Comment by notorandit

6 months ago

Commercial partnership between open source projects and real companies can be tricky if not deadly.

I still remember CyanogenMod powering the first OnePlus One as Cyngn Co.

Lineage OS raised from the ashes of CyanogenMod.

On top of this, any ad blocking and "privacy first" project just shutters in pieces when the hardware manufacturer gives you a bunch of binary-only closed-source modules to be stuck into the kernel.

Stop using apps and run Firefox or any other open source browser. That type of privacy can be (almost) achieved that way.

But if your os runs non-auditable binaries directly into the kernel, then it's clear we are talking about dreams, not reality.

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notorandit

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strcat  6 months ago

GrapheneOS isn't a product or a business. It's partnership between a non-profit organization (GrapheneOS Foundation) obligated to pursue the defined mission and a for-profit Android OEM making hardware. It's not a for-profit venture from the GrapheneOS side.

There are no closed source components in kernel space for Pixels and won't be for other devices we support either. Hardware and firmware is closed source in practice for all modern computers. Open source doesn't mean something is inherently more private or secure. In the case of hardware, you also can't verify it matches the sources in a similar way as software.

Firefox has poor security, but especially on Android where it doesn't implement sandboxing yet let alone site isolation. It has much worse exploit protections and other security protections than Chromium-based browsers.

Using web apps over native apps makes sense for reducing their access but has privacy downsides too such as trusting the servers rather than having signed releases able to provide more meaningful end-to-end encryption. Not everything can be done with web apps, especially in Firefox where there's no WebUSB, etc. as alternatives to installing native apps providing much less access to other things beyond what's required. For example, Firefox can't be used to install GrapheneOS on a device via the easy to use web installer due to lack of WebUSB despite Mozilla coming up with the early version of it as part of FirefoxOS.