This account has been posting lies about what GrapheneOS has said and done for the past several days. Those are being widely propagated across this platform. People are being played.

mas.to/@zzt/117246243842026067

This is very clearly a lie about what we said about codeberg and they're also lying about us about deleting posts we haven't. In previous threads they lied about us deleting a file we clearly never deleted and similarly lied about many things we said and did.

grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/

GrapheneOS@GrapheneOS@grapheneos.social

@zm Codeberg also banned cryptocurrency which is our primary source of funding and is what we use to send money to nearly everyone on our team. A huge portion of our users are cryptocurrency users. Many of them care about financial privacy and support Monero. We also support financial privacy.

Most of the people attacking us on this platform aren't our users. We aren't being attacked elsewhere. People in our chat rooms oppose the attacks on us and it's only an active topic in the media rooms.

Replying to @⁨GrapheneOS@grapheneos.social⁩

Cryptocurrency enables us to reliably pay a team distributed around the world. It has provided the majority of our funding and is how we're able to run GrapheneOS as a non-profit entirely funded by donations. Many other privacy projects also receive the majority of their donations via cryptocurrency.

We're being attacked because we're transparent about how we're funded, how we pay our team and our general belief in technology protecting people from authoritarian states.

grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/

GrapheneOS@GrapheneOS@grapheneos.social

@darkwolf GrapheneOS is an open source privacy project with a development team spread around the world. It exists to protect people from corporate and government surveillance.

GrapheneOS isn't a business and our legal entity is a Canadian non-profit organization.

GrapheneOS is entirely funded by donations. The majority of the donations are made via cryptocurrency.

We pay people an hourly rate set in USD or CAD. We currently pay around 14 people with Ethereum donations and 1 person with CAD.

Replying to @⁨GrapheneOS@grapheneos.social⁩

We strongly believe in privacy including for financial transactions. People should expect nothing less from a privacy project.

It should be obvious we aren't fans of traditional banking and financial services built to enable mass surveillance.

We also aren't fans of unencrypted blockchains and believe those should be fixed.

We believe in the privacy of cash being preserved in the same way we believe in people's private conversations and thoughts being protected.

grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/

GrapheneOS@GrapheneOS@grapheneos.social

@darkwolf People's conversations, thoughts and financial transactions have been largely private for most of human history. Law enforcement still managed to do their jobs. They can continue to do so in a world where privacy technologies preserve historical privacy norms.

We use and support open source projects working on restoring the privacy provided by cash including Monero. Moving from cash to credit cards, PayPal, etc. is an ongoing privacy disaster. Bitcoin and Ethereum currently are too.

Replying to @⁨GrapheneOS@grapheneos.social⁩

Many of the recent threads attacking us are doing so with fabricated stories where they falsely claim we've covered up how we use technologies. In reality, these attacks started because we've been transparent.

The recent attacks began when we replied to a question about how we use AI. After the attacks began, we made a top-level thread explaining our AI policies and how we arrived at those:

grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/

We believe it's the right approach for us minimizing harm and maximizing good.

GrapheneOS@GrapheneOS@grapheneos.social

GrapheneOS imposes a set of restrictions on how generative AI can be used in our project and community. It isn't forbidden but rather we imposed rules based on actual issues.

Posts made in our forum, chat rooms, issue tracker and the rest of our project must be written by humans. There's an exception from this rule for translation and accessibility features. That means commit messages, pull request messages, bug reports and feature requests are expected to be written by humans, not a machine.

Replying to @⁨GrapheneOS@grapheneos.social⁩

Directing endless hate towards us with lies, misrepresentations, bullying and vitriol is not going to convince us that we've made any incorrect decision in our approach to this. We believe we're doing a large amount of good with our approach and that it massively outweighs the harm.

AI is being used to harm our users with far more powerful surveillance tech, rapid vulnerability discovery, rapid exploit development and much more. If we did not adapt then we would be failing to protect our users.

Replying to @⁨GrapheneOS@grapheneos.social⁩

LLMs are a massively disruptive technology causing a lot of harm and information security is one of the areas most impacted by it. It has been heavily adopted for offense and defense. It's very scary how good the latest models are at finding vulnerabilities and even developing exploits for those. It isn't viable for GrapheneOS to pretend that isn't the case and skip protecting our users from it. There's an ongoing crisis for privacy and security but attackers only have a temporary advantage.

Replying to @⁨GrapheneOS@grapheneos.social⁩

Privacy and security on computers was always always thoroughly neglected. It is no longer nearly as viable to continue doing so and dismissing it as only mattering in targeted attacks.

The vulnerabilities being discovered were nearly entirely already there and it's a good thing they're getting found and fixed. Many years of technical debt must be repaid. Decisions such as monolithic kernels and massive codebases written in C and C++ must be repaid. We have to somehow keep users safe through it.

Replying to @⁨GrapheneOS@grapheneos.social⁩

Similarly to AI, social media has been an incredibly disruptive and largely harmful technology. The recent days of hive mind abuse towards us are a great example. We're still using social media to publish information about GrapheneOS and communicate. We even have accounts on Facebook and LinkedIn.

No amount of abuse will change our minds about what we believe is the best way to approach the brave new world we live in. We'll continue doing what we believe is best for our users and the world.