I only recently learnt that iode and /e/ OS receive funding from the French government (As alleged from a post by the GrapheneOS team).
Recently also, the French government has been going after GrapheneOS for refusing to work with them and put backdoors in their software to aid the French government in their mass surveillance.
However, iodeOS and /e/ OS seem to be safe from the French government’s attack. This creates a little suspicion for me, especially after the GrapheneOS developers have alleged that iodeOS and /e/ OS are complying with the French government’s demands.
Now, I also know that the GrapheneOS leader is always having a beef with competing degoogled Android ROMs. That’s why I’ll like to hear from iodeOS about their relationship with the French government and how it affects the privacy of the Operating System
IodéOS is all open source, so if they were put any ‘back doors’ in their software, it wold be visible to anyone who cares enough to look,
And I really wouldn’t pay much attention to anything written by the GrapheneOS team. They make a lot of statements based on innuendo, rumour, paranoia, and an almost complete lack of evidence.
Graphene appear to be acting in desperation at the moment IMHO, possibly due to the sudden realisation that Screwgle will only tolerate so much of their action before putting them out of business altogether. If they are lucky the big G might just buy them out and reinvent Google Graphene in in a similar way that Lexus is to Toyota fanboys. You will pay a premium in advance NOT to have them sell your personal data or spy on you, but the premium will be in the region of that which only politicians, footballers and ‘A’ list celebrities can afford.
All the ‘pond dwellers’ such as ourselves will have to like LOS or lump it. Only plausible alternative being native linux phones which I’m finding offer a reasonably practical option providing a) You choose compatible hardware and b) You are happy to take the FOSS lifestyle option. It’s not ready for mainstream yet though. Needs more attention to entry level detailing and a little more polish, but I believe it will come over time.
Yes, the French government asked us to implement a backdoor. But, they proposed too few money. You know, French’s deficit is abysmal, budgets are decreasing, there’s a severe political crisis…
However, CIA, KGB, MI6 and Mossad proposed much more ! So, … you understand what I mean… I had to change my car and I wanted to bring my kids to Bora-Bora for the hollydays this year, … Times are tough and making ends meet is difficult, we sometimes have to compromise a little to improve our quality of life, don’t we ? I’m sure everyone will understand.
Btw, I am taking advantage of this opportunity to pass on a short message. I heard that DZ Mafia makes bitcoin donations to a famous custom ROM ; guys if you are also willing to support us, could you please use Zcash ? That’s much better for privacy.
How do you you know ?? Oh Gosh you must be from one of these agencies to which I sold a backdoor… Or a hacker ? Forgot to mention that a few backdoors are also for sale on the darkweb !…
Well, where to start? Sadly, this is normal (corporate) business behaviour nowadays. Nobody takes pride in manufacturing quality any more … This is why advertising (and PR) was invented instead of winning customers over through service and quality.
This is getting normal because nobody is doing something against it. Sometimes you have to fight for your rights and freedom. But that’s another topic andI don’t want to begin a wild discussion here.
Satire aside, let me state what we hope would be blatantly obvious for those that don’t know us:
No, there is nothing at all to iodé “secretly implementing French government backdoors”.
Wow, is this where we have arrived at when this needs to be stated?
No, the French government has not been communicating with us to try and leverage our compliance.
Sad to again comment that I need to actually state this?
In no way is iodé currently or has ever “actively attack(ed) GrapheneOS” as alleged in the post linked above.
I think the most simple summary is this: Repeating unfounded allegations and spreading them and further expanding on them with each wave of attack does not actually make them true but they are certainly damaging to those innocently caught in the crossfire.
Let’s not forget that graphene only supports google devices, which are most likely to have hardware backdoors. I hope they manage to offer other brands as they announced. But the best thing would be some collaboration among LOS, iodé and graphene. We’re all in the same boat at the end.
No. The Hardware is really, really secure, so it’s almost impossible to implement a backdoor. I suppose that Google Pixel OS had the backdoor, not the Hardware of the Pixels.
But that’s missing the point twice over: First, open source does not protect against backdoors being built in (see XZ-Utils). There are too many projects and too few reviewers. Reviewing is also very time-consuming.
Furthermore, backdoors may be included in the precompiled iodé images, but not in the source code. To my knowledge, the iodé images are not reproducible, which means that this goes unnoticed. Reproducible images would, of course, be a major gain in trust.
but they are certainly damaging to those innocently caught in the crossfire.