TechTakes

oh I meant the rant that started this thread, but fuck it, let’s go, welcome to the awful.systems privacy guide

grapheneOS review!

pros:

• provably highly Cellebrite-resistant due to obsessive amounts of dev attention given to low-level security and practices enforced around phone login
• almost barebones AOSP! for better or worse
• sandboxed Google Play Services so you can use the damn phone practically without feeding all your data into Google’s maw
• buggy but usable support for Android user profiles and private spaces so you can isolate spyware apps to a fairly high degree
• there’s support coming for some very cool virtualization features for securely using your phone as one of them convertible desktops or for maybe virtualizing graphene under graphene
• it’s probably the only relatively serious choice for a secure mobile OS? and that’s depressing as fuck actually, how did we get here

cons:

• the devs seem toxic
• the community is toxic
• almost barebones AOSP! so good fucking luck when the AOSP implementation of something is broken or buggy or missing cause the graphene devs will tell you to fuck off
• the project has weird priorities and seems to just forget to do parts of their roadmap when their devs lose interest
• their browser vanadium seems like a good chromium fork and a fine webview implementation but lacks an effective ad blocker, which makes it unsafe to use if your threat model includes, you know, the fucking obvious. the graphene devs will shame you for using anything but it or brave though, and officially recommend using either a VPN with ad blocking or a service like NextDNS since they don’t seem to acknowledge that network-level blocking isn’t sufficient
• there’s just a lot of userland low hanging fruit it doesn’t have. like, you’re not supposed to root a grapheneOS phone cause that breaks Android’s security model wide open. cool! do they ship any apps to do even the basic shit you’d want root for? of course not.
• you’ll have 4 different app stores (per profile) and not know which one to use for anything. if you choose wrong the project devs will shame you.
• the docs are wildly out of date, of course, why wouldn’t they be. presumably I’m supposed to be on Matrix or Discord but I’m not going to do that

and now the NextDNS rant:

this is just spyware as a service. why in fuck do privacyguides and the graphene community both recommend a service that uniquely correlates your DNS traffic with your account (even the “try without an account” button on their site generates a 7 day trial account and a DNS instance so your usage can be tracked) and recommend configuring it in such a way that said traffic can be correlated with VPN traffic? this is incredibly valuable data especially when tagged with an individual’s identity, and the only guarantee you have that they don’t do this is a promise from a US-based corporation that will be broken the instant they receive a court order. privacyguides should be ashamed for recommending this unserious clown shit.