seems to get pressured by Daniel Micay (thestinger) himself and his minion/mod mbananasynergy in GitHub issues all the time

I read a few of those, and I didn’t see any kind of pressure, just clarifications. And they provided information on not just GrapheneOS, but LineageOS and AOSP.

That’s exactly how I would handle things as well if I was working on a project and someone publishes a comparison table that gets posted a few places.

As for why GrapheneOS is mostly green, I guess there are three explanations:

• GrapheneOS is really that good
• GrapheneOS happens to meet all the metrics the author is interested in
• nobody has bothered adding other fields (most likely)

But it’s also not all green, GrapheneOS gets red for Google Pay compatibility and device support, which are two pretty important categories for many people.

If you know of categories where GrapheneOS doesn’t do well, by all means, suggest them in an issue or open a PR. It’s the best comparison I’ve seen, and seems worthwhile to contribute to.

It is either impossible for one person

Well yeah, Linus Torvalds does almost no actual development, but he’s involved in merging patches. That job has value, and the end result is that people trust his branch.

That’s the same way I see GrapheneOS or any Linux distro, it’s just a handful of patches and configurations on top of a common core. AOSP is a high quality OS and there are lots of independent researchers looking at it, so it’s a good base to build on, with the main problem being integration with Google services. Forking it is a huge task, so they should stay as close to AOSP as they can while achieving their goals.

And yeah, if GrapheneOS is an embargo partner, that’s has a lot of value, and I hope other ROMs are able to get that as well. Faster access to patches is a good thing.

Code can be bought. Developers can be bought

Sure, and that would likely be pretty obvious, and can happen to pretty much any project. But the community could easily fork it and move on if that happens. That’s what GrapheneOS did when they split from CopperheadOS, and that’s what’ll happen if GrapheneOS is bought or compromised.

So the real concern isn’t with copyright, but with Trojan Horse inclusions, which is where security researchers come in. GrapheneOS has documented how to audit their changes vs AOSP, and they share code with other projects, which apparently has uncovered more bugs. That sounds pretty responsible to me.

Micay wants to steer everyone away from Firefox towards Chrome

But Chrome is superior to Firefox on mobile in terms of security because Mozilla hasn’t ported many of the security features from the desktop browser. That’s a fact. There’s also an argument that Chrome is more secure on desktop as well, but there are tradeoffs to that.

I don’t see any evidence that Micay prefers closed source code (most of Chrome is open source btw), so I’m not sure where this is coming from.

Fuchsia is the future, where Google’s microkernel

Well yeah, Fuchsia is incredibly interesting and mikrokernels have fantastic security and isolation properties. If Google can pull it off, it’ll be a really interesting kernel to use.

However, there’s a reason mikrokernels aren’t very popular: they’re kind of difficult to work with. It just so happens that having your drivers in kernel space is incredibly convenient and performant. RedoxOS is another interesting mikrokernels project, and both Windows and macOS’ kernels are moving that direction (both are hybrid kernels).

So it’s only natural for him to be excited by it, I’m excited too. I don’t like Google much, but their FOSS R&D side is really interesting. I don’t know if he’s a “fanboy” (I haven’t bothered to do more than a cursory read of the links you’ve provided), but that’s only relevant if it impacts his security choices (e.g. trusts Google with user data “for security”).

feature rebranding plus firewalls, app permission modifications and stuff you can do without rooting, I see absolutely no reason how it claims to be better than anything else

Sane defaults has a ton of value. Most people don’t know how to configure an OS to be secure.

It’s not the only option obviously, that’s just stupid dogmatism, but it is a good option, and perhaps the best option out of the box. There are also security features that Pixels have that other phones either don’t or lock away from users, so GrapheneOS can have even better defaults than others due to the hardware it’s limited to (e.g. the open bootloader). Whether that matters to you depends on what you’re looking for.

So I’ll agree that dogmatism should be policed, but ideally with reminders and not comment removals. Maybe have a three strikes policy or something if you’re worried about repeat, intentional offenders.

why Google hardware is backdoored by NSA

I’m guessing most phones are, or at least compromised by the NSA. The NSA’s job is to maintain backdoors to go after national security threats, so there’s no reason to expect any default configuration to protect you.

Projects like GrapheneOS try to protect you as much as they can, but at the end of the day, anything that touches a network is going to risk.

That’s why I’m so excited about Linux phones, the Pinephone and Librem 5 both have hardware kill switches for times when you’re worried about surveillance.

Snowden lives in Russia to stay alive

Yet Snowing allegedly recommends GrapheneOS. Unless you think Micay is bullying Snowdon as well…

That said, I don’t put a ton of stock into what Snowdon has to say. He’s not a security expert, he’s just a contractor who got away with government documents. He’s careful, but fairly average.

Apple’s security chips have all been pwned, and their latest one also got pwned recently

Sure, that’s going to happen because they’re a big target. That said, it’s unlikely to impact regular users because those attacks are quite sophisticated and often caught by security researchers pretty quickly. The Android market is more sketchy because there’s so much more diversity to the point where security researchers are going to miss a lot.

Regardless, staying up to date on security patches is the best line of defense, and sandboxing everything is the next line. GrapheneOS provides both.

“security by obscurity”

Ok, you lost me here. What they’re providing is security by layers (sandboxing, reducing attack surface by having less stuff running, etc) and rapid security updates from upstream.

The proper solution is to completely open source the telephony stack, but that’s not happening for any phone (though the Pinephone community is reverse-engineering theirs, so that’s cool).