alt Hacker NewsI don't know if I can trust a motorola phone with grapheneOS. Motorola is owned by a Chinese company that has recently been caught for injecting affiliate codes in users purchases. Yes, I know it won't be Motorola's OS but they do modify a large part of the BSP (bootloader, modem, etc.) with their "mot_sec" additions which you'll find if you reverse engineer any motorola firmware. It's unclear if qualcomm will give grapheneOS permission to rebuild or see the source code everything else. Modern phones run multiple operating systems like in the DSP, modem, trustzone, etc.
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It concerns me as well as the user-land OS isn't really where control of the RF happens. The OS running in their baseband chip is where the backdoors would best be placed from their perspective. But I'm happy that there are some additional options to run Graphene on the market.
My thoughts exactly.
I'm pretty uncomfortable with how many smartphones I'd like to buy end up being Chinese owned companies. I wish Fairphone had a better camera, if it did, I'd just buy one of those and call it day.
Ok so just don’t do banking and critical communication on a cellular device with mysterious CPUs. What’s your threat model? I like to use a flip phone and just don’t do anything important on it.
What non Chinese manufacture are you looking at? I liked Xperia I for being made in Japan but it’s still Chinese components underneath and as you say there’s no control of all the code.
There’s always Bunnie’s Precursor phone if anyone is interested in commercially developing something reasonably secure and auditable.
Supply chain attacks? Is grapheneOS itself audited by an external auditor?
Also of note: they are a competitor to Flock. While it's not crazy for a company of that scale to bet on both sides of the "privacy vs surveillance state" match, it can be assumed that they'll need to commit to one over the other, somewhere down the line.
I always feel amused at these takes from north american citizens.
From a latin american POV, it is same-ish as USA manufacturers, they're also tracking everything we do to sell us more unneeded stuff.
The difference is that chinese government is just trying to sell stuff, while USA government is trying to convert all the southern continent into a colony to impose governments and suck up minerals in the meantime. If you ask me if I trust more China or USA, at least China's intentions are clear and direct.
Of course, you people will always have the argument of "national interest" which for us (at least tech-literate people) that's no argument, but still you will find some bootlickers in the mobs.
I on the other hand am looking to purchase electronic devices because they are owned by the Chinese. I work under the impression that everyone and everything is spying on us in this surveillance-capitalist world, so if that's true then why not let others spy on me for a change. Just to give our guys a break. At least the other guys don't condition my loan or my kids' university admission.
unfounded fearmongering
The OS alone, however, still provides a considerable privacy upgrade over a Googled system and the associated apps including Gemini, GMail, Drive and others. By default, those apps and other Google system components are incredibly invasive and remove or limit the freedom to install other programs.