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by HybridStatAnim8 58 days ago
What they said here is accurate, not sure what youre trying to show?
1 comments

What exactly is accurate? Have you seen my reply to that? Hardware kill switches cut power and prevent any recording.
You have been saying this sort of stuff on the Qubes forum and a bunch of other places for awhile now.

Hardware kill switches are nice-to-have, but they are significantly less important than the OS actually protecting the mic. With your Librem/PinePhone, you cannot even reasonably expect your calls with end-to-end encrypted apps like Signal and Element to be protected. Any app with access to the PulseAudio socket (which happens to be anything that you want to have audio playback with) can snoop on your mic at any moment in time. This does not even require an OS compromise.

This has been pointed out to you repeatedly and yet you choose to ignore it, and instead you just do character assassination whenever a post regarding GrapheneOS or Daniel Micay shows up because what Micay says goes against your favorite ideological products...

> Any app with access to the PulseAudio socket (which happens to be anything that you want to have audio playback with) can snoop on your mic at any moment in time.

I said multiple times that I exclusively run trusted apps on the phone. I use Qubes for untrusted staff. Do you understand that threat models can vary?

> Hardware kill switches are nice-to-have, but they are significantly less important than the OS actually protecting the mic.

I never said they were more important. I only said they could reliably protect in sensitive cases.

> instead you just do character assassination

I choose to dispute false information. I don't care about any personalities. And I would be happy to be proven wrong, too.

> I said multiple times that I exclusively run trusted apps on the phone. I use Qubes for untrusted staff. Do you understand that threat models can vary?

By that logic, you might as well just not have the killswitch at all. Everything is magically "trusted", right?

Yes, I do understand that threat models can vary. Please give an example of a threat model where it makes more sense to use a phone which cannot protect any private calls over a functioning phone that has real protection.

If you are going to say "oh, when you never talk on the phone at all" then you might as well just remove the mic. It's not hard.

As usual, there is nothing that GrapheneOS or Micay says regarding the Librem or Pinephone that is inaccurate. You are just saying stuff that doesn't even remotely make any sense. Perhaps you are being deliberately disingenuous. Perhaps you are just so blinded by an ideology that you cannot see that what you say is just nonsense. I wouldn't know.

> I choose to dispute false information. I don't care about any personalities.

Doesn't seem to be what you are doing here.

> there is nothing that GrapheneOS or Micay says regarding the Librem or Pinephone that are inaccurate.

This is completely false:

> Their microphone kill switch also doesn't prevent audio recording

> Their microphone kill switch also doesn't prevent audio recording

It doesn't prevent audio recording in the super paranoid "oh, the whole phone has been compromised" scenario because it is bypassable via the sensors.

In fact, it doesn't even protect the phone in normal operation, because apps with device=all can access the sensors without the whole phone being compromised.

It doesn't prevent audio recording with any normal usage either because the OS is incapable of protecting private conversations thanks to the PulseAudio socket. "Exploiting" this is significantly easier than any of the stuff involving the sensors.

> This is completely false:

>> Their microphone kill switch also doesn't prevent audio recording

More dangerous advice. The microphone kill switch prevents audio recording via the mic, not via the sensors or speaker. A Librem 5 user needing to secure against audio attacks would need to switch all kill switches off, not just the mic one (by Librem 5's own estimation), but would still be vulnerable to the speaker.

The effect of your participation in threads about projects you claim to care about is harmful. Please do better.

Their entire post regarding pinephones is accurate.

Hardware kill switches need to be correctly implemented. A kill switch cutting off mics and not sensors or speakers is incomplete and privacy theater.

Not to mention kill switches assume the device is already compromised, at which point everything on it is likely compromised as well.

> Their entire post regarding pinephones is accurate.

I never mentioned Pinephones, although I do believe that the attack on them is still too harsh. Their security is about as good as the one for Linux. And it's not exactly "atrocious". Especially if you only use software from the official repositories. Let's agree that it should be improved though. (I prefer Qubes OS myself.)

> Hardware kill switches need to be correctly implemented.

Are you saying they aren't for Librem 5?

> A kill switch cutting off mics and not sensors or speakers is incomplete and privacy theater.

I explained in the link above that cutting all sensors is exactly what happens if you choose it.

> Not to mention kill switches assume the device is already compromised

This is not accurate. Kill switches imply that even if the device is compromised (which you can never 100% verify, even on GrapheneOS), your location etc is still private, when you need it.