The FBI has been unable to access a Washington Post reporter’s seized iPhone because it was in Lockdown Mode, a sometimes overlooked feature that makes iPhones broadly more secure, according to recently filed court records.
The court record shows what devices and data the FBI was able to ultimately access, and which devices it could not, after raiding the home of the reporter, Hannah Natanson, in January as part of an investigation into leaks of classified information. It also provides rare insight into the apparent effectiveness of Lockdown Mode, or at least how effective it might be before the FBI may try other techniques to access the device.
“Because the iPhone was in Lockdown mode, CART could not extract that device,” the court record reads, referring to the FBI’s Computer Analysis Response Team, a unit focused on performing forensic analyses of seized devices. The document is written by the government, and is opposing the return of Natanson’s devices.
Archive: http://archive.today/gfTg9
I’m talking about daily use. I have a good friend, we’ve both been computer nerds since The Apple II era, we both used to put custom roms on our android phones, we’re avid self hosters, etc… He recently switched to Graphene and wants to switch back to something that’s less of a pain. His complaints are pretty much the same as reasons I haven’t switched. I warned him it would be an adjustment.
I didn’t test every app created but I think you don’t know what you’re talking about. To say GrapheneOS or any similar ROM is unusable for daily driver is wild. What specific usecase do he and you have to be such a deal breaking pain? You could’ve shared what was a pain at least to be helpful for someone. It’s Android with or without Google Play. If this didn’t work for you can just try something else like iodeOS. There is always an excuse.
As someone who uses GrapheneOS with sandboxed GooglePlay on his only smartphone (with daily usage for years at this point): I don’t know what kind of adjustment you are referring to. I never had to adjust to anything, because I never encountered anything that GrapheneOS couldn’t do that stock Android could. Follow the installation process and after that the phone behaves like a regular phone, except you have way more options regarding security and privacy.
Is your friend trying to use GrapheneOS without any Google services maybe?
I had to fiddle with some stuff to get the Google location history and Android Auto working. But if you’re using it for privacy-from-Google purposes you probably don’t care about those.
Edit: also RCS and tap to pay with credit/debit card. Those require your carrier and Google to allow them, respectively.
Correct, I am not using GrapheneOS to then give my data to Google willingly. Kinda defeats the purpose I would say. I think it is the right thing that this is blocked by default and you have to actively turn it on. (Edit: I am assuming that you are talking about the fact that location data gets redirected to GrapheneOS by default, which can be changed in settings)
Is this a country-specific topic? I don’t know anybody who still uses SMS/MMS to communicate. Everybody uses WhatsApp or Signal where I am.
Yeah, as an example Tmobile / Mint Mobile regularly stop working and require reprovisioning every 36 hours.
Look, there always will be obstacles. Do you have any other carrier option? If yes- change it and tell them why, if not- you’re already fucked and I wouldn’t comply when it’s already that bad. Nothing’s going to get better when doing nothing. My bank wanted to store a picture of my face on their servers to continue using their service so I changed my bank. You need to not be lazy.
My own personal experience over the past year with it has… Largely not lined up with that? The install process was easy, I do have gplay enabled but rarely use it, favoring fdroid, and it’s… Been fine? It’s felt mostly like stock android tbh
That’s the same thing stopping me from switching my friends from Linux. I know one of them would if I pushed.
I’ve been daily driving Linux for almost 2 years and also always have a minor issue daily. “Oh. Bluetooth module decided it just didn’t want to work. Better reload. Oh. Reloading doesn’t work? Got to restart. Oh. Now my Wi-Fi has completely crapped the bed and restarts every 5 seconds”.
Then the major issues are catastrophic, even though rare. I once had a system just start… filling up empty storage at a rate of 1 GB a second with an empty log file. I couldn’t figure out why. Ended up reinstalling everything.
I don’t mind fixing these issues. And hell, I have fun, but I’m the only computer guy in our group though so I’d be playing tech support for these people if they ever changed.
But this is different. Linux doesn’t work well on many PCs especially laptops because the manufacturs don’t give the needed drivers and firmware. And on the top of that many programs are built with Windows and maybe macOS in mind. GrapheneOS is not entirely different operating system and is only for Pixels with Google’s own firmware and everything work the same as stock ROM.
What distro are you using? This seems bizarre and the sort of thing you see on a less stable rolling release.
I’ve hopped around. The 3 main ones I’ve touched though are:
All of which are the Stable Versions. I believe Bazzite and CachyOS are both Rolling Releases which would explain the issues. I don’t think Ubuntu is as far as i know which makes it’s storage issue especially interesting.
I also have an issue with Debian on my media server where despite telling it everywhere possible not to go to sleep, it decides it wants to go to sleep anyways. But i don’t really consider that under these same issues because that’s a media server and i expect it to be a little more “Tinkery” than my Main use PCs.
That’s weird. Ubuntu has two tracks, the standard that gets updated every six months and the LTS track that updates every two years. I think the developers recommend the LTS versions, and it’s the version I see that tends to get better corporate support. But even on LTS you can find some oddities sometimes I suppose.
I have a hypothesis that it was some niche hardware compatibility issue, because streaming was that machines bare minimum. It had a 32 bit dual core CPU, an iGPU, 4 GB of DDR3 RAM, and a 500 GB HDD. All this was in the year 2020 and this PC was made in 2008, so suffice to say it wasn’t winning any awards.
Like i said though, this is a hypothesis, so it’s entirely possible it was just Ubuntu deciding it wanted to freak out on me.
It could’ve also been a snap issue (we’ve seen an issue recently with the VSCode Snap eating up storage) and IIRC Firefox on Ubuntu is a Snap (by default, obviously you can install it any other way as well but you shouldn’t be expected to).
I’ve been on Fedora for 3 or so years and it has pretty much worked flawlessly (the only exception to that is it used to sometimes have issues with automatically sleeping correctly when I closed the laptop lid, but that hasn’t been an issue for about a year)
So you haven’t used it yourself and are shitting on an OS based on anecdotal evidence? "Stop making stupid assumptions”, I once heard someone say.
I use GrapheneOS and have helped other less tech-savvy people install and use it. You can just roll with the defaults and have a better privacy stance than the spyware Google puts out, or you can take a deep dive. It works just fine either way.
Hey, you can judge something without using it in some degree in my opinion. I’ve judged iOS and macOS because of their user experience, design and etc based on things I’ve seen and knew. But I didn’t want to spent a fortune just to express my thoughts and end up with something that I don’t like. Now that I’ve used them I hate on them even more. But in this example it seems that this person don’t have enough knowledge about this specific thing and don’t know what they’re talking about.