Hacker News Reader

Comment by mnmalst | Hacker News Reader

I am exited as well but the OS is only one part of the equation. If the firmware BLOBs don't get updates we still have a problem. I really hope this cooperation means that Motorola commits to longer support for gOS devices.

View on HN

Motorola Signature (2026) has 7 years of support. It's a subset of Motorola's future devices in 2027 and later which are going to support GrapheneOS since the current ones in 2026 didn't quite meet all of the requirements yet. The intent has never been to support their existing devices but rather for future devices to provide everything needed and official GrapheneOS support. There's a lot of work to do. Meeting all of our requirements on low-end devices is currently unrealistic but can be a goal further down the road.

Aside from that, we'll have a lot more access to the code for firmware, etc. and ability to do hardening below the OS layer through the partnership with Motorola and their partnership with Qualcomm.

> firmware BLOBs

Nitpick, but it’s just ‘blob’ as in ‘a big blob of bytes’. It’s not an acronym or abbreviation for anything :)

Big bLob Of Bytes.

In the database world a BLOB is a Binary Large OBject ... are you sure of your etymology?

Edit: and I'm not btw - for all I know BLOB in DB land might be backronym from blob in the common usage.

Wikipedia lists exactly the two cases you mention [0]:

> > Not to be confused with Binary large object (BLOB).

> In the context of free and open-source software, proprietary software only available as a binary executable is referred to as a blob or binary blob.

[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_blob

I hadn't read that page, but now I do I note that it says:

"The term blob was first used in database management systems to describe a collection of binary data stored as a single entity."

So I guess I'm not any clearer on this point.

edit: If I had to bet on it then I'd put money on the theory that "blob" became "BLOB" to sound more technical though...

And the radio firmware.

From a phone by a Chinese company.

Unless GrapheneOS handles the radio firmware, not really interested.

What's the difference compared to a phone with a radio firmware by a US company?

In both cases it's something closed and the government has shown overreach. (Yes, China a lot more than the US, but still ... things are not looking good a the moment. And I have no more trust, even if the political direction changes for a presidency period or two.)

But yes, ultimately we want open source firmware. Still, then there could be hardware backdoors anyways ...

I as a Canadian, lack trust too for the US these days.

And there are indeed issues.

Yet these issues are perhaps 1 foot high, and the issues with China and PRC's interference in domestic corporations, reaches to the moon.

There's literally no comparison. Even now.

I dont think grapheneos handles radio firmware on pixels, radios also not made in the US. I wonder if even apple does, as their radios are also not made in US.

They address this issue specifically (don't have the links now, I'm sorry) - basically one of the "must haves" for the hardware to be considered good enough (meaning pixels have it and new motos will have it) is a hardware capability of the strict separation between the os and devices, ie baseband unable to influence the os (snoop/inject stuff, etc).

Don't remember that at the moment, it should be one of the requirements they list under "future hardware" In the FAQ.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com