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Comment by NoboruWataya

1 day ago

I'm sure their concerns are valid but just because GrapheneOS don't consider the Fairphone to meet their standards for security doesn't mean it is not worth considering for other people who may have different priorities. Fairphones have certain advantages over Pixels such as better repairability and more ethically sourced labour/components. IMO it's good to see the Fairphone do well (and I hope GrapheneOS's partnership with Motorola also goes well).

Unfortunately it looks like it's not just a issue of missing hardware security features:

> Their partnership with Murena along with promoting it themselves with misleading marketing means no possibility of working with us.

I want to like GrapheneOS, but the pettiness of its leadership is a real problem for the long term prospect of the project.

  • Is it pettiness or just sticking to their morals? Murena, as they mentioned, forwards data to OpenAI which is against pretty much everything Graphene stands for.

    • It is pettiness: watch them below spread their hate of Fairphone in the comments below… (I counted the almost same message being posted 13 times)

      It's absolutely OK to disagree with another project's security stance, but spending your time going to the HN comment section of the other project's announcement and spamming disparaging comments there isn't, at all.

    • Only for one voice to text feature which is completely optional to use and can be replaced with something else.

      As another commenter mentioned, this voice to text feature is now an offline feature and no longer sends data outside the device.

      As another note, this Fairphone can be purchased without /e/OS at all. It’s now being sold in the US without Murena being involved at all.

      1 reply →

    • > Murena, as they mentioned, forwards data to OpenAI which is against pretty much everything Graphene stands for.

      How? In what way? Source?

      3 replies →

    • You can stick to your morals without blowing things out of proportion.

      “We are the only acceptable way to do things and no tradeoffs are acceptable” is fairly petty.

      “We have a difference of opinion” isn’t.

    • I think it's absolutely pettiness at this point, on both sides. I've lost track of the number of times I've seen a post about /e/OS on Mastodon with someone in the replies ranting about how everyone should use Graphene instead. It reminds me of the old joke about vegans.

      GrapheneOS and /e/OS' goals are different - the former is about security tightening and the latter is about deGoogling. They just had a public falling out and refuse to let it go.

      11 replies →

  • Refusing to work with organizations or individuals that are detrimental to privacy and security is not petty.

    Murena does not provide private or secure products and has positioned itself to be against what GrapheneOS provides. A partnership with a company opposed to GrapheneOS and spreading misinformation about it would not be beneficial, and it is not petty to make the smart choice for the benefit of privacy and security.

The Graphene devs can be a bit obsessive about security, but with a starting price above $600, I think the average user is probably better off with a Pixel 10a bought on sale closer to $300. The stock Fairphone OS seems to include Google services, which is kind of surprising and at odds with the focus on user control and all that.

  • Fairphones don't provide bare minimum privacy and security. Expecting that is not being obsessive. The flaws are increasingly glaring and easier than ever to exploit thanks to advances in AI models. People should care about this and should get a device with reasonable privacy and security such as an iPhone instead.

    Fairphone 5 and earlier having an end-of-life Linux kernel with the Fairphone 6 coming up next is a disaster. Many months of delays for standard Android userspace patches from when they can first be shipped and years of delays for the full patches is also a major problem. An increasingly small portion of the patches is backported to older releases and they have months of delays for those.

    Fairphones are also missing crucial industry standard hardware security features. People have come to expect their device will provide strong encryption with a random 6 digit PIN rather than a very strong passphrase but that's not the case with a Fairphone.

    More information:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49354623