The much more interesting recent news IMO is that Google is not allowing (non-Samsung) OEMs to sell devices with GrapheneOS:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49946698

See the last paragraph.

For example, non-Samsung Android OEMs aren't allowed to directly sell devices with GrapheneOS and Google will only permit it within a quota. It can and is being worked around and there will be devices sold with GrapheneOS as the stock OS without Google restricting how many can be sold.

My guess is that the workaround is that Motorola sells them with Google-certified Android. A third-party (non-OEM) buys them in bulk and preinstalls GrapheneOS.

But this is really end-90s/begin-00s Microsoft levels of anti-competitiveness. I'm surprised that (particularly non-US) regulators are not investigating them yet.

Every company is nice until the monies they earn is not guaranteed anymore. They were closing the doors they have intentionally left open in the name of security for a couple of generations.

Now they're being more open about why they are limiting user choice. Because like Chrom(e/ium), Android is designed to be a large data sink for Google to feed The Machine.

Also maintaining the monopoly over the app market and getting a good cut out of every transaction within. A non google controlled device in the mass market can introduce new markets independent of google (and not paying them).

They would not like that.

Can design forgeries be prevented by selecting as designs phrases and fragments of text that are politically provocative in China? To the extent that they continue to make faithful copies to sell in the West, they are exposing labor force to provocative say anti-party content. Or they forego the imitation business?

how is that legal??

that sounds like a very clean cut case of thinks companies aren't allowed to do under fair market lawes

The GPL clearly grants every recipient the same full rights as whoever they received something from, so copyright law itself says that you can take that source and redistribute it.

But starting a year or so ago RedHat says you may not redistribute, which they can't actually say, so you still can, but if you do you will be fired as a customer and lose all future access, so you only get to do it once.

Given the clear wording that makes the intent of the GPL unambiguous, that every end user is fully empowered and you may not do anything to curtail that, I don't see how they get away with it except the simple fact that no one has been willing to take on the legal fight.

If you're a pre-"stream" Centos user, you don't have the money for that. If you're a paying RHEL user, you don't want to be on bad terms with RedHat or maybe IBM either, and neither the licence costs nor the rules bothers you at all anyway.

So it's plainly illegal in my opinion, but will stand, illegal and yet in effect and unchallenged probably indefinitely.

This is basically the reason Google lost their Play Store anti-trust lawsuit when Apple won theirs. Google did all these incriminating, behind closed doors deals to lock out competition from their “open ecosystem”, where Apple never pretended to be open to behind with.

[0] https://tildes.net/~tech/1wam/blocking_of_unverified_apps_on...

Except when Steve Jobs lied saying FaceTime would be an open standard.

"FaceTime is based on a lot of open standards: H.264 video, AAC audio, and a bunch of alphabet-soup acronyms. And we’re going to take it all away. We’re going to the standards bodies, starting tomorrow, and we’re going to make FaceTime an open industry standard." - Steve Jobs at Apple’s WWDC 2010 keynote (emphasis mine)

Bill Gates published that infamous open letter about copying software, and both Bill Gates and Brad Smith said that Microsoft's core pillar is IP: "Microsoft is built upon the idea of having IP and protecting and using it" (paraphrased by me).

The quotes I can find by digging the net:

> Microsoft was founded on the premise that software is valuable intellectual property that people should pay for. --Bill Gates

> Microsoft was founded on intellectual property. Intellectual property is the foundation of our business. --Brad Smith (This is the quote I remember in the first place)

So, Microsoft never wanted to be an open company. They were the epitome of the closed source, behemoth software company, where you get the goods, get to use it, and pay them for the privilege.

Microsoft doesn't just choose not to release source code; they send takedown notices to projects that redistribute Microsoft's proprietary software (e.g. Ninjutsu OS). They also put clauses in the EULA for Windows to disallow reverse engineering and certain kinds of remote access (something related to if you change who has access too frequently).

Microsoft takes extra effort to prevent people from sharing or modifying Microsoft software, in order to make more money.

Is it evil to introduce terms and conditions that restrict how you expect your users to use your product? No, it's probably more hypocritical than evil; I don't think my parents telling me not to smoke while they struggled with addiction was evil, but it sure didn't model the best behaviour.

Is it evil to lobby government to curtail the freedoms of individuals to protect your business model? Yeah, probably; in most cases I believe that reducing consenting adults freedoms is usually a pretty evil act.

Microsoft is guilty of both, but I prefer to save Evil to describe actions that actively cause harm, either physically, mentally, emotionally, or in terms of harming the freedoms that people enjoy, especially if that choice to cause harm is economically motivated.

I'm not advocating on behalf of Bill Gates or Microsoft, just on clear terminology so that we can focus on actual evil behaviour versus consenting adults entering into a valid contract for mutual benefit.

I may have been too focused on the "false dichotomy" part and forgotten that you were talking about old Microsoft and not current Microsoft. I don't know enough about old Microsoft to say whether they were "evil" all along, so I won't comment on that part. I do agree with "don't hate the player, hate the game" in general though.

I also understand that we need to eat and have bills to pay, and there are many ways to achieve that, incl. Free or Closed Source software.

What I'm against is weaponization of closed source software beyond reasonable point. To EEE, to deprecate otherwise capable and functional hardware in the market, to limit user freedom or to extort money.

I hope I made my point clear.

Furthermore:

> I've worked at software companies - have you?

I didn't work at a software company per se, yet I develop open source software for the projects we work on, and I know what preparing a codebase for publishing entails. I also worked as a tech-lead of a Linux distribution, and a nation-wide one at that. I know what it entails, trust me.

If we're talking about experience in terms of years, I'm doing this for ~20 years, using Linux for ~25 years, and using computers in a level I understand what programming them entails for ~30 years.

So yeah, I'm not that newbie who have seen some Python and tied themselves to a knot of awe.

> causes a lot of risk,

Don't let's get into FUD territory of "Free Software is insecure", shall we? We see how Windows has been breached yesterday and today, and will see it more for years to come, as with other software.

> and provides absolutely no benefit whatsoever so it is simply irrational to do it.

Hmm, I'll agree to disagree here because 90% of the thing your digital stack is living on is Open Source and Free Software.

I don't have time to flesh out the benefit and irrationality aspect of it, because I mean, it's plainly wrong when it's put that squarely. We can find some nuances maybe, but it's limited to certain scenarios.

your comment honestly just sounds like you dislike closed-source software.

for most commercial software projects, releasing the source provides no tangible benefit, aside from people like HNers being happy

but if Microsoft would've open sourced their OS, they would've been vulnerable to their OS being diluted into free versions or maybe even OEM-maintained versions

from a business sense, it makes no sense.

and as for security, closed source software is harder to attack (and was a lot harder to attack before LLMs). like, there's still much that we don't know about Windows internals exactly, and even those who do are a very small group of people.

it'd be a lot easier to find vulnerabilities if the source was open.

yes, it doesn't mean it's automatically more secure, in fact it can be less so if people don't have eyes on it, but I'd say the amount of attacks is less and usually done by more sophisticated attackers

Right now it doesn't really affect me that Ableton Live is closed-source. But it would affect me if the main method of sharing music on the internet was Ableton Live project files. And if Ableton had cultivated that situation on purpose they would be weaponizing the closedness of their software.

Some business models - like OSS, and free-with-ads - are like dimension-folding weapons from Dark Forest trilogy: once deployed, there is no stopping them, they just permanently drop a degree of freedom from the universe, inside a shell expanding at the speed of light.

I can understand specific hardware and/or CPU generation requirements up to a certain point. Because CPU generations bring more than new instructions and performance, but I don't understand why Windows Team or Microsoft doesn't use function multi versioning to allow more systems to use up to date versions of Windows for longer time.

On the other hand, using closed file format related documentation as reference in a supposedly open format's specifications and trying to short-circuit ISO to push their seemingly open but ultimately closed document formats as standard or using Embrace, Extend, Extinguish tactics to kill competing products, or inserting code which makes their applications crash in competitors' operating systems is straight up malice.

...and we have Halloween documents which are openly(!) trying to make Linux non-functional on PC hardware, so there's that.

I'll note that these stuff can be also weaponized in Free / Open Source software. Pulling hardware baseline higher, deprecating drivers, and not giving good enough errors to make the problems obvious while not giving the source and/or building instructions/configurations is also a tactic of Red^H^H^H IBM. Remember: If you merge a company with IBM, you get IBM.

> your comment honestly just sounds like you dislike closed-source software.

Insisting about something when I openly and honestly said it's not is not very nice. Yes, Free Software is my first choice and where my heart lives at, but I'm not malicious about closed source software. This comment is being written on a Mac, for example. If you really want to dig that, my comment history is also in the open. For the record, as I always say, I prefer Linux desktops and Mac laptops, again for ~20 years or so.

> but if Microsoft would've open sourced their OS, they would've been vulnerable to their OS being diluted into free versions or maybe even OEM-maintained versions

I'm not saying that Windows would be dead if it was open source, but we'd have versions where ads and telemetry are straight up ripped from every possible part of it. Windows 11 and 10 to a certain point feels like it's working against me. Constant nagging, no ability to use local accounts during install, suggested apps everywhere... It's not an operating system anymore. It's a software holding me hostage to its agenda with a side effect of making my computer run. Windows XP was not like that, 2000 was not like that. Even 7 was good.

> from a business sense, it makes no sense.

You can always make it sense, if you decide to do that. There's SQLite for example. It's not an OS, but its development environment is protected enough so you can't get the quality the official versions propose.

However, I'm not saying that Windows shall be open source. However, its closed source nature is weaponized towards its users. Not with hardware requirements primarily, but how it herds the user and siphons data out of the computer in the name of telemetry.

> and as for security, closed source software is harder to attack

Ha, no. A small anecdote: When WMF attack vector was introduced, WINE team had the laugh of their life because the problem seemed so stupid to pass on. The next day, WINE released a patch, because it turned out that WINE also had the same security hole. They reverse engineered Windows API to a level that their implementation was bug for bug compatible.

Another one, about WINE again: My friends' Linux machine got infected with a Windows virus via WINE. The virus was unable to do harm, but it was infecting any USB drive attached to that computer. So, even if we didn't have the code, WINE has reverse engineered and implemented a bug-for-bug compatible Win32 API under Linux.

Both are pre 2010 events, BTW.

Also, with the leaks we have learnt that NSA had a truckload of zero days to infiltrate Windows systems. Great for security, right?

> it'd be a lot easier to find vulnerabilities if the source was open.

This is the half truth. Finding, fixing and evading the introduction of vulnerabilities are a lot easier if the source is open. We evaded 7z incident. Do we know that there's no universal backdoor in Windows? I don't. You can't know either. I don't my computer to have a TSA-approved keyhole somewhere.

Do you remember how NSA backdoored a cryptography algorithm? I do. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG

Have you ever read how Crypto AG rigged secure communication devices sold to certain countries, even NATO allies, because they were in fact owned by CIA (and BND up to a certain point)? See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG

Closed source something can't be audited to be secure or anything. It doesn't make it harder to attack, however. Only the good guys (or nobody but us) doctrine doesn't work. An intentional backdoor doesn't discriminate. You say the correct phrase, and it opens.

> yes, it doesn't mean it's automatically more secure, in fact it can be less so if people don't have eyes on it, but I'd say the amount of attacks is less and usually done by more sophisticated attackers

Security through obscurity never stopped anyone from infiltrating anything. With enough persistence, any system even obfuscated can be cracked, even without LLMs. People reverse engineered SMB despite Microsoft's best efforts. Then, they registered it as CIFS and open sourced it, because they had to.

Please, we have gone through this 30 years ago. These arguments doesn't hold water anymore.

[1] https://fightchatcontrol.eu/chat-control-overview

[2] https://waag.org/en/article/european-digital-id-wallets-are-...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU_Kids_Act

[4] https://www.androidauthority.com/why-i-use-grapheneos-on-pix...

How? Even in the case a majority of MEPs have different views to the Commission, it does not matter because only the Commission can initiate legislation. On the off chance the Commission does not get what it wants from the Parliament they can just ask the Council to send the same proposal to the Parliament as an 'emergency' procedure that has to be rejected by a minimum of 361 MEPs even if 50%+1 of the MEPs in attendance vote against. That's how Chat Control 1 was resurrected after it was voted down by a majority of MEPs. 331 MEPs voted against it vs 301 for, and it still passed due to the 361 rule. Which is why lobbying anyone except the Commission is pointless. You can do that even in China - people lobby the CCP there too, nobody claims this is democratic.

So, no conspiracy is needed, this is the EU functioning exactly as designed.

Google was found guilty by the EU antitrust investigation and payed a 4 billions euros fine (and Google has changed nothing since then, they only increased the pressure).

GrapheneOS is especially annoying for them as it destroys their blanket excuse that it's ""for security""

You mean like the Skyhook vs Google 2014 lawsuit? (look it up) Settled before it could go any further.

Was this ever the deal with Moto? They announced something recently, but it didn't read like Moto would be distributing devices with preinstalled GOS. Just that it would be able to run GOS.

Then there's expectation GOS might be sold pre-installed as well.

This seems similar to wanting to follow the advice of "only buy bottled water on your trip to India", but the bottle you're buying has the cap removed so they could put a straw in it for your convenience.

> The Auditor app uses hardware-based security features to validate the identity of a device, along with the authenticity and integrity of the operating system. It ensures the device is running a verified operating system with a locked bootloader and that no tampering has occurred." [0]

I assume that it would be quickly discovered if Motorola were tampering with phones en masse.

[0] https://attestation.app/about

But never, never has the EU sanctionned Microsoft for signing OEM deals that prevent companies from installing other OS than Windows.

Because corporate managed phones are required for all the id crap governance franchises intend to foist on people.

Absolute anti-competitive behavior. "Android is open, but not really"

That sounds like a brilliant idea, I'm sure it'll be amazing show of force for all the top kernel contributors as well.

This actually is a brilliant idea.

Simple reason, they're afraid of Trump bullying them into submission, just look at the oil/diesel stockpile release drama.

The US has never been shy about its politicians up to and including the President being an extended arm of the large US corporations - but Trump takes that x1000.

Google made the choice to announce that Android was open to all, in an attempt to take market share from Windows Phone.

Now they want to go back on their word.

> Alphabet's Google on Thursday lost its long-running fight against a record [€4.1 Billion] EU antitrust fine for using its Android mobile operating system to block rivals

https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2026-07-02/goo...

Now they are trying block Motorola from pre installing a different fork of Android.

They will either back down or face another enormous fine in the EU.

The important part is allowing users to make an informed choice, which requires you to be honest about what you are selling.

Apple doesn't allow Apple selling Apple devices with other operating systems.

Google doesn't allow other OEMs selling the OEMs' devices with other operating systems.

Big difference.

(Yes, pedantics: I know that OEMs could sell devices with other OSes, but not being able to sell GMS Android devices would lose them most of their customers.)

Not from the perspective of competition, as I see it. Like, if you want to compete with Apple by using part of its platform for your own stuff, you can't at all. But you can with Google, just not all of it and in all ways.

Point being: this is just another platform flame. People with one kind of phone in their pocket are outraged at the maker of the other thing.

Apple doesn’t prevent other OEMs from selling phones.

The linked comment was posted a day ago by what appears to be an account used for speaking officially about GrapheneOS.

So, like, you could go ask.

Nah. The guy who -presumably- has all the relevant information in his head can be reached by writing an HN comment. The proposed question is directly relevant to the comment you'd be replying to.

Regardless of how the guy replies... with a sensible story, bullshit, or silence, everyone saves a ton of effort by asking him.

Seems stupid to go redo a whole bunch of research when the primary source of the claims in question is figuratively sitting right next to you and obviously open for conversation, doesn't it?

Or, you know, any actual market. Where I can sell whatever I want from my stall but I can't sabotage other people's stalls.

Oh, if you sell in your stall oranges at 10c box, with plenty of stock, you will sabotage the other stall selling fruit. And you can do that because your actual business is another one.

Flagship phone turned into a useless device after 18 months of ownership due to a manufacturing issue and I've got no recourse. I'm done with Pixel and Google in general.

[0] https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/15009955?hl=en

- Suddenly being without a phone while you're travelling or dealing with something important is generally not fun

- Anything stored locally that isn't backed up is gone

- You can't transfer over your eSIM yourself

- Probably going to be a pain in the ass to get into accounts where the now brick was set up for 2FA

Anything complex enough to get over the air updates could lose its trustworthiness at any time. If a device is going to contain your digital soul, it should be simple and pluggable.

Another good reason not to buy an iPhone. As if there weren't enough good reasons already.

If you want something good and reliable, you go iPhone

Unless by "good" you mean being able to install software without Apple's blessing. Or send files to and from the device without iTunes or other similar monstrosity.

Devices need to be considered disposable. Expensive but disposable.

* All photos auto upload to Google photos

* All other important files are in a syncthing folder with at least two other devices (laptop+desktop)

* 2fa in Authy with cloud-sync

* Passwords on Firefox sync

* Google Fi is my carrier, and pulls eSIM when I log in to the app even without my old phone

* Google voice number is my main phone number. I don't lose access to incoming or outgoing sms or voice calls if I lose my phone.

In a pinch, I can buy a cheap prepaid phone and sim while traveling and be fully functional and reachable. I've had to do this before, and while I probably wouldn't go to the trouble for work, I feel compelled to be at least reachable for family.

I've thought about de-googling this further; photos could go straight into syncthing and I could port my # to a generic SIP provider that offers SMS. So far neither have seemed quite worth the trouble.

I've always felt very uncomfortable treating my phone as anything other than a rather overpowered thin-client.

Now the codes are with you and not in your phone or in the cloud.

I personally use Keepass for 2FA, Bitwarden for passwords. It's worked great for me so far, and I expect to stay with this setup for the foreseeable future.

My 9 has had no hardware issues besides the designed ones.

Sadly I never, ever put the 8 Pro in any case or protective shell, and the damage of repeated minor drops took its toll. The screen was just cracked a tiny bit around the corners, but eventually the upper-right corner began a creeping black amoeba of darkness, and finally the entire touchscreen became unreliable, I suppose due to that damage, so I decided to bail out. Repairs were exorbitant so I decided to take Google's own trade-in deal.

Don't forget the notorious vertical pink line issue! Luckily that had (has?) an extended warranty programme.

Flagship phone turned into a useless device after 18 months of ownership due to a manufacturing issue and I've got no recourse. I'm done with Pixel and Google in general.

[0] https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/15009955?hl=en

I've not heard anything good about Google's support in general.

Their partner repair company which did my screen replacement tried to refuse because it was running GOS - had to use all my charm to convince her to do it.

£50 for the 8 Plus isn't too bad though

(€150 = £127)

I used the OP15 in the meantime and its ram management and (ironically enough) performance in day to day apps was somehow much worse. It unloaded apps, skipped notifications, apps took longer to open. Google have put in a lot of work into software ahead of the rampocalipse.

You bought arguably the same phone with marginal gains to CPU score and a little better battery. Paying €650 for that privaledge doesn't seem like a great deal to me...

It's an emotional discussion about Google not supporting MTE on Pixel 11 (old news of August, GrapheneOS had to roll back that statement in September [0]).

Now the question is whether MTE will be enabled by Google as part of a future OS-upgrade, to which there is no definite answer AFAIK

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49536384

Still means that currently the phone has no support for MTE.

I have bought too many things on vague promises that did not happen.

It's not there now -> it's not supported. EOL.

MTE but slow

It has no MTE right now, okay. Is there any evidence on the rest?

This reads like “your front door lock is the perfect place for security services to have a master key.” True, but not strong as an argument against having a lock.

Even that analogy fails because MTE is in addition to existing countermeasures against memory corruption attacks. In the worst case, compromising MTE just means you don't have MTE, not that you get arbitrary code execution.

https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/41564-pixel-11-doesnt-yet-m...

GrapheneOS:

``` We're not going to add support for the Pixel 11 series unless it ships MTE support. It has hardware level support for MTE but it shipped without firmware support for it. It's unknown why that's the case and it could be due to flaws in the hardware implementation which have to be worked around. It isn't yet clear if it's going to support MTE but we've decided we won't support it unless it ships. Android 17 QPR2 Beta launched for the Pixel 11 after we made our initial posts about this and added preliminary firmware support for MTE while keeping it fully disabled for the OS even as a developer option. It isn't clear if something is severely wrong with it or not yet so we can't make any commitment to supporting the Pixel 11 series. ```

If you're doing comms for a serious project, it's probably best not to speculate on the justification of an internal decision at a different org, even if you're reasonably sure.

I think at this point is too late for complicity, they are actively fighting against GrapheneOS anyway. You either fight back, or wait until you loose all the leverage

Edit: Maybe you replied to the wrong comment? I didn't say anything about complicity and neither did the GrapheneOS announcement in the part I quoted.

Because? The obvious implication is you're saying Google will abuse their monopoly to hurt you if you upset them. Is that what you're implying? Or is it user trust, or something else you think is improved by avoiding such speculation?

That is generally true: prior to any professional communication you have a goal, assumptions, messaging, etc. Why would you produce communication at all, if you had not?

Marketing people often think there is a cookie-cutter rulebook you should follow, but there is not.

We are living in the "the bird is freed" and "nice genes" era of corporate communication.

Oh, and I'm not going to tell you what it was, and 'don't try to guess'.

/s

If so, it seems odd to cut it back.

Have they introduced some other mitigations, for eg UAF, to improve memory safety?

It seems possible that nixing MTE is to prevent stomping on some TLAs exploits?

In terms of mitigation of UAF, a great deal of new code written for Android userspace these days is in memory safe languages such as rust. Also, a lot of testing with instrumented code sanitizers is still done before release. We don't know how much risk MTE actually mitigates.

[1]: https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117194007157499435

[1] https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/41564-pixel-11-doesnt-yet-m...

Can you get arbitrary code execution on the RTOS from another app? No? Then adding layers to protect apps from each other is meaningful.

What you're saying isn't too far from "Well, if the attacker has physical access they can just freeze and decap the memory to read all secrets, so like there's no point in even hashing passwords or fixing XSS"

If you're talking about the baseband, AFAIK it's already isolated on both iPhones and pixels. Not sure about other androids.

at least they went with something with snapdragon - the upcoming moto phone

not Lacker News.

Not tall enough, try again next year.

The GrapheneOS project would have lots of other devices to choose from (or any) if everyone making hardware (besides Google) weren’t so obsessed with selling cheap, insecure trash.

You don’t know what you’re talking about.

If you ever do: you’re free to build the project from source for whatever generic device - but will gain only small details over vanilla AOSP without proper hardware to make use of.

Someone high up got tired to pull over every pixel user at the border.

With the new Motorola, TSA line are going to move faster that ever!

If you care about privacy, stay away for the moto release and stick with pixel.

For reference Pixels have about 1% market share, the graphene phones will be the same hardware as normal moto flagships and 99% of TSA agents won't be able to differentiate motorola models

You're off by a factor of 3, unless you count global market share, which includes random brands unlikely to be in the US like xiaomi or huawei.

https://counterpointresearch.com/en/insights/us-smartphone-m...

Moreover motorola flagships (ie. the only model that support grapheneos for now) are likely a fraction of the market share of motorola as a whole, so OP is still correct in that motorola grapheneos phones are more identifiable.

>the graphene phones will be the same hardware as normal moto flagships and 99% of TSA agents won't be able to differentiate motorola models

That argument could be used for pixels as well, which are also just generic black rectangles, especially the "a" models that lack the distinctive camera bump. Also if DHS/ICE really wanted to, they could avoid this problem altogether by requiring travelers to self-declare what phone they have. Sure, you can lie, but then you committed a federal offense by lying on immigration paperwork.

Every Google Pixel model per generation ends up supported.

DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE TSA.

Social hardening is a real problem.

I missed a news story. Context?