access or privileges. People are running Google Play code inside apps like Tinder and Discord since those include the Google Play SDK / libraries, and those apps run in the same sandbox. No permissions need to be granted to sandboxed Google Play to have 99% of the functionality working well, which is more than can be said for most apps.

Re the use of "ROM", it seems like I used a bad colloquialism rather than a technical term but you make a good point that " aftermarket OS" is a clearer term. Thanks for the suggestion there, I'll do that moving forward.

Re: your response to point 3, I appreciate that engaging with trolls and other harassment is not fun for the person being targeted, so my comment here is not actually targeted at you specifically, but anyone in Graphene willing to help here. Here is what I mean specifically:

Your provided examples are definitely better than the chatlog situation but there is still something that I would like to see different if possible. In each of your examples in your text block, you potentially provide with something I would call documentation, but the format is transient. There is no direct quote and no link.

More explicitly, there is a verbal reference to posts by @maxtannahill (I quickly browsed his twitter but just saw crypto nonsense), but missing are a direct quote with link to the tweets he made. The direct quote means he cannot delete the tweet and delete the wrongdoing, and the link provides a way for third parties to verify claims.

For example, this might look like e.g. "strcat did so and so"[1]. Then in the references section - [1] - quote pulled from https://URLofSpecificTweetInQuestion. Again, it wouldn't be something I'd ask you to do because if it is targeting you in particular, that would be somewhat confronting.

The same issue exists for the harassment you mentioned in this thread. There is a deleted comment by joemazerino, whom I assume is the harasser you are mentioning, and his replies are vague as fuck and slightly hostile (which is suspicious) but his post is deleted so its hard to come into it "fresh". A preemptive direct quote and link in situations like this is ideal.

Re: 5 I think I may have made an error that I need to correct. Based on the sandbox model, does that mean that, other than install and updates, the sandboxed playstore apps are just as private as the Aurora offering? And is there any plans to provide anonymisation for installs and updates moving forward?

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