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I changed bank because they stopped supporting GrapheneOS for bullshit reasons (they support my completely unsecure and outdated /e/OS but not GrapheneOS, and they call that "security").

The only way a bank cares is if enough users complain and leave for another bank. Banks (like all companies, but especially banks) care about money and nothing else.


GrapheneOS is installed with their keys which you can verify, right?

My understanding is that the problem is not on GrapheneOS' side. We need more manufacturers to care and build devices that meet GrapheneOS' requirements.

My hope is that Motorola will be very successful with that. GrapheneOS currently has half a million users and growing. The more users it gets, the more interesting it is for manufacturers to actually consider it.

Google being Google, if Motorola gets a relatively cheap phone to run GrapheneOS (the flagship is quite expensive IMHO), I think people will flock away from Pixels (I definitely will, and I will tell everyone and their dog that they should when they renew their phone).


> GrapheneOS currently has half a million users and growing

That is a total install base right? Unless all 500k of them are upgrading yearly, this number is miniscule. You are underestimating the R&D required to put out a new phone each year only to have 30% (high estimate) of users buying it. That's 150k devices, which is not worth any volume.


> Switch to android which has even more ads?

I am on Android, I have no ads.


> The average person has no idea what lineageOS is

The beauty of it is that the average person can buy a LineageOS-enabled system without having to know it's not "normal Android". Look at /e/OS for instance, and hopefully soon GrapheneOS will come preinstalled on some Motorolas.


> you don't reach certain peaks of crappiness accidentally, it takes _work_.

Have you really never seen what happens when something grows organically without global maintenance? Not saying that this is what happened in Germany, but "it takes work" sounds naive.

It doesn't take work to write a crappy codebase: all you have to do is add code without really caring about the overall architecture.

Or said differently, if you can fix the German traffic engineering, you should apply there because I'm sure they would be happy to have an easy and perfect solution.


> He could have used whistleblower routes

Against... the NSA. Do you genuinely believe that anyone could leak that amount of NSA data anonymously?


It’s wasn’t anonymous back then iirc and I wasn’t advocating for leaking anything

> I wasn’t advocating for leaking anything

What is whistleblowing, then?


There are secure ways to whistleblow inside the org he was in and not to the press and not to Congress itself. He didn’t use those avenues.

He also leaked information that didn’t need to be leaked which had nothing to do with the privacy issues people keep being up (which btw were not ruled to be in violation of the 4th amendment only that they went beyond the FISA approved collection standards)


Who do you leak to when you believe even your organization is compromised/complicit? Who watches the watchmen? He chose 'the people' and I can't fault him for it.

You report it to the Inspector General (IG). How are you not familiar with it ? Snowden even talked to them before not about this but something else. He is a traitor. The other stuff he leaked had nothing to do with Americans “privacy concerns”. It was fairly minor

Funny, I consider him a national hero. Agree to disagree I guess.

> There are secure ways to whistleblow

... when your adversary is the NSA? We're circling back to my original message.


You report it to the Inspector General (IG). How are you not familiar with it ? Snowden even talked to them before not about this but something else. He is a traitor. The other stuff he leaked had nothing to do with Americans “privacy concerns”. It was fairly minor

Ah yes, he "even talked to them". You don't think that perhaps therefore Edward Snowden might've had a better conception of the viability of "the proper channels" than you do?

And, before you answer that too hastily - have you ever heard of William Binney? How about Thomas Drake? Do you know what happened when they used "the proper channels"? If so, your failure to mention them when discussing Snowden's motivation is in bad faith. If not, you're simply not informed enough to be coming into threads speaking authoritatively about this.


“Snowden talked to the IG” only applies to his conversation with the CIA IG about management and IT. There was no NSA IG complaint about surveillance which contrasts with the others (Binney and Drake that you mentioned). So no he did not even try. Was the Binney and Drake incidents ugly? Yes. But neither are in jail and both still live in the US.

Snowden did it completely the wrong way.


Back then I didn't have expectations of privacy, I think. I just didn't have a notion of privacy. I didn't think the internet was hostile, I believe?

I think it started like this, but it no longer is the case.

I feel like Huawei missed a gigantic opportunity there: forking AOSP may have gotten them traction. I would totally buy a Huawei device if it could run GrapheneOS, and I wouldn't mind if GrapheneOS was based on Huawei's fork rather than Google's.


Why would China allow the domestic sale of a device that could run GrapheneOS?

Historically, some very large Android OEMs based in China and selling in China also provided bootloader unlocking support in their devices including Xiaomi https://github.com/zenfyrdev/bootloader-unlock-wall-of-shame... and Oppo https://github.com/zenfyrdev/bootloader-unlock-wall-of-shame...

It doesn't have anything directly to do with GrapheneOS, and would have enabled custom OS support of any Android distribution.


Xiaomi claims to provide unlocking, but doesn't actually. I don't know about Oppo.

Why not?

Because it's a totalitarian state that does not tolerate dissent? It's the same reason North Korea requires all devices to be bootloader locked to RedStarOS, but weaker.

So you're saying that running AOSP is fine, but running GrapheneOS is not? Huawei used to run Android, I don't think it was blocked...

I don't think they allow AOSP (which is not Android) either.

Well whatever you call it, when you run something that looks like Android, it has AOSP inside.

Just like the ATM has Windows 3.1 inside.

Sounds like you don't know what AOSP is.

Google managing to get worse every day.

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