Create a problem, and then heroically fight to make a solution.
This shouldn't exist in the first place. There would be no need for it if Apple didn't insist on "we own all the iPhones, our users just get to tap at them".
If you could just unlock the bootloader, re-enable SWD and do what you want with an iPhone that you actually own, there would be no need for this restrictive program at all.
This is also why my current Macbook will be my last, I'm going back to Linux. No matter how superior M-series chips are the amazing hardware can't make up for the unbearable nanny software. So tired of Apple machines telling me what I should do. It's supposed to be the other way around.
Almost every employer in my career ignored that I want to choose my hardware, and gave me a macbook, and I got them to compromise by giving me a pass to run whatever software I wanted. Every time I installed Linux on it, sometimes porting it myself with custom patches, on their time.
The greatest middle finger to Apple is freeing their hardware. Been at it since I built and booted a uCLinux kernel on my first iPod I got as a kid.
And how many of those were because the phone was insecure, and how many were because the user was not practicing good security...?
For instance, the much-touted "iCloud hack" of several years back was not made possible by iCloud being insecure; it was made possible because the users whose accounts were accessed had their passwords stolen in, IIRC, spearphishing attacks.
A bit of side track, but the 2014 massive hack was due to bad passwords hygine AND a serios vulnerability in Apple icloud (backup restore would bypass f2a and login failure rate limiting).
Back to the subject. See the reports from citizen labs, Google TAG and others. You will see they are often due to undisclosed vulnerabilities not user stupidity
By definition, it could be more secure if people actually would be able to inspect it. Is it regardless the most secure? Hard to say. GrapheneOS is quite secure, probably more.
GrapeheneOS are both operating systems where a single party has the signing keys to run any software they want on your device at any time, and even remotely brick it.
I for one am not comfortable with anyone having that much power over something that is supposed to be mine, so they are the same to me. Untrustable black boxes.
The difference between GrapheneOS and iOS is that it is 100% open source, replicable, able to self-sign, and only <1% of the part has dynamic code loading, which is incredibly low compared to any major OS.
Software doesn't stop being open source because the releases are signed to be able to verify those. Any OS can be installed on the supported device. The verified boot key hash shown at boot will be different for an unofficial build and so will a query to the hardware asking it to provide it. Auditor and AttestationServer are open source. Those work fine with unofficial builds and forks of GrapheneOS after making builds of those with the correct key.
It's ludicrous to claim software with signed releases isn't open source. Having private keys used to generate the signatures for APKs, updates and the vbmeta image doesn't somehow make it not open source. Every APK is signed and the software isn't somehow not open source because the signature requires the private keys. There are standard tools to compare APKs with different signing keys to ensure the build is reproducible and the same thing exists for the OS as a whole which contains many signed APKs and a signed vbmeta image with verified boot metadata.
The signatures enable the update client to verify the releases and the firmware to verify the OS with the public key flashed by the user as part of installing the OS. Signed updates and verified boot fully work with any build of GrapheneOS following our build instructions. Auditor and AttestationServer also work once they're rebuilt with the new verified boot hash included.
GrapheneOS is open source with reproducible builds. Android key attestation isn't specific to GrapheneOS and is OS independent. It mainly exists to check that a key was generated in a hardware keystore. There's no pass or fail based on having an official or unofficial build of GrapheneOS. The hardware can sign public key certificates with metadata on device security including verified boot state (green, yellow or orange), verified boot key hash, verified boot hash (hash of the core OS) and patch levels. That's not nefarious and is useful to end users. Our Auditor app uses it to help users protect their devices. GrapheneOS doesn't use it to require people to use an official build for any purpose. Some banks have regulations requiring them to verify the hardware, OS and app which means they need to specifically allow each non-Google-certified OS. There are only around 3 banking apps are known to permit GrapheneOS that way and without it they'd ban using any non-Google-certified OS.
You are still having to trust a pile of binary blobs even if you built and self signed every release yourself, which I used to do, but at 240gb of source code it is not practical for most individuals even if you do trust all those dozens of blobs from random vendors, which I do not.
This one is not really a fault of GrapheneOS, and more a reality that Android is not actually an open platform and never will be. I require a lot more control of a device I need to be able to trust than anything in the android ecosystem can offer anymore.
Replicant was the right approach but sadly never got the resources to pursue it at the required scale to support new devices.
You can litteraly build and sign GrapeheneOS yourself and you can audit it, if this is your concern.
While in the chain of trust there is still Google Root key first, is this far away from "run any software they want on your device at any time, and even remotely brick it"
(and ofc you could also block updates on grapheneOS, which would also prevent this aswell)
And a black box is not something that you dont understand, applying that logic anything becomes a black box.
Also what setup are you using then ?
edit: and i mean i understand the idea of not trusting devices, but this is just a false equivalence.
While at the same time, if you dont want to live with technology from like 100 years ago, at some point do you have to trust a black box, if you want to call it that.
GrapheneOS is only 100% open source if you do not count a giant pile of proprietary and privileged binary blobs required for it to function on any supported hardware.
This is not the fault of the Graphene team so much as a fundamental problem in the mobile chipset market.
Desktop/Laptop CPUs give you dramatically more control, especially with OpenSIL etc.
There are simply are no sovereign software solutions for modern mobile hardware.
> The need for proprietary code for firmware and hardware is the same on desktop.
The Linux distro I founded has zero blobs. Built completely from source and boots and runs on real laptops and desktops. That is what 100% open source looks like. Meanwhile every Android distro requires a vendor partition with dozens of black box blobs.
The fact so many technical people believe that security and freedom are mutually exclusive, and pay for that lie, is proof the Apple propaganda is working exactly as intended.
In my case, it is the fact that a secure and free (as in speech) alternative does not exist that leads me to believe that. And not in the sense that it’s theoretically secure, I mean in the practical sense that I cannot trust my parents to use any currently available “free” device and not immediately load it up with malware.
> In my case, it is the fact that a secure and free (as in speech) alternative does not exist that leads me to believe that.
I don't think that is a logical statement.
Just something doesn't exist, does not prove that it can't exist.
You need a stronger proof than that to show that in my opinion.
At some point, you have to empower your users and trust them to do the right thing.
>I don't think that is a logical statement. Just something doesn't exist, does not prove that it can't exist.
Let me expand the claim to include the caveats:
>The fact so many technical people believe that security and freedom are mutually exclusive [under current technological/financial/political constraints]
>At some point, you have to empower your users and trust them to do the right thing.
All I know is, my and my parents’ quality of life is far better after switching them to devices where they are not empowered.
You need to have a stronger argument than "it has never existed and doesn't exist now, but it MIGHT exist IN THEORY". That's an enormously weak argument. Borderline dishonest really.
Let's assume for the moment that such a thing can exist. Why does it not exist?
What do we know about free (as in speech) software?
- It tends to be written by people on their own time, or funded by companies that want to make sure it continues to exist (though generally, AFAIK, such companies only support existing projects; they don't fund people to create new open-source projects that wouldn't be under their control).
- Largely because of this and the Unix philosophy, it tends to be created as individual projects each made to do one job well, which can then be glued together to do larger jobs.
- It tends to be much less user-friendly than commercial software.
Putting all this together, it is not too hard to see why there aren't widely-adopted free-as-in-speech phone OSes. A phone OS is a large project, which needs to bring a lot of smaller components together within it in a consistent and predictable way; it is a very significant undertaking, requiring a high number of person-hours of work to make usable; and vitally, in order to be commercially viable, it needs to be user-friendly.
So it is very likely that such a project could, theoretically exist, but in practice never will, unless some very wealthy person or group decides to fund its creation without hope of commercial ROI.
Except “my Mac’s very secure and I can install whatever I want” is a complete fallacy. It isn’t secure - case in point Muse recently trawling through people’s messages. Or Mac cleaner like apps that trick users into installing them and giving liberal access.
I think if you don’t get the point of protecting a device against the user, you’ve not had to help un-tech savvy relatives get out of situations where dark or confusing UI practices have got themselves into a mess.
It would be a piece of cake to create a device that can be permanently downgraded for the un-tech savvy. It would be interesting to see how many customers would voluntarily choose that mode. My guess is that it would once and for all put Apple's security theater into the graveyard of stupid, annoying, and patronizing ideas where it in my opinion belongs.
> The fact so many technical people believe that security and freedom are mutually exclusive, and pay for that lie, is proof the Apple propaganda is working exactly as intended.
My Aunt Millie's iPhone is secure against herself because she can't install random garbage off the Internet and is in a walled garden.
As someone who works in IT: users are often their (and their organization's) own worst enemy. We've tried training and blacklisting (with anti-virus) for decades, and it appears that whitelisting and locking things down is what actually works.
I'd be happy with a 'compromise' where there's a factory reset where you can install your own code but it blows an e-fuse to indicate that device is no longer 'OEM certified secure' state.
> I'd be happy with a 'compromise' where there's a factory reset where you can install your own code but it blows an e-fuse to indicate that device is no longer 'OEM certified secure' state.
You just described what Samsung does with their phones. You can unlock them, but even if you later switch back to the normal OS, some features are permanently disabled by that fuse.
That is correct. Samsung OneUI 8 removed the ability to unlock the bootloader to any device that installed it. It removed the toggle and also removed the functionality from the codebase as well.
I got screwed by this by buying a used Samsung Tablet for the purpose of rooting it and made the mistake of letting it update after I factory reset it. Never buying a Samsung product again.
Lumping consumer devices with the need for secure business devices and often offloading that to personal devices is the problem.
I wish they stop finding ways to lock down the device in the name of security and/or release different SKUs for the more secure use cases, provided by the organizations themselves if they deem it necessary.
Calling a phone a simple “consumer device” is a lot of hand waving. It’s my bank account, my access to a number of services, an identity provider, etc. I don’t trust myself to secure an open phone and I do this kind of thing for a living. It’s the asymmetric problem: I need to be right 24/7 forever, a bad actor only needs me to slip up once.
I do not even own a cell phone and have not for approaching a decade. I live a modern life as a founder and tech worker.
I have a house full of servers and self host virtually my entire digital life and even my own usage of AI, but when I leave home I typically carry no electronics at all.
We convince ourselves we need phones, but I promise you, they are optional. Being offline a few hours a day is also good for your brain.
What’s the irony? You have a tendency to appear in any thread about phones preaching the Gospel of Digital Detox without seeming to consider the level of privilege required to be able to live like that. Could I do it? Sure. Is life too goddamn short from my perspective to do it? Also sure.
Never claimed otherwise. I just want to always make it clear people have a valid third choice in threads where people are talking as though Apple and Google are the only options. It is a prolific false dichotomy and I do not mind being That Guy.
I make an actual case for the things I advocate for and actually live my convictions.
Why everyone would is better off electing Apple or Google or Meta to decide what software we are allowed to install, what content we can share with our friends, when our data should be deleted, and when it should be sold to the highest bidder that wishes to manipulate us at scale?
I am convinced surveillance capitalism is a net negative for society, but if you really think otherwise, please make an actual case for your own view instead of complaining about me making mine.
> We convince ourselves we need phones, but I promise you, they are optional.
Many people's employer's use of MFA (including my own) says otherwise.
For many people ensuring their spouse and/or their children's school be able to reach them for emergencies and sudden matters says otherwise. Or an elderly parent (e.g., location tracking).
> Many people's employer's use of MFA (including my own) says otherwise
yubikey/nitrokey. Much more secure by a mile and works when your phone battery is dead. I switched multiple past employers from apps to these, joining as an SWE.
meshtastic asset tracking tag which will work even in emergencies when cell towers are down.
> children's school be able to reach them for emergencies
call-to-one-way-pager bridge, or voip-to-meshtastic bridge. Cheap to free solutions that will also work when cell towers are down.
Hit me with more perceived blockers if you are actually interested. Give me your gotchas. I have probably heard it all and am passionate about engaging people on this topic.
My wife and I have lived without a cell phone subscription for going on a decade and live a modern life as silicon valley tech workers.
Most have the choice to enjoy mostly the same lifestyle they have today, without Apple or Google or proprietary software or cell phones or even debit cards. There are reliable solutions for everything outside of the US surveillance capitalism bubble for those that actually want them.
Exiting surveillance capitalism is possible without major lifestyle changes.
Plenty of ways to build credit without revealing where you live or what locations you frequent and what you buy at the drug store. You can get a line of credit, take it out as cash, spend it privately, then pay it back. They learn nothing about you except you pay back your loans, which is the signal they need to give you more credit.
Where will give you a line of credit without knowing where you live? I'd be interested in _specific_ examples - I did not find any when attempting to actually build US credit when I moved here.
The need for you to do banking, and employees do MFA on a phone and thinking that doing requires a secure and closed phone is again a spillover of offloading costs to users.
We did have hardware tokens for corporate logins and banking needs.
There is no real reason why an open phone cannot be secure for sensitive applications.
It's true! The EU forced Apple to make it so you can install apps from third parties and every day iPhones are found haunted by malware! That's why root exploits only exist in Europe!
Well, except that one-click PDF persistent root exploit American researchers found, and there not being any sort of iOS malware wave in the EU.
This is the same Apple that openly claimed in marketing material their computers "can't get a virus". My dude, a virus is code, code written with a specified malicious intent. They can...
Also every iOS usually ends up with a "jailbreak", which is also known as an exploit. But somehow in Apple world that's different.
I've seen malware popups that give detailed steps on how to install the app on Android. You can put up all the scary warnings you want but if someone really wants to install some scam app, they will click past everything.
I really wish we could have a simple "don't bother me, I know what I'm doing" switch on these phones but I can certainly understand the reasons why Apple and Google are putting in as many roadblocks as possible to protect users from themselves.
Which is why Google is getting ready to lock down Android.
I wouldn’t mind phones having “Adult” mode that intentionally fails secure net and is completely split off from the standard user space. In adult mode I install what I want.
Chromebooks had a screw you could remove on the motheboard to fully unlock them to do whatever you want. Something no one would do by accident. This was a reasonable solution from the less-evil Google days.
Maybe we should be specific when we mean “secure”. What you mean is like “secure MDM”, when the adversary is the user.
The parent meant “secure against external adversaries”.
Security and freedom are mutually exclusive for the vast majority of non-technical people who will happily infect themselves over and over with malware.
So make it kid mode by default, and require technical expertise to unlock it. Stop making excuses for corpos stripping freedoms from everyone because tech illiterate people exist.
"mutually exclusive" isn't a good way to think of it. "Tradeoffs" is much better.
iPhones are aimed at the many millions/billions of technically unsophisticated users who don't care about rooting their phone, but would be very unhappy to get phished out of their life savings.
Ah. So Apple -must- take freedoms away from everyone to install any software they want, to protect us. They could not possibly have a "format and void your warranty to unlock all features" switch on the motherboard like chromebooks have. Or the "get a one time warranty-voiding code from manufacturer" code like Samsung and other Android vendors have. Apple must make sure the path to freedom does not exist, for Grandma.
Grandma does not need the freedom to install the DeFlock or ICEBlock to help protect herself and her neighbors, right? Tim Cook is a Trump doner but of course has no political bias, and remains confident ICE and law enforcement always behave ethically so there is nothing to fear.
A corporation takes away basic freedoms of people over the tools they use to communicate with society, and then consumers get on the internet in public forums and -defend- them for it. Unbelievable.
I really hope you do not vote with this type of thinking.
So rather than address the substance of my comment, you hand waive it away and argue we should just let people give up freedoms to choose what software they install without even trying to educate them on risks or alternatives.
Tech CEOs will always do the right thing and act in public interest before profits or political favors, right?
They would never censor an app that the public largely wanted, right?
Fortnite did not pay their Apple tax, so no one got to install Fortnite. For safety.
To be clear, Google is just as bad. I do not use or recommend any products from either company.
I use laptops, desktops, or nothing, and get along just fine.
I have interviewed countless infosec workers who have never compiled an operating system from source, or even comfortable installing an OS on their own hardware, let alone any clue how to harden one or how basic Linux syscalls work... these are mostly not people we should be looking to for operating system advice.
As an serial OS architect and infosec worker myself with over two decades of experience in OS hardening, and many critical public finds impacting nearly every fortune 500 company, I do not use Apple or Google products at all. They are both complete shit at security and privacy, among other reasons.
I do not carry or use a cell phone at all, and most people are probably better off with a dumb phone or no phone either over the current options, IMO.
I rarely leave home with any electronics at all. Sometimes a portable music player.
My only portable computers are sub 10 inch laptops running QubesOS, but will be replacing that with an OS of my own design soon based on stagex, which I founded.
Any software I absolutely need to -trust- is built with stagex and run in dedicated enclaves, servers, and VMs.
> most people are probably better off with a dumb phone or no phone either over the current options, IMO.
...if you're primarily concerned with security.
Most people are not. They're primarily concerned with convenience, staying connected to people in their lives, and entertaining themselves.
And guess what? The iPhone does a pretty good job at this, while also being very good (not perfect) at security.
In general, if you start thinking of anything in the mode of "most people would be better off doing X the way I do it, but they don't", you need to start thinking about a) in what way they would be better off (because in 99% of cases, it's not going to be "universally, with no tradeoffs"), and b) what differences in understanding and priorities "most people" might have from you that would cause them to make those choices.
The reason I asked is that knowing which brand used by infosec experts might lend some insight as to which phone has a better reputation for security among experts in the field.
My argument is there actually are very few actual experts in the field because there are very few standards in this industry. Anyone can call themselves an infosec worker and probably even get a job as one if they learned burp suite a few months ago and did a CTF that one time.
But look at people like Bunnie that actually reverse engineer things down to the metal. He made his own mobile device from scratch, from OS to metal, exactly because all existing options are garbage. These are the types people we should be paying attention to IMO.
That’s pretty dismissive and insulting to a wide swath of people who in fact are experts and have decades of professional practice under their belts. I don’t think you get a very good reception if you went to a DefCon or B-Sides and said that aloud.
> ...if you're primarily concerned with security. Most people are not.
Obviously. Most people also were once not concerned with basic sanitation at hospitals, or with avoiding lead paint, or avoiding giving their kids alcohol to help them sleep.
The evidence these things were really bad came decades before public behavior changes.
Humans are so tribal that most will put fitting in and social norms before objective evidence to the point of killing themselves, and even their kids, so we should never assume the popular choices are the least harmful and well informed ones.
It is an evolutionary advantage that some of us do not weigh social norms so much.
I do not own a cell phone, but I build my operating systems from 386 bytes of machine code all the way up to dual hardware anchored remotely attestable servers with memory encryption and hardware anchored disk encryption, and can do whatever I want on them with confidence.
I even rack my own GPUs at home and own my own AI and "Cloud" too for less than the price of a used car.
The motivated and technical can do virtually anything with tech with total sovereignty and privacy. It has never been easier.
You keep posting this stupid crap that's meaningless. The second you step out of your house nearly everything you do is being logged by someone. Your internet connection is being spied on at multiple levels.
You cranking out at autist level 11 and thinking this is somehow normal and won't get you put on your own list.
Go to Defcon or even Linux Summit in the US and you see nothing but Macbooks and people that agree with you. Go to FOSDEM or CCC or European conferences, and almost exclusively Linux machines and most I talk to self-host anything they can. They must all be autists too.
You read to me as someone in an American tech bubble suffering from cognitive dissonance so profound you cannot even engage with the substance of a single viewpoint not shared by you or those in your bubble, except to mock and insult.
I've covered that in the second part of my comment, even if you deliberately exclude GrapheneOS (not sure why you would as it's used by high profile targets), Apple still isn't #1
It would still be a secure consumer phone if the process to unlock bootloader requires connecting to mac and running some commands along with accepting 10 different warnings.
> Payment infrastructures demand tamper proofing for devices that handle payments
It wasn't that long ago that my bank's app had its own NFC payment feature that worked perfectly fine on a rooted phone. Unfortunately, they killed that feature and moved to Google Wallet.
As it turns out, payment infrastructure only requires tamper proofing if that's part of the arbitrary requirements of the app you're using.
And if Apple decides not to fix it? Like when I have multiple times broken their DRM to help users have more freedom? I would never agree not to share such things as I like.
If you sign up to this program and use one of their devices for 'research', then you are bound by contract to report any security bugs to them and only them (unless the bug is in a 3rd party app). I see this as a pretty sneaky way of avoiding your security vulnerabilities going public and all the bad media exposure that goes along with it.
It is giving security researchers something they have always wanted in return for their silence. Another way to put it is bribery.
They also presumably don't want the exploits to fall into the wrong hands.. which might be a slightly less nefarious and equally plausible interpretation of the program.
Probably both things are true.
Either way, consumers ultimately win in that the products and services they use will be made more secure.
"you must not disclose it to anyone other than Apple until after Apple has released a software update and published a security advisory for the reported security vulnerability."
> For a reported security vulnerability affecting any Apple platform to be eligible for an Apple Security Bounty award, you must not disclose it to anyone other than Apple until after Apple has released a software update and published a security advisory for the reported security vulnerability.
Which does not have the meaning of prohibiting disclosure to third parties or the public; it only means that you forfeit the bounty.
The catch is, if you sign up to the Apple Security Research Device Program then every bug you find on that device has to submitted that way. Therefore if you choose to 'only forfeit the bounty' as you put it, then:
"Apple reserves the right to immediately end your participation in the Apple Security Bounty program if you violate any of these terms and conditions as determined by Apple"
This shouldn't exist in the first place. There would be no need for it if Apple didn't insist on "we own all the iPhones, our users just get to tap at them".
If you could just unlock the bootloader, re-enable SWD and do what you want with an iPhone that you actually own, there would be no need for this restrictive program at all.
The greatest middle finger to Apple is freeing their hardware. Been at it since I built and booted a uCLinux kernel on my first iPod I got as a kid.
Given how many high profile politicians, journalists and businessmen have gotten their phones hacked, the iPhone is not unhackable.
For instance, the much-touted "iCloud hack" of several years back was not made possible by iCloud being insecure; it was made possible because the users whose accounts were accessed had their passwords stolen in, IIRC, spearphishing attacks.
A bit of side track, but the 2014 massive hack was due to bad passwords hygine AND a serios vulnerability in Apple icloud (backup restore would bypass f2a and login failure rate limiting).
Back to the subject. See the reports from citizen labs, Google TAG and others. You will see they are often due to undisclosed vulnerabilities not user stupidity
I for one am not comfortable with anyone having that much power over something that is supposed to be mine, so they are the same to me. Untrustable black boxes.
The signatures enable the update client to verify the releases and the firmware to verify the OS with the public key flashed by the user as part of installing the OS. Signed updates and verified boot fully work with any build of GrapheneOS following our build instructions. Auditor and AttestationServer also work once they're rebuilt with the new verified boot hash included.
This one is not really a fault of GrapheneOS, and more a reality that Android is not actually an open platform and never will be. I require a lot more control of a device I need to be able to trust than anything in the android ecosystem can offer anymore.
Replicant was the right approach but sadly never got the resources to pursue it at the required scale to support new devices.
You can litteraly build and sign GrapeheneOS yourself and you can audit it, if this is your concern. While in the chain of trust there is still Google Root key first, is this far away from "run any software they want on your device at any time, and even remotely brick it"
(and ofc you could also block updates on grapheneOS, which would also prevent this aswell)
And a black box is not something that you dont understand, applying that logic anything becomes a black box.
Also what setup are you using then ?
edit: and i mean i understand the idea of not trusting devices, but this is just a false equivalence. While at the same time, if you dont want to live with technology from like 100 years ago, at some point do you have to trust a black box, if you want to call it that.
GrapheneOS is 100% open source and supports reproducible builds. It is in no way a black box.
If you do not want anyone to hold your signing keys, you will need to stop using nearly all modern hardware and software.
This is not the fault of the Graphene team so much as a fundamental problem in the mobile chipset market.
Desktop/Laptop CPUs give you dramatically more control, especially with OpenSIL etc.
There are simply are no sovereign software solutions for modern mobile hardware.
The Linux distro I founded has zero blobs. Built completely from source and boots and runs on real laptops and desktops. That is what 100% open source looks like. Meanwhile every Android distro requires a vendor partition with dozens of black box blobs.
This is a silly argument to make. By pretty much any standard, the iPhone has really good security.
Anyone know if those exploit(s) worked on iPhones with Lockdown Mode enabled?
* https://support.apple.com/en-ca/105120
* https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/fbi-stymied-by-a...
The "no root access, no bootloader unlock, no installing your own Apple-unapproved software" bullshit is mandated by Apple, with no opt-out.
I don't think that is a logical statement. Just something doesn't exist, does not prove that it can't exist. You need a stronger proof than that to show that in my opinion. At some point, you have to empower your users and trust them to do the right thing.
Let me expand the claim to include the caveats:
>The fact so many technical people believe that security and freedom are mutually exclusive [under current technological/financial/political constraints]
>At some point, you have to empower your users and trust them to do the right thing.
All I know is, my and my parents’ quality of life is far better after switching them to devices where they are not empowered.
Let's assume for the moment that such a thing can exist. Why does it not exist?
What do we know about free (as in speech) software?
- It tends to be written by people on their own time, or funded by companies that want to make sure it continues to exist (though generally, AFAIK, such companies only support existing projects; they don't fund people to create new open-source projects that wouldn't be under their control).
- Largely because of this and the Unix philosophy, it tends to be created as individual projects each made to do one job well, which can then be glued together to do larger jobs.
- It tends to be much less user-friendly than commercial software.
Putting all this together, it is not too hard to see why there aren't widely-adopted free-as-in-speech phone OSes. A phone OS is a large project, which needs to bring a lot of smaller components together within it in a consistent and predictable way; it is a very significant undertaking, requiring a high number of person-hours of work to make usable; and vitally, in order to be commercially viable, it needs to be user-friendly.
So it is very likely that such a project could, theoretically exist, but in practice never will, unless some very wealthy person or group decides to fund its creation without hope of commercial ROI.
I think if you don’t get the point of protecting a device against the user, you’ve not had to help un-tech savvy relatives get out of situations where dark or confusing UI practices have got themselves into a mess.
The average user has zero reason to go into some deep settings menu, or even plug in over USB and execute against it to unlock the bootloader.
Unless of course what you install is nefarious?
My Aunt Millie's iPhone is secure against herself because she can't install random garbage off the Internet and is in a walled garden.
As someone who works in IT: users are often their (and their organization's) own worst enemy. We've tried training and blacklisting (with anti-virus) for decades, and it appears that whitelisting and locking things down is what actually works.
I'd be happy with a 'compromise' where there's a factory reset where you can install your own code but it blows an e-fuse to indicate that device is no longer 'OEM certified secure' state.
You just described what Samsung does with their phones. You can unlock them, but even if you later switch back to the normal OS, some features are permanently disabled by that fuse.
I got screwed by this by buying a used Samsung Tablet for the purpose of rooting it and made the mistake of letting it update after I factory reset it. Never buying a Samsung product again.
I wish they stop finding ways to lock down the device in the name of security and/or release different SKUs for the more secure use cases, provided by the organizations themselves if they deem it necessary.
I have a house full of servers and self host virtually my entire digital life and even my own usage of AI, but when I leave home I typically carry no electronics at all.
We convince ourselves we need phones, but I promise you, they are optional. Being offline a few hours a day is also good for your brain.
> Not everyone’s life is your life. Not everyone living not your life is doing it wrong.
The irony.
But I do advocate pretty strongly for open phones because they are becoming indispensable for leading a normal life without becoming a digital hermit.
They should be either open and indispensable or closed and dispensable, not indispensable and closed at the same time.
I make an actual case for the things I advocate for and actually live my convictions.
Why everyone would is better off electing Apple or Google or Meta to decide what software we are allowed to install, what content we can share with our friends, when our data should be deleted, and when it should be sold to the highest bidder that wishes to manipulate us at scale?
I am convinced surveillance capitalism is a net negative for society, but if you really think otherwise, please make an actual case for your own view instead of complaining about me making mine.
Many people's employer's use of MFA (including my own) says otherwise.
For many people ensuring their spouse and/or their children's school be able to reach them for emergencies and sudden matters says otherwise. Or an elderly parent (e.g., location tracking).
yubikey/nitrokey. Much more secure by a mile and works when your phone battery is dead. I switched multiple past employers from apps to these, joining as an SWE.
> tracking elderly parent (e.g., location tracking)
meshtastic asset tracking tag which will work even in emergencies when cell towers are down.
> children's school be able to reach them for emergencies
call-to-one-way-pager bridge, or voip-to-meshtastic bridge. Cheap to free solutions that will also work when cell towers are down.
Hit me with more perceived blockers if you are actually interested. Give me your gotchas. I have probably heard it all and am passionate about engaging people on this topic.
My wife and I have lived without a cell phone subscription for going on a decade and live a modern life as silicon valley tech workers.
Most have the choice to enjoy mostly the same lifestyle they have today, without Apple or Google or proprietary software or cell phones or even debit cards. There are reliable solutions for everything outside of the US surveillance capitalism bubble for those that actually want them.
Exiting surveillance capitalism is possible without major lifestyle changes.
Read Digital Vegan by Andy Farnell.
It really isn't - credit rating agencies are the most egregious examples by far, and next to impossible to opt out of.
We did have hardware tokens for corporate logins and banking needs.
There is no real reason why an open phone cannot be secure for sensitive applications.
Well, except that one-click PDF persistent root exploit American researchers found, and there not being any sort of iOS malware wave in the EU.
Also every iOS usually ends up with a "jailbreak", which is also known as an exploit. But somehow in Apple world that's different.
I really wish we could have a simple "don't bother me, I know what I'm doing" switch on these phones but I can certainly understand the reasons why Apple and Google are putting in as many roadblocks as possible to protect users from themselves.
I wouldn’t mind phones having “Adult” mode that intentionally fails secure net and is completely split off from the standard user space. In adult mode I install what I want.
iPhones are aimed at the many millions/billions of technically unsophisticated users who don't care about rooting their phone, but would be very unhappy to get phished out of their life savings.
Grandma does not need the freedom to install the DeFlock or ICEBlock to help protect herself and her neighbors, right? Tim Cook is a Trump doner but of course has no political bias, and remains confident ICE and law enforcement always behave ethically so there is nothing to fear.
A corporation takes away basic freedoms of people over the tools they use to communicate with society, and then consumers get on the internet in public forums and -defend- them for it. Unbelievable.
I really hope you do not vote with this type of thinking.
You can muddy the waters with strawmen and politics, but I doubt you'll convince many people around here.
Tech CEOs will always do the right thing and act in public interest before profits or political favors, right?
They would never censor an app that the public largely wanted, right?
Fortnite did not pay their Apple tax, so no one got to install Fortnite. For safety.
To be clear, Google is just as bad. I do not use or recommend any products from either company.
I use laptops, desktops, or nothing, and get along just fine.
As an serial OS architect and infosec worker myself with over two decades of experience in OS hardening, and many critical public finds impacting nearly every fortune 500 company, I do not use Apple or Google products at all. They are both complete shit at security and privacy, among other reasons.
I rarely leave home with any electronics at all. Sometimes a portable music player.
My only portable computers are sub 10 inch laptops running QubesOS, but will be replacing that with an OS of my own design soon based on stagex, which I founded.
Any software I absolutely need to -trust- is built with stagex and run in dedicated enclaves, servers, and VMs.
https://stagex.tools
...if you're primarily concerned with security.
Most people are not. They're primarily concerned with convenience, staying connected to people in their lives, and entertaining themselves.
And guess what? The iPhone does a pretty good job at this, while also being very good (not perfect) at security.
In general, if you start thinking of anything in the mode of "most people would be better off doing X the way I do it, but they don't", you need to start thinking about a) in what way they would be better off (because in 99% of cases, it's not going to be "universally, with no tradeoffs"), and b) what differences in understanding and priorities "most people" might have from you that would cause them to make those choices.
But look at people like Bunnie that actually reverse engineer things down to the metal. He made his own mobile device from scratch, from OS to metal, exactly because all existing options are garbage. These are the types people we should be paying attention to IMO.
Also had the ability to run Linux natively on my work machine, which was nice.
Obviously. Most people also were once not concerned with basic sanitation at hospitals, or with avoiding lead paint, or avoiding giving their kids alcohol to help them sleep.
The evidence these things were really bad came decades before public behavior changes.
Humans are so tribal that most will put fitting in and social norms before objective evidence to the point of killing themselves, and even their kids, so we should never assume the popular choices are the least harmful and well informed ones.
It is an evolutionary advantage that some of us do not weigh social norms so much.
So what happens when there's a baseband exploit?
I do not own a cell phone, but I build my operating systems from 386 bytes of machine code all the way up to dual hardware anchored remotely attestable servers with memory encryption and hardware anchored disk encryption, and can do whatever I want on them with confidence.
I even rack my own GPUs at home and own my own AI and "Cloud" too for less than the price of a used car.
The motivated and technical can do virtually anything with tech with total sovereignty and privacy. It has never been easier.
You keep posting this stupid crap that's meaningless. The second you step out of your house nearly everything you do is being logged by someone. Your internet connection is being spied on at multiple levels.
You cranking out at autist level 11 and thinking this is somehow normal and won't get you put on your own list.
You read to me as someone in an American tech bubble suffering from cognitive dissonance so profound you cannot even engage with the substance of a single viewpoint not shared by you or those in your bubble, except to mock and insult.
Almost certainly. Nero divergent people make up a large part of the tech crowd.
It's not mocking and insulting. It's pointing out you are atypical and therefore any solution you have is not global.
And if you only take into account stock phones, stock Pixels are still above it as per exploit costs.
So they are basically 3rd or 4th place if you add some other Android flagships into the list.
Graphene is iOS
It wasn't that long ago that my bank's app had its own NFC payment feature that worked perfectly fine on a rooted phone. Unfortunately, they killed that feature and moved to Google Wallet.
As it turns out, payment infrastructure only requires tamper proofing if that's part of the arbitrary requirements of the app you're using.
What problem are you trying to "solve"?
Do not fall for it. Publish everything publicly after appropriate embargo periods.
There are some really ridiculous attempts to be outraged about this program.
It is giving security researchers something they have always wanted in return for their silence. Another way to put it is bribery.
Probably both things are true.
Either way, consumers ultimately win in that the products and services they use will be made more secure.
The subsequent sentence on the page also says that if you find a vulnerability in a third-party app you have to tell the third party.
https://security.apple.com/terms-and-conditions/
> For a reported security vulnerability affecting any Apple platform to be eligible for an Apple Security Bounty award, you must not disclose it to anyone other than Apple until after Apple has released a software update and published a security advisory for the reported security vulnerability.
Which does not have the meaning of prohibiting disclosure to third parties or the public; it only means that you forfeit the bounty.
"Apple reserves the right to immediately end your participation in the Apple Security Bounty program if you violate any of these terms and conditions as determined by Apple"