France is taking state actions against GrapheneOS?(grapheneos.social) |
France is taking state actions against GrapheneOS?(grapheneos.social) |
But that sort of thing sells newspapers. There didn't appear to be anything about the French state taking specific action (eg passing a law) against Graphene.
https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/115584160910016309
> This doesn't have anything to do with how French journalists have responded to the state actions against GrapheneOS but rather the actions and statements by France's state agencies and law enforcement which are highly concerning. They're making highly inaccurate and libelous claims about GrapheneOS while clearly actively trying to justify taking actions against us. They've shown their hand so we're leaving France including OVH prior to anything bad happening rather than waiting.
and more in the thread.
What you should take seriously though, is this amping up of right-wing populist rhetoric, manufacturing a mass hysteria about crime (when it's at its lowest point in decades) that is then used to justify increasingly authoritarian policies.
The crime is down stat is a political stat that doesn't tell you are safer. It could mean police are not going after small crimes or people just stop reporting them or they are classified differently. It could say money spent on law enforcement is working and more is needed. On the other hand it could say community outreach and educational coapaigns are working. Many previous crimes reported thats changing with a more racially diverse force.
It tells you whatever you want to believe.
It's just not today, but tomorrow.
This is public data, it's not a conspiracy. Lots of newspapers would not exist without the taxpayer money: https://www.culture.gouv.fr/thematiques/presse-ecrite/tablea...
But they are not a State tool, they are the tools of they owners which are all private billionaires.
The public money is here to pretend that, because they receive it, they'll work for the interest of the public.
What it actually does is to lower the bill for their owners.
More importantly this is the smart choice, the only thing, to do: Shake the dust from your sandals, walk away, don't look back.
This is the ongoing horror of the overbearing state, which wants to rule efficiently by knowing everything that everybody is doing all the time. Those who focus on and value law enforcement before freedom.
I think GrapheneOS needs a really good PR expert volunteer, or funding to pay for a non-volunteer.
My non-PR-expert guesses are... If the journalist is in bad faith or flaky, that might need to be handled. But if the journalist is in good faith, this might be an opportunity, to promote GrapheneOS and/or to start to head off adverse gov't actions there.
(GrapheneOS does some great technical work, and has given me what seems to be a more respectful and trustworthy smartphone than I could get from Apple or Google. Right now, I'd think many countries in Europe and elsewhere should be looking at something like GrapheneOS as a possible interim measure on their way to greater digital sovereignty. I understand that the French people especially value liberty.)
If you make the response boring or used a canned legalish message, it doesn’t allow them to say you didn’t talk to them.
A better rule is: don’t let anyone untrained talk to journalists.
Unfortunately we still don't know what it is or what its goals are.
I did not follow up with whether there was any kind of understanding or resolution of what was going on with the Archive situation, but it seems oddly coincidental that these types of actions would be going on effectively simultaneously.
But here’s the thing: criminals end up exploiting tech like this, and that makes the project an easy target for law enforcement. We’ve seen the exact same thing happen with crypto.
We need to just accept that any technology designed for security and privacy is always going to be a double-edged sword.
When Ross Ulbricht was arrested, they made sure to do it in a way that they got access to his laptop while logged in. I'm sure competent investigators can figure out the login method used daily by someone on their phone if they follow them because they are committing a crime. Just like they did with Ulbricht. But they can't do that for everyone whenever they feel like it, and that's the problem.
I agree, therefore it should be my legal right to use such technology. Like a 2A for encryption and privacy
Start with one of the open source projects - I guess an Android derivative, sans all the Google stuff. Give them funding, maybe regulate (that always helps).
Then mandate that within X years, various key apps must provide for this system - things like bank apps, state admin apps etc. In high likelihood, development would be close enough to Android that it would not be a crazy high burden - and anyway, it seems most people use cross platform frameworks.
EU could regulate, or influence via ownership, privacy controls better tailored to European tastes.
That would give the EU a dose of digital sovereignty without doing much, and ensuring some degree of usability.
It's a shame that instead GrapheneOS seems to get sued.
Of course they will hate it if a particular OS and phone combination make this impossible.
Coincidentally, I just bought an old Pixel on eBay today. Because it had GrapheneOS already installed.
My interest in privacy is growing, but I confess I was mostly motivated by an admiration for the GrapheneOS project... They're really good at what they're doing, and they are swamped with work, and attacked by bots, weirdos and authoritarian speculators.
And, because I want to sport that monochromatic minimalist interface. Maybe I'll come out of my cocoon to pitch in.
Veracrypt stopped development in France and moved TLD's to .jp (though they also physically moved).
If I had Android, I’d absolutely be using GrapheneOS.
I can go on and on...
This can be solved, though. We have to move moderation and ranking mechanisms to the client-side, especially for search engines and social media. Each person should be able to decide what they post and see, but not what anyone else posts or sees.
It's a stolen quote but rings true:
Those with power fear one thing above all else; losing said power.
I know it's borderline conspiracy theorist but I fear that the COVID-19 lockdowns with the surveillance systems and control gained during them gave the elites worldwide a taste for new levels of power and control.
All in the name of doing it for our own good of course. But ultimately its for more power. What terrors man won't inflict on others for "their own good".
Rather, Occam's razor suggests that their interests simply align against individual privacy.
Company executives are plutomaniacs, and companies can't access and exploit your data if you want to keep it private. Politicians are megalomaniacs, highly insecure and defensive of their position, and governments can't monitor your thoughts and activities if you want to keep them private; they take comfort in knowing that you are a good and subservient citizen.
Many decades ago people in governments and companies understood that they can accomplish their goals much easier if they cooperate, which is why lobbying is a legal multi-billion-dollar industry, why we see CEOs in politics, and so on. The world of 1984 is a reality; it's just that our leash is long enough and the carrot enticing enough for us to care about it.
Anonymous posters like what looks like a troll bot that the GrapheneOS account is arguing with have flooded the zone with so much noise its fracturing society imo
'GrapheneOS Update 2025 Privacy Savior or Hacker’s Paradise'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCgi6bJy-qo
I get all my utube from the bash-prompt (and never have to deal with algorithm or see who is who and what else is there), so I don't know who posted this video to YouTube, but maybe there's more?
This could be a case study in an amateur low-grade half-ass influence operation.
On the other hand, it could simply be a grudge, a coordinated personal attack on the lead dev.
There are a slew of other videos by YouTube personalities who, at various times, seem to be disparaging the guy, including a very upset Grossman (right-to-repair guy).
Or hey, maybe it's just coincidence. C'est la vie!
This wave of authoritarianism is simply the result of well-funded right-wing populists taking advantage of an economically tough situation for the masses, after decades of neoliberalist austerity and deregulation. They're using fear and hate to further the goals of their wealthy patrons: deregulating the economy further. Mass surveillance comes for free with these people, it's purely a consequence of focusing the entire public discourse on perceived crime levels and fear of foreigners.
The two articles attacking GrapheneOS come from right-wing rags: Le Figaro and Le Parisien, who make their bread and butter painting a bleak picture of the country, when crime levels are at an all-times low. QED
> I am preparing an article on the use of your secure personal data phone solution by drug traffickers and other criminals. Have you ever been contacted by the police?
The claims in the main story strongly indicate they're not talking about GrapheneOS itself but rather companies selling closed source forks of it with significant modifications. They refer to features which don't exist in GrapheneOS. Supposedly GrapheneOS which is freely available from https://grapheneos.org/install/web and https://grapheneos.org/releases with sources on GitHub is distributed on the "dark web" and promoted via unlisted YouTube videos. They're clearly conflating products which market themselves by saying they're using GrapheneOS with the upstream project those are forked from. These are largely sketchy products and we regularly have to deal with them infringing on our copyright and trademarks.
One of these companies marketing products claiming to use GrapheneOS, ANOM, turned out to be a company run by the FBI as a sting operation which was hiring criminals to sell phones to other criminals. ANOM told people what they were getting was GrapheneOS when it was actually a mix of GrapheneOS and LineageOS code. The FBI was broadly facilitating crime in Europe by providing them devices they considered secure and safe to use while disregarding most of it to avoid exposing their operation. They were also misusing our brand and harming our reputation us through this. A lot of the claimed criminal usage was directly engineered by the FBI. A detailed podcast episode on this:
https://darknetdiaries.com/transcript/146/
There's also this second article from the same paper containing the explicit threat referred to in our posts:
It says that if we don't cooperate, they'll take similar actions against us they did against 2 named secure phone companies. Those actions were taking over their servers and criminal charges. It's clear what they want is a backdoor to have access to devices they're unable to exploit due to the advanced exploit protections. They're threatening that if this is not provided, they'll go after us as they did companies they said were collaborating with criminals. They likely consider providing freely available open source software which anyone can use for any purpose to be collaborating with criminals.
The main result will be OVH losing our business to a Toronto colocation provider for important non-static content (discussion forum, email, Matrix, Mastodon, attestation service), Vultr (American) for our anycast DNS + exotic webserver locations, Netcup (German) and perhaps another 1-2 companies for NA/EU web servers where Vultr is extremely overpriced due to double the costs for the same specs and metered bandwidth (it's great for exotic locations and BGP support for our anycast though).
There's another article here, but the paywall isn't bypassed by archive sites (we've read it though):
Internet 101: don't provide sustenance to the creatures who sometimes live under bridges.
This thread is hosted on GrapheneOS's server so I'd assume GrapheneOS team could block multimilliardaire https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/115584160910016309
I mean, it's also not great ux that it shows up where it does and with so much real estate.
LET ME SHOW YOU THE DOOR, MAY I?
Edit: the news article don't mention legal action being started or being prepared...
If there is a hint of the person actually reading your messages, then yeah, I'd agree in many cases. But read the messages this person posted, it is clear after just a couple of messages that they're not responding to anything @GrapheneOS actually wrote, they're spewing nonsense into the ether.
Personally, I don't think it's worth trying to save everybody, focus on people who are actually willing to listen, and have a conversation instead.
You usually have some influence. Enough people are smart enough to read between the lines to make it worth trying.
Perfect example: I had to fire someone from staff rather promptly. The reasons were serious even that not responding to questions in timely manner would have been a fatal error for the convention.
Unfortunately, there are times you can’t opt out of the game because opting out is a response. Silence will be misconstrued as support.
It must be hard sometimes not to get quite a dim view of the world when pressed up against this part of it. Condolences.
What? What is the French state doing in this case?
People can write politically motivated things on HN too. That is very different than a law enforcement action of the government.
A foreign country can only threaten you if you depend on revenue from this country, or plan to go there. In theory one can even pull of a project like GrapheneOS completely anonymously (assuming you're in a proper free speech jurisdiction that won't rat you out), so people behind it can still travel freely.
French citizens deserve privacy no less than anyone else.
They have no obligation to do otherwise. - ~~~~
As for the crime stat, you can always control for such things, to an extent. If we can't trust the official statistics office, then what should we base our policies off? Vibes? There are certainly things to improve with how the stats are collected and used, but you can't just go around telling everyone they're useless and providing no alternatives.
The equation is simple: tax one productive member of society 1000 euros - lose 1 vote. Redistribute 100 euro each - win 5 votes. The rest goes towards various government programs implemented by companies owned by friends that can redirect pay the profit in offshore accounts of relatives of said politician.
> People can write politically motivated things on HN too.
Sure, and that would be a problem if that was 1) targeted and 2) originated from the people with connections.