Hacker News: summm

Firefox Promotion in Berlin

summm — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 15:15:09 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/firefox-aeg-uber-arena-partnership/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50006837

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by summm in "Why I'm Not Excited About the Graphene OS and Motorola Partnership"

summm — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 20:05:04 +0000

Regarding 2. they seem to refer to this: https://github.com/zenfyrdev/bootloader-unlock-wall-of-shame...

Why I'm Not Excited About the Graphene OS and Motorola Partnership

summm — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 16:07:04 +0000

Article URL: https://podcast.switchedtolinux.com/@tehankorage/episodes/why-im-not-excited-about-the-graphene-os-and-motorola-partnership

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49612327

Points: 35

# Comments: 59

New comment by summm in "How Fairphone built the Fairphone Gen 6+"

summm — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 15:44:31 +0000

Another more important angle: GrapheneOS creates an appliance, where the user has no freedoms, in that freedom aspect not better than stock Android: The users cannot realistically change any aspect of the OS. Sure, technically they could edit the source, but then they need to compile the whole system, reset their device and lose all data, be cut off from easy updates, and additionally lose remote attestation (which GrapheneOS devs call anti-competitive when used against them, but then gladly provide a variant that inevitably will be used against users.) Users cannot wield any more power over their apps than the apps admit. They cannot patch a binary app that misbehaves. They cannot reroute the environment of that app. And so on. With AOSPs and Graphenes "security model" there is nothing in-between "dumbest user" and "full-blown developer who cannot even be a proper user of that development system". The user to "advanced user" to "power user" to "tinkerer" to dev pipeline is kept dry. Most of power-user's potential self-defense mechanisms against abusive and monopolist app and service providers are intentionally neutered by Android as well as GrapheneOS. And hopefully less so by "Linux Phones"

New comment by summm in ".name Termination"

summm — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 06:49:46 +0000

Gnunet was and is incredibly advanced technology, solving many problems better than most p2p systems that came after, who never bothered to even look at those ideas, and implemented worse concepts from scratch (IPFS, veilid, libp2p...) However, it is exclusively academic, and the authors let themselves be distracted too much. The system was mainly developed by grad students who mostly leave after they have completed a barely working proof of concept for their thesis. It never had enough functionality running smoothly enough to attract a meaningful community, which would have been a prerequisite for a p2p network. It is so sad.

New comment by summm in "How Bluesky draws its logo on screenshots"

summm — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 14:21:17 +0000

Correction: GrapheneOS is concerned with their so called "Android security model" more than anything else, and where that security model gives guarantees to app developers and service providers that harms the user's security, they merrily side with the developer's security against the user, at best give some more or less questionable reasons why that unfortunately currently cannot be changed, and at worst insult you for suggesting anything else.

New comment by summm in "Pixel 11 Pro Fold"

summm — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 19:56:21 +0000

Which was not the point. Each one of these changes made it harder, not yet impossible to make a custom Android or Linux variant. The harder it is the more likely people will continue. At some point it might be too hard. Or, one of these changes will finally make all of that impossible.

New comment by summm in "Pixel 11 Pro Fold"

summm — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 06:22:57 +0000

Here, the Pixel 10, especially in more niche variants like Pro and with larger flash has almost disappeared from the market, or is as expensive as the equivalent Pixel 11 offers.

New comment by summm in "Pixel 11 Pro Fold"

summm — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 19:30:18 +0000

With direction Google has chosen to go with the Pixel 10, it might as well be that GrapheneOS will never be available on the Pixel 11. They started by not publishing device trees anymore, squashing commits in AOSP, publishing open source drivers as a tar ball dump only after the requester has entered personal data in a web form, instead of having them public in an version control system. I wonder what dumb ideas they come up with next in order to make the GrapheneOS people suffer even more.

Walrus: An Efficient Decentralized Storage Network

summm — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 22:12:10 +0000

Article URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.05370

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49265190

Points: 11

# Comments: 0

GNUnet 0.28.0 Released

summm — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 19:35:36 +0000

Article URL: https://www.gnunet.org/en/news/2026-07-0.28.0.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48951397

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Curb impacts of AI on programming to maintain EU sovereignty

summm — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 18:14:48 +0000

Article URL: https://www.draketo.de/software/curb-ai-impact

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48850205

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by summm in "The bottleneck might be the air in the room"

summm — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 10:08:18 +0000

Can you recommend some?

New comment by summm in "European digital ID wallets rely on safety services of Google and Apple"

summm — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 10:11:50 +0000

I think Meneth was basically correct but a bit imprecise: Boot integrity itself is only user respectful as long as the user can freely decide and change the integrity reference values, without consequences to the latter usefulness of their system. But attestation (based on boot integrity) as a principle directly contradicts "respect user ownership". This is not a question of technical feasibility, but of principle. Attestation is directed against users. The main purpose of attestation is to make sure that the local user can be forced to use a specific software (and not run other software at the same time that could influence this specific software) to access a certain remote service. Remote attestation means by definition "vendor lock", in that the vendor and their contractual partners lock and control the device's software. Therefore an attestation model that fully respects the user simply cannot exist.

New comment by summm in "European digital ID wallets rely on safety services of Google and Apple"

summm — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 18:18:24 +0000

So now you have the choice between two approved ROMs. Not a lot of improvement? And as soon as GrapheneOS implements something beneficial to the users that the government does not like, the approval will be taken back. That's also why GrapheneOS will probably not even think about doing that. So you want some OS functionality neither Google nor Graphene offer, you're, again, out of luck. CA is something completely different, and much more limited in what can be centrally controlled. Everybody can go to a CA, get a certificate for their domain, and use it with any server software, even with software they compiled themselves.

New comment by summm in "European digital ID wallets rely on safety services of Google and Apple"

summm — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 18:02:08 +0000

No, this would just require a publicly verifyable signature of the software, and the user would just choose to have their operating system verify it. No remote attestation or other hand-over-your-controls necessary.

New comment by summm in "European digital ID wallets rely on safety services of Google and Apple"

summm — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 17:51:41 +0000

Nope. It is still not possible to give someone else (the government, or the bank) control over your phone while at the same time run software that you alone control with higher privileges. Please don't mix that up with "is practically hard to implement because of sloppy code. Also your attacker model is still "occasional evil government agency or evil private corporation wants to crack and read your messages", while what is discussed here is more fundamental "evil government or abusive corporation controls your phone in the first place, and can just remote control it you can't use really secure apps"

New comment by summm in "Volkswagen started blocking GrapheneOS users"

summm — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 22:40:43 +0000

My opinion: Any kind of attestation that is delivered to a non-user-controlled server about the state of a user's end device that the user (possibly using means outside of the end device) cannot change will be abused, e.g for anti-competitve purposes. I am hearing lots of arguments that grapheneOS is more secure (it is) and should therefore be included in remote attestation.

The pinning you are proposing, does it imply that there is again some certification of the "official" GrapheneOS, versus e.g. the user's own fork of GrapheneOS?

How would any of the existing proponents of remote attestation agree to anything like this, given what we consider abuse is exactly their reason of implementing it in the first place? Here, VW wants to stop use of the API by anything else than their App, in order to stop hobbyists and sell API access to commercial middle men. If the user could pin their own software's attestation or even register an arbitrary public key to cover updates, then the user would as well be able to code his own API client that just emulates the attestation. Is there any write up or discussion of the pinning you propose?

I am really not yet convinced how you want to counter the inevitable abuse that app developers and service providers will subject the user to if the OS security model gives them that kind of power over the user's end device.

New comment by summm in "Volkswagen started blocking GrapheneOS users"

summm — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 21:10:20 +0000

The GrapheneOS supporters are not on our sides, apparently. The seem to actually like remote attestation. They just don't like that they are not in on Play Integrity. But what is won if attestation includes official GrapheneOS releases but would still otherwise be exactly the same evil stuff that takes control of the user's device?

I still am hoping that at one point they understand the full consequences of remote attestation. There are some signs they start to notice, but it's slow...

Mozilla Added Google Play Integrity to Firefox for Android

summm — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 22:19:57 +0000

Article URL: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2046154

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48563000

Points: 18

# Comments: 3