Hacker News: _vere

New comment by _vere in "Government agencies buy commercial data about Americans in bulk"

_vere — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 10:46:29 +0000

Netzpolitik.org actually reported on what you can do with this type of data a while ago. They tricked a databroker into getting a free sample of geolocation data, 3.6 billion datapoints. They were able to build individual movement profiles for people and link that with real identities by putting just a little bit of work in. For a government with access to stuff like palantir this would mean a full movement profile for pretty much everyone with a phone. German article about movement profiles: https://netzpolitik.org/2024/databroker-files-firma-verschle... Broader article about their research into the databroker topic: https://netzpolitik.org/2024/databroker-files-die-grosse-dat... Wired article for English speakers: https://archive.ph/DmWrw Wired frames this a little strange, around how the government is powerless to stop it and such, especially considering how they now actively admit this is in their interest.

New comment by _vere in "Motorola GrapheneOS devices will be bootloader unlockable/relockable"

_vere — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 11:05:09 +0000

It's unlikely for the Razr line to support microsd since those are foldables, and flagships like the signature line generally tend not to, but nowhere on their hardware requirements list does it say that a potentially supported device cannot have a microsd card slot, thats just wrong. There is nothing about a memory slot that would make the phone less safe inherently, they already support USB drives, internal emmc memory isnt that much more crazy than that, right? I just think its super weird to be like preemtively mad at them for an imagined aversion to supporting hardware that doesnt exist. I get that the people involved with the project can be a little prickly when you ask them for advice about stuff, but what do you expect them to do here? They support the devices they do not out of some sort of adherence to a skewed model of security, they actually genuinely need the hardware to be able to do all of the things they ask for, which currently literally only the pixel line offers. If a manufacturer like Sony who tends to do aux, microsd slots and no holepunch cameras were to adapt to their hardware standards (https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices) there would likely be an effort by people to get these supported, its not the lack of will from the devs, its the lack of support from phone manufacturers that has kept the line of supported devices constrained to pixels.

New comment by _vere in "Motorola GrapheneOS devices will be bootloader unlockable/relockable"

_vere — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 09:16:56 +0000

They said on Twitter that future devices in the Razr (foldable) and signature line will be supported. The current devices by Motorola do not fulfill their hardware requirements, so no need to buy one yet. This is speculation on my part, but its not unthinkable that non-flagship support could happen eventually, although mid tier SoCs generally don't have the hardware required to support graphene (hardware memory tagging, sufficiently open secure element, etc), so in the medium term, it's unlikely that anything but the flagships will be supported by graphene.

New comment by _vere in "Motorola GrapheneOS devices will be bootloader unlockable/relockable"

_vere — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 09:08:01 +0000

Their hardware requirements do not say this, where'd you get that idea? Graphene has stated they'll work with the Motorola team on supporting their devices, starting with the successors of the Razr foldable and the signature line, but there really hasn't been any talk about how additional peripherals like aux would be a no-go. USB is also a security concern, which is why they give you the option to disable it outright, disable data or disable until after-first-unlock. I don't see what would keep them from implementing this for aux, although since it's unidirectional I'm not sure if it even makes sense to compare aux to USB. They've supported pixels with aux ports in the past, and I don't think it's inclusion would be a blocking criteria. The comment about the camera is also kinda misguided. They zero out the camera input if you disable it, unlike traditional android. You can have a camera toggle in your quick settings and keep it disabled literally all the time. Enabling it when you bring up any camera related app takes either pin or biometrics, having the hardware here really shouldn't be a concern since you can look at how the code handling it works yourself. I'm not trying to convince you to use a pixel or a Motorola phone, do what you want, but at least be informed about stuff like this when you state things as if they are facts.

New comment by _vere in "Colorado proposal moves age checks from websites to operating systems"

_vere — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 09:32:37 +0000

Treating Linux as a monolith here is kind of missing the point. Desktop Linux and Android have an entirely different application model, a solution for Android would have to be applied in a significantly different manner to desktop Linux. It'd likely be folded in to play services, as was the case with the exposure notification framework during covid for example.

New comment by _vere in "Why we're taking legal action against SerpApi's unlawful scraping"

_vere — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 11:45:22 +0000

Move fast and break things unless they are the things owned by billionaires and gigacorps instead of stuff owned by normal people

New comment by _vere in "Phone searches at the US border hit a record high"

_vere — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 17:52:22 +0000

To a degree. You have the duress pin, so you can wipe your phone quickly if need be. But I wouldn't call that guarding, your phone won't get searched but if TSA or ice saw you wipe your phone in front of them with a, to them, unknown feature, I doubt they'll let you enter the country.

New comment by _vere in "Proton begins moving hardware out of Switzerland due to proposed legislation"

_vere — Sat, 16 Aug 2025 09:12:41 +0000

Interesting they'd chose to move to germany with their infra after the whole "gov sued Tutanota into providing a backdoor into e2ee email and won" thing happened. I've been with proton specifically because they are one of the few privacy focused email providers that isnt based in germany. Maybe it's time to say screw it and host my own, even if deliverability is gonna be an issue. I don't feel like my email is safe if it's hosted in germany.

New comment by _vere in "Graphene OS: a security-enhanced Android build"

_vere — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 07:51:19 +0000

This is just conspiratorial fearmongering based on vibes. If pixels somehow phoned home on a hardware level, do you think we wouldn't be able to tell? Do you think we wouldn't see it in our network logs? GrapheneOS supports pixels because they are currently the only devices that fulfill their list of requirements, like an actually usable secure element, hardware memory tagging, etc. They have said and continue to reiterate that they would support other devices that fulfill their requirements and seem to be currently looking into working with OEMs to move away from pixels in the long term. Just saying "you claim to degoogle phones yet the phone you use is a GOOGLE pixel, suspicious" is baseless nonsense.

New comment by _vere in "TapTrap: Animation‑Driven Tapjacking on Android"

_vere — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 07:09:20 +0000

Actually insane that this isn't patched in AOSP yet, literally the only android devices that aren't vulnerable are those running graphene. For companies as big as google, there really ought to be just disgusting financial penalties if they leave something like this unfixed for this amount of time.

New comment by _vere in "I feel open source has turned into two worlds"

_vere — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 20:27:57 +0000

Its not really about if you mind, they create derivative works in direct violation of the gpl.

New comment by _vere in "I feel open source has turned into two worlds"

_vere — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 09:47:28 +0000

It's also notable that these companies often dont respect the terms of foss software at all. Anyone worth their salt can tell you that training your LLM on gpl3 code would make it a derivative product, as it is able to reproduce large parts of that code. LLMs that are currently earning Google, Facebook, Openai, etc, billions, while they obviously dont make "their" products available under gpl3.

New comment by _vere in "US-backed Israeli company's spyware used to target European journalists"

_vere — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 19:16:45 +0000

Stuff like this will just keep happening unless a major jurisdiction goes after these digital mercinaries. The fact that we ignore all laws for no reason other than "our agencies really like spying on people" is laughable. Literally crime as a service, sanctioned by most governments. Should not be surprising that such criminal organizations use their tools to spy on people who don't deserve it.

New comment by _vere in "Europe needs digital sovereignty – and Microsoft has just proven why"

_vere — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 09:50:05 +0000

There was a court case here a while ago because the feds wanted access to someone's emails. They won the case and forced tuta to build them a way into their system that allows them to get at non end to end encrypted emails before they get at-rest-encrypted. German article https://www.heise.de/news/Gericht-zwingt-Mailprovider-Tutano... English article about the same topic https://hackread.com/encrypted-email-provider-tutanota-backd... This essentially means they are forced to save a copy of the non encrypted emails somewhere, at least for german customers. You can argue its not a "backdoor" in the typical sense, since end to end encryption is still in place, but like, come on

New comment by _vere in "Europe needs digital sovereignty – and Microsoft has just proven why"

_vere — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 09:39:21 +0000

I wish they weren't sued into providing a backdoor for the German government, I vastly prefer their corporate structure to proton, but I cant really trust to use a "encrypted" service with a government backdoor.

New comment by _vere in "EU startups fail because their press refuses to hype them up"

_vere — Wed, 21 May 2025 17:21:43 +0000

Call me crazy but i don't think european media should hype up an airbnb-like company, just because it has the capability to make money does not mean its good for the world or should exist. We do not need a european amazon, we need to move away from companies like that full stop.

New comment by _vere in "The 'invisible crew' who have 35 seconds to prevent a Eurovision blunder"

_vere — Thu, 15 May 2025 19:48:02 +0000

Maybe they should have prevented the blunder of a genocidal nation using their show to launder their image, but what do I know

New comment by _vere in "Finland is painting deer antlers with reflective paint (2014)"

_vere — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 09:07:08 +0000

I feel like this would fuck with me if i was a deer, imagine someone gets you, sprays stuff onto our antlers and suddenly they glow when light hits them, thats some animal body horror

New comment by _vere in "DeepMind program finds diamonds in Minecraft without being taught"

_vere — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 08:58:41 +0000

So can i and no one needed to teach me either, but you dont see nature writing articles on it...

New comment by _vere in "Hetzner root servers get traffic for other machines"

_vere — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 17:50:58 +0000

We have independently confirmed that we are getting traffic designated for other servers on our serverauction root server at hetzner. Pretty sketchy feeling to have this be the case for a hoster on the scale of hetzner.