by strcat | 2025-07-26 05:14:29+00:00
> I am not qualified to actually diagnose you with anything

You should stop calling be insane, delusional, etc. It's quite easy to stop.

> yet also you seem stuck in a revisionist history narrative that people were trying to rip off or steal from GrapheneOS

No, I'm not doing that. The fact that they built on our code while trying to undermine us with misinformation and numerous forms of attacks is what makes it wrong. Calyx knowingly spread and supported misinformation about GrapheneOS and myself. They welcomed, tolerated and worked with people involved in harassment along with frequently participating in it. You do it yourself as you've demonstrated here so of course you don't see it for what it is or think it's wrong.

> but the constant citing of conspiracies and sock-puppet campaigns that never happened

The harassment and their involvement in it happened and continues to happen. Your involvement in it is real and continues too. There's no conspiracy. It's plain for all to see you repeatedly calling me insane, delusional, schizophrenic, etc. and personally targeting me in similar ways over and over. You're just one of many people doing it. That is the harassment, which clearly does exist and you participate in it including in this thread. Calyx and their community are heavily involved in it.

> your hostility to CalyxOS, F-Droid and others who are good community actors

CalyxOS and F-Droid both have multiple people who were involved in the takeover attempt and supported their attacks on us, including the lead developers of both projects.

> a lot of people including me felt you lost the plot and were not being rational

It's factual information, and it's you not being rational about it.

> The "takeover attempt" narrative never happened and every time you say it did without evidence you hurt your credibility

It is exactly what happened. My former business partner tried to take over my open source project against the terms of our agreements. The project was started prior to the company existing in late 2015 and was very clearly separate from it. This has been confirmed by other people involved and around at the time including the 3rd person involved in forming the company.

> It is an incredible conspiracy accusation that merits proof, or you will continue to be called delusional

My former business partner trying to take over my open source project is what happened and is not a conspiracy theory or delusion.

> I do always make an effort to separate these seemingly irrational views with otherwise well reasoned security engineering work.

My statements and views about this are not irrational.

> The primary thing we disagree on in a pure objective security engineering capacity is you feel it reasonable that a single person, you, can be trusted to resist coercion or manipulation to hold the signing keys that would allow pushing any code to the phones of a lot of highly targeted and vulnerable individuals.

We don't disagree on the concept that it would be nice to avoid trusting a single person with this. Where we disagree is that I do not think your proposed approaches are better or that they actually address the trust placed in many people.

> and I am more inclined to support cdesia/CalyxOS which at least attempts basic signing

Not clear how you think we do not do basic signing.

> and trust cdesia as a keyholder when someone really wants to use Android purely because of his peace-keeping personality

He was directly involved in the very real takeover attempt on the GrapheneOS project at Copperhead. He stood by as Nick repeatedly spread misinformation about GrapheneOS and personally attacked me including regularly covering it up. He has a long history of making false claims about GrapheneOS and myself himself. He's friends with many people participating in harassment towards me and clearly has no issue with it along with openly helping them do it.

> that is normally very receptive to criticism

In reality, no, and they'll quickly shut down conversations particularly involving any of this. You think they'd talk openly about this where someone raises actual things they've done and participated in? No.

> and is never hostile to anyone that forks their code for use in other projects as you have a history of doing

Calyx gained influence over Seedvault, a project written for GrapheneOS by a GrapheneOS user, and has since used that to be hostile towards our users reporting issues there and us for continuing to reluctantly use a project now hostile towards us. They've done the same with other projects. They're hostile towards our users, not only us.

A Calyx contractor recently closed a valid F-Droid bug filed by a GrapheneOS user causing it to wrongly show a warning on GrapheneOS every time it installs/updates an app. It's clearly an F-Droid bug since we use standard Android infrastructure to add our Sensors permission and their bug occurs with the POST_NOTIFICATIONS permission and multiple other past cases of added or split permissions in Android. It's a long term F-Droid bug which has existed for ages. Instead of fixing it, they're keeping incorrect code with no purpose and instead adding workarounds for specific cases found to occur with Android's added or split permissions. There's no reason for F-Droid to be checking that the requested permissions parsed from the APK by them match what the OS considers to be the requested permissions. The APK is verified before it's installed and F-Droid's understanding of permissions not matching Android's understanding is fully expected since it does not handle implementation details. It cannot properly handle it as the OS does because the OS adds and splits permissions this way in future releases, so adding all of the current ones still causes it to break in the future. This used to break automatic updates for GrapheneOS users, but at least now it only displays an incorrect warning. They may change it to break things again. Meanwhile, they falsely claimed we were avoiding doing something about this to hinder F-Droid's compatibility with GrapheneOS when they are blatantly doing that. This is one example of how they misuse their control over projects to cause harm to their own users to hurt GrapheneOS. They've done so repeatedly.

> If you were to agree to take on quorum controlled signing of reproducible builds, then there is no central trust in you, and all my primary arguments against GrapheneOS go away and GrahpheneOS would be leaps and bounds better than CalyxOS by any technical measure I am aware of.

The whole thing is a personal grudge and you hold us to a standard you don't hold other projects to based on it. A substantial amount of resources is required to simply make 1 set of builds. Blocking releases indefinitely any time there's a regression in determinism without any more resources to deal with that or early access to address issues prior to when a stable release comes out isn't going to work. When we're porting to a new release like Android 16, addressing some kind of new bug causing something to be non-deterministic cannot be our priority without early access to the release and resources to handle it. If you truly wanted us to do this then you could have helped us get what we needed to do it, make the required scripts and improve protection against non-determinism getting introduced. Instead you act as if this isn't something we want, when it is, but we aren't willing to break updates with an improper implementation.

It's not clear how you avoid trusting me or the developers doing nearly all of the actual development and code review on GrapheneOS through this though. Reproducible builds combined with checking it's reproducible from other parties does not truly accomplish that. Source code is being trusted either way.

There is someone actively reproducing each of our builds after we make releases. It's fully reproducible but AOSP and other projects do have upstream regressions for this we have to fix on a regular basis. It's not always easy to fix.

> If you put aside any dislike of me, objectively, removing trust in a single person makes you and the project and users safer, and make it much easier for people to separate your personal views from the stability of the project as a whole.

I dislike your false claims about me and your harassment towards me. Most of the few times I've interacted with you for several years have involved you making personal attacks on me and talking about us not providing a reproducible build verification feature which barely any projects provide and which is not practical for a project largely based on AOSP without early access or the resources to fix all reproducibility issues they introduce prior to stable releases.

> I'll let you have the last reply as this will go on forever otherwise. You know how to contact me if you ever want to discuss any of this privately.

I don't think we're ever going to come to an understanding. I simply want you to stop making public personal attacks on me. I'm not showing up in threads about your projects talking about what you've done towards me, but you keep showing up in discussions about GrapheneOS to claim that I'm crazy and delusional. You're doing the opposite of encouraging us to implement the signing feature you want.