I do not really believe that I'm in a good position to accomplish my long term goals especially with the weight of maintaining GrapheneOS as it exists today on my shoulders. I was once optimistic, but that was before being taken advantage of and screwed over repeatedly including
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by one of the companies you seem to have been duped by in regards to their product. Based on my experience / knowledge, including personal/insider experience with that company and the experience of others, they are not how they portray themselves to be and neither is the product.
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I don't really care about the marketing as much as I do tangible defects in the current hardware offerings you may be aware of. If you get time to share those I would love to hear them.
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As far as ethics.... Every hardware bender is unethical at some level. I have to pick the hardware with the most flexibility and that seems like the Librem5 until I learn otherwise from you.
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If they punch babies that is not ideal, but that is separate from specific concerns with the hardware and firmware they produce.
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And there are serious issues with the hardware / firmware including them going out of the way to sabotage security. They are against being able to ship firmware updates in the first place, unless the firmware has no signature verification, otherwise they see it as mandatory to
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at least block updating it from the OS and it's probably really required to block updating it at all to fit the requirements they have chosen. Couple that with deliberately not setting up the SoC / CPU in a secure way including on their laptops and other issues like badly chosen
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components based on criteria for choosing it not aligned with privacy/security. I really think you're better off with the Pinephone which while using lower end, more outdated hardware has compatible goals (just different ones) and doesn't have active sabotage in these areas.
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I don't really see how something designed to be locked down in a way that even a Pixel is not (i.e. going out of the way to sabotage firmware updates to remove that option from users and operating systems) is more flexible, or what advantage there is to sketchy component choices.
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Can you elaborate on sabotaging firmware updates? This point has remained unclear.
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They have a policy of blocking firmware upgrades and designing around making it impossible, including for peripheral components. Read up on it. It's one of the goals of the device to prevent updating firmware unless it's not signed so anything can be installed as an update.
But even then, they still have to block updating it per their policies, unless it's a component that actually has open source firmware, and that's not the case for any of it unless you count the later portions of the boot chain as being firmware.
I mean the schematics are public, I can swap in my own modules... I don't see how they could stop me unless it is enforced at the CPU level. Will research this.
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SoCs themselves have a lot of firmware and they went out of the way to stop updating it via the OS for any other components too. It's not supposed to be possible to update the firmware on the baseband, Wi-Fi, etc. on it and particularly not for the SoC or other components.
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