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and like, kiwi farms fucking sucks! getting swatted by them is horrid!
unfortunately I don’t think the choices graphene’s been making actually alleviate the concern of that happening for most of their users
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@thehole @zzt a horrible and horrifying harassment site full of Nazis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms
@davidgerard @zzt ugh, sounds "lovely", thanks
their built-in browser is an ultra paranoid privacy browser with missing features to prevent fingerprinting
and that’s probably what you want for a system browser, especially if it can be used embedded
it doesn’t have effective ad blocking. they claim it has some form of ad blocking built in now, but it doesn’t appear to do anything.
the graphene community recommends you do blocking on the DNS level with something like nextDNS, which is both relatively bad at blocking ads and a US service that correlates all your traffic with your identity. that’s how it works.
if you recommend using any other browser with a working ad blocker, the graphene devs will yell at you. don’t you know every other option is horrifically insecure?
but ad blocking isn’t just ad blocking. it’s tracking and malicious script blocking. other than ads being horrible, that’s the privacy concern that something like ublock origin fixes.
for most people who are using their browser normally, tracking is going to be the biggest concern
most people are logging into websites with their browsers, and a ton of those sites are going to be using a known set of techniques to track them, and most of those techniques are resistant to DNS-based blocking
the graphene dev response is most likely that they deserve to be tracked for logging into a site, for not using a VPN at all times (one they can trust to not correlate all their traffic or ever be compromised), for doing normal things with their phones
that doesn’t seem workable. now there’s a big privacy gap because the graphene devs are incredibly stubborn and incredibly focused on a fucking weird threat model.
all of this is fantastic if you’re bunkered down for years accusing others of being kiwi farms, of course
@zzt
One of their replies to me implied that they know their users involvement on Mastodon (i.e. "we know our users aren't using Mastodon") which is somewhat concerning to see from a privacy based project.
Like, how would you know this without tracking your users' behavior
@zm it’s even sadder than that
they believe that the people on here aren’t their users because their users would never criticize them. that’s nowhere near true of course, there’s a ton of graphene users on fedi (myself included, see my previous threads raging about seedvault and other teething issues partially moving to graphene)
the only people they see as their users are the people in their discord and on their forums glazing them
the people “opposing the attacks” are the ones coming on here with accounts that only talk about graphene, posting unhinged shit in our replies. that’s more or less a raid.
I’d like to say that grapheneOS is legitimately excellent for hardening Android, for sandboxing google play services, for making AOSP and private Android relatively usable
but now I have a lot of information about what they consider exploit analysis (throwing an LLM at it because everyone else is doing it) and threat analysis (fedi is kiwi farms). my confidence is shaken. these people have been confidently asserting that their practices are best in class or near best in class. are they really?
I’m not sure the people using LLMs who couldn’t accurately talk about LLMs, and who deleted the posts where they talked about all this just to disrupt conversation once the backlash came, are people I can trust to honestly analyze their own work
also, it’s gotta be pointed out
graphene was previously on here starting shit because an article on degoogled android forks dared to mention options that weren’t graphene (they’ll deny this happened if you ask them, they’re kind of notorious for gaslighty responses)
the practical reason why a lot of people use grapheneOS is because you can use google play services in a relatively private way
grapheneOS is trying to lay exclusive claim to the term degoogled, but they’re the most googled AOSP fork
@zzt oh interesting. Graphene OS means buying a Google device anyway (or Motorola, which is deeply involved with the Israeli gov). I guess I’ll explore Lineage OS and /e/ instead.
@davidgerard @Nicovel0 @zzt Is there a better option? I was thinking of fairphone as like the gold standard
anyway your reminder that the above thread is what GrapheneOS thinks kiwi farms harassment looks like
that’s the threat model
@zzt now there's a term I haven't heard before. What is a kiwi farm?