cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/15995282
Real unfortunate news for GrapheneOS users as Revolut has decided to ban the use of ‘non-google’ approved OSes. This is currently being posted about and updated by GrahpeneOS over at Bluesky for those who want to follow it more closely.
Some cool features, wonder what backdoors google have put in the hardware
Those conspiracy theories often come up in discussions here on Lemmy, but the TLDR is: Google is a tiny player in the smartphone market, compared to vendors like Apple, Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi, and others (https://www.statista.com/chart/25463/popularity-of-google-smartphones/). They also serve a much smaller geographical region than most other manufacturers. The Pixel 9 lineup, for example, is only sold in 32 countries. Most of those are wealthy industrial nations. Google doesn’t even try to assume market share in developing countries in Africa and Asia. It can also be assumed that over 97% of Google Pixel users keep the Stock Pixel OS, where Google doesn’t need a hardware backdoor since they can just implement it in software. So that leaves only a tiny fraction of all users: people in some wealthy industrial nation who specifically buy a Pixel to install a custom ROM. GrapheneOS for example has about 300K users. Do you really think Google would put in the effort to create a hardware backdoor and take all the risk associated with it (negative PR, loss of sales, etc.) just to collect some data about this tiny amount of users? Google already controls EVERY Android phone on the market by forcing vendors to include Google Play Services as a system application through their contracts, licensing and monopolistic market position. Be realistic for a second, and you will realize that your backdoor theories make absolutely no sense and that no business in the world would ever take such a huge risk with such little reward.
Bare in mind the chipset is the Google Tensor G4, they already had to design and build their own hardware. We don’t know everything it can do
Neither do we know this about any other CPU on the market. All chipsets on the market are proprietary. All of them. And no, despite many people (who don’t know anything about what they are talking about) claiming this, RISC-V won’t actually solve any of these issues. Sure, the ISA is open source, but the ISA would be the worst place for malicious actors to introduce a backdoor. I can guarantee you that despite using the RISC-V ISA, the chips themselves will still be fully proprietary and the IP will be highly protected as trade secrets. You can build a fully RISC-V conformant chip with a backdoor, there’s absolutely nothing in place that could stop this, and it surely won’t change for the forseeable future.