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.
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.
@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.
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.
@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.
@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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
An experimental branch in our Camera repository was rebased on top of main which results in the commits being orphaned.
Nothing in that experimental branch is against our publicly stated policies and none of it is hurting code quality. Only high quality code will be merged upstream as always.
We've renamed it from compose to compose-prototype to help address it being misrepresented.
Defederating abusive people and moving content to our top-level feed is also the opposite of a cover-up.
LineageOS and especially operating systems based on it are the opposite of privacy and security hardened. It does not appear to matter to people recommending moving to those throughout these threads that they use generative AI themselves:
GrapheneOS is partnered with Motorola Mobility which is Lenovo's mobile division.
In 2011, Motorola was split into Motorola Mobility and Motorola Solutions. Google acquired Motorola Mobility in 2012 and sold it to Lenovo in 2014. Motorola Mobility is the company selling smartphones and tablets.
Nice, also consider integrating BitcoinCash (BCH), the real Bitcoin, much cheaper and faster than Monero.
Monero works best for me, but I am not against adding other payment methods... Especially if a community is willing to fund development and ongoing maintenance.
> What about Taler instead, which truly is cash-like?
It's far further from cash than Monero and Monero is not the only cryptocurrency with privacy. Taler doesn't provide similar functionality able to replace existing systems. It deliberately avoids providing privacy on the receiving end too.
@GrapheneOS yes, I excluded Monero from my message as I'm aware that it provides privacy on both ends (which, for this reason, I'm not sure works well with AML regulations, at lest here in the EU).
My message was more centered around the other cryptocurrencies, which are less puzzling to use for a newbie as they are available in many mainstream personal finance applications: don't they only provide anonimity, and zero privacy?
Hence: why not also push Taler forward, which provides privacy for the buyer while being designed with existing regulations in mind?
@tachi@GrapheneOS A private payment system that complies with regulations is akin to a backdoored end-to-end encryption messenger. It doesn't work for those who need it the most.
@GrapheneOS i dont think theres anything brave about the new world .. contrary , its pussified ..if it was brave , OSs like graphene would be a default ..
@GrapheneOS Sucks that you're having to deal with all of these nutters when you're one of the most important independent and open organisations trying to help and improve things in the world, and for the people. Many of us support you.
@GrapheneOS The only real problem I have with GrapheneOS is that there is no pixel phones available in my country. That is a major problem for me and many others as it seems privacy is only available for people who can afford it or lucky enough to have it as an option. I use LineageOS instead, with very small changes to harden it. It's the only rom available for my device (that no longer receives vendor security patches). I am hoping that Motorola partnership will change this.
@alkatraz_200@GrapheneOS Obviously, you have a product that is not comparable to the rest, but the comparisons are hateful. People, in general, do what they can, much is that they decide to get out of the comfort of a phone full of bloatware. As you have already been told, not everyone has access or can afford to have a Pixel phone. If Motorolla can change this, well-help it be, but I doubt it could be at an affordable price, let alone at this precise moment.
@GrapheneOS@ferrebam did other projects like LineageOS or CalyxOS attack the GrapheneOS team? Were these attacks made by users of these operating systems or the develepors?
@alkatraz_200@ferrebam /e/ and Murena have been engaging in years of extreme ongoing attacks on our project and team directly from their leadership.
Calyx was attacking GrapheneOS for years prior to the recent change in leadership. CalyxOS was created as an offshoot of attacks on the GrapheneOS project by Copperhead which they were then involved in continuously.
iodéOS is closely partnered with a business and YouTuber relentlessly spreading misinformation about GrapheneOS and attacking us.
@GrapheneOS@ferrebam this is really sad to hear. I really hope open source projects that seem to care about the same values be more respectful to each other. Thank you for telling us this.
@alkatraz_200@ferrebam None of those is privacy or security hardened. Each is heavily marketed as being something they are not and put users at risk. None does the bare minimum of keeping up with standard privacy/security updates and protections. None of those tries to protect users from privacy or security exploits.
Those projects call themselves private because they don't include Google apps, although they do include a bunch of Google services with privileged access unlike GrapheneOS.
@GrapheneOS@ferrebam I have read and what the hell? This should be more known, thank you for posting this. I will definitely stop following murena. But this makes me wonder, is LineageOS also really unsecure or is it at least better than vendor stock android (for example oneui)?
@alkatraz_200@ferrebam LineageOS lags substantially behind standard Android updates. Android 17 was released in June 2026 and is required for full privacy and security patches. They haven't moved to it for their stable releases yet. For Pixels and other devices which have already moved to Android 17, it's also required for firmware, driver and HAL updates.
LineageOS does not keep all the standard security model intact and outright breaks certain security features such as verified boot.
@alkatraz_200@ferrebam It can be better than using the stock OS on devices where that's not receiving updates but bear in mind that means LineageOS isn't receiving half the important security updates either. Those devices aren't very safe to use regardless of OS choice. It's rapidly getting far worse due to AI models accelerating vulnerability discovery and exploit development. People spent years claiming it was fine due to not everyone being an exploit developer but now it's widely available.
@GrapheneOS@ferrebam my phone used to be Android 13 and it stopped getting security updates. If pixel was available im my country I would surely use GrapheneOS but I have no such option. Not at the moment at least. Speaking of being available, will the Grapheneos motorola phones be available in Turkey? Sorry if I asked too many questions at once, I really appreciate the responses.
@ferrebam@alkatraz_200@GrapheneOS Not everyone can afford a Pixel, but Pixel a-series are one of the cheapest phones on the market. They are often between 300-400 Euro new and can be had for 200-300 Euro second-hand or refurbished.
Anything below that price bracket will simply be a disaster security-wise, not only lacking MTE and a secure element, but also getting irregular to no security updates.
@ferrebam@alkatraz_200@GrapheneOS The companies that make 50-200 Euro phones are never going to make reliable monthly firmware, driver, and other security updates. It's nearly impossible at those margins.
Even companies with a huge sales volume, like Samsung, only offer quarterly updates on their budget models (A07, A17, A37, etc.).
Claiming that such phones are secure (even with GrapheneOS) would be a lie.
@ferrebam@alkatraz_200@GrapheneOS The last Android security bulletin almost 100 high/critical vulnerabilities in the main Android system components and over 80 in vendor-specific components (counted them approximately).
Waiting for weeks or months to fix them is terribly irresponsible (which unfortunately applies to most Android OEMs).
These are not theoretical issues, last week there was a chain of a WeChat + Android vulns that gave 0-click remote root access:
@danieldk@ferrebam@alkatraz_200 The patches can be shipped before they appear in Android Security Bulletins too despite nearly everyone still treated that as the initial date it can be shipped.
@danieldk@ferrebam@GrapheneOS Pixel phones are literally unavailable in my country. And even if I found a way to get a phone, I would have to register the IMEI which costs 1000 dollars... We need to push for as much as privacy and security as possible for as many people as possible. Even if that means using LineageOS on a samsung phone. Sometimes the BEST option isn't a possibility, so your option is the next best thing. Open source projects should support each other.
For me, the key is to go in the same direction of mutual help and respect. Fights and "dramas" in open source projects have been too common. Let everyone do their best in their area and contribute, if they can the rest. Not everything is black or white, there are many nuances.
@alkatraz_200@ferrebam@GrapheneOS I know, I was specifically addressing price. I hope gets better with more options, like the Motorola phones coming next year might get sold in different countries than Pixel.
If it is purely about security (I know other factors may be important to people, like the system being open source), iPhone is the next best thing. Yes, that's sad, but it is what it is.
@GrapheneOS i am excited for the grapheneOS motorola collab if graphene os is truly what it claims to be as i have personally not given it a try because i don't feel like spending $600+ on a pixel 10 + i hate google. would love to also see a Samsung collab but thats probably unlikely to happen because Samsung has a stick up their ass with knox and locking their bootloader with UI 8.0
Can you please expand on what kind of responsibility in here is to take? I fail to see what the damage is and what the solution should be. Maybe you can help dense people like me to have a better overview of the problem.
@GrapheneOS you have to snatch the employer that jumped ship at anthropic for security conserns on a existinsion-level.. ASAP.. from what was communicated after some time to calm down it seems very likely he would be open to invest time into a humanitarian project.
@GrapheneOS GrapheneOS team works so hard to give real privacy and security to as many people as possible. Why can't these people direct their hate to government surveillance that use AI or big tech in general. Instead they attack the people that actively fight against surveillance.
@alkatraz_200 They are either so mentally numb or actually government accounts for this exact use case. Either way, actually just a waste of life. @GrapheneOS
@GrapheneOS Don't worry about it too much. You've always been known for handling things the best way possible, and generative AI is an additional tool that allows you to identify potentially new vulnerabilities. It's good that you're using it specifically for review, not code generation, where criticism would be more justified. People need to understand that a fully effective solution supported by a morally problematic tool is a much better choice than a morally pure solution that can't protect against that morally problematic tool.
@GrapheneOS I can accept some of these arguments, but the core of the issue hasn't been addressed: Codeberg being fine or not with hosting a crypto-funded project
and assuming this is an attack based on your principles and not on e.g. the rejection of hosting at Codeberg is a hell of a take to defend, there's a million reasons for this and I wouldn't bet on that one in particular
@xerz We never said anything of the kind. We responded to codeberg's policies being brought up as an argument by explaining we disagree with it.
We weren't ever talking about moving to codeberg. We'll move to self-hosting Git long term but that's not the topic. We definitely aren't going to use a platform which bans important privacy projects such as Monero, Zcash and many related things. The topic in that thread wasn't moving to another Git platform or anything like that.
@GrapheneOS Codeberg bans "Content that harms the reputation of Codeberg, such as cryptocurrency related projects", not software funded by cryptocurrency. Here's the clarification:
If a project does not harm the reputation of Codeberg (e.g. by scamming people or doing other shady stuff) it does not fall under this specific rule. And if it did, it would be a TOS violation even before the change. Cryptocurrency (the scammy kind) was just added as an example here.
@adamhotep We never said it banned software funded by cryptocurrency. That's a misrepresentation of what we said in the linked post by someone who keeps posting many lies and misrepresentations to direct hate towards GrapheneOS.
@adamhotep The point is that they banned open source projects providing the tools we use to obtain our funding and pay developers.
We strongly support building full alternatives to banks and centralized financial services. We also strongly believe those should use encryption to provide strong privacy, unlike Bitcoin and Ethereum which enable mass surveillance of financial transactions in their own way.
We're not on the same page as a project which is against escaping corporate finance.
@GrapheneOS I don't have the details of what projects you're referring to and whether/why they left Codeberg, but from what I quoted above, such tools do not appear to violate any terms.
