TLDR: Drug dealers in Catalonia have started to adopt GrapheneOS en masse leading to Catalan police suspecting anyone with a Google Pixel is a drug dealer
This is a weird advertisement, but I kind of want grapheneOS now.
The police: ‘We’ve encountered a difficulty with out paid spying software. Welp it must be just the criminals.’
pretty much. The original article says that if they have a pixel they have to ask for a warrant
Glances at my new Pixel, Welp, I guess I ain’t ever goin’ to Catalonia. Not that I was planning to go there anyway.
***Tinfoil conspiracy: Maybe this a scare tactic to keep the British out of Spain.
Merci per la idea de negoci. (/s)
“Feds”
checks Wikipedia page for Spain
Government: “Unitary parliamentary constitutional monarchy”
🧐
(Sorry for nitpicking lol 😅)
But serious tho:
I kinda hate these weird associations. Its like arresting people who wear glasses because intellectual rebels wear glasses? (Pol Pot?)
Like can’t someone just use a phone in peace? Most Pixel users don’t even use Graphene OS.
Hey you know what, drug dealers drink water. Lets arrest people who drink water!
If she floats, she’s a witch and we’ll burn her at the stake.
This is the best recommendation for a phone I’ve seen yet.
Thanks catalonian police
Basically, if you don’t have a phone the cops can easily backdoor, you must be a criminal.
“What do you have to hide?” taken to it’s logical conclusion.
Humans are apes desiring power, there’s no excuse under which you can give it to them. They’ll invent authority giving them right to judge you and think they are in the right.
Also why I absolutely despise the Silicon Valley - it’s many such people who think they are the elite now. I want that place detroited as soon as possible. Zuckerberg prosecuted for all the murders he’s committed (I’m certain there are plenty, a person with ASPD with such power just can’t be anything else) which are now unknown, Brin and other jerks playing “cooperating with legal elected authorities” while giving them something with no mandate whatsoever feeling themselves powerful - prosecuted for high treason, all these playing censorship and recommendation - prosecuted for scams on the scale of billions, yadda-yadda.
Cops saying this should be immediately sued for inciting hate or defamation or whatever against people who don’t want to be backdoored.
I have a right to not be surveilled, they don’t have a right to surveil me.
Anyway, I might all the time fly a weird trajectory between various ideologies, but they are all anarchist and Silicon Valley bosses are all thieves.
they are all anarchist and Silicon Valley bosses are all thieves.
Nothing is ever absolute, but Silicon Valley has been going in a consistently bad direction for 20+ years now.
Basically, if you don’t have a phone the cops can easily backdoor, you must be a criminal.
… and if it’s an obscenely expensive one.
Normal people either can’t afford these devices or don’t have time for all the hassle of installing and using a rare operating system on a phone.
You can install Graphene from the browser, it’s really not a huge hassle to install especially if you do it right when you get the phone.
Pixels are mid range if you buy a generation back. I have 6a and paid $250 two years ago.
No one forces you to root your Pixel, you are allowed to use it with stock android.
Oh my, I hear Google is going to brick the batteries of the 6a just like they did with the 4a phones. Due to worry about them catching fire. So good luck!
I have 6a
Well shit. Guess I need a battery
Minimum wage in Spain is €1,300 per month. A Pixel 9a is under $500 and under €550 and currently on sale for $449 and €500. A couple of hundred can get you a Pixel 9. What exactly is a not obscenely price for a flagship phone to you?
And I don’t even understand your second comment. People spend over an hour a day on social media alone.
So the normal person in Spain could buy this phone and the normal person in Spain does have the time to figure out how to install a “rare” operating system. A “rare” operating system that’s free and easily copied.
Rare is a matter of popular practice, not difficulty.
It’s rare to walk around with an actual tinfoil hat, but not difficult or expensive to do.
When someone says “rare operating system”, the word “rare” describes “operating system”.
Here is the statement again:
Normal people either can’t afford these devices or don’t have time for all the hassle of installing and using a rare operating system on a phone.
In your sentence, “rare” is used to describe “it”, a pronoun, which refers to the action “to walk around with an actual tinfoil hat”.
rare operating system
android
🤔
maybe they dumbed down “a custom ROM” or just didn’t want to name GrapheneOS
You can buy a Pixel with Graphene already installed, and they’re by no means obscenely expensive.
Now THAT is something I wouldn’t ever trust.
Interesting, at least four people in my closer circle aren’t normal people. Including myself.
What sorts of drugs do you and your gang sell?
Mint?
Maybe Arch or even Ubuntu?
Do you live in that region?
GrapheneOS is most used on old Google Pixels which are anything but “obscenely expensive”
Pixel 9 pro with 512Gb is obscenely expensive. Pixel 8a, with minimal storage is pretty affordable. 7a dare I say cheap.
The refurbished pixel 8 I bought cost a fraction of what I’d have paid for a new phone and the installation took 5 minutes.
The A series lines have been the best value smartphones generation after generation. I would not say theyre expensive. I have bought each current gen for about $350 or less (excluding tax), no trade in.
They’re mad they can’t use cellbrite to snoop on properly configured GOS phones and that they actually have to do real police work to catch drug dealers
Yes. They (cellebrite) don’t mention GrapheneOS support very loudly because it’s poor. They can’t decrypt one that’s BFU (Before First Unlock), not even by brute force if it’s a 6 digit passcode apparently. Don’t know if they can get data from an AFU GOS pixel. A year ago when their internal docs leaked, they also had no support for latest iOS at the time, but had brute force support for older versions as long as phone itself wasn’t too new and had AFU access without brute force for even older versions.
Moral of the story: if there’s a chance police might take your phone to investigate for a crime you hopefully didn’t even commit, shut down your phone completely - the 5x power button trick on iOS disables biometric unlock, but the device itself stays decrypted and thus more vulnerable. Also keep your OS up to date.
If you’ve got a phone that’s neither iOS nor GrapheneOS, it’s probably pretty much Swiss cheese anyway. IOS isn’t as good as GrapheneOS either, but it offers some protection against Cellebrite if up to date and BFU. But if they keep your phone for long enough (months, years), they’ll get it unlocked because you can’t install updates that would patch any newly discovered vulnerabilities and one day they’ll find a BFU unlock for it, probably.
Does a full shutdown encrypt all contents on iOS? This is something that everyone entering the USA as I have to do annually needs to think about.
It’s all encrypted in storage. The decryption key is in the secure element / TPM chip, additionally protected by your PIN / password. Shutting it down unloads all encryption keys from memory.
Beware that US customs / immigration / border control can seize your phone and refuse entry.
Grapheneos also has options to just disable data over the USB port when its locked. Or disable it outright.
Yep, disabling it entirely allows for charging when the device is off, but otherwise, it is functionally useless and is disabled at the hardware level.
Ooh nice.
Sounds like a good recommendation.
Yeah, this is legitimately an amazing ad, though Google may bot want it because they probably make more money off your data than you buying the device.
Doesn’t a Google Pixel device come with its own OS image by default, independent of Graphene OS? Is there some kind of step that we’re missing here?
Yes. Cops are idiots. Duh.
It does, but a lot of people but the pixels specifically to put graphene on it because graphene they’re compatible and graphene offers better privacy and security. What I’m getting here is drug dealers are using graphene to dodge digital narcs and it’s becoming common enough that the Venn diagram skews heavily to drug dealing.
I mean yeah, I’d say 250k is a lot for a 3rd party phone OS.
You can buy them with either stock Android, or Graphene. Meaning you don’t need to re flash the device or anything.
You cant buy grapheneos preloaded on anything and doing so would be pretty foolish since it could be backdoored. GraphenOS is aimed at people who value security and privacy, you dont let some rando flash your phone if you value those things.
I think this is incorrect but I could be wrong.
You can not buy a Pixel device preloaded with GrapheneOS. They only come from Google with their standard Android and it’s up to the end user to install GrapheneOS. Unless you buy a used Pixel device with GrapheneOS already installed.
If friends asked I would flash their pixel with Graphene, then set it up basically as they would use it for them.
Getting started was complex, your average user won’t have a good experience getting their apps added without a power user helping.
I would like to install it someday but I’m afraid of this process
Its really not too complicated. Id recommend doing it using a other phone as the installer rather than a PC though, just goes smoother IMO. Very straightforward web installer, just push buttons alongside the instructions.
What’s the complex part?
Yeah I’d consider that as a used phone. I’d only get the hardware from the OEM and install GrapheneOS myself. Less chance of man in the middle. It’s super easy to install using the web installer.
Hmm, you used to be able to buy them directly from Google, but that doesn’t seem to be the case any more.
Umm… I don’t think that’s right. I don’t think you could ever buy a phone from Google with GrapheneOS.
TLDR: Drug dealers in Catalonia have started to adopt GrapheneOS
Gonna guess that’s probably a lie.
Why?
I don’t doubt the claim, but I would imagine others do because there’s a relatively minor technical skill hurdle on replacing a phone’s operating system which would turn most people away.
I never used a Pixel or Graphene OS, but when I installed Lineage OS on a Redmi, Xiaomi made me wait a week to unlock the bootloader. Huge pain in the ass.
Or there might be a better “drug-dealer-friendly” OS. I only know of Lineage and Graphene as open source alternatives, so I could just be speculating.
Also, all my former drug dealers used WhatsApp on the stock vendor OS. But then again… I live in South Africa, so the police are more focused on violent crimes (both enforcement and perpetration)
You can unlock the bootloader on a Pixel in about a minute.
I can understand some people finding the whole process a bit daunting, but it’s not actually that difficult with Graphene.
Spain? Federal? Must be the victim of that American “education”.
Lol, yes, posted at late American time, mentioning “feds” in EU, for a split second I thought we had a major international incident because some stupid badged individuals powertripped to Spain ‘to bust a crim’nl’.
I’m glad they didn’t, tho it would be at last something to read about.
Congratulations at finding the most unimportant part of this post and wasting your time by typing out a useless post and clicking “enter”
Because it’s not relevant at all that Americans keep insisting on thinking that everyone else is just like them. Never caused any issues.
I don’t think it’s very relevant to the discussion of drug dealers using Graphene.
Spain can get fucked. They hate tourists and air conditioning too.
Your Airbnb was someone’s home.
Aaand don’t come back!
You clearly don’t live in a tourist heavy zone. Also the fact that you generalise what some locals in selected very tourist heavy cities are doing with the whole fucking country is very telling. We are better without you <3
there’s nothing wrong with being anti-gentrification. don’t act like a tourist and you’ll be fine
