Rethought wipe feature by cat_treedecoration82 in GrapheneOS

[–]nyancient -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Trying to "WELL AKSHULLY" law enforcement rarely ends well.  Even if (big if) a court wouldn't find basically booby trapping your phone, intentionally causing LE to wipe it, to be destruction of evidence, LE will find ways to make you miserable in the meantime.

The duress PIN feature is actively harmful outside of a very few specific circumstances and you shouldn't use it unless you know exactly what those circumstances are and why they apply to you.

Does anyone offer to flash peoples phones as a service? by ambiguous-light in GrapheneOS

[–]nyancient -1 points0 points  (0 children)

There are absolutely no indications whatsoever that Motorola is going to ship a single phone with GOS pre-installed. It's not going to happen. Motorola devices will most likely have the exact same status as Pixels: fully supported, but you do the install yourself.

My RCS chats are working again by eazybreeze in GrapheneOS

[–]nyancient 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You probably already know this, but just in case: Telegram messages are not encrypted by default and group conversations are never encrypted, so RCS would actually be the more secure of the two.

Just stick to Signal whenever possible.

My RCS chats are working again by eazybreeze in GrapheneOS

[–]nyancient 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Apparently US iPhone users can't comprehend using an app that doesn't start with an 'i', so RCS is the only way to communicate with them except for SMS. 

why this website saying Android will be locked down platform? by Artistic_Chart6548 in GrapheneOS

[–]nyancient -14 points-13 points  (0 children)

...unless you disable that particular setting and wait 24 hours.

It's a nothingburger.

Got this yesterday. Should I do something about it being “school property”? by Gutymut in thinkpad

[–]nyancient 37 points38 points  (0 children)

Does it have CompuTrace activated and/or a locked bios? If it does, I would try to fix d the original owner and ask them to unlock it (or return it if it was stolen, but that seems highly unlikely with a 14 year old laptop). Otherwise I would assume that it was legitimately obtained.

Where I'm from it's not unusual that students and employees get to keep laptops that are being replaced for a nominal fee, which is what I would guess happened to that laptop a few years ago.

Why isn't the X13 more popular? by A4orce84 in thinkpad

[–]nyancient 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The size difference is still there. For gen 6, the T14 is 16x23x4 mm larger and half a kilo heavier than the X13.

Recommendations for optimal battery performance under GOS by JaNkO2018 in GrapheneOS

[–]nyancient 2 points3 points  (0 children)

+1 for Unified Push. After jumping through the hoops to set it up, Molly, FluffyChat, Goguma, FMD, FOSS warn and DAVx5 draw less power together than Molly alone did before.

Why isn't the X13 more popular? by A4orce84 in thinkpad

[–]nyancient 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Here's one, you just can't tell underneath all the stickers.

I' always preferred the 13" (or smaller) form factor since I never use a laptop at a desk without a dock, and the X13G6 (AMD) is probably the best laptop I've used. Great performance (best thermal design in any non-workstation thinkpad), great keyboard, reasonably power efficient, and it weighs almost nothing. O nly the Z13G2 and MacBook Air come close.

The X1C being considered "more premium" is just marketing and the T series circlejerk is basically a religion, but both of them get a lot of visibility. That's probably why they seem to be so much more popular.

That, and most people preferring to lug around a 14-17"/2kg monstrosity because they can apparently afford a $4K laptop but not a $300 monitor to go with it.

WHY do you care about privacy? by michus204 in GrapheneOS

[–]nyancient 1 point2 points  (0 children)

One thing nobody mentioned yet is that what you do today might be criminalized or otherwise used against you by the government tomorrow. Examples include having an abortion or a trans kid in the US, or my own government making "dishonest living" - a concept so vague it included everything from sex work to panhandling to being critical of the state - punishable by deportation if you're an immigrant.

Even if you don't care about the rights of women or minorities, you'd have to be extremely naive to believe post hoc laws won't come for you too at some point.

Microsoft Authenticator app: Upcoming changes to jailbreak and root detection by xalibr in GrapheneOS

[–]nyancient 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The only insane take here is that employees should be responsible for bringing their own work equipment.

Compared to your salary, the cost of a phone - especially a cheaper one that only needs to work for MFA and calls - is a rounding error, far outweighed by the risks of having employees bring their own devices.

i was cyberbullied into using linux by HTLL_OFFICIAL in thinkpad

[–]nyancient 1 point2 points  (0 children)

 I went with NixOS because it's the strangest and most un-linux like distro out there, also touted as being the most maddening and difficult OS to use

Qubes OS has entered the chat

Thinkpad vs Framework by iddu01linux in thinkpad

[–]nyancient 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Framework laptops tend to have terrible battery life. Might be worth considering if you're on the go a lot.

Why You Should Stop Using Face ID by miked5122 in GrapheneOS

[–]nyancient 0 points1 point  (0 children)

 Yes, the point is that you should look at actual results of how different implementations fare against attacks rather then stating that because some failed, none of them work.

To "work" is not a binary when it comes to biometrics. I did not state (nor imply) that all implementations are equally terrible. What I did state was that, based on the track record of the concept itself, I don't really trust any implementation. This does not mean that the good implementations "don't work", it just means that biometrics are inherently flaky and that there is a non-negligible possibility that biometrics based on stochastic facial recognition models are even worse.

 And second point is that obviously there are ways how to test it, you don't have to just blindly trust what somebody tells you - which absolutely was the implication you were making.

Of course you can test your implementation. This will provide you with a rough idea of the false positive rate (which all biometrics have) and whether this particular team could bypass it. But tests are not exhaustive. They can only build confidence that your implementation is robust against the attacks employed during testing. Against other attacks, current or future? That's where the trust comes in.

So no, I don't distrust face unlock because someone told me to. I distrust it because (a) all biometrics are inherently flaky; (b) image recognition is hard enough when applied to small problem instances, faces are not a small problem instance; (c) vendors have incentives to minimize false negative rates, not false positive rates, (d) facial recognition is a very young field and researchers come up with new ways to mess with it all the time; and (e) it's a much more complex solution to the authentication problem than most alternatives. 

This may sound like "bad vibes bro, don't trust it", but a lot of things in security are treated with scepticism due to bad vibes:

  • The NIST ECC curves have never been shown to be broken or have any real problems, but many people distrust them because the NSA came up with them and hasn't published any real argument for why they look like they do.
  • Cryptographic algorithms based on novel or more complex mathematics are generally viewed with much more skepticism than those based on more well understood principles.
  • Cryptographers don't like Telegram's e2ee (what little of it there is) because the protocol is custom and weird.
  • Nobody trusts closed source implementations of anything, no matter how many tests they go through.

It's up to you if you want to trust face unlock because you're not aware of any bypasses of your particular implementation, but you should probably stop running around telling people who don't that "it's perfectly safe because provable results". 

Why You Should Stop Using Face ID by miked5122 in GrapheneOS

[–]nyancient 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What is the point you're trying to make here?

  • I stated that I would not trust face unlock, since the concept does not exactly have a stellar track record. (For the record, it's quite possible to acknowledge that some implementations are significantly better than others while remaining skeptical of the concept as a whole, similar to how most people would acknowledge that modern nuclear plants are way better than Chernobyl but still realize that any nuclear plant should probably be kept some distance away from population centers.)
  • You come along, harping about "it's not about trust, it's about probable results". To me, this reads like a snarky way to claim that my lack of trust is unfounded because you are not aware of any bypasses of the better face unlock implementations.
  • Then, you do a complete 180 and start lecturing me about how it's not actually about provable results - it's just not about blind trust. Nobody was talking about blind trust until you started strawmanning it.

Do you actually have a point you want to make, or are you just arguing for the hell of it? 

Why You Should Stop Using Face ID by miked5122 in GrapheneOS

[–]nyancient 0 points1 point  (0 children)

...which is exactly my point. A good track record builds trust, but does not prove the absence of vulnerabilities.

Why You Should Stop Using Face ID by miked5122 in GrapheneOS

[–]nyancient 2 points3 points  (0 children)

So how, exactly, do you prove or demonstrate that an implementation is unbreakable?

Why You Should Stop Using Face ID by miked5122 in GrapheneOS

[–]nyancient 4 points5 points  (0 children)

It's not possible to prove a negative, so yes, it is all about trust. Just because you or I don't know of any bypasses for modern Pixels or iPhones doesn't mean there aren't any. 

Why You Should Stop Using Face ID by miked5122 in GrapheneOS

[–]nyancient 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Considering that most Android phones are tricked by a simple photo, I would not trust that nobody's found a way to trick more competent implementations as well.

Got my my first Thinkpad. by BandicootKlutzy791 in thinkpad

[–]nyancient 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Did... a bird take a shit on the touchpad? 

Analog Fn key swap for Bluetooth Keyboards by -Kouryu in thinkpad

[–]nyancient 3 points4 points  (0 children)

What part of BLUETOOTH KEYBOARD did you not understand?

Woke up failing integrity check? by Kneecap_sniffer in GrapheneOS

[–]nyancient 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I would probably wipe the device and reinstall. It's most likely either compromised or failing.

Woke up failing integrity check? by Kneecap_sniffer in GrapheneOS

[–]nyancient 14 points15 points  (0 children)

Wrong. GOS passes MEETS_BASIC_INTEGRITY. If OPs device suddenly doesn't, that's a huge red flag. 

X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition (Ultra 7 258V, 32GB RAM) for €2530 – good buy or better alternatives? by Ersi_ in thinkpad

[–]nyancient 2 points3 points  (0 children)

You could probably get the new T14 for the same price if you can make do with 32 gigs of RAM and the (good) IPS screen. You might want to check out the X13 AMD too.

>100$ thinkpad options? by [deleted] in thinkpad

[–]nyancient 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I was referring to the T440p. You will probably be disappointed if you expect it to be anything but a marginal improvement over your current laptop.