For example, non-Samsung Android OEMs aren't allowed to directly sell devices with GrapheneOS and Google will only permit it within a quota. It can and is being worked around and there will be devices sold with GrapheneOS as the stock OS without Google restricting how many can be sold.
My guess is that the workaround is that Motorola sells them with Google-certified Android. A third-party (non-OEM) buys them in bulk and preinstalls GrapheneOS.
But this is really end-90s/begin-00s Microsoft levels of anti-competitiveness. I'm surprised that (particularly non-US) regulators are not investigating them yet.
> But this is really end-90s/begin-00s Microsoft levels of anti-competitiveness. I'm surprised that (particularly non-US) regulators are not investigating them yet.
Every company is nice until the monies they earn is not guaranteed anymore. They were closing the doors they have intentionally left open in the name of security for a couple of generations.
Now they're being more open about why they are limiting user choice. Because like Chrom(e/ium), Android is designed to be a large data sink for Google to feed The Machine.
"Because like Chrom(e/ium), Android is designed to be a large data sink for Google to feed The Machine."
Also maintaining the monopoly over the app market and getting a good cut out of every transaction within. A non google controlled device in the mass market can introduce new markets independent of google (and not paying them).
It's all about that sweet backdoor. With Google and Samsung the NSA can just waltz in and out of your phone no matter which OS is running. But if some Chinese OEM decides that Unisoc chip & baseband would be the best choice for your GrapheneOS device the NSA will be quite unhappy.
Graphene is a privacy focussed rom. In China there is not such a concept as privacy. In fact, it might be illegal to be distributing this, even for export.
Yeah, I don't understand this, graphene is FOSS and unaffiliated with google so if you as an oem install grapheneos on hardware you manufactured how does Google have any say at all?
Because Google will cut you off from access to the privileged Android access to Play Store, Services and everything else. So it’s basically all or nothing.
I saw an interview with Bill Gates once where he said that one thing he would've done differently is more quickly come around to the idea of sending people to Washington. Apparently he didn't like the idea of lobbying and that cost them when the regulators started coming for them
Wow, then there we go: don't hate the player, hate the game. You're telling me even Bill Gates wasn't evil until the system forced him to either become evil or get shut down.
Bill Gates published that infamous open letter about copying software, and both Bill Gates and Brad Smith said that Microsoft's core pillar is IP: "Microsoft is built upon the idea of having IP and protecting and using it" (paraphrased by me).
The quotes I can find by digging the net:
> Microsoft was founded on the premise that software is valuable intellectual property that people should pay for. --Bill Gates
> Microsoft was founded on intellectual property. Intellectual property is the foundation of our business. --Brad Smith (This is the quote I remember in the first place)
So, Microsoft never wanted to be an open company. They were the epitome of the closed source, behemoth software company, where you get the goods, get to use it, and pay them for the privilege.
Closed source software is a reality, not an explicit evil. It is the same reason I don't have schematics for my bedframe. I've worked at software companies - have you? - it takes extra effort to release source code, causes a lot of risk, and provides absolutely no benefit whatsoever so it is simply irrational to do it.
Microsoft doesn't just choose not to release source code; they send takedown notices to projects that redistribute Microsoft's proprietary software (e.g. Ninjutsu OS). They also put clauses in the EULA for Windows to disallow reverse engineering and certain kinds of remote access (something related to if you change who has access too frequently).
Microsoft takes extra effort to prevent people from sharing or modifying Microsoft software, in order to make more money.
Yes, some of those parts are evil. The mere lack of releasing source code, or being frustrated people are using your product without paying, itself isn't.
I may have been too focused on the "false dichotomy" part and forgotten that you were talking about old Microsoft and not current Microsoft. I don't know enough about old Microsoft to say whether they were "evil" all along, so I won't comment on that part. I do agree with "don't hate the player, hate the game" in general though.
I'm not an opponent/critic of closed source software or enemy of it. I pay for quite a few high quality closed source software packages, and I like them as much as the Free Software counterparts which I use every day.
I also understand that we need to eat and have bills to pay, and there are many ways to achieve that, incl. Free or Closed Source software.
What I'm against is weaponization of closed source software beyond reasonable point. To EEE, to deprecate otherwise capable and functional hardware in the market, to limit user freedom or to extort money.
I hope I made my point clear.
Furthermore:
> I've worked at software companies - have you?
I didn't work at a software company per se, yet I develop open source software for the projects we work on, and I know what preparing a codebase for publishing entails. I also worked as a tech-lead of a Linux distribution, and a nation-wide one at that. I know what it entails, trust me.
If we're talking about experience in terms of years, I'm doing this for ~20 years, using Linux for ~25 years, and using computers in a level I understand what programming them entails for ~30 years.
So yeah, I'm not that newbie who have seen some Python and tied themselves to a knot of awe.
> causes a lot of risk,
Don't let's get into FUD territory of "Free Software is insecure", shall we? We see how Windows has been breached yesterday and today, and will see it more for years to come, as with other software.
> and provides absolutely no benefit whatsoever so it is simply irrational to do it.
Hmm, I'll agree to disagree here because 90% of the thing your digital stack is living on is Open Source and Free Software.
I don't have time to flesh out the benefit and irrationality aspect of it, because I mean, it's plainly wrong when it's put that squarely. We can find some nuances maybe, but it's limited to certain scenarios.
by weaponization you mean Win 11 requiring specific hardware etc?
your comment honestly just sounds like you dislike closed-source software.
for most commercial software projects, releasing the source provides no tangible benefit, aside from people like HNers being happy
but if Microsoft would've open sourced their OS, they would've been vulnerable to their OS being diluted into free versions or maybe even OEM-maintained versions
from a business sense, it makes no sense.
and as for security, closed source software is harder to attack (and was a lot harder to attack before LLMs). like, there's still much that we don't know about Windows internals exactly, and even those who do are a very small group of people.
it'd be a lot easier to find vulnerabilities if the source was open.
yes, it doesn't mean it's automatically more secure, in fact it can be less so if people don't have eyes on it, but I'd say the amount of attacks is less and usually done by more sophisticated attackers
Weaponization of closed source software could take many forms and is just part of the general weaponization of market mechanisms that businesses do.
Right now it doesn't really affect me that Ableton Live is closed-source. But it would affect me if the main method of sharing music on the internet was Ableton Live project files. And if Ableton had cultivated that situation on purpose they would be weaponizing the closedness of their software.
If we're talking about weaponization, then for sake of completeness let's remember that weaponization of open source is a very powerful business strategy that's been frequently used in the past 20 years, whether to market software, acquire free work, or as direct move, to try and destroy a market some competitor works on.
Some business models - like OSS, and free-with-ads - are like dimension-folding weapons from Dark Forest trilogy: once deployed, there is no stopping them, they just permanently drop a degree of freedom from the universe, inside a shell expanding at the speed of light.
> by weaponization you mean Win 11 requiring specific hardware etc?
I can understand specific hardware and/or CPU generation requirements up to a certain point. Because CPU generations bring more than new instructions and performance, but I don't understand why Windows Team or Microsoft doesn't use function multi versioning to allow more systems to use up to date versions of Windows for longer time.
On the other hand, using closed file format related documentation as reference in a supposedly open format's specifications and trying to short-circuit ISO to push their seemingly open but ultimately closed document formats as standard or using Embrace, Extend, Extinguish tactics to kill competing products, or inserting code which makes their applications crash in competitors' operating systems is straight up malice.
...and we have Halloween documents which are openly(!) trying to make Linux non-functional on PC hardware, so there's that.
I'll note that these stuff can be also weaponized in Free / Open Source software. Pulling hardware baseline higher, deprecating drivers, and not giving good enough errors to make the problems obvious while not giving the source and/or building instructions/configurations is also a tactic of Red^H^H^H IBM. Remember: If you merge a company with IBM, you get IBM.
> your comment honestly just sounds like you dislike closed-source software.
Insisting about something when I openly and honestly said it's not is not very nice. Yes, Free Software is my first choice and where my heart lives at, but I'm not malicious about closed source software. This comment is being written on a Mac, for example. If you really want to dig that, my comment history is also in the open. For the record, as I always say, I prefer Linux desktops and Mac laptops, again for ~20 years or so.
> but if Microsoft would've open sourced their OS, they would've been vulnerable to their OS being diluted into free versions or maybe even OEM-maintained versions
I'm not saying that Windows would be dead if it was open source, but we'd have versions where ads and telemetry are straight up ripped from every possible part of it. Windows 11 and 10 to a certain point feels like it's working against me. Constant nagging, no ability to use local accounts during install, suggested apps everywhere... It's not an operating system anymore. It's a software holding me hostage to its agenda with a side effect of making my computer run. Windows XP was not like that, 2000 was not like that. Even 7 was good.
> from a business sense, it makes no sense.
You can always make it sense, if you decide to do that. There's SQLite for example. It's not an OS, but its development environment is protected enough so you can't get the quality the official versions propose.
However, I'm not saying that Windows shall be open source. However, its closed source nature is weaponized towards its users. Not with hardware requirements primarily, but how it herds the user and siphons data out of the computer in the name of telemetry.
> and as for security, closed source software is harder to attack
Ha, no. A small anecdote: When WMF attack vector was introduced, WINE team had the laugh of their life because the problem seemed so stupid to pass on. The next day, WINE time released a patch, because it turned out that WINE also had the same security hole. They reverse engineered to a level that it was bug for bug compatible.
Another one, about WINE again: My friends' Linux machine got infected with a Windows virus via WINE. The virus was unable to do harm, but it was infecting any USB drive attached to that computer. So, even if we didn't have the code, WINE has reverse engineered and implemented a bug-for-bug compatible Win32 API under Linux.
Both are pre 2010 events, BTW.
Also, with the leaks we have learnt that NSA had a truckload of zero days to infiltrate Windows systems. Great for security, right?
> it'd be a lot easier to find vulnerabilities if the source was open.
This is the half truth. Finding, fixing and evading the introduction of vulnerabilities are a lot easier if the source is open. We evaded 7z incident. Do we know that there's no universal backdoor in Windows? I don't. You can't know either. I don't my computer to have a TSA-approved keyhole somewhere.
> yes, it doesn't mean it's automatically more secure, in fact it can be less so if people don't have eyes on it, but I'd say the amount of attacks is less and usually done by more sophisticated attackers
Security through obscurity never stopped anyone from infiltrating anything. With enough persistence, any system even obfuscated can be cracked, even without LLMs. People reverse engineered SMB despite Microsoft's best efforts. Then, they registered it as CIFS and open sourced it, because they had to.
Please, we have gone through this 30 years ago. These arguments doesn't hold water anymore.
> I'm surprised that (particularly non-US) regulators are not investigating them yet.
This is basically the reason Google lost their Play Store anti-trust lawsuit when Apple won theirs. Google did all these incriminating, behind closed doors deals to lock out competition from their “open ecosystem”, where Apple never pretended to be open to behind with.
Except when Steve Jobs lied saying FaceTime would be an open standard.
"FaceTime is based on a lot of open standards: H.264 video, AAC audio, and a bunch of alphabet-soup acronyms. And we’re going to take it all away. We’re going to the standards bodies, starting tomorrow, and we’re going to make FaceTime an open industry standard."
- Steve Jobs at Apple’s WWDC 2010 keynote (emphasis mine)
The EU never sanctionned Microsoft for monopoly. They received $2bn fines in 2005 for lack of transparency on the documentation for drivers, if I remember, then a little extra for paperwork. Then Microsoft complied mostly at the last minute before being fined (even for the 6-months disappearance of the Browser Choice Dialog, it only cost them $500m).
But never, never has the EU sanctionned Microsoft for signing OEM deals that prevent companies from installing other OS than Windows.
Right. The EU still seems successful in shaping (foreign) tech to some extent. Handing out huge fines is maybe less important than effecting change. Though it would of course be good if other national/transnational regulators would join in and take care of some of these topics. Imagine for example if Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia and New Zealand teamed up. Together they might be able to accomplish something.
> My guess is that the workaround is that Motorola sells them with Google-certified Android.
Was this ever the deal with Moto? They announced something recently, but it didn't read like Moto would be distributing devices with preinstalled GOS. Just that it would be able to run GOS.
Unless they've recently changed the deal, they'll be selling GOS out of the box. That was the announcement two or so years ago, and so far as I know nothing had changed.
One obvious challenge with the distribution is: would you want to buy a phone with pre-installed GrapheneOS?
This seems similar to wanting to follow the advice of "only buy bottled water on your trip to India", but the bottle you're buying has the cap removed so they could put a straw in it for your convenience.
GrapheneOS has attempted to cover this, it comes with an Auditor app that can be used from another Android device to check for tampering.
> The Auditor app uses hardware-based security features to validate the identity of a device, along with the authenticity and integrity of the operating system. It ensures the device is running a verified operating system with a locked bootloader and that no tampering has occurred." [0]
I assume that it would be quickly discovered if Motorola were tampering with phones en masse.
EU is hell bent on locking "your" devices down as much as possible so they can shove their big brother spyware down your throat under the guise of "protecting the kids" [1]. They are building tons of EU and national level apps where strong Play Integrity is required [2] and will pair these up with the need to prove your identity to "make sure you are an adult" everywhere on the internet [3]. At least one EU country, Spain, has already begun to profile people based on whether they may be running phone OSes other than Google blessed ones [4]
Speaking of 'EU' as a single entity seems a bit like a deep state conspiracy theory. Yes l, there is lobbying around CSAM scanning, security agency, banking industry and media networks, that all work against open source and security by design. Still there is also other movements and I don't think anticompetition has the same agenda. But in the end it is politics: there needs to be enough people to care about something. For anticompetition to be active I think the problem is rather there is no European market to protect. And particularly graphene (I will get downvotes for this) is not really good in joining forces with other European businesses in this space. Activism is important, but for lobbying you need to escape the niche.
The EU bureaucracy IS a single entity controlled by the EU Commission President, currently Ms. von der Leyen. Speaking of it as a single entity is definitely not a conspiracy theory as anyone can read how the EU works and see how the only democratic component of the EU, the Parliament, is an absolutely powerless body. Basically, the Commission can get what it wants every time.
How? Even in the case a majority of MEPs have different views to the Commission, it does not matter because only the Commission can initiate legislation. On the off chance the Commission does not get what it wants from the Parliament they can just ask the Council to send the same proposal to the Parliament as an 'emergency' procedure that has to be rejected by a minimum of 361 MEPs even if 50%+1 of the MEPs in attendance vote against. That's how Chat Control 1 was resurrected after it was voted down by a majority of MEPs. 331 MEPs voted against it vs 301 for, and it still passed due to the 361 rule. Which is why lobbying anyone except the Commission is pointless. You can do that even in China - people lobby the CCP there too, nobody claims this is democratic.
So, no conspiracy is needed, this is the EU functioning exactly as designed.
I am working with different EU DGs in a very different context and I can assure you first hand that it would be rather nice in many cases if that would be true in general.
They probably know already, it's not the first time it happens. See the illegal pressure Google has made against OEM after CyanogenMod wanted to go commercial.
Google was found guilty by the EU antitrust investigation and payed a 4 billions euros fine (and Google has changed nothing since then, they only increased the pressure).
GrapheneOS is especially annoying for them as it destroys their blanket excuse that it's ""for security""
> But this is really end-90s/begin-00s Microsoft levels of anti-competitiveness. I'm surprised that (particularly non-US) regulators are not investigating them yet.
You mean like the Skyhook vs Google 2014 lawsuit? (look it up) Settled before it could go any further.
> I'm surprised that (particularly non-US) regulators are not investigating them yet.
Simple reason, they're afraid of Trump bullying them into submission, just look at the oil/diesel stockpile release drama.
The US has never been shy about its politicians up to and including the President being an extended arm of the large US corporations - but Trump takes that x1000.
To be That Guy, Apple is not allowing anyone anywhere to sell any devices with anything but MacOS/iOS.
Apple doesn't allow Apple selling Apple devices with other operating systems.
Google doesn't allow other OEMs selling the OEMs' devices with other operating systems.
Big difference.
(Yes, pedantics: I know that OEMs could sell devices with other OSes, but not being able to sell GMS Android devices would lose them most of their customers.)
Not from the perspective of competition, as I see it. Like, if you want to compete with Apple by using part of its platform for your own stuff, you can't at all. But you can with Google, just not all of it and in all ways.
Point being: this is just another platform flame. People with one kind of phone in their pocket are outraged at the maker of the other thing.
That may well be true. But the upthread point was that this was "anti-competitive", not "word-breaking". And in an argument about competition, Android is and remains by far (!) the most accessible platform. The restriction here is just that you can't get a license for Google's proprietary stuff if you also sell GrapheneOS, not even that you can't run GrapheneOS.
Google was already found guilty of antitrust, in part because they tried to contractually prevent device manufacturers from building devices to run forks of Android (like Amazon's Fire OS) if they also made devices for an OEM who used Google's Android.
> Alphabet's Google on Thursday lost its long-running fight against a record [€4.1 Billion] EU antitrust fine for using its Android mobile operating system to block rivals
If you say something about it you are accused to be a communist because you are against free market, from people that doesn't even know what the term free market means (yes, we need rules to make the market truly free, deregulation is not the way).
A free market is like an OS without memory protection. Every process can scratch in memory everywhere they want. Some may like it, but for most people it's just terrible.
That's a deregulated market. A free market is more like an android phone (minus developer ID verification) where everyone gets a space, you can do what you want in your space, you can't intrude on others' spaces without consent, and the market is formed and boundaries are enforced by some higher power who is not part of the market and is out of reach of all market participants.
Or, you know, any actual market. Where I can sell whatever I want from my stall but I can't sabotage other people's stalls.
> Or, you know, any actual market. Where I can sell whatever I want from my stall but I can't sabotage other people's stalls.
Oh, if you sell in your stall oranges at 10c box, with plenty of stock, you will sabotage the other stall selling fruit. And you can do that because your actual business is another one.
The Pixel 11 is the first Pixel phone to be released after the RAMpocolypse. It has made a lot of compromises in the name of lowering cost. I am definitely going to skip that generation. I tend to upgrade every 3 years, but there really isn't a big driver to do so right now. My Pixel 8 is holding up great. If I broke it and needed to buy a new phone today, I'd probably get a used Pixel 10 instead of a new 11.
I tend to "upgrade" to the previous release, I always got them as their stocks dwindle and their prices are low. Did this with the last nexus, pixel 6, 7, and now I got a pixel 9 from work so the pattern is broken.
Just be careful with the 8 because their motherboards tend to randomly fry themselves - both me and a friend had this happen around 2 years into owning ours and there are a decent number of people online with the same issue. Switched to the 10a on sale right before the price hike and man I'm glad I did. It'll probably be the last great Pixel if hardware costs keep getting worse and Google keeps shoving Gemini down everyone's throats.
I fried my 8 pro wifi but I attributed it to listening to it inside my shower where it would get the full force of steam damage. So at least on my part I can admit that was a mistake.
I had this happen twice with pixel 5a's as well. Older, but just to say I'm not sure this is limited to the 8 line. One of them literally just died in my hand and was unfixable.
If you're worried about things like this you should probably switch to a physical sim and just earmark some money so you can buy a new phone when it happens and transfer the sim. Maybe get some yubikeys while you're at it.
Anything complex enough to get over the air updates could lose its trustworthiness at any time. If a device is going to contain your digital soul, it should be simple and pluggable.
I use an eSim adaptor in my physical sim slot. You can then transfer eSims effortlessly between phones. This seems the obvious solution to get the best of both worlds - all the good things about eSims, none of the bad.
Definitely a good idea to plan on this at all times. In my case this looks like:
* All photos auto upload to Google photos
* All other important files are in a syncthing folder with at least two other devices (laptop+desktop)
* 2fa in Authy with cloud-sync
* Passwords on Firefox sync
* Google Fi is my carrier, and pulls eSIM when I log in to the app even without my old phone
* Google voice number is my main phone number. I don't lose access to incoming or outgoing sms or voice calls if I lose my phone.
In a pinch, I can buy a cheap prepaid phone and sim while traveling and be fully functional and reachable. I've had to do this before, and while I probably wouldn't go to the trouble for work, I feel compelled to be at least reachable for family.
I've thought about de-googling this further; photos could go straight into syncthing and I could port my # to a generic SIP provider that offers SMS. So far neither have seemed quite worth the trouble.
I've always felt very uncomfortable treating my phone as anything other than a rather overpowered thin-client.
I recommend you get off Authy - they don't have a browser extension or a desktop client, and surprise they don't have a way to export your codes either. I had to send them a GDPR data request, and then Claude decrypted the csv file they sent. I now use Ente and it's so nice having 2fa inside a browser extension. I can also export the secrets at will.
Yes but I don't want my phone to be lost or destroyed or stolen. So using a phone that will likely fail until it does so is not taking preventative measures.
I had an 8 Pro and it had a fantastic run, and it was probably the best phone I ever had until I upgraded to the 10 Pro.
Sadly I never, ever put the 8 Pro in any case or protective shell, and the damage of repeated minor drops took its toll. The screen was just cracked a tiny bit around the corners, but eventually the upper-right corner began a creeping black amoeba of darkness, and finally the entire touchscreen became unreliable, I suppose due to that damage, so I decided to bail out. Repairs were exorbitant so I decided to take Google's own trade-in deal.
I have Pixel 9a and considered Pixel 10 for a while, but seeing Pixel 11 show up with absurdly microscopic improvements over 10 made me realize, that this smartphone line is just a solved problem since years ago.
I know it's not really an argument, but I tend to change my devices also every 2-3 years, just so I can pass the "old" one to my less technical family.
I hear people say things like this about phones, laptops and cars, but anecdotally I have never once seen any sort of trade-in offer, and only rarely and arguably on any kind of lease or lease-to-buy arrangement, where I would consider that even remotely true.
Same thing here, I will keep my 10a for the foreseeable figure. It's unclear if future Pixels will support GOS at all, and the new Motorola is almost certainly going to be a $1000+ phone. Hopefully mid-range models will follow. I don't need a huge, expensive phone with five cameras.
To be fair, the trade in offers are larger this year than during P10 release window, at least where I live. So I was able to go from 10 Pro 16/256 to 11P 16/512 for something like 650 eur. It's a great deal IMHO as the SoC + modem combo is at least 30 to 40% more efficient. The phone runs faster, cooler and I don't have the battery anxiety that I got after 10 Pro.
I used the OP15 in the meantime and its ram management and (ironically enough) performance in day to day apps was somehow much worse. It unloaded apps, skipped notifications, apps took longer to open. Google have put in a lot of work into software ahead of the rampocalipse.
I'm not wanting to dispute or tell somebody what to spend their money on. I see this take a lot on reddit especially.
You bought arguably the same phone with marginal gains to CPU score and a little better battery. Paying €650 for that privaledge doesn't seem like a great deal to me...
Huh, good point. I wonder if this is the beginning of the end of constant phone upgrades. It used to be that new phones had much better hardware, so software that was only tested on new phones would make an older phone grind to a halt. But if the upgrades are much more incremental, perhaps a phone will last a lot longer?
The people who I knew that upgraded every 2 years stopped doing that nearly ten years ago now. Smartphones barely get better, why get a 49€/month contract when you can get one for 15€ instead and not have to migrate phones every two years upon contract renewal when the new phones aren't significantly better anyway?
I get new phones and computers from my company every 3 years, I don't even bother upgrading so often. The improvements aren't even worth me spending a few hours to set up and migrate data.
It's an emotional discussion about Google not supporting MTE on Pixel 11 (old news of August, GrapheneOS had to roll back that statement in September [0]).
Now the question is whether MTE will be enabled by Google as part of a future OS-upgrade, to which there is no definite answer AFAIK
Why are we dependent on Google to enable MTE on the OS-side? If it's a hardware feature, why couldn't GrapheneOS enable it in GrapheneOS even if Google's OS wouldn't enable it?
> It still has at least bare minimum support for MTE at a hardware level. We think they removed most of the hardware acceleration from the CPU cache to save money. They ruined the performance so it ended up being fully disabled in firmware. It may still be usable.
MTE support in itself says nothing as vendors usually obscure implementation details and also MTE is a perfect place to implant undocumented backdoors for security services to use.
This reads like “your front door lock is the perfect place for security services to have a master key.” True, but not strong as an argument against having a lock.
>This reads like “your front door lock is the perfect place for security services to have a master key
Even that analogy fails because MTE is in addition to existing countermeasures against memory corruption attacks. In the worst case, compromising MTE just means you don't have MTE, not that you get arbitrary code execution.
>It appears Google cut an important security feature to save money.
If you're doing comms for a serious project, it's probably best not to speculate on the justification of an internal decision at a different org, even if you're reasonably sure.
>For example, non-Samsung Android OEMs aren't allowed to directly sell devices with GrapheneOS and Google will only permit it within a quota. It can and is being worked around and there will be devices sold with GrapheneOS as the stock OS without Google restricting how many can be sold.
I think at this point is too late for complicity, they are actively fighting against GrapheneOS anyway. You either fight back, or wait until you loose all the leverage
Because? The obvious implication is you're saying Google will abuse their monopoly to hurt you if you upset them. Is that what you're implying? Or is it user trust, or something else you think is improved by avoiding such speculation?
It entirely depends on the strategy you try to implement through your communication.
That is generally true: prior to any professional communication you have a goal, assumptions, messaging, etc. Why would you produce communication at all, if you had not?
Marketing people often think there is a cookie-cutter rulebook you should follow, but there is not.
We are living in the "the bird is freed" and "nice genes" era of corporate communication.
Innuendo about how large organizations make decisions, issued by people who have never had a job, are de rigueur for open source activists and catnip for HN.
Not surprised, since it wasn't used in Android to begin with they probably thought nobody will notice if it's removed. And indeed, for the vast majority of people nobody will notice.
The field is certainly moving in the opposite direction. Apple has their own extension of MTE (MIE) and uses it in the kernel and a bunch of system processor. Samsung has had MTE support in flagship Exynos for some years now and they started experimenting with MTE in the OneUI 9 betas (not sure what the MTE status in the final release is).
MTE requires several things to work well. Notably there is some missing hardware believed to be necessary for MTE to be performant on the pixel 11.
In terms of mitigation of UAF, a great deal of new code written for Android userspace these days is in memory safe languages such as rust. Also, a lot of testing with instrumented code sanitizers is still done before release. We don't know how much risk MTE actually mitigates.
The discussion in the post is on-going. Two days ago they posted that they will not support Pixel 11 unless Google adds MTE support in a future update. That may happen in an upcoming December update, but it is just a rumor.
Serious question about phone security: do phone application operating systems do anything to protect against the device's real-time OS from being able to access RAM/Disk that's being used by the application OS? Because if that cannot be controlled security at the application OS level is meaningless.
Security isn't just an absolute, it's also a multi-faceted series of defense-in-depth measures.
Can you get arbitrary code execution on the RTOS from another app? No? Then adding layers to protect apps from each other is meaningful.
What you're saying isn't too far from "Well, if the attacker has physical access they can just freeze and decap the memory to read all secrets, so like there's no point in even hashing passwords or fixing XSS"
>do phone application operating systems do anything to protect against the device's real-time OS from being able to access RAM/Disk that's being used by the application OS? Because if that cannot be controlled security at the application OS level is meaningless.
If you're talking about the baseband, AFAIK it's already isolated on both iPhones and pixels. Not sure about other androids.
There are several peripherals running their own OS. Those have their access to RAM limited by an iommu and they have no direct access to the primary storage (they may have some local ROM storage for firmware). If you're asking about the other OS that runs on the application processor such as the bootloaders, trusted firmware, trusted os, etc, then no, those have a superset of access to what the primary OS running on those cores have access to. This is by design.
What's meant by "your device's real-time OS"? Heard several variations of this questioning recently and it seems more like FUD than anything else. I presume it's a telephone game away from the fact that some modem processors have DMA access and WAN-side exploits?
Yes, at least Pixels and Apple devices do (the Titan/T security chips handle disk encryption and communication and are behind IOMMU which disallows direct acces from things like modems).
My pixel 7 is starting to get long in the tooth, I know I'll run it into the ground but I'm starting to wonder where I'll go for the next one now that Google is increasingly locking down their platform.
Motorola Signature 27, since that seems to be the phone that is going to support GrapheneOS? I have a P10P, but I'm very excited that they are working with a manufacturer that actually supports them. I'll most likely buy the Signature 27 at some point, just to vote with my wallet (even if the P10P) is still fine.
> GrapheneOS would have much more adoption if they weren't so Google-obsessed.
The GrapheneOS project would have lots of other devices to choose from (or any) if everyone making hardware (besides Google) weren’t so obsessed with selling cheap, insecure trash.
You don’t know what you’re talking about.
If you ever do: you’re free to build the project from source for whatever generic device - but will gain only small details over vanilla AOSP without proper hardware to make use of.
English version:
Yes, please buy the low volume phone from a 5% market share manufacturer.
Someone high up got tired of having to pull over every pixel user at the border.
With the new Motorola, TSA lines are going to move faster than ever!
If you care about privacy, stay away from the moto release and stick with pixel.
For reference Pixels have about 1% market share, the graphene phones will be the same hardware as normal moto flagships and 99% of TSA agents won't be able to differentiate motorola models
Moreover motorola flagships (ie. the only model that support grapheneos for now) are likely a fraction of the market share of motorola as a whole, so OP is still correct in that motorola grapheneos phones are more identifiable.
>the graphene phones will be the same hardware as normal moto flagships and 99% of TSA agents won't be able to differentiate motorola models
That argument could be used for pixels as well, which are also just generic black rectangles, especially the "a" models that lack the distinctive camera bump. Also if DHS/ICE really wanted to, they could avoid this problem altogether by requiring travelers to self-declare what phone they have. Sure, you can lie, but then you committed a federal offense by lying on immigration paperwork.
As others have said, this is not the most recent status update (it depends on future Google changes in QPR1 or QPR2).
The much more interesting recent news IMO is that Google is not allowing (non-Samsung) OEMs to sell devices with GrapheneOS:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49946698
See the last paragraph.
For example, non-Samsung Android OEMs aren't allowed to directly sell devices with GrapheneOS and Google will only permit it within a quota. It can and is being worked around and there will be devices sold with GrapheneOS as the stock OS without Google restricting how many can be sold.
My guess is that the workaround is that Motorola sells them with Google-certified Android. A third-party (non-OEM) buys them in bulk and preinstalls GrapheneOS.
But this is really end-90s/begin-00s Microsoft levels of anti-competitiveness. I'm surprised that (particularly non-US) regulators are not investigating them yet.
> But this is really end-90s/begin-00s Microsoft levels of anti-competitiveness. I'm surprised that (particularly non-US) regulators are not investigating them yet.
Every company is nice until the monies they earn is not guaranteed anymore. They were closing the doors they have intentionally left open in the name of security for a couple of generations.
Now they're being more open about why they are limiting user choice. Because like Chrom(e/ium), Android is designed to be a large data sink for Google to feed The Machine.
"Because like Chrom(e/ium), Android is designed to be a large data sink for Google to feed The Machine."
Also maintaining the monopoly over the app market and getting a good cut out of every transaction within. A non google controlled device in the mass market can introduce new markets independent of google (and not paying them).
They would not like that.
Apple did the same thing. In the early days of OSX much of Darwin was open-sourced. Now, not so much.
It's all about that sweet backdoor. With Google and Samsung the NSA can just waltz in and out of your phone no matter which OS is running. But if some Chinese OEM decides that Unisoc chip & baseband would be the best choice for your GrapheneOS device the NSA will be quite unhappy.
I'm honestly a little surprised we haven't seen a Chinese OEM use grapheneOS or their own fork of it.
Graphene is a privacy focussed rom. In China there is not such a concept as privacy. In fact, it might be illegal to be distributing this, even for export.
> The much more interesting recent news IMO is that Google is not allowing (non-Samsung) OEMs to sell devices with GrapheneOS:
how is that legal??
that sounds like a very clean cut case of thinks companies aren't allowed to do under fair market lawes
Yeah, I don't understand this, graphene is FOSS and unaffiliated with google so if you as an oem install grapheneos on hardware you manufactured how does Google have any say at all?
Because Google will cut you off from access to the privileged Android access to Play Store, Services and everything else. So it’s basically all or nothing.
Corporations learned they have to get in bed with regulators first, and how to do it.
I saw an interview with Bill Gates once where he said that one thing he would've done differently is more quickly come around to the idea of sending people to Washington. Apparently he didn't like the idea of lobbying and that cost them when the regulators started coming for them
Source: https://www.politico.com/story/2011/04/how-microsoft-learned...
Wow, then there we go: don't hate the player, hate the game. You're telling me even Bill Gates wasn't evil until the system forced him to either become evil or get shut down.
No, he just say he's inexperienced.
Bill Gates published that infamous open letter about copying software, and both Bill Gates and Brad Smith said that Microsoft's core pillar is IP: "Microsoft is built upon the idea of having IP and protecting and using it" (paraphrased by me).
The quotes I can find by digging the net:
> Microsoft was founded on the premise that software is valuable intellectual property that people should pay for. --Bill Gates
> Microsoft was founded on intellectual property. Intellectual property is the foundation of our business. --Brad Smith (This is the quote I remember in the first place)
So, Microsoft never wanted to be an open company. They were the epitome of the closed source, behemoth software company, where you get the goods, get to use it, and pay them for the privilege.
Closed source software is a reality, not an explicit evil. It is the same reason I don't have schematics for my bedframe. I've worked at software companies - have you? - it takes extra effort to release source code, causes a lot of risk, and provides absolutely no benefit whatsoever so it is simply irrational to do it.
Reality vs explicit evil is a false dichotomy.
Microsoft doesn't just choose not to release source code; they send takedown notices to projects that redistribute Microsoft's proprietary software (e.g. Ninjutsu OS). They also put clauses in the EULA for Windows to disallow reverse engineering and certain kinds of remote access (something related to if you change who has access too frequently).
Microsoft takes extra effort to prevent people from sharing or modifying Microsoft software, in order to make more money.
Yes, some of those parts are evil. The mere lack of releasing source code, or being frustrated people are using your product without paying, itself isn't.
I agree, I think.
I may have been too focused on the "false dichotomy" part and forgotten that you were talking about old Microsoft and not current Microsoft. I don't know enough about old Microsoft to say whether they were "evil" all along, so I won't comment on that part. I do agree with "don't hate the player, hate the game" in general though.
Closed source was perfectly acceptable when planned obsolescence and government mandated kill switches/backdoors weren't a thing.
I'm not an opponent/critic of closed source software or enemy of it. I pay for quite a few high quality closed source software packages, and I like them as much as the Free Software counterparts which I use every day.
I also understand that we need to eat and have bills to pay, and there are many ways to achieve that, incl. Free or Closed Source software.
What I'm against is weaponization of closed source software beyond reasonable point. To EEE, to deprecate otherwise capable and functional hardware in the market, to limit user freedom or to extort money.
I hope I made my point clear.
Furthermore:
> I've worked at software companies - have you?
I didn't work at a software company per se, yet I develop open source software for the projects we work on, and I know what preparing a codebase for publishing entails. I also worked as a tech-lead of a Linux distribution, and a nation-wide one at that. I know what it entails, trust me.
If we're talking about experience in terms of years, I'm doing this for ~20 years, using Linux for ~25 years, and using computers in a level I understand what programming them entails for ~30 years.
So yeah, I'm not that newbie who have seen some Python and tied themselves to a knot of awe.
> causes a lot of risk,
Don't let's get into FUD territory of "Free Software is insecure", shall we? We see how Windows has been breached yesterday and today, and will see it more for years to come, as with other software.
> and provides absolutely no benefit whatsoever so it is simply irrational to do it.
Hmm, I'll agree to disagree here because 90% of the thing your digital stack is living on is Open Source and Free Software.
I don't have time to flesh out the benefit and irrationality aspect of it, because I mean, it's plainly wrong when it's put that squarely. We can find some nuances maybe, but it's limited to certain scenarios.
by weaponization you mean Win 11 requiring specific hardware etc?
your comment honestly just sounds like you dislike closed-source software.
for most commercial software projects, releasing the source provides no tangible benefit, aside from people like HNers being happy
but if Microsoft would've open sourced their OS, they would've been vulnerable to their OS being diluted into free versions or maybe even OEM-maintained versions
from a business sense, it makes no sense.
and as for security, closed source software is harder to attack (and was a lot harder to attack before LLMs). like, there's still much that we don't know about Windows internals exactly, and even those who do are a very small group of people.
it'd be a lot easier to find vulnerabilities if the source was open.
yes, it doesn't mean it's automatically more secure, in fact it can be less so if people don't have eyes on it, but I'd say the amount of attacks is less and usually done by more sophisticated attackers
Weaponization of closed source software could take many forms and is just part of the general weaponization of market mechanisms that businesses do.
Right now it doesn't really affect me that Ableton Live is closed-source. But it would affect me if the main method of sharing music on the internet was Ableton Live project files. And if Ableton had cultivated that situation on purpose they would be weaponizing the closedness of their software.
If we're talking about weaponization, then for sake of completeness let's remember that weaponization of open source is a very powerful business strategy that's been frequently used in the past 20 years, whether to market software, acquire free work, or as direct move, to try and destroy a market some competitor works on.
Some business models - like OSS, and free-with-ads - are like dimension-folding weapons from Dark Forest trilogy: once deployed, there is no stopping them, they just permanently drop a degree of freedom from the universe, inside a shell expanding at the speed of light.
> by weaponization you mean Win 11 requiring specific hardware etc?
I can understand specific hardware and/or CPU generation requirements up to a certain point. Because CPU generations bring more than new instructions and performance, but I don't understand why Windows Team or Microsoft doesn't use function multi versioning to allow more systems to use up to date versions of Windows for longer time.
On the other hand, using closed file format related documentation as reference in a supposedly open format's specifications and trying to short-circuit ISO to push their seemingly open but ultimately closed document formats as standard or using Embrace, Extend, Extinguish tactics to kill competing products, or inserting code which makes their applications crash in competitors' operating systems is straight up malice.
...and we have Halloween documents which are openly(!) trying to make Linux non-functional on PC hardware, so there's that.
I'll note that these stuff can be also weaponized in Free / Open Source software. Pulling hardware baseline higher, deprecating drivers, and not giving good enough errors to make the problems obvious while not giving the source and/or building instructions/configurations is also a tactic of Red^H^H^H IBM. Remember: If you merge a company with IBM, you get IBM.
> your comment honestly just sounds like you dislike closed-source software.
Insisting about something when I openly and honestly said it's not is not very nice. Yes, Free Software is my first choice and where my heart lives at, but I'm not malicious about closed source software. This comment is being written on a Mac, for example. If you really want to dig that, my comment history is also in the open. For the record, as I always say, I prefer Linux desktops and Mac laptops, again for ~20 years or so.
> but if Microsoft would've open sourced their OS, they would've been vulnerable to their OS being diluted into free versions or maybe even OEM-maintained versions
I'm not saying that Windows would be dead if it was open source, but we'd have versions where ads and telemetry are straight up ripped from every possible part of it. Windows 11 and 10 to a certain point feels like it's working against me. Constant nagging, no ability to use local accounts during install, suggested apps everywhere... It's not an operating system anymore. It's a software holding me hostage to its agenda with a side effect of making my computer run. Windows XP was not like that, 2000 was not like that. Even 7 was good.
> from a business sense, it makes no sense.
You can always make it sense, if you decide to do that. There's SQLite for example. It's not an OS, but its development environment is protected enough so you can't get the quality the official versions propose.
However, I'm not saying that Windows shall be open source. However, its closed source nature is weaponized towards its users. Not with hardware requirements primarily, but how it herds the user and siphons data out of the computer in the name of telemetry.
> and as for security, closed source software is harder to attack
Ha, no. A small anecdote: When WMF attack vector was introduced, WINE team had the laugh of their life because the problem seemed so stupid to pass on. The next day, WINE time released a patch, because it turned out that WINE also had the same security hole. They reverse engineered to a level that it was bug for bug compatible.
Another one, about WINE again: My friends' Linux machine got infected with a Windows virus via WINE. The virus was unable to do harm, but it was infecting any USB drive attached to that computer. So, even if we didn't have the code, WINE has reverse engineered and implemented a bug-for-bug compatible Win32 API under Linux.
Both are pre 2010 events, BTW.
Also, with the leaks we have learnt that NSA had a truckload of zero days to infiltrate Windows systems. Great for security, right?
> it'd be a lot easier to find vulnerabilities if the source was open.
This is the half truth. Finding, fixing and evading the introduction of vulnerabilities are a lot easier if the source is open. We evaded 7z incident. Do we know that there's no universal backdoor in Windows? I don't. You can't know either. I don't my computer to have a TSA-approved keyhole somewhere.
> yes, it doesn't mean it's automatically more secure, in fact it can be less so if people don't have eyes on it, but I'd say the amount of attacks is less and usually done by more sophisticated attackers
Security through obscurity never stopped anyone from infiltrating anything. With enough persistence, any system even obfuscated can be cracked, even without LLMs. People reverse engineered SMB despite Microsoft's best efforts. Then, they registered it as CIFS and open sourced it, because they had to.
Please, we have gone through this 30 years ago. These arguments doesn't hold water anymore.
Poor innocent early 00s Microsoft corrupted by the system.
The thing being described would have been in the 1980s.
Well, one aspect of evil anyhow.
> even Bill Gates
Not a big news person?
How can you say someone visiting Epstein island is not evil?
> I'm surprised that (particularly non-US) regulators are not investigating them yet.
This is basically the reason Google lost their Play Store anti-trust lawsuit when Apple won theirs. Google did all these incriminating, behind closed doors deals to lock out competition from their “open ecosystem”, where Apple never pretended to be open to behind with.
> Apple never pretended to be open
Except when Steve Jobs lied saying FaceTime would be an open standard.
"FaceTime is based on a lot of open standards: H.264 video, AAC audio, and a bunch of alphabet-soup acronyms. And we’re going to take it all away. We’re going to the standards bodies, starting tomorrow, and we’re going to make FaceTime an open industry standard." - Steve Jobs at Apple’s WWDC 2010 keynote (emphasis mine)
It takes EU regulators like half a decade or so to make up their minds on each issue.
The EU never sanctionned Microsoft for monopoly. They received $2bn fines in 2005 for lack of transparency on the documentation for drivers, if I remember, then a little extra for paperwork. Then Microsoft complied mostly at the last minute before being fined (even for the 6-months disappearance of the Browser Choice Dialog, it only cost them $500m).
But never, never has the EU sanctionned Microsoft for signing OEM deals that prevent companies from installing other OS than Windows.
Right. The EU still seems successful in shaping (foreign) tech to some extent. Handing out huge fines is maybe less important than effecting change. Though it would of course be good if other national/transnational regulators would join in and take care of some of these topics. Imagine for example if Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia and New Zealand teamed up. Together they might be able to accomplish something.
> My guess is that the workaround is that Motorola sells them with Google-certified Android.
Was this ever the deal with Moto? They announced something recently, but it didn't read like Moto would be distributing devices with preinstalled GOS. Just that it would be able to run GOS.
Unless they've recently changed the deal, they'll be selling GOS out of the box. That was the announcement two or so years ago, and so far as I know nothing had changed.
One obvious challenge with the distribution is: would you want to buy a phone with pre-installed GrapheneOS?
This seems similar to wanting to follow the advice of "only buy bottled water on your trip to India", but the bottle you're buying has the cap removed so they could put a straw in it for your convenience.
GrapheneOS has attempted to cover this, it comes with an Auditor app that can be used from another Android device to check for tampering.
> The Auditor app uses hardware-based security features to validate the identity of a device, along with the authenticity and integrity of the operating system. It ensures the device is running a verified operating system with a locked bootloader and that no tampering has occurred." [0]
I assume that it would be quickly discovered if Motorola were tampering with phones en masse.
[0] https://attestation.app/about
Motorola is at 5% of the world's market share. They fell really deep.
You can always notify the EC anti competition whatsdpg through their wistleblower portal:)
EU is hell bent on locking "your" devices down as much as possible so they can shove their big brother spyware down your throat under the guise of "protecting the kids" [1]. They are building tons of EU and national level apps where strong Play Integrity is required [2] and will pair these up with the need to prove your identity to "make sure you are an adult" everywhere on the internet [3]. At least one EU country, Spain, has already begun to profile people based on whether they may be running phone OSes other than Google blessed ones [4]
[1] https://fightchatcontrol.eu/chat-control-overview
[2] https://waag.org/en/article/european-digital-id-wallets-are-...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU_Kids_Act
[4] https://www.androidauthority.com/why-i-use-grapheneos-on-pix...
Speaking of 'EU' as a single entity seems a bit like a deep state conspiracy theory. Yes l, there is lobbying around CSAM scanning, security agency, banking industry and media networks, that all work against open source and security by design. Still there is also other movements and I don't think anticompetition has the same agenda. But in the end it is politics: there needs to be enough people to care about something. For anticompetition to be active I think the problem is rather there is no European market to protect. And particularly graphene (I will get downvotes for this) is not really good in joining forces with other European businesses in this space. Activism is important, but for lobbying you need to escape the niche.
The EU bureaucracy IS a single entity controlled by the EU Commission President, currently Ms. von der Leyen. Speaking of it as a single entity is definitely not a conspiracy theory as anyone can read how the EU works and see how the only democratic component of the EU, the Parliament, is an absolutely powerless body. Basically, the Commission can get what it wants every time.
How? Even in the case a majority of MEPs have different views to the Commission, it does not matter because only the Commission can initiate legislation. On the off chance the Commission does not get what it wants from the Parliament they can just ask the Council to send the same proposal to the Parliament as an 'emergency' procedure that has to be rejected by a minimum of 361 MEPs even if 50%+1 of the MEPs in attendance vote against. That's how Chat Control 1 was resurrected after it was voted down by a majority of MEPs. 331 MEPs voted against it vs 301 for, and it still passed due to the 361 rule. Which is why lobbying anyone except the Commission is pointless. You can do that even in China - people lobby the CCP there too, nobody claims this is democratic.
So, no conspiracy is needed, this is the EU functioning exactly as designed.
I am working with different EU DGs in a very different context and I can assure you first hand that it would be rather nice in many cases if that would be true in general.
with how EC has been behaving recently that might make things worse..
They probably know already, it's not the first time it happens. See the illegal pressure Google has made against OEM after CyanogenMod wanted to go commercial.
Google was found guilty by the EU antitrust investigation and payed a 4 billions euros fine (and Google has changed nothing since then, they only increased the pressure).
GrapheneOS is especially annoying for them as it destroys their blanket excuse that it's ""for security""
> But this is really end-90s/begin-00s Microsoft levels of anti-competitiveness. I'm surprised that (particularly non-US) regulators are not investigating them yet.
You mean like the Skyhook vs Google 2014 lawsuit? (look it up) Settled before it could go any further.
Also reminiscent of iirc Intel's choke hold on companies like Dell that froze out AMD
> I'm surprised that (particularly non-US) regulators are not investigating them yet.
Because corporate managed phones are required for all the id crap governance franchises intend to foist on people.
> I'm surprised that (particularly non-US) regulators are not investigating them yet.
Simple reason, they're afraid of Trump bullying them into submission, just look at the oil/diesel stockpile release drama.
The US has never been shy about its politicians up to and including the President being an extended arm of the large US corporations - but Trump takes that x1000.
This is where governments should slam them with regulations.
Absolute anti-competitive behavior. "Android is open, but not really"
> The much more interesting recent news IMO is that Google is not allowing (non-Samsung) OEMs to sell devices with GrapheneOS:
To be That Guy, Apple is not allowing anyone anywhere to sell any devices with anything but MacOS/iOS.
> But this is really end-90s/begin-00s Microsoft levels of anti-competitiveness.
It's not even the most anti-competitive in the market of 2026!
To be That Guy, Apple is not allowing anyone anywhere to sell any devices with anything but MacOS/iOS.
Apple doesn't allow Apple selling Apple devices with other operating systems.
Google doesn't allow other OEMs selling the OEMs' devices with other operating systems.
Big difference.
(Yes, pedantics: I know that OEMs could sell devices with other OSes, but not being able to sell GMS Android devices would lose them most of their customers.)
> Big difference.
Not from the perspective of competition, as I see it. Like, if you want to compete with Apple by using part of its platform for your own stuff, you can't at all. But you can with Google, just not all of it and in all ways.
Point being: this is just another platform flame. People with one kind of phone in their pocket are outraged at the maker of the other thing.
iOS was never never an OS that was open to any device maker who cared to use it.
Google made the choice to announce that Android was open to all, in an attempt to take market share from Windows Phone.
Now they want to go back on their word.
That may well be true. But the upthread point was that this was "anti-competitive", not "word-breaking". And in an argument about competition, Android is and remains by far (!) the most accessible platform. The restriction here is just that you can't get a license for Google's proprietary stuff if you also sell GrapheneOS, not even that you can't run GrapheneOS.
Google was already found guilty of antitrust, in part because they tried to contractually prevent device manufacturers from building devices to run forks of Android (like Amazon's Fire OS) if they also made devices for an OEM who used Google's Android.
> Alphabet's Google on Thursday lost its long-running fight against a record [€4.1 Billion] EU antitrust fine for using its Android mobile operating system to block rivals
https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2026-07-02/goo...
Now they are trying block Motorola from pre installing a different fork of Android.
They will either back down or face another enormous fine in the EU.
If you say something about it you are accused to be a communist because you are against free market, from people that doesn't even know what the term free market means (yes, we need rules to make the market truly free, deregulation is not the way).
A free market is like an OS without memory protection. Every process can scratch in memory everywhere they want. Some may like it, but for most people it's just terrible.
That's a deregulated market. A free market is more like an android phone (minus developer ID verification) where everyone gets a space, you can do what you want in your space, you can't intrude on others' spaces without consent, and the market is formed and boundaries are enforced by some higher power who is not part of the market and is out of reach of all market participants.
Or, you know, any actual market. Where I can sell whatever I want from my stall but I can't sabotage other people's stalls.
> Or, you know, any actual market. Where I can sell whatever I want from my stall but I can't sabotage other people's stalls.
Oh, if you sell in your stall oranges at 10c box, with plenty of stock, you will sabotage the other stall selling fruit. And you can do that because your actual business is another one.
But you don't because you don't have the money to afford infinite free oranges. If you did, you wouldn't be running a fruit stall.
Yes, that's why we need regulation.
The Pixel 11 is the first Pixel phone to be released after the RAMpocolypse. It has made a lot of compromises in the name of lowering cost. I am definitely going to skip that generation. I tend to upgrade every 3 years, but there really isn't a big driver to do so right now. My Pixel 8 is holding up great. If I broke it and needed to buy a new phone today, I'd probably get a used Pixel 10 instead of a new 11.
I tend to "upgrade" to the previous release, I always got them as their stocks dwindle and their prices are low. Did this with the last nexus, pixel 6, 7, and now I got a pixel 9 from work so the pattern is broken.
Just be careful with the 8 because their motherboards tend to randomly fry themselves - both me and a friend had this happen around 2 years into owning ours and there are a decent number of people online with the same issue. Switched to the 10a on sale right before the price hike and man I'm glad I did. It'll probably be the last great Pixel if hardware costs keep getting worse and Google keeps shoving Gemini down everyone's throats.
I fried my 8 pro wifi but I attributed it to listening to it inside my shower where it would get the full force of steam damage. So at least on my part I can admit that was a mistake.
I had this happen twice with pixel 5a's as well. Older, but just to say I'm not sure this is limited to the 8 line. One of them literally just died in my hand and was unfixable.
So just use it until the motherboard dies, why switch before it dies?
Just off the dome:
- Suddenly being without a phone while you're travelling or dealing with something important is generally not fun
- Anything stored locally that isn't backed up is gone
- You can't transfer over your eSIM yourself
- Probably going to be a pain in the ass to get into accounts where the now brick was set up for 2FA
All the same applies if your phone is stolen…or lost…or seized at the airport.
Devices need to be considered disposable. Expensive but disposable.
Okay but I try to prevent any of those things from happening, unlike the suggestion to use your phone with a high rate of failure until it dies.
If you're worried about things like this you should probably switch to a physical sim and just earmark some money so you can buy a new phone when it happens and transfer the sim. Maybe get some yubikeys while you're at it.
Anything complex enough to get over the air updates could lose its trustworthiness at any time. If a device is going to contain your digital soul, it should be simple and pluggable.
I use an eSim adaptor in my physical sim slot. You can then transfer eSims effortlessly between phones. This seems the obvious solution to get the best of both worlds - all the good things about eSims, none of the bad.
I do still use a physical SIM but I'm sure we're all on borrowed time. The last 3 generations of iPhones don't have a SIM tray at all in the US.
> The last 3 generations of iPhones don't have a SIM tray at all in the US.
Another good reason not to buy an iPhone. As if there weren't enough good reasons already.
Yeah I'm sure Android manufacturers aren't gonna follow suit, just like how they all have headphone jacks still right?
Many of them do have a headphone jack, still. If you're the sort of person that wants hardware options, Android has 'em.
All of those things are possibilities with any phone. If you're not prepared for the loss/damage/failure of your phone that's on you.
Definitely a good idea to plan on this at all times. In my case this looks like:
* All photos auto upload to Google photos
* All other important files are in a syncthing folder with at least two other devices (laptop+desktop)
* 2fa in Authy with cloud-sync
* Passwords on Firefox sync
* Google Fi is my carrier, and pulls eSIM when I log in to the app even without my old phone
* Google voice number is my main phone number. I don't lose access to incoming or outgoing sms or voice calls if I lose my phone.
In a pinch, I can buy a cheap prepaid phone and sim while traveling and be fully functional and reachable. I've had to do this before, and while I probably wouldn't go to the trouble for work, I feel compelled to be at least reachable for family.
I've thought about de-googling this further; photos could go straight into syncthing and I could port my # to a generic SIP provider that offers SMS. So far neither have seemed quite worth the trouble.
I've always felt very uncomfortable treating my phone as anything other than a rather overpowered thin-client.
One flaw in that is that Google Voice or other VOIP provider numbers are often rejected for 2FA or account validation.
Sometimes, yes, but not that often IME. Maybe 10-15% of the time.
I recommend you get off Authy - they don't have a browser extension or a desktop client, and surprise they don't have a way to export your codes either. I had to send them a GDPR data request, and then Claude decrypted the csv file they sent. I now use Ente and it's so nice having 2fa inside a browser extension. I can also export the secrets at will.
They are stronger possibilities once you know they are going to happen eventually, not just that they could theoretically happen.
Yes but I don't want my phone to be lost or destroyed or stolen. So using a phone that will likely fail until it does so is not taking preventative measures.
I had an 8 Pro and it had a fantastic run, and it was probably the best phone I ever had until I upgraded to the 10 Pro.
Sadly I never, ever put the 8 Pro in any case or protective shell, and the damage of repeated minor drops took its toll. The screen was just cracked a tiny bit around the corners, but eventually the upper-right corner began a creeping black amoeba of darkness, and finally the entire touchscreen became unreliable, I suppose due to that damage, so I decided to bail out. Repairs were exorbitant so I decided to take Google's own trade-in deal.
> Just be careful with the 8
Don't forget the notorious vertical pink line issue! Luckily that had (has?) an extended warranty programme.
I have Pixel 9a and considered Pixel 10 for a while, but seeing Pixel 11 show up with absurdly microscopic improvements over 10 made me realize, that this smartphone line is just a solved problem since years ago.
Is there a point in changing a phone so often if it's not broken?
I know it's not really an argument, but I tend to change my devices also every 2-3 years, just so I can pass the "old" one to my less technical family.
Att offered such good trade in rates for my phone that it’s been effectively free to upgrade to the last two generations.
I hear people say things like this about phones, laptops and cars, but anecdotally I have never once seen any sort of trade-in offer, and only rarely and arguably on any kind of lease or lease-to-buy arrangement, where I would consider that even remotely true.
it's not free because it's priced into the phone plan (phone plan price is jacked up), unless you got grandfathered in w/ a good rate.
Plus externalities. Producing things is never "free", even if the manufacturer were a charity and, you're right, they're not
Or even Google itself. I got a 150€ trade in rebate for an iPhone 8 with a cracked screen.
Whaaa? It gives me £65 even on an iPhone 12 in good condition. £50 for an 8 Plus. Same amount for 11 Pro or 10a
£50 for the 8 Plus isn't too bad though
(€150 = £127)
Well, back then when the Pixel 7a had just come out. So comparable to an iPhone 11 now
Oh I thought you meant recently. My bad
Same thing here, I will keep my 10a for the foreseeable figure. It's unclear if future Pixels will support GOS at all, and the new Motorola is almost certainly going to be a $1000+ phone. Hopefully mid-range models will follow. I don't need a huge, expensive phone with five cameras.
To be fair, the trade in offers are larger this year than during P10 release window, at least where I live. So I was able to go from 10 Pro 16/256 to 11P 16/512 for something like 650 eur. It's a great deal IMHO as the SoC + modem combo is at least 30 to 40% more efficient. The phone runs faster, cooler and I don't have the battery anxiety that I got after 10 Pro.
I used the OP15 in the meantime and its ram management and (ironically enough) performance in day to day apps was somehow much worse. It unloaded apps, skipped notifications, apps took longer to open. Google have put in a lot of work into software ahead of the rampocalipse.
I'm not wanting to dispute or tell somebody what to spend their money on. I see this take a lot on reddit especially.
You bought arguably the same phone with marginal gains to CPU score and a little better battery. Paying €650 for that privaledge doesn't seem like a great deal to me...
Summed over all phones I've ever bought, I don't think I've spent €650.
Huh, good point. I wonder if this is the beginning of the end of constant phone upgrades. It used to be that new phones had much better hardware, so software that was only tested on new phones would make an older phone grind to a halt. But if the upgrades are much more incremental, perhaps a phone will last a lot longer?
The people who I knew that upgraded every 2 years stopped doing that nearly ten years ago now. Smartphones barely get better, why get a 49€/month contract when you can get one for 15€ instead and not have to migrate phones every two years upon contract renewal when the new phones aren't significantly better anyway?
Yeah, I've got a 10 Pro, jumped up from an 8. Looked briefly at upgrading to the 11 but it's clearly not worth it.
My Pixel 3 is still going strong! :)
I loved my 4a, but broke a couple due to water infiltration in rainy conditions. Modern phones are resistant to water which is a nice improvement.
why upgrade every 3 years when there are 7 years of updates?
I get new phones and computers from my company every 3 years, I don't even bother upgrading so often. The improvements aren't even worth me spending a few hours to set up and migrate data.
photos
The Pixel 10 Pro is even fairly cheap in many countries if you can live with 128GB storage and the base model still has 16GB RAM.
I never thought about it like that, damn.
Quite a bad signal-to-noise ratio in this link.
It's an emotional discussion about Google not supporting MTE on Pixel 11 (old news of August, GrapheneOS had to roll back that statement in September [0]).
Now the question is whether MTE will be enabled by Google as part of a future OS-upgrade, to which there is no definite answer AFAIK
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49536384
> Now the question is whether MTE will be enabled by Google as part of a future OS-upgrade, to which there is no definite answer AFAIK
Still means that currently the phone has no support for MTE.
I have bought too many things on vague promises that did not happen.
It's not there now -> it's not supported. EOL.
Why are we dependent on Google to enable MTE on the OS-side? If it's a hardware feature, why couldn't GrapheneOS enable it in GrapheneOS even if Google's OS wouldn't enable it?
> It still has at least bare minimum support for MTE at a hardware level. We think they removed most of the hardware acceleration from the CPU cache to save money. They ruined the performance so it ended up being fully disabled in firmware. It may still be usable.
MTE but slow
"We think", followed by a quite fueled accusation.
It has no MTE right now, okay. Is there any evidence on the rest?
I wonder what the comms would have been without the Motorola partnership
They would have either sucked it up and supported the 11, or shut down the GrapheneOS project completely.
The comms have been like that for years now.
MTE support in itself says nothing as vendors usually obscure implementation details and also MTE is a perfect place to implant undocumented backdoors for security services to use.
Any evidence of those backsoors?
This reads like “your front door lock is the perfect place for security services to have a master key.” True, but not strong as an argument against having a lock.
>This reads like “your front door lock is the perfect place for security services to have a master key
Even that analogy fails because MTE is in addition to existing countermeasures against memory corruption attacks. In the worst case, compromising MTE just means you don't have MTE, not that you get arbitrary code execution.
>It appears Google cut an important security feature to save money.
If you're doing comms for a serious project, it's probably best not to speculate on the justification of an internal decision at a different org, even if you're reasonably sure.
>For example, non-Samsung Android OEMs aren't allowed to directly sell devices with GrapheneOS and Google will only permit it within a quota. It can and is being worked around and there will be devices sold with GrapheneOS as the stock OS without Google restricting how many can be sold.
I think at this point is too late for complicity, they are actively fighting against GrapheneOS anyway. You either fight back, or wait until you loose all the leverage
My point isn't about fighting back vs rolling over. Just that it doesn't achieve anything to guess at why Google did a certain thing.
Edit: Maybe you replied to the wrong comment? I didn't say anything about complicity and neither did the GrapheneOS announcement in the part I quoted.
The quote is from another thread, not sure why GP didn't link their source to avoid this confusion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49946698
>best not to
Because? The obvious implication is you're saying Google will abuse their monopoly to hurt you if you upset them. Is that what you're implying? Or is it user trust, or something else you think is improved by avoiding such speculation?
I was actually just implying that it looks unprofessional. Say they cut an important security feature. Don't try to guess why.
It entirely depends on the strategy you try to implement through your communication.
That is generally true: prior to any professional communication you have a goal, assumptions, messaging, etc. Why would you produce communication at all, if you had not?
Marketing people often think there is a cookie-cutter rulebook you should follow, but there is not.
We are living in the "the bird is freed" and "nice genes" era of corporate communication.
Innuendo about how large organizations make decisions, issued by people who have never had a job, are de rigueur for open source activists and catnip for HN.
I think cutting it for saving money is the most charitable explanation you can give, the other ones would look much worse for Google.
Timeline pressure seems to me the most likely one, and that looks no worse than saving money.
How could that be when previous models have it? In terms of timeline, it seems quicker not to remove a feature than to remove and test the new changes
Not surprised, since it wasn't used in Android to begin with they probably thought nobody will notice if it's removed. And indeed, for the vast majority of people nobody will notice.
I don’t really follow Android so my memory may be wrong but didn’t Google make a big deal about this when they rolled it out?
If so, it seems odd to cut it back.
The field is certainly moving in the opposite direction. Apple has their own extension of MTE (MIE) and uses it in the kernel and a bunch of system processor. Samsung has had MTE support in flagship Exynos for some years now and they started experimenting with MTE in the OneUI 9 betas (not sure what the MTE status in the final release is).
So Arm built in MTE but Google have decided to prevent access to it at the firmware level?
Have they introduced some other mitigations, for eg UAF, to improve memory safety?
It seems possible that nixing MTE is to prevent stomping on some TLAs exploits?
MTE requires several things to work well. Notably there is some missing hardware believed to be necessary for MTE to be performant on the pixel 11.
In terms of mitigation of UAF, a great deal of new code written for Android userspace these days is in memory safe languages such as rust. Also, a lot of testing with instrumented code sanitizers is still done before release. We don't know how much risk MTE actually mitigates.
Guess I should order the 10 to replace the 9a I dropped down the stairs.
It's hard to tell, is this a new announcement?
Looks like that post was last edited August 30th. On Sept 1st they posted saying they think they found a way forward [1].
[1]: https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117194007157499435
The discussion in the post is on-going. Two days ago they posted that they will not support Pixel 11 unless Google adds MTE support in a future update. That may happen in an upcoming December update, but it is just a rumor.
[1] https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/41564-pixel-11-doesnt-yet-m...
Ah - that would have been a more helpful post for the OP to have linked.
It was posted 29 Aug
Old news
Serious question about phone security: do phone application operating systems do anything to protect against the device's real-time OS from being able to access RAM/Disk that's being used by the application OS? Because if that cannot be controlled security at the application OS level is meaningless.
Security isn't just an absolute, it's also a multi-faceted series of defense-in-depth measures.
Can you get arbitrary code execution on the RTOS from another app? No? Then adding layers to protect apps from each other is meaningful.
What you're saying isn't too far from "Well, if the attacker has physical access they can just freeze and decap the memory to read all secrets, so like there's no point in even hashing passwords or fixing XSS"
>do phone application operating systems do anything to protect against the device's real-time OS from being able to access RAM/Disk that's being used by the application OS? Because if that cannot be controlled security at the application OS level is meaningless.
If you're talking about the baseband, AFAIK it's already isolated on both iPhones and pixels. Not sure about other androids.
There are several peripherals running their own OS. Those have their access to RAM limited by an iommu and they have no direct access to the primary storage (they may have some local ROM storage for firmware). If you're asking about the other OS that runs on the application processor such as the bootloaders, trusted firmware, trusted os, etc, then no, those have a superset of access to what the primary OS running on those cores have access to. This is by design.
It's not just phones, either. All modern computers are full of non-architectural cores running all kinds of wacky stuff.
What's meant by "your device's real-time OS"? Heard several variations of this questioning recently and it seems more like FUD than anything else. I presume it's a telephone game away from the fact that some modem processors have DMA access and WAN-side exploits?
Yes, at least Pixels and Apple devices do (the Titan/T security chips handle disk encryption and communication and are behind IOMMU which disallows direct acces from things like modems).
GrapheneOS last said they should be able to support Pixel 11 along with the Motorola phones
My pixel 7 is starting to get long in the tooth, I know I'll run it into the ground but I'm starting to wonder where I'll go for the next one now that Google is increasingly locking down their platform.
Motorola Signature 27, since that seems to be the phone that is going to support GrapheneOS? I have a P10P, but I'm very excited that they are working with a manufacturer that actually supports them. I'll most likely buy the Signature 27 at some point, just to vote with my wallet (even if the P10P) is still fine.
Whatever Graphene or Lineage supports. Google doesn't even have magic power over all phone makers, let alone all ROMs.
Relying on Google hardware seems like a very bad idea. GrapheneOS would have much more adoption if they weren't so Google-obsessed.
noooooo it needs the secuureee coooproccesssorr or it is 1% easier to haaack
at least they went with something with snapdragon - the upcoming moto phone
Sorry kids, this is Hacker News,
not Lacker News.
Not tall enough, try again next year.
> GrapheneOS would have much more adoption if they weren't so Google-obsessed.
The GrapheneOS project would have lots of other devices to choose from (or any) if everyone making hardware (besides Google) weren’t so obsessed with selling cheap, insecure trash.
You don’t know what you’re talking about.
If you ever do: you’re free to build the project from source for whatever generic device - but will gain only small details over vanilla AOSP without proper hardware to make use of.
Why does the announcement focus so much on Apple when they exclusively support Android?
Yes please buy the low volume phone from a 5% market share manufacturer.
Someone high up got tired to pull over every pixel user at the border.
With the new Motorola, TSA line are going to move faster that ever!
If you care about privacy, stay away for the moto release and stick with pixel.
English version: Yes, please buy the low volume phone from a 5% market share manufacturer. Someone high up got tired of having to pull over every pixel user at the border. With the new Motorola, TSA lines are going to move faster than ever! If you care about privacy, stay away from the moto release and stick with pixel.
For reference Pixels have about 1% market share, the graphene phones will be the same hardware as normal moto flagships and 99% of TSA agents won't be able to differentiate motorola models
>For reference Pixels have about 1% market share,
You're off by a factor of 3, unless you count global market share, which includes random brands unlikely to be in the US like xiaomi or huawei.
https://counterpointresearch.com/en/insights/us-smartphone-m...
Moreover motorola flagships (ie. the only model that support grapheneos for now) are likely a fraction of the market share of motorola as a whole, so OP is still correct in that motorola grapheneos phones are more identifiable.
>the graphene phones will be the same hardware as normal moto flagships and 99% of TSA agents won't be able to differentiate motorola models
That argument could be used for pixels as well, which are also just generic black rectangles, especially the "a" models that lack the distinctive camera bump. Also if DHS/ICE really wanted to, they could avoid this problem altogether by requiring travelers to self-declare what phone they have. Sure, you can lie, but then you committed a federal offense by lying on immigration paperwork.
Go on the Motorola website, over 40 SKUs! We all know that the most expensive one is not going to be the most popular.
Every Google Pixel model per generation ends up supported.
DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE TSA.
Social hardening is a real problem.
> With the new Motorola, TSA line are going to move faster that ever!
I missed a news story. Context?
Motorola has partnership with GrapheneOS.