I can't tell if they are developers or not, but I have seen what I'll refer to as "evangelists" of GrapheneOS spread a lot of misinformation about LineageOS and Mainline Linux phones, then when ignore technical arguments and block people who raise those technical arguments.

After seeing it a few times, it really makes me uneasy to use GrapheneOS. Heck, I switched back to LineageOS because of this behavior.

In the Linux phone community, we all have our preferences (I use Mobian and am a Mobian Dev), but we are very cooperative and friendly to one another. For example, I go out of my way to make sure all of my projects work on other OSes/DEs, and I am just as welcome in the PostmarketOS developer community as I am in the Mobian community as I am in the Mobile Fedora community. I personally consider quite a few of the pmOS devs to be my friend, as well as the Fedora devs I work with.

I have been a proponent of GrapheneOS, but seeing this on HN has made me uneasy:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28095033 (Log in to HN and enable "showdead" in your HN profile to see all comments)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28095108

At that time, I wasn't entirely sure what was going on, but I did some more research and found this:

- https://github.com/AOSPAlliance/README/commit/cbd2a95cba7c2a...

- https://web.archive.org/web/20210403012439/https://freenode....

This kind of behavior is limiting the success of GrapheneOS, and there needs to be a Linus-style intervention (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18000698) to get the project back on good terms with the rest of the Android ROM community.

> I have been a proponent of GrapheneOS

It's common for CalyxOS folks to claim to be a proponent / user of GrapheneOS or member of our community in order to spread misinformation about it or act badly in order to make the project look bad. You saying that doesn't make it true. It has become quite extreme:

https://github.com/bromite/bromite/discussions/1186

> https://github.com/AOSPAlliance

AOSP Alliance is simply CalyxOS and they made a unilateral decision to kick us out of the organization after we brought up the misinformation and harassment they've engaged in towards GrapheneOS. They invented completely false claims and their highly dishonest and malicious behavior towards us including this incident where cdesai (lead developer of CalyxOS) churned out lies about and unilaterally kicked us out of a 'collaborative' project without consulting anyone else is a clear example of their behavior.

> This kind of behavior is limiting the success of GrapheneOS, and there needs to be a Linus-style intervention (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18000698) to get the project back on good terms with the rest of the Android ROM community.

That's what needs to happen with CalyxOS and their relentless, vicious attacks on GrapheneOS including here, and including you spreading them on their behalf. They've engaged in substantial bullying and harassment targeting me in particular and we have ample evidence of that including the screenshots / logs where the leader of the organization (Nick) engages in vicious bullying targeting me for my depression and attempting to gaslight me repeatedly over a period of months. He very explicitly pretended to be a friend, as did cdesai, on order to get in a position where they could cause more harm to us and myself in particular.

Since you're the founder and lead developer of GrapheneOS, your unfounded accusations against other HN users are tarnishing the credibility of the project. There is no justification for any of these attacks (from the links above) that you posted on HN:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28099846

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28101158

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28101118

(Log in to HN and enable "showdead" in your profile to view them.)

Branding people who disagree with you as "malicious" and "spreading misinformation", and accusing them of being affiliates of other projects, will earn GrapheneOS more opposition than support. I support just about any FOSS project, but I will never endorse the type of hostility that's being shown here.

Please reconsider the way you communicate publicly. HN and other forums are full of potential GrapheneOS users, and toning down the abrasiveness would only serve to improve the adoption of GrapheneOS.

Heh, so I figured it was some random followers, but strcat seems to actually be the founder:

https://github.com/thestinger

https://daniel.micay.dev/

Which is honestly surprised me.

Why is that everyone who disagrees with you is automatically 'engaging in bullying'? Do you not see the irony here?

I don't see anything wrong there. But I thought Linus' behavior was fine as well. Perhaps I'm in the minority.

Or say (OpenBSD) Theo-style?

I doubt that Micay gives a good goddamn about the rest of the Android "ROM" scene — the ones that can rarely allow a secure boot, these are the ones we're referencing, right?

That's fine, the project devs of GrapheneOS (I assume that's who Micay is?) can do what they please, but when your comments adds needless disparaging remarks, it outlines the exact point I made above. When I see this, I really don't want to be associated with such a community, nor would I recommend it to anyone else.

> disparaging remarks

Mentioning a project breaking the security model of the project they're kang'ing is disparaging?

Have a good day, there.

I've been doing CyanogenMod for years, and since become a director at LineageOS.

I've never heard anything akin to " malicious organization/project that's involved in spreading misinformation about GrapheneOS and harassing our developers" and if I were I'd have no problem with going around smacking some of my friends ( some I've known since ~2014 ) that work on the project.

Nowadays most of custom ROM developers are chill and there's really nothing like the old "wars", everyone is "friend" with other projects. The issues arise with these people that you called "evangelists", and I couldn't agree more. It seems like a cult. And it's always on these "super" security/privacy oriented projects.

> I've been doing CyanogenMod for years, and since become a director at LineageOS.

Thank you for all the work you have contributed to.

> I've never heard anything akin to " malicious organization/project that's involved in spreading misinformation about GrapheneOS and harassing our developers" and if I were I'd have no problem with going around smacking some of my friends ( some I've known since ~2014 ) that work on the project.

That matches what I have seen with Mainline Linux devs. We all have our preferences, but we all have common goals in mind and want to help each other.

Indeed, everyone works in its own way. Most on this scene started because people had obscene support by some OEM, so just for personal interest. But after a while you see the whole community behind it and you don't have much of a choice to start sharing your work and goals with other people.

GrapheneOS attacks on other projects is well documented. They have went to the extent of trying to get a Monero community member removed by harassing them [1]. Techlore has documented some of the more nefarious actions [2]. GrapheneOS is currently involved in a dispute with CalyxOS as well.

1 - https://sethforprivacy.com/posts/community-drama-and-mobile-...

2 - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Dx7CZ-2Bajg

Two people just collected stuff said by others out of context does not make it documentation of anything.

It sure does -- and your throwaway status is suspect.

This is just one example (linked below) but I've seen a fair bit of this type of behaviour just specifixally from the project founder/leader. There does seem to be a lot of other more level-headed folk involved with the project too however so not sure how insurmountable the problem is.

https://github.com/Peter-Easton/GrapheneOS-Knowledge/issues/...

> I can't tell if they are developers or not, but I have seen what I'll refer to as "evangelists" of GrapheneOS spread a lot of misinformation about LineageOS and Mainline Linux phones, then when ignore technical arguments and block people who raise those technical arguments.

This is completely untrue and is you trying to spin your regular persistent attacks on us into us doing something wrong. We aren't spreading any misinformation about LineageOS. AOSP can use mainline Linux kernels and traditional Linux distributions often use Android kernels so there's another an example of muddying the waters.

> After seeing it a few times, it really makes me uneasy to use GrapheneOS. Heck, I switched back to LineageOS because of this behavior.

It's you engaging in this behavior.

> In the Linux phone community, we all have our preferences (I use Mobian and am a Mobian Dev), but we are very cooperative and friendly to one another. For example, I go out of my way to make sure all of my projects work on other OSes/DEs, and I am just as welcome in the PostmarketOS developer community as I am in the Mobian community as I am in the Mobile Fedora community. I personally consider quite a few of the pmOS devs to be my friend, as well as the Fedora devs I work with.

You're acknowledging right here that you're a developer in those projects and here you are acting maliciously towards GrapheneOS with falsified claims about it. That's pretty unfortunate. It's pretty sad that you folks show up whenever it's mentioned to attack it. We'll be contacting those projects about your behavior here and elsewhere. We do not consider it to be those projects doing something wrong and expect that the others involved in them don't want you spreading FUD about GrapheneOS and starting a conflict with it.

Heh, youre actually the founder?

https://github.com/thestinger

https://daniel.micay.dev/

I'm surprised to be honest.

Micay seems to be the productive nerd that got ripped off by the businessman.

Never had such an extremely solid android rom.

But Anuprita and a bunch of other manchildren trying to save from misinformation by flak-ing James (the business guy) lets them look bad.

Imo this is a case of asperger + frustration.

Sorry, I don't know who any of these people are, so it makes your comment very confusing.

Your statements are quite general and not much substance can be attributed to it unless you give some solid evidence as to why or what was said of LineageOS/Linux that hurt your feelings. If you are merely referring to the discussions in the room about the shortcomings of the above mentioned OS/Kernel security-wise then this is just a reflection of the frustration people face with security in Linux. You didn't even bother to add some relevant quotes. And I dont know, but we rarely talk about LineageOS and maybe someone said something about it in a disparaging way when someone new to the room must have brought up the topic of lineage OS and privacy/security.

I dont know how Graphene OS has anything to do with your judgement of the developers behavior. He is quiet a reasonable person ,helps people out a lot. Anyone who comes to the matrix room with genuine interest knows that. There are of course trouble-makers who get themselves banned and then go around the internet spreading ill-will.

I dont know of anyone who was blocked because they just made technical arguments about linux phones and got blocked. It always comes down to someone shilling some linux phone, calling it more secure and distracting everyone in the room with weird conspiratorial messages. So if you know of a situation where you or anyone you know were merely making technical points about linux phones/mainline linux in some argument about some aspect of those projects and someone blocked you or accosted you please tell us here. We take care that we act in a civil manner in the room and try to have fruitful rational discussions and do not tolerate hot-blooded-loud mouthed "evangelists"

Two things:

- You seemed to make an account specifically to respond to me. Is there a reason you did that?

- I debated if i wanted to call out specific instances or not, but many of them are personal ones and I didn't want to dox anyone. Based on the replies I have gotten, it seems unnecessary to do it now.

> Currently Graphene does not support Network Location Providers. So, apps won't be able to get location when you are indoors and location lookups would be slow.

That's not super surprising. NLPs will come through either Google Play Services or MicroG, and Only in MicroG do you get a choice of them.

Location lookups still shouldn't be too bad, as from what I have seen, the Modem will still keep either an AGPS or GPS lock, so toggling the location icon really only toggles whether the information is presented to apps.

There's another option for users who don't need Google Play Services or microG for notifications, etc., but still want to use Wi-Fi and cell tower trilateration to speed up the process of getting location readings. DivestOS includes only the location module (UnifiedNlp) of microG and nothing else:

https://divestos.org

This lets you choose non-Google network location providers (which can even be fully offline), and would be a good choice if you don't need the parts of microG that communicate with Google's servers.

Having said that, if you're already on an OS with microG pre-installed (such as CalyxOS), you can also keep the parts of microG that communicate with Google's servers disabled to achieve the same effect.

I've never had an issue with GPS not working indoors. I did have that issue when using degoogled ROMs on other phones but GrapheneOS on a Pixel 5 has worked flawlessly.

I guess if I was inside a big brick/concrete building then it might not work? It seemed to work fine in my brick apartment. Anyway if I am indoors then I probably don't need GPS anyway since I am not traveling and hopefully know where I am already.

> Anyway if I am indoors then I probably don't need GPS anyway since I am not traveling and hopefully know where I am already.

Many apps won't start when location is not available. E.g. Tinder. I guess usually people use Tinder while staying indoors.

pshirshov is a CalyxOS user who is active in their community and tried to create drama on our issue tracker. The comment was removed and now the duplicate issue has been removed. An archive has been kept to document the raid.

https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/24 is the feature request for this and the other one was closed as a duplicate in favor of it.

1) I'm your user as well. 2) I didn't try to create any dramas and, frankly, I don't care about your relationships with calyx 3) I'm pursuing my own interests - I need a good phone. Atm I'm self-building Calyx (their own build is not up to my expectations) and I'm experimenting with building Graphene with microG. 4) I'm an Asperger and I see something familiar in you. You may need to seek an advice.

Regarding network location providers: sandboxed play services should do what you want.

Nope. For some reason NLP doesn't work it such setup.

Unfortunately I don't yet have an expertise so I can explain why.

I wasn't aware; that is unfortunate.

>So, apps won't be able to get location when you are indoors and location lookups would be slow.

What? GPS works fine indoors.

> What? GPS works fine indoors.

Not in all the cases. In my particular house GPS (and all the others, Galileo, Glonass, etc) doesn't work. It may find a sattelite or two but never gets a fix, even when I stay close to a window.

Not really, no. Modern chipsets are way better than previously, but it's still far from universally reliable, and can't be.

The linked page is not from the GrapheneOS project. It's from a company selling the phones. The best place to read about what's offered by GrapheneOS is at https://grapheneos.org/features. Sandboxed Play services compatibility layer is explained at https://grapheneos.org/usage#sandboxed-play-services.

> Well, while I like a lot of things about Graphene, at the moment there is at least one aspect of it which makes it somehow unusable (see https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/24)

This seems like an extremely minor thing to nitpick over...

> Currently Graphene does not support Network Location Providers. So, apps won't be able to get location when you are indoors and location lookups would be slow.

It doesn't bundle them in the OS and the OS doesn't trust third party providers. It doesn't mean that network location providers can't be used. They can still be used by apps and provided by apps to other apps such as how it works with the Play services location APIs. We also aren't going to be sending real time location information to that kind of network service, especially if it's a proprietary service from Apple/Google/Mozilla rather than something we can self-host. We don't particularly want to host a server receiving that kind of sensitive data though. We want a robust and secure local implementation respecting the OS security model for location providers. We'll need to set up generating databases for different regions, signing them and hosting them on a server. A new client needs to be developed for this.

> At the same time they use SeedVault which is developed by Calyx. I guess they need to add some notes on this into their FAQ.

GrapheneOS came up with the overall design/concept of SeedVault and it was implemented by a member of our community long before CalyxOS existed. They started funding development work on it but they didn't create it and it isn't inherently their project. We fully intend to fund development on improving backups and will be splitting away from what SeedVault has become for various reasons including their actions against us. The developer they're funding to work on SeedVault is NOT hostile towards us but their involvement is concerning to us nonetheless.

> So, while I think that Graphene has a lot of good properties (e.g. sandboxed Play Services are MUCH better than microg) and is somehow superior to Calyx

https://grapheneos.org/features explains what it provides.

> I won't recommend Graphene to a regular user who is privacy concerned but doesn't want to trade too much for privacy

It has much broader app compatibility, so what are you trading away for better privacy and security? Is this entirely about the OS itself not feeding your location to Mozilla to get back a location estimate based on their proprietary Wi-Fi data and the openly available cellular data? The cellular data would be put to much better use by via regional databases distributed from a first party server, with a first party location service locally consuming them while respecting the security model for this.

> For such people CalyxOS (probably a self-build) looks like a better option.

All simply because we don't do include a network location service? Really?

> Also there is some strange conflict between Graphene and Calyx, for some reason unknown to me Graphene guys consider Calyx as "malicious project" (see https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/632#is...).

It comes down to the CalyxOS project and community spreading misinformation and attacks on GrapheneOS and GrapheneOS developers across platforms along with engaging in substantial harassment. Our project members have been regularly impersonated by clearly fake sockpuppet accounts too, which were then used to engage in ridiculous false flag attacks such as https://github.com/bromite/bromite/discussions/1186 and the Monero incident brought up below although with the spin that we did something wrong when we were impersonated. It has become ridiculous, with this misinformation spread whenever GrapheneOS is brought up and with our developers subjected to substantial bullying and harassment.

You're a member of the CalyxOS community doing exactly the kind of thing that has led to this situation, including what you did on our issue tracker. It may seem small, but you started a whole pile on from the usual suspects lying about it here and you're representing CalyxOS whether you like it or not. They welcome you in their community, as they do others, and encourage you to attack us. Nick himself has directly engaged in vicious bullying and harassment.

> You're a member of the CalyxOS community doing exactly the kind of thing that has led to this situation, including what you did on our issue tracker. It may seem small, but you started a whole pile on from the usual suspects lying about it here and you're representing CalyxOS whether you like it or not. They welcome you in their community, as they do others, and encourage you to attack us. Nick himself has directly engaged in vicious bullying and harassment.

How did you come to this conclusion? I've seen a number of accusations such as these from yourself, and am wondering where they seem to come from. Normally, you seem to be mistaken.

> They can still be used by apps and provided by apps to other apps such as how it works with the Play services location APIs.

I'm not sure why but even with PS installed "Network" location provider never returns anything.

> It doesn't bundle them in the OS and the OS doesn't trust third party providers.

A user-installable package may be a good option?

> We want a robust and secure local implementation respecting the OS security model for location providers. We'll need to set up generating databases for different regions, signing them and hosting them on a server. A new client needs to be developed for this.

Maybe you are not aware, but isn't "GSM location provider" doing exactly that?

> It comes down to the CalyxOS project and community spreading misinformation and attacks on GrapheneOS

I guess you should create some kind of a FAQ entry explaning your relationships with Calyx and other distros. For a random person who just tries to find a good solution for their needs all these in-house dramas are pretty obscure and demotivating.

> You're a member of the CalyxOS community doing exactly the kind of thing that has led to this situation,

You've mistaken me with someone. I'm a passerby. Something is wrong with your perception. As I said before, I have same traits (I'm an Asperger and I had some depression-alike problems) though I've learnt to keep these traits more or less under control. Maybe it's a good idea to seek an advice.

> including what you did on our issue tracker

I posted a comment saying "there is also DejaVu location provider which is used by Calyx". I don't know why you think I did somehting wrong, I'm sorry if this bothered you SO much.

> They welcome you in their community, as they do others, and encourage you to attack us.

I'm not attacking you anyhow, I think that your project is very good and in many aspects superior to other projects, though as an end user I found it somehow inconvenient because of the NLP issue. Moreover I'm really impressed by your work on sandboxed PS. Nothing more.