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Comment by busterarm | Hacker News Reader

There's healthy paranoia and there's treating even casual commentary/criticism from anyone as an existential threat & coordinated attack...and responding to that with sustained, coordinated attack campaigns online. That's what Micay's history is.

That's not healthy for any project.

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This is false. Commentary and criticism is not treated as a coordinated attack. Coordinated attacks are treated as coordinated attacks. Criticism is often used as an excuse to try and hide attacks, and many people unfortunately cannot tell the difference.

Well, they have had to deal with multiple swattings, constant misinformation from some competitors (e.g. Murena's CEO doing interviews with various media where they insinuate that security-hardened systems like GrapheneOS are only for criminals and secret agents, complete with 'think of the children'-style arguments), and some local/national governments boosting the narrative that GrapheneOS is for criminals.

So I can understand why they are as defensive as they are.

Recently, the socials have been more moderate and level-headed, imo.

Could you share a link or something about this?

> ...responding to that with sustained, coordinated attack campaigns online. That's what Micay's history is.

For the rest, in general, I'm tempted to give grapheneOS the benefit of the doubt. Running any FOSS project is hard, running it against the (implicit) wishes of OEMs/Google (who throw in things like Play Integrity) is even harder, and doing it when 3 letter agencies at the US govt actively hate you is harder still.

Being paranoid in responses to FUD campaigns isn't ideal, but save coordinated attacks, I'd say fairly understandable.

Based on how discourse in the US has been perverted by inches and millions of mosquito bites they may not be wrong. Stamping out bad information fast and hard seems to be the only way to combat mass coordinated disinformation. Being polite just lets people play the "both sides have merit" game.

not true at all...

There's no coordinated attacks on anyone or projects by GrapheneOS. They respond to misinformation, that's about it.

There have been many attacks on privacy/security projects, not just GOS, recently. If you keep up with the GOS forum you can see posts saying GOS was hacked without evidence. Other claims that GOS is only used by criminals. Theyre not true. Misinformation that aims to destroy the reputation of the project should be responded to.

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