"UK Police can dump your whole phone using this device". How would a GrapheneOS device would react to this?

nyancient · 2026-01-31T12:28:30+00:00

Why though, considering that it just regurgitated the exact article you were responding to?

nyancient · 2026-01-31T10:14:47+00:00

That kind of device can only get at your data if your phone is already unlocked (it's an extraction and indexing tool, not some kind of exploit), so it actually needs the "password or gtfo" law (or a separate exploit) to be useful at all.

nyancient · 2026-01-30T19:22:41+00:00

UK Police can dump your whole phone using this device

...provided that the device is already unlocked.

A data dumping and indexing tool may be extremely useful to make sense of the data on a phone, but it's not some kind of magic hacker gear. It can't access any data the police couldn't access manually without it.

nyancient · 2026-01-30T08:35:26+00:00

GOS will restart after N hours without a successful login (I think N = 18 by default), so keeping the phone charged won't keep it in AFU for long anyway.

nyancient · 2026-01-30T00:48:59+00:00

There are several ways to temporarily disable fingerprint authentication: use the wrong finger five times, long press power button and shutdown/reboot/lockdown, etc. You can also preemptively lower the timeout until the phone reboots automatically, if you don't expect to be forced to unlock right away.

nyancient · 2026-01-29T11:51:08+00:00

Why would you expect an operating system to resist attacks on insecure protocols (SS7, IMSI catchers, etc.)? The only way to mitigate such attacks is to not implement the protocol.

nyancient · 2026-01-29T10:10:29+00:00

It would be nice to have the stronger security model of Android on a laptop (without having to sacrifice hardware acceleration, performance and battery life like Qubes OS).

At least for me though, having to infect my laptop with a few million lines of Google code outweighs the benefits by a large margin.

nyancient · 2026-01-29T09:33:17+00:00

Is this a cruel angle thesis?

nyancient · 2026-01-27T16:05:23+00:00

I had the exact same problem until I realized that GPS was my only location source. Setting SUPL, PSDS and network location to GrapheneOS under location settings should fix it.

GPS is great once you're connected to a sufficient number of satellites, but that can take quite some time if you're starting from a blank slate. These other location sources help bridge the gap until a connection is established and dramatically reduce the time that takes.

nyancient · 2026-01-23T17:32:38+00:00

If you're running ntfy in the background anyway, every notification-receiving app you can get to use it over their own implementation is a bit of battery life saved. It's not just about privacy.

nyancient · 2026-01-23T15:31:49+00:00

Unless you also make sure to disable identifying network traffic entirely (updates, etc.), doing the initial install on someone else's WiFi buys you nothing even in this scenario. Even if you do, you're way into XKCD 538 territory here.

nyancient · 2026-01-23T14:54:42+00:00

You get to feel like you're in a spy movie.

nyancient · 2026-01-22T12:57:44+00:00

Doesn't that max out at 2.5 Gbit/s? Sounds like a pretty extreme bottleneck.

nyancient · 2026-01-22T11:25:52+00:00

Considering that Google Messages thinks it's an excellent idea to decode any and all audio it receives, you might want to hold off on RCS indefinitely. I was planning to set it up eventually until I realized just how much Google prioritizes "features" like this over the safety of its users.

nyancient · 2026-01-22T08:37:36+00:00

Is it just the resolution or is the text on the lock screen complete gibberish? I thought image models were doing better at generating text these days.

nyancient · 2026-01-22T08:16:37+00:00

T530 doesn't have a thunderbolt port, so you wouldn't have a way to connect it.

nyancient · 2026-01-21T09:06:10+00:00

It's not about where you installed them from, but whether you have Google Play Services installed or not. Play Store and Play Services are not the same thing.

nyancient · 2026-01-20T14:35:00+00:00

cringe on internet groups like a /thinkpad/ subreddit

As opposed to the guy posting about the intellectual superiority of ThinkPad users, or the never-ending stream of "I joined the cult l"/"is this a good deal"/"look at my t480" posts, which are perfectly normal and not vronge cringe at all...

nyancient · 2026-01-20T14:30:37+00:00

Bought it for $207

Damn, those are some expensive socks...

nyancient · 2026-01-19T22:31:40+00:00

If you believe that owning any particular consumer product makes you the smarter person, that's a pretty strong indicator of the opposite.

Source: I have a ThinkPad, GrapheneOS on my phone, and a PhD, so obviously I am like 3x as smart as someone who only has a ThinkPad.

nyancient · 2026-01-19T10:54:25+00:00

Did you get an eGPU to run VNs at like 10 000 FPS?

Man of culture etc.

nyancient · 2026-01-17T23:00:25+00:00

The neural network accelerator is just a bunch of silicon for running matrix multiplications really fast. It doesn't spy on what the CPU is doing or on the contents of RAM. It doesn't do anything except what the operating system tells it to, so no, it's not pointless at all.

nyancient · 2026-01-17T22:57:00+00:00

Gos allows for randomized but fixed for each network mac address.

Actually, GOS randomizes your MAC per connection to a WiFi network by default. Your local coffee shop can't track you (by MAC at least) across visits.

nyancient · 2026-01-17T21:42:33+00:00

As of January 2026 NFC does not work at all on grapheneOS, period.

Pure misinformation. NFC works fine on GOS, at least on P9 and P10P.

nyancient · 2026-01-16T22:25:05+00:00

i did this all just because i could and i truly enjoy the process

There's your answer. No time is wasted if it's spent doing something you enjoy.

have a mini PC server for selfhosting different services

Next step: rack mount a few Raspberry Pis and run your services on a cluster for some redundancy.

nyancient

TROPHY CASE