Re:Ask HN: How do you trust that your personal machine is no...
by mindslight on Sunday January 15, 2023 @12:38PM
(#34391224)
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Re:Ask HN: How do you trust that your personal machine is no...
by sowbug on Sunday January 15, 2023 @02:51PM
(#34392603)
Concretely, what discourages me from going Pixel is the Qualcomm integrated baseband/application chipsets.
Google Pixel hasn't used Qualcomm chipsets since the Pixel 5.
Re:Ask HN: How do you trust that your personal machine is no...
by mindslight on Sunday January 15, 2023 @03:04PM
(#34392747)
Thank you! Not following so closely, I had been thinking that "Tensor" was just a coprocessor based on the name.
Re:Ask HN: How do you trust that your personal machine is no...
by nl on Sunday January 15, 2023 @10:01PM
(#34396321)
> What commercial vendors offer out of the box has never been a good yardstick for talking about security features
It absolutely is. Default setting matter a lot!
It's great to have extra security features too. But even experienced users won't change defaults if they have too much cost. If things are turned on by default then those costs diminish because other software has to work within them.
Re:Ask HN: How do you trust that your personal machine is no...
by mindslight on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @12:39PM
(#34415654)
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True, but those protections are enabled by default (on Pixels at least). Users don't have to do anything here.
> And from what I remember, a plain AOSP install seemed to still phone home to Google to check for Internet connectivity and whatnot.
You're not wrong, but GrapheneOS and CalyxOS are valid options, if you don't trust the ROM Pixel ships with. Even with a custom ROM you're left trusting the OEM. It'd be nice if we could have an open hardware / open firmware Android, but it hasn't happened, yet.