Yes, “because one of their council is leftist pro censorship”

Like this crap

Literally a KDE setting. In the GUI.

And nobody needs that, otherwise there would be a plasmoid.

https://grapheneos.org/features#grapheneos

Not sure but GrapheneOS has an “LTE only” mode, stock Android only has preferred Network afaik.

visiting only known websites is not a scaleable option, a browser needs to be secure. Kiwix is the browser that basically runs desktop Chromium on Android, so it has Addon support. But that is also soon manifest v3 restricted, and likely pretty insecure.

of course the user data partition is not checked, but every other important one. I have not tested what would happen when it is modified though.

I dont know what magisk did, but I think that is only about Google Play adding their “safety” scanning to the OS. Nothing regarding boot. But yes, likely there could, can or should be OS components scanning things too.

Googles stuff is pretty insecure, for example the latest SafetyNetFix simply disabled hardware cryptography, as they still support insecure phones.

For sure this is very complex and there are always vulnerabilities found in Android and GrapheneOS.

Yes that is one definition.

But what if you get it back? Or if you just keep it?

There is a chance that you have Pegasus on there, and I wouldnt want a phone without the detection of this.

GrapheneOS can likely detect pegasus with their Attestation and if you have it, use an external device to reflash it.

Not sure if VPN eliminates all risks with 2G and 3G, maybe it does.

Sandboxing, javascript

Vanadium has sandboxing but its javascript blocking is useless (no granular control)

Mull has no process isolation at all, but support for UBO and Noscript. Bad situation

it’s a walk in the park for it to modify any of the partitions

These cannot be written without TPM verification or stuff, ask GrapheneOS devs about that, I dont know. The firmware signing is required, the verification will not be done inside the OS, that would be totally flawed.

If they have the firmware signing keys, they can fuck you. If they dont, they can only write to the system partition, and Attestation can see that.

Reading data has nothing to do with that. They likely can, but that doesnt matter.

My 6 years old phone still receives LOS updates

This will not include firmware and likely even the kernel.

Thanks! TLDR spamhaus (a big spamlist provider) has them on their spamlist, or maybe not, and they are using some fancy CDN.

It is VERY likely just a technical error.

Yes I know, and I want to try DivestOS one time. But they do incomplete patches.

They cannot update the kernel themselves or even worse the firmware. The kernel needs to be built and patched for the specific hardware, GrapheneOS relies completely on Google here. And the firmware needs to be signed by the vendors, so no chance either.

And especially baseband, cellular stuff has extremely many vulnerabilities in the code.

I think 3a is already too old. I think 4a is a better minimum, but this is still insecure of course.

Image toolbox is awesome, damn!

What, source?

How would you block an OS?

And btw there are some reasons why GrapheneOS may be criticised

Mailbox.org missing, pass

VPNs are not meant for privacy. The concept is clunky, as is the concept of our internet.

Tor or I2P are made for privacy, but the interactions with the clearnet have the same problems, you need a legal entity hosting the server, IPs are known and can be blocked etc.

Hosting your own VPN does not anonymize you anymore but is very unlikely to get blocked.

All Android phones have Google malware installed by default, as system apps, which means those apps can do whatever they want.

So every piece of data you put on there is possibly tracked and collected.

Then there are 2 more problems

• the software is proprietary and cannot be externally wiped clean
• the software is outdated

This makes it vulnerable to Pegasus attacks and others. There are tons of secure practices to avoid getting it, like LTE-only, HTTPS only, encrypted and trustworthy DNS, sandboxed processes, blocked javascript execution from unknown websites…

But still if the phone is outdated there are unpatched and publicly known security issues. Just spamming them at all phones is likely to succeed as so many people run vulnerable versions, as vendors suck.

Then if you have pegasus, the only way for security is to reflash the A/B partitions, both. Factory reset is not secure as it will keep what is already in the system partitions.

The firmware is protected and signed by the vendors, so it is likely clean.

But Pegasus installs itself to the phone storage.

If you A cant obtain factory images or B cant flash the phone at all, you cannot wipe it clean.

So a good activism phone needs

• trustworthy and minimal system apps / stock software
• modern software updates
• possible to reflash whole device externally
• nice to have: ability to verify checksum of system partition, like GrapheneOS Attestation

This makes them poorly pretty expensive. I think a slightly outdated GrapheneOS phone is okay though.

Burner phones are a strange concept. If you want to store sensitive data on it, you shouldnt use some cheap android phone or even a dumbphone without encryption support.

Same on Thinkpad T495

Any system app on Android, the captive portal login and more CAN all bypass a VPN in “block all other connections” mode.

Android is really problematic and having as little system apps as possible is the only fix.

For sure, edited it. GrapheneOS screenshots have no metadata afaik

Software that doesnt store private metadata

• grapheneOS cam
• opencamera (not by default!)
• KDE spectacle
• android GrapheneOS screenshots

Which is a chromium instance. I would use mull with UBO and noscript.