Kinda funny seeing the pope promoting decentralized systems, with the catholcatholic church being one of the most centralized hirachical systems.

As the database is encrypted in your device, you dont really need to self host. A keepass database in the Google cloud is not really problematic, although you should still choose a more private cloud provider.

Its all the AI safety peoples fault, stop expressing your concerns and start blindly trusting us already. /s

Because the public appearance, like the way they attack everything and everone on mastodon and other places is the first thing, many potential users see from GrapheneOS. If I saw their tweets back when deciding what OS to use I would not have trusted them.

After using GrapheneOS for many years, I understand that his “abrasive public appearance” doesnt reflect in the implementation of GrapheneOS, but new users don’t have that trust.

The problem is that companies will no longer publish the source code for their projects, as they are not in control of what happens to it and they can’t restrict competitors anymore.

Im not a big fan of fake open source, but source available is better than closed source.

And license laundering will not primarily be used to make projects with less restrictive licenses, its main purpose will be using copyleft or noncommercial projects in closed source products.

No, but they see that you are connected to a tor entry node and that someone is sending you data. From this they can conclude that you are running a tor proxy.

Most apps typically use Google services for notifications, so all apps use one single service running all the time.

Without Google, apps can develop a fallback where each app polls for its own notifications, but continously running a service per app costs battery, so the services do not run all the time. This is the reason why notifications are delayed.

What would a vpn do for you with snowflake? Hide your IP from tor entry nodes and the bridge user. I mean sure more vpn is always great, but running snowflake without a vpn seems less bad than surfing the web without a vpn.

There are no legal risks in forwarding traffic to an entry node and your ISP knowing that you use snowflake also isnt really an issue.

Snowflake is different though, because you just forward encrypted traffic from users into tor. Your just a bridge from one network into another and don’t send any malicious data data to random servers. Only the exit nodes have that legal issue.

Protons mobile app doesn’t have an independent push notification service. If you’re not using Google play, you will not get push notifications.

Not the end of the world, but may be a deal breaker for some.

For what. Thats a lot of effort for a small userbase. And most importantly a userbase that doesn’t see Google ads. Custom hardware is expensive and doesn’t provide much additional data for most users and provides unprofitable data for degoogled phones.

Google doesnt spy on us just because they are evil. They spy on us to sell more expensive targeted ads.

The anonymous credential signature scheme that is planned to be used is BBS#, I don’t know how it handles revocation.

Additionally, BBS# proposes a solution for device-binding from ECDSA-signatures, relying on re-randomization of ECDSA signatures and public keys. Furthermore, a trust model for BBS# that covers revocation and proof of validity is defined in [BBT2025].

[BBT2025]: Trust Model : Securing digital identity with advanced cryptographic algorithms, available at https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/BBS-SHARP-doc-eudi-wallet , 2025

https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/eudi-doc-standards-and-technical-specifications/blob/main/docs/technical-specifications/ts4-zkp.md

I haven’t found where in that source the implementation of revocation is discussed.

Edit: https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/BBS-SHARP-doc-eudi-wallet/blob/main/Trust-model-privacy-on-attestation-presentation.md#14-attestation-revocation

Seems like no ways of enabling privacy preserving revocation with bbs# are known jet. This means that arithmetic circuit based proofs would be the only way to enable revocation. And as they can prove any statement in NP with ZK, the fact that they can prove that a revocation id is not part of a given list is obvious. https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/eudi-doc-standards-and-technical-specifications/blob/main/docs/technical-specifications/ts4-zkp.md#22-proofs-for-arithmetic-circuits-programmable-zkps

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/main-51.pdf As crescent by Microsoft is one of the considered implemations, this paper is probably the most relevant work on revocation of anonymous credentials.

The reason why it works is a bit complicated, but basically the trick is that the signatures are not immutable. Given a valid signature, it is possible to create a new valid signature over the same content that is not linkable to the original one. This means that it is still possible to derive, what authority signed the document, but the authority cannot know in which transaction it has signed that specific document.

I wanted to get in contact with a researcher that didn’t have a public university mail and instead linked to his LinkedIn. I wasnt able to see his contact info unless logging in and I couldn’t contact him without paying LinkedIn, so I didn’t contact him…

Great networking platform /s

And if you don’t want the government to know what sites you visit, have sites route the request through a proxy.

Actually, no on the fly communication with the issuer is required for selective disclose. You just need a signed document with individually salted hashes of different properties and you can create a zero knowledge proof non-interactively. Zero knowledge meaning that truely nothing but the disclosed property (age > 18, County == DE, or whatever) is communicated to anyone.

Theres a lot of other cool stuff that can be done with zero knowledge digital identity wallets. You could for example hash your pubkey together with the service providers pk and disclose that as a per service ID, but not reveal your pk. This allows linkability within one service (as a login method for example) while preventing cross service linkability.

Im not a big fan of meta and WhatsApp, but these claims are a bit much. Any employee gets access to messages through a well documented internal process? “No separate decryption step is required” , so the WhatsApp CLIENT is not doing any actual e2e encryption and no attempt at reverse engineering or traffic analysis has ever seen that this is the case?

Where can one see, what these whistleblowers have actually published? I would expect to see this “simple process” and how that interface actually works… And I would expect any journalist to request some proof (show me the last message i sent to Alice) before trusting an anonymous whistleblower making such an extraordinary claim.

From what I heard so far, that anonymous whistleblower could be a troll or an ex-employee who just wants to cause some trouble for meta.

We should not trust anything blindly, even if it fits with our view of the world. Meta is an evil company, but as long as there is no indication for these specific allegations to be true, we should treat them as unfounded allegations.

I don’t think that googles mail Client supports pgp. And if you use a client you trust with Google mail, the content of your mail is encrypted.

They will still use metadata to track who you are talking to and about what. The Mail subject is metadata and therefore not encrypted.

So to keep your conversations private, dont use gmail, and probably don’t use mail at all, use something build with encryption in mind.

Its main “security” feature is that they are uncooperative towards most governments. If a government makes a legally binding request to signal, they recieve IP, Account creation date and other unavoidable stuff and signal is transparent about that. If telegram gets that request, they probably ignore it, but maybe they don’t and there is no way to know as a user.

Also telegram is the platform of drug dealers, nazis and conspiracy theorists. So even if it had e2e by default, I would still prefer using another platform.

As long as they celebrate voluntary chat contol as a victory and shut up about it, I’m fine with that.

But they will always return to wanting more eventually.

GrapheneOS is popular with degoogling, but that’s not its primary goal. If there is a tradeoff between independence from Google and security, they will always choose to increase security.

GrapheneOS is also probably the only custom rom that cooperates with Google to get access to vulnerabilities and patches before the embargo is lifted.

If you want to be completely independent from Google, GrapheneOS is not what you’re looking for. Its it’s a security focused os that also has some degoogling features, not the other way around.