Discussion
graphene shouting libertarian crap and conspiracy theories about fedi doing “kiwi farms harassment” reveals a bit about their approach
to me it reveals why things like their browser are the way they are
a lot of parts of grapheneOS aren’t for you, they’re for the kind of person who receives harsh criticism and accuses it of being a kiwi farms harassment op that will surely end in swatting and violence
@zzt now there's a term I haven't heard before. What is a kiwi farm?
@thehole @zzt a horrible and horrifying harassment site full of Nazis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms
@davidgerard @thehole @zzt
Yeah, us Gen AI haters are famously more likely to be Nazis. /s
GrapheneOS is completely out of touch with reality.
BTW, there was a KiwiFarms page making me a "LOLCow" in 2015.
their built-in browser is an ultra paranoid privacy browser with missing features to prevent fingerprinting
and that’s probably what you want for a system browser, especially if it can be used embedded
it doesn’t have effective ad blocking. they claim it has some form of ad blocking built in now, but it doesn’t appear to do anything.
the graphene community recommends you do blocking on the DNS level with something like nextDNS, which is both relatively bad at blocking ads and a US service that correlates all your traffic with your identity. that’s how it works.
if you recommend using any other browser with a working ad blocker, the graphene devs will yell at you. don’t you know every other option is horrifically insecure?
but ad blocking isn’t just ad blocking. it’s tracking and malicious script blocking. other than ads being horrible, that’s the privacy concern that something like ublock origin fixes.
for most people who are using their browser normally, tracking is going to be the biggest concern
most people are logging into websites with their browsers, and a ton of those sites are going to be using a known set of techniques to track them, and most of those techniques are resistant to DNS-based blocking
the graphene dev response is most likely that they deserve to be tracked for logging into a site, for not using a VPN at all times (one they can trust to not correlate all their traffic or ever be compromised), for doing normal things with their phones
that doesn’t seem workable. now there’s a big privacy gap because the graphene devs are incredibly stubborn and incredibly focused on a fucking weird threat model.
all of this is fantastic if you’re bunkered down for years accusing others of being kiwi farms, of course
@zzt
One of their replies to me implied that they know their users involvement on Mastodon (i.e. "we know our users aren't using Mastodon") which is somewhat concerning to see from a privacy based project.
Like, how would you know this without tracking your users' behavior
I’d like to say that grapheneOS is legitimately excellent for hardening Android, for sandboxing google play services, for making AOSP and private Android relatively usable
but now I have a lot of information about what they consider exploit analysis (throwing an LLM at it because everyone else is doing it) and threat analysis (fedi is kiwi farms). my confidence is shaken. these people have been confidently asserting that their practices are best in class or near best in class. are they really?
I’m not sure the people using LLMs who couldn’t accurately talk about LLMs, and who deleted the posts where they talked about all this just to disrupt conversation once the backlash came, are people I can trust to honestly analyze their own work
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and like, kiwi farms fucking sucks! getting swatted by them is horrid!
unfortunately I don’t think the choices graphene’s been making actually alleviate the concern of that happening for most of their users