- cross-posted to:
- privacy@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- privacy@lemmy.ml
TLDR: Drug dealers in Catalonia have started to adopt GrapheneOS en masse leading to Catalan police suspecting anyone with a Google Pixel is a drug dealer
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Basically, if you don’t have a phone the cops can easily backdoor, you must be a criminal.
“What do you have to hide?” taken to it’s logical conclusion.
Humans are apes desiring power, there’s no excuse under which you can give it to them. They’ll invent authority giving them right to judge you and think they are in the right.
Also why I absolutely despise the Silicon Valley - it’s many such people who think they are the elite now. I want that place detroited as soon as possible. Zuckerberg prosecuted for all the murders he’s committed (I’m certain there are plenty, a person with ASPD with such power just can’t be anything else) which are now unknown, Brin and other jerks playing “cooperating with legal elected authorities” while giving them something with no mandate whatsoever feeling themselves powerful - prosecuted for high treason, all these playing censorship and recommendation - prosecuted for scams on the scale of billions, yadda-yadda.
Cops saying this should be immediately sued for inciting hate or defamation or whatever against people who don’t want to be backdoored.
I have a right to not be surveilled, they don’t have a right to surveil me.
Anyway, I might all the time fly a weird trajectory between various ideologies, but they are all anarchist and Silicon Valley bosses are all thieves.
they are all anarchist and Silicon Valley bosses are all thieves.
Nothing is ever absolute, but Silicon Valley has been going in a consistently bad direction for 20+ years now.
This is the best recommendation for a phone I’ve seen yet.
Thanks catalonian police
This is a weird advertisement, but I kind of want grapheneOS now.
Been on it for ~2 years and never going back, fuck Google, fuck the government.
Well you still bought a Google phone
True, with the intention of installing Graphene OS on it. No other options.
They’re easy to get used!
Strange that google is the only option for the only “secure” operating system.
Hey, do you know what is Ring Level minus One ?Strange that google is the only option for the only “secure” operating system.
The have their reasons: https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices
Hey, do you know what is Ring Level minus One ?
I know you’re only trolling here and I’m feeding into it, but you nerd sniped me just right to explain why your question is stupid on multiple fronts.
First of all, “Ring -1” is the hypervisor, at least on virtualization-capable devices (which modern Pixels are), and the hypervisor will be Linux’s KVM in this case, which is open source and compiled by the Graphene team as part of the kernel from source.
Secondly, Arm (which is the architecture basically all phone chips use, including Pixels) has a slightly different model of security, where apps are Exception Level 0, the OS is EL1, the hypervisor is EL2, and the “secure monitor” (or management firmware) is EL3 (and is probably what you were trying to refer to).
So yeah, I don’t think you know what “Ring -1” is. At least not enough to warrant a snarky comment.
“-1” is not just hypervisors, things like Intel Management and AMD Platform Security Processor can peer into system memory. I have no doubt similar system exist on ARM, I suspect the radio transceiver can also read system memory and read secrets out of the security devices.
I don’t think modern phones are trustable devices. They are opaque blackboxes, pretending to have high security but this security only really protects the spyware operators from being notices.
I don’t think it’s coincidence that the most “secure” and “private” operating system only operates on a very narrow model selection of phones from just one manufacturer. Probably because they have the best technology to keep the inherent backdoor invisible and implausible. A backdoor to a system nobody trusts wouldn’t be very useful.
The original post is about how it’s so secure the piggies can’t get in. Unless the super secret backdoor is only for the shadow government to disappear dissidents with no trace, thus keeping their super secret backdoor secret.
Been on it for about 19 months now, it’s what Android should be.
I have an iPhone since the first one and I wanna try it to.
Shameless plug for SwapMyOS
Sounds like a good recommendation.
Yeah, this is legitimately an amazing ad, though Google may bot want it because they probably make more money off your data than you buying the device.
They’re mad they can’t use cellbrite to snoop on properly configured GOS phones and that they actually have to do real police work to catch drug dealers
Yes. They (cellebrite) don’t mention GrapheneOS support very loudly because it’s poor. They can’t decrypt one that’s BFU (Before First Unlock), not even by brute force if it’s a 6 digit passcode apparently. Don’t know if they can get data from an AFU GOS pixel. A year ago when their internal docs leaked, they also had no support for latest iOS at the time, but had brute force support for older versions as long as phone itself wasn’t too new and had AFU access without brute force for even older versions.
Moral of the story: if there’s a chance police might take your phone to investigate for a crime you hopefully didn’t even commit, shut down your phone completely - the 5x power button trick on iOS disables biometric unlock, but the device itself stays decrypted and thus more vulnerable. Also keep your OS up to date.
If you’ve got a phone that’s neither iOS nor GrapheneOS, it’s probably pretty much Swiss cheese anyway. IOS isn’t as good as GrapheneOS either, but it offers some protection against Cellebrite if up to date and BFU. But if they keep your phone for long enough (months, years), they’ll get it unlocked because you can’t install updates that would patch any newly discovered vulnerabilities and one day they’ll find a BFU unlock for it, probably.
Grapheneos also has options to just disable data over the USB port when its locked. Or disable it outright.
Yep, disabling it entirely allows for charging when the device is off, but otherwise, it is functionally useless and is disabled at the hardware level.
Ooh nice.
Graphene OS in particular comes with a default feature enabled called Auto Reboot to protect against this. I think it’s set to 18 hours by default because that’s what mine is, but you can go as low as 4 hours.
If you have it set to four hours, I’d wager your phone would reset way before the pigs had enough time to try and get their way in.
Yeah, I have mine at 4 hours and it’s pretty good. It triggers while I’m at work sometimes, but other than that, it’s mostly just when I sleep.
iOS started doing this a year or 2 ago, but unfortunately it’s 3 days and not configurable
Does a full shutdown encrypt all contents on iOS? This is something that everyone entering the USA as I have to do annually needs to think about.
It’s all encrypted in storage. The decryption key is in the secure element / TPM chip, additionally protected by your PIN / password. Shutting it down unloads all encryption keys from memory.
Beware that US customs / immigration / border control can seize your phone and refuse entry.
What happens if I turn it back on but don’t unlock it? Are the encryption keys in memory?
They’re not in memory until the first unlock, that’s why there’s the AFU vs BFU distinction for cellebrite unlocking devices incl iPhones.
But as the other person said, they can seize your phone and refuse entry. If you need to travel to the USA annually and you don’t want them to see your shit, you may want to have a decoy phone that’s not logged into your real accounts or have many photos on it. Just enough to make it believable it’s your real phone, but not enough to help them forge anything on you.
I am a non-resident US citizen so I believe it would be more difficult for them to search and hold me without trial or legal representation. But these days anything is possible.
The police: ‘We’ve encountered a difficulty with our paid spying software. Welp it must be just the criminals.’
Edit: Missed the R and hit the T on our.
pretty much. The original article says that if they have a pixel they have to ask for a warrant
Without? Even with paid spying software is hard, as far as data forensics go. Going with Pegasus and the likes, you never know, just reboot every 2 hours if you don’t mind the hassle.
I’m pretty sure they just misspelled our as out
Technically I didn’t misspell. This is me missing the correct key.
“Feds”
checks Wikipedia page for Spain
Government: “Unitary parliamentary constitutional monarchy”
🧐
(Sorry for nitpicking lol 😅)
But serious tho:
I kinda hate these weird associations. Its like arresting people who wear glasses because intellectual rebels wear glasses? (Pol Pot?)
Like can’t someone just use a phone in peace? Most Pixel users don’t even use Graphene OS.
Hey you know what, drug dealers drink water. Lets arrest people who drink water!
If she floats, she’s a witch and we’ll burn her at the stake.
It’s supposed to be kind of sort of federal(ish) (federalish enough, in theory, to keep Catalonia and Euskadi happy enough that we won’t want to leave). “States” are called autonomías (autonomies) and have their own government, laws, and institutions, though they still have to obey the Spanish government and most of its laws. It isn’t really working.
The article is still wrong when it uses “feds”, though, because the cops doing this are the mossos d’esquadra, the Catalan autonomic police, not the “federal(ish)” policía nacional (the Spanish police proper) or guardia civil (despite the name, the military Spanish police, a relic from Franco’s dictatorship, like most of the country and its institutions).
Police are not the brightest in any society.
So I guess somebody needs to tell them that they need to focus their efforts a little better if their current plan is ‘anyone with a Google Pixel is a drug dealer’.
Can I suggest they start with the people with drugs, rather than the people with the – not uncommon - google phones in their search for drug dealers?
Police are not the brightest in any society.
It’s a literal job requirement. If you’re smart, you’re not going to blindly follow orders. Police cognitive testing literally discards candidates that perform well in intellectual tasks. This is not a conspiracy or a joke, it’s how police works.
Doesn’t a Google Pixel device come with its own OS image by default, independent of Graphene OS? Is there some kind of step that we’re missing here?
Yes. Cops are idiots. Duh.
It does, but a lot of people but the pixels specifically to put graphene on it because graphene they’re compatible and graphene offers better privacy and security. What I’m getting here is drug dealers are using graphene to dodge digital narcs and it’s becoming common enough that the Venn diagram skews heavily to drug dealing.
I mean yeah, I’d say 250k is a lot for a 3rd party phone OS.
The experience speaks for itself. I dont know of anyone who’s ever willingly gone back to stock android either.
You can buy them with either stock Android, or Graphene. Meaning you don’t need to re flash the device or anything.
You cant buy grapheneos preloaded on anything and doing so would be pretty foolish since it could be backdoored. GraphenOS is aimed at people who value security and privacy, you dont let some rando flash your phone if you value those things.
You absolutely can, just not from the manufacturer. But I agree that it’s dumb, installation is easy and doesn’t come with the added risk of the seller putting on some spyware or whatever.
I think this is incorrect but I could be wrong.
You can not buy a Pixel device preloaded with GrapheneOS. They only come from Google with their standard Android and it’s up to the end user to install GrapheneOS. Unless you buy a used Pixel device with GrapheneOS already installed.
If friends asked I would flash their pixel with Graphene, then set it up basically as they would use it for them.
Getting started was complex, your average user won’t have a good experience getting their apps added without a power user helping.
I would like to install it someday but I’m afraid of this process
Its really not too complicated. Id recommend doing it using a other phone as the installer rather than a PC though, just goes smoother IMO. Very straightforward web installer, just push buttons alongside the instructions.
What’s the complex part?
Technically if something goes wrong you will need help and need to find answers on your own. If you are confident using duckduckgo searches to find answers for technical problems already you should be fine, and most likely won’t even need support at all.
deleted by creator
Yeah I’d consider that as a used phone. I’d only get the hardware from the OEM and install GrapheneOS myself. Less chance of man in the middle. It’s super easy to install using the web installer.
Hmm, you used to be able to buy them directly from Google, but that doesn’t seem to be the case any more.
Umm… I don’t think that’s right. I don’t think you could ever buy a phone from Google with GrapheneOS.
Reminds me of getting a notice in Middle School, decades ago, about how a pager was considered “drug paraphernalia”
There was also a big Bloomberg-Era push by the NYPD to arrest any woman carrying condoms on her person, on the grounds that a woman carrying a condom must be a sex worker.
Everything I hear about Bloomberg make me question how he ran as a democrat, and then I remember he fits the democratic party better than anyone else…
NYC’s greatest act was tricking everyone into thinking it’s a progressive city. I am interested in Mamdani at least.
Well I do use a Pixel (for lineage OS) and I do make my living selling drugs… wait wait this is a bad example.
Well in that case two marijuanas please
As long as you are in my province then sure! Gotta obey the law after all.
Original or hot n spicy?
1/2 and 1/2 with extra cheese pls
You too!?
Oh crap, are they onto us?
Shhhh! They don’t know yet.
Glances at my new Pixel, Welp, I guess I ain’t ever goin’ to Catalonia. Not that I was planning to go there anyway.
***Tinfoil conspiracy: Maybe this a scare tactic to keep the British out of Spain.
Install Graphene
become a dealer
First install GrapheneOS, then become a dealer. You’re welcome.
Installing Graphene doesn’t lessen the danger of your Pixel bursting into flames because of the old and dangerous batteries.
Maybe it helps
Update, July 3, 2025 (11:45 AM ET): The crew behind GrapheneOS is understandably none too pleased about their good name being dragged through the mud, and members are speaking out about these reports from Spain. Over on X, the official GrapheneOS account posts:
European authoritarians and their enablers in the media are misrepresenting GrapheneOS and even Pixel phones as if they’re something for criminals. GrapheneOS is opposed to the mass surveillance police state these people want to impose on everyone.
Security is a tool, and can be wielded just as much for good as it can for bad. While some people may see this as an indictment, we’d say it’s more the inevitable consequence of GrapheneOS just being very, very good at what it does.
Yeah, when the media is wrong, GrapheneOS out here correcting the media!
Reminds me of when the US tried to fight “terror” by kidnapping people and shoving them in Gitmo because they were wearing Casio watches, which is apparently a brand favoured by terrorists.
There was a guide to craft a timed bomb with the f-91w and other common materials. Uploaded by the terrorists. It worked
Guess they’re gonna throw my kid into Gitmo then…
I’ve used Samsungs for years, but they have gotten too expensive for what I need, so I went for a Pixel this time around. I got issues with it, but mostly because I’m so used to the Samsung universe. Still way better than an Apple.
I guess I’m a Spanish drug dealer now.
You went from the biggest name in non-apple phones to the second biggest name in non-apple phones. You’re so brave.
What’s your point?
