by handedness | 2026-03-04 14:12:59+00:00
Attempting to compare line counts of 'security-related code' in isolation, if such a thing can even be framed that way, as if that's a useful metric indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of the issue. Making very selective hardware comparisons while attempting to compare the relative strengths of the operating systems running on said hardware also indicates the same.

Framing closed blobs as fatal flaws while advocating for other situations also containing different closed blobs is disingenuous.

Saying no hardware designed by Google could be trustworthy while advocating for x86 architecture and hand-waving IME (or PSP to whatever degree) as being "disabled," when no such thing is fully possible, is lazy. You don't get to care about this stuff selectively. IME when disabled to our fullest ability can still receive and apply microcode updates without the user's knowledge, making access to full unrestricted PCI lanes, DMA and USB possible. Wi-Fi certainly, at least in some specific scenarios. I'm not as concerned by IME/PSP as some, though I am much more concerned by it than some others, but the consistent selectiveness of your approach to attempting to understand that (and I'm taking it in good faith that you are) is precisely the kind of thing that makes people give up on attempting to give you additional information by which to reconsider your opinion.

Citing Joanna's research without any relevant context when you find it convenient yet ignoring it when it doesn't isn't helpful, either. You raise issues, people provide relevant research, and you ignore it while accusing broad swaths of people of doing the same. At some point it feels like projection.

I don't like even the appearance of unfairly criticizing the Qubes team publicly, because it's an important yet still-fledgling-in-resources project and they're doing amazing work nonetheless, but "the last relevant VM escape" overly relies on "relevant," and you overstate Xen's security because you're looking at it in isolation as if you can compare the relative security of operating systems while selectively comparing their hardware. The Qubes OS team has allowed significant Xen vulnerabilities to remain unpatched for weeks to months, sometimes not even capturing them in their XSA tracker. The GrapheneOS team seems fairly exemplary in pushing out important patches. I say this not to knock the Qubes OS team which does great work with very limited resources, but there are real, practical, significant differences in the two approaches and so long as you're comparing specific points in isolation of their broader context you're going to miss significant fundamentals.

Qubes OS's encryption situation out of the box is lacking in numerous ways which some Qubes OS users attempt to manually address. Consider the rigor it would take one to replicate your config vs. the rigor it would take to buy a Pixel and install Graphene OS. A journalist or dissident who is massively concerned with being in possession of data, the discovery of which could see them jailed or killed, is significantly better off storing that on a device running Graphene OS. That's not a hand-wavy thing, when you consider the full stack the advantages are numerous and concrete. There are many other practical differences between the two security models, when compared holistically. File system security of GrapheneOS is miles ahead of where Qubes OS is, and it's partly due to the OS, partly due to the differences in hardware. Brute force resistance is leagues better on GrapheneOS in part because the hardware facilitates it, and the OS does a best-of-class job at taking full advantage of that hardware.

At what point will you stop repeating your line of, "I keep asking for examples but they never answer"?