Speaking of unsubstantiated accusations, do we have actual, reliable information about what is really going on? Any link in either French or English appreciated.
State surveillance begins when protecting privacy is treated as a suspect act.
Preventing crimes apparently necessitates to forbid any resistance to surveillance.
So much for France/Europe being a defender of (digital )rights.Fuck France and its government-sponsored terrorism! When will they learn from the days of Vichy France and its mass surveillance?
Just for convenience (since it’s hard to read the screenshot on a phone), here’s the text:
GrapheneOS is being heavily targeted by the French state because we provide highly secure devices and won’t include backdoors for law enforcement access. They’re conflating us with companies selling closed source products using portions of our code. Both French state media and corporate media are publishing many stories attacking the GrapheneOS project based on false and unsubstantiated claims from French law enforcement. They’ve made a clear threat to seize our servers and arrest our developers if we do not cooperate by adding backdoors. Due to this, we’re leaving France and leaving French service providers including OVH. We need substantial help from the community to push back against this across platforms. People malicious towards us are also using it as an opportunity to spread libel/harassment content targeting our team, raid our chat rooms and much more. /e/ and iodéOS are both based in France, and are both actively attacking GrapheneOS. /e/ receives substantial government funding. Both are extremely non-private and secure which is why France is targeting us while those get government funding. We need a lot more help than usual and we’re sending our the first ever notification to everyone on the sewer because this is a particularly bad situation. If people help us, it will enable us to focus more on development again including releasing experimental Pixel 10 releases very soon.
Thanks for posting the contents of the image. This is especially important for folks using a screen reader and the source content is behind a paywall or login link.
Thank you
Next time I go to the comments first…
From France: news outlets began parroting government stating GrapheneOS is used by narcos.
GrapheneOS reacted strongly.
However, France is on a very shitty auth-right trend (including arresting Telegram founder) so the reaction is very understandable.
France and the rest of Europe… sigh Fuck Fascists. That includes our German government, full of selfish fuckheads who further fortify the surveillance state.
Not to protect /e/os and Iode (neither to promote the french laws), but I would like to have real source of what’s happening, what /e/os and idoe didn’t do right, when they conveyed fakes about graphene…
Not to say but the graphene community (mainly his leader) is always having drama with some people. So real proofs and explanations would be greatly appreciated. Wouldn’t like to say black or white to this subject and would like to nuance the post
Gael Duval (/e/os) wrote as a response:
"I’d like to state *very clearly* that Murena and e Foundation are not related in case to this ridiculous and pseudo-drama.What we seek is to totally ignore these guys, and have nothing to do with them.
And again, and again, despite what they are repeating, we are NOT competitors, as we are not in the hardened-security market spaces."
Pretty good response but somehow they will suffer from Graphene accusations
They (graphene) are really playing childish this time
EDIT : misinterpretations
So they finally admit being inferior and less secure.
Again not to defend anyone but you fell in the trap.
1 - These roms never said anything like we’re superior and most secure (something that grapene is proudly advertising)
2 - By saying these words, only unjustified hate is bring to some FOSS projects and slow down development and adoption to the whole public
And people are just gonna hate Graphene cause of this and other hating alternatives roms cause graphene said something…And that is the reason I kind of don’t like grapheneos.
yeah as a graphene user I have been worried for a while now about the mental state of the project head. It also doesn’t seem like he cares much for the opinions of the users
If you’re wondering, I checked a bit online and here’s what I understood :
The 19th November a newspaper in France called “Le Parisien” published an article about GrapheneOS and that it was a dream OS for drug dealer (and whole networks).
That it could erase itself if a intrusion was detected by showing for example a fake Snapchat page (which is btw totally false and doesn’t take part in the official releases), these claims where besides made by french cops.For that, the newspaper contacted Graphene, and they (graphene) answered that the tool they’re providing is simply working and that like a knife it could be used for malicious activities, but as with a knife most people would use it responsibly (to protect their privacy)
At this point I think that the Graphene reaction was pretty great and acted to defend citizens privacy.
But what follows next didn’t make the same impression, by quitting the France they are not really focusing on the good topics :
1 - France cops are no exceptions to others, surely all of them around the world would like to break encryption and privacy (grapheneOS for example)
2 - That’s not the government that propagates wrong statement about graphene, but the journalists from “Le Parisien” (if they can be called “journalists”)
(The authorities maybe lied (not the first time btw) to scare the public, the newspaper shouldn’t published it with fakes in it…)And accusing any French based initiative is not an argument (at first they didn’t have anything to do between french authorities and graphene)
Even if FOSS projects have a country on the paper, it’s not really much more of a negative aspect than to respect the laws in place…
So why Graphene doesn’t blame Framasoft (guys that are maintaining peertube) for example?And lastly in Europe many initiatives gets money from governments (whatever they’re doing)
Note : I’m not saying that /e/os and Iode aren’t guilty of anything sketchy but that in this case Graphene are just insulting FOSS privacy projects…
To conclude, I would say that Graphene done right by replying and arguing to a bullshit article.
BUT they shouldn’t generalize to all french projects and promote hate against frenchies and/or french projects (Btw they moved their servers from France to Germany and Canada, these countries are no more private than France and any others countries)This is roughly what I thought, part sensible part taking tinfoil hat a little too far even for a privacy developer. Really the ones doing the most harm to graphene seem to be google
Well if anyone is out to get you it sure seems everyone is out to get you, or something.
I think I’d get paranoid and antsy as a lead dev of GrapheneOS, too. Couple that with a certain brain structure needed to be a lead developer and connect two and two to figure out why lead developers are rarely good community managers.
I hope Daniel Micay doesn’t go cray cray. I really like what they did here.
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The billionaires really want all in on no privacy.
For everyone else*
Made a sizable donation. I encourage you all to help them manage this situation, defend themselves and keep up their good work.
Yep, drama or not, completely true or not (as is being claimed in this thread), they do incredible work, and if you benefit from it, let this serve simply as a reminder that they deserve some support if you don’t want to wade into all the details.
Super happy to see they take Interac e-Transfers in Canada too.
Are they a registered charity in Canada?
It does not appear so, no :-(
At this point I’m sure it’s not even about control anymore, it’s just that privacy sometimes gets in the way of “line go up”.
This isn’t the US… French billionaire have next to no stakes in tech industry. (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_French_billionaires_by_net_worth, the only tech company on there is datadog and that’s a US one)
I doubt L’Oréal or Chanel much for your online data.
French billionaires are actively promoting fascism, headed by Bolloré who owns a TV station similar to foxnews and has a neo Nazi body guard on his private island.
French police is killing more people every year, with little to no consequence. French protests have changed from family walks to full riots as police attacks peaceful protests (a recent leak shows amongst other things a riot-cop telling his officer during what can only be described as a battle that protesters have children amongst them, officer replies that it’s what you choose when protesting).
It’s not about tech, it’s about control of the masses so they don’t rebel.
Maybe then Bolloré should be confiscated of all his media empire and wealth. Liberté, egalité, fraternité! Fuck fascist pigs, fuck oligarchs and billionnaires with their wage theft!
If the state can’t protect its people from the damage that technology and capitalism can do, they have no right to prevent people from protecting themselves.
Fix climate change. Tax billionaires. Address the housing crisis. Then we can talk about taking away privacy in the name of upholding the law.
Doesn’t even have to be a lofty goal like fixing climate change. I’d settle for the backdoors not leading to disclosure and scams, as any such weakening of security or privacy inadvertently does.
When there was the leak of ID photos from that one site (forget which one) I sighed, because neither the users nor the site wanted to keep ID photos around, but the government made them do that. It was the most predictable result I could have imagined.
I’d also settle for the billionnaires getting a French revolutionary treatment. It’s high time the reactionary leeches get what they fucking deserve: they must pay their taxes, hand over all their media ownership to the public, and a shitton more. And if they don’t want that, then by police force, or by the will of the people.
what exactly is /e/ doing against graphene ?
Existing, probably.
Graphene (more specifically its founder) is always in a vicious cycle of claiming that everyone asking for proof of Graphene being “under attack” is in itself making an “attack”. You can consider yourself Graphene’s enemy for life for your transgression.
Watching these youtube links makes you an attacker also, so be careful: https://youtu.be/Dx7CZ-2Bajg https://youtu.be/4To-F6W1NT0
I doubt it. I think these kind of comments are a very classic “divide and conquer” tactic.
We should not be divided, but stand behind both e/ and Graphene as perfectly good privacy defenders.
To me it reads like Graphene is saying /e/ is “actively attacking” them as a puppet of the government of France. How do you reconcile them both being perfectly good when either one is engaging in this behavior, or one is lying about it? It’s okay to support both projects overall and not agree with every action they take, but that doesn’t mean you have to turn a blind eye to accountability when they are making bad choices (to put it lightly). In any other project, criticism would lead to positive changes and correction of bad behavior. Because Graphene doesn’t work like that, I think it’s important to understand their history so that everyone is more informed when they make serious accusations about other innocent projects like this.
Given this, do we actually know that the French government is targeting GrapheneOS in a significant way, or is this just another dramatisation?
I did skim through some similar discussion on the HN link, which you can read here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45999024
I honestly don’t know or care enough to figure out how much exaggeration is taking place, but it seems like there’s at least a possibility that this is a nothingburger from a powerless journalist that’s being extrapolated like crazy. There might be a definite answer in that thread but I don’t have the time to evaluate all angles of this incident right now.
Ok, first I was very worried when I saw the original message, but after watching these videos… well, The Boy Who Cried Wolf came to mind.
This is actually a really relevant note, because all of us are the “wolf-watchers” in that sense. We’re all trying to keep track of accountability on stuff like this and use what little power we have to protest and counteract government overreach and abuse. When hyperbole and gaslighting are used by those “crying wolf” it makes our jobs that much more difficult. Even after reading through the HN thread I still am not sure if the threat is real or imagined. There are a couple paranoid leaps in logic asserted as fact, and that makes it impossible to know which other “facts” are actually just opinions. By all means, they should GTFO of France if they feel they might be threatened, but turning around and saying they’re being imminently attacked by France makes it so much harder to understand what’s actually happening.
Sort of.
Governments, including France, want to weaken security. Sometimes they intentionally conflate illegality with security. It sounds like that’s what’s happening here, with an assist from the journalist who hasn’t done any investigation.
Is there any information on this from a more reliable source than a screenshot of a discord message from a generic account? Especially from a project whose leader is known for persecutory claims.
generic account
? it is the project account
Yes, I know, that’s what I meant. These statements are not attributable to a person.
ah sry i always thought a generic account is something else,
like an account of some random person
This is 100% definitely attributable to Daniel Micay. Nobody else should have access to the official account on the chat platforms.
Please just copy and paste the text. It’s not private information.
It’s in the alt text
Alt text is like putting Braille next to a sign; it’s a tool for the blind (who use screen readers to access alt text).
It’s also a backup when the image fails to load, but it’s not a substitute for making sure the image is legible for people who can see.
If you add a transcription in the body of the post, that should cover your remaining bases.
Ah, I use Voyager and it lets you easily read the alt text after clicking on the image, I figured there was similar functionality on other clients. Noted
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So in the drama between the Graphene team vs every other privacy-focused Android dev - who should I trust?
Yeah the most secure android operating system vs a bunch of custom roms which are significantly less secure than stock due to less updates, being less hardened, and using insecure components (like reverse engineered gapps)
Secure from what? Security isn’t a dick measuring contest, it’s a living process and arms race. If someone is trying to tell me, “My stuff is the mostest of the biggest security because, hard!” - what I’m hearing is that their threat modeling is ill-defined, maybe not defined at all, and something misleading is going on. Especially when the lead dev of a platform appears to be screaming and shouting about everyone else with a dubious persecution complex.
Both, and probably more Graphene.
France’s put up a lot more mass surveillance these days. The fact that the French state tries to blackmail defenders of privacy, should tell you enough.
Examples of who is on the other side besides “everyone”?
Graphene was going against Calyx or said Calyx was going after them. I only ever seen the Graphene part though so don’t know who was right.
Ty for bringing this to light
CoyoteFacts posted those videos above https://youtu.be/Dx7CZ-2Bajg https://youtu.be/4To-F6W1NT0 so it seems like the other side is literally everyone, from every other android project, random other software, to big yt channels that actually promote GrapheneOS… I wonder how long it will take for the lead dev to start saying his own userbase is after him…
Pixels are very expensive in my country but I was looking forward acquiring one in the future, if my finances permitted, just because of GrapheneOS… but honestly, after discovering its creator is a real mental case, unless the project gets forked out of his control, I wouldn’t trust it.but honestly, after discovering its creator is a real mental case, unless the project gets forked out of his control, I wouldn’t trust it.
I know it’s different (Lemmy isn’t supposed to protect your privacy) but are you familiar with Lenny’s lead developer? Interesting fellow, to say the least.
I joined this fief because it promotes itself as being about open source software, then I discovered the .ml actually stands for marxist-leninist and it’s not mentioned anywhere in the About (I don’t know how it works elsewhere, in my country it’s just an euphemism for stalinist, although .ml contrasts highly with the general disregard for “superstructural” themes, that are just labeled as liberal ideology around here). I keep hearing a lot of things of my lords and my fief’s censorship, although I haven’t witnessed/experienced it yet… I’m probably moving out of Lemmy completely when I have the time.
Lemmy is federated and not an OS. Many different clients also.
Me and the boys on our way to help Graphene in France.Got a link?
Just added to the post
Appreciated.
Graph
ineOSGrapheneOS
Good catch I was in a rush
No worries!
