Well, if the town pays the departments and then the town goes bankrupt, it seems like the town can't pay the departments and thus they're still bankrupt. It also has the effect of pissing off everybody wondering where the fuck their money went, only to find out that it was pissed away by their police department.

Also, I don't know much about your town, but I know my town doesn't have shit for social services or social service spending like the majority of small towns in the United States.

Capitial and power mostly.

Yay! I am all here for it.

US is currently to busy shooting themselves in the foot to bother to much with Latin America right now. Something about an impeding oil crisis

I mean, I understand the skepticism. I get the concerns and complaints you're having.

Personally, for me, I've done the research on how TPM chips work, and the encryption behind it, and generally find it to be very, very secure, and I'm perfectly comfortable using the technology. As far as needing it for graphene, I mean, yeah. If it's used for security hardening, then yeah, they're going to need it. Graphene developers are even highly critical of Debian security practices, and Linux security practices, and standard hardening. They're like the experts at this. I'm going to very heavily trust what they have to say. I mean, they're so overly critical. I mean, it's actually kind of a point of contention in the open source community with how aggressive and obtuse the graphene developers can be over perceived security flaws.

Graphene phones typically don't "phone" home either. All that code was ripped out. Apps can still though.

Even if you get in trouble of legally, I still like that feature of graphene. Also, the little trouble you get for wiping your phone will probably be worth depending on what your activities are Considering this administration is giving people 30 years for doing things like moving magazines.

Didn't know TPM was for DRM originally. Tech was a little before my time and had already rebranded.

Look, at least this way I don't have to worry about all the software back doors phoning home.

I just don't take the phone out with me when I think I'm going to be arrested or something.

You know that Moto G is like a first-class supported phone on lineage, right? It seems like every one of their newest models is on lineage.

I'm not sure where you got the idea that a TPM chip is used for DRM, because that is not their function. It's a hardware encryption chip used to generate Cryptographically secure keys.

DRM Enforcement works with or without these hardware chips being installed on your phone.

You want something like the TPM chip because it makes your phone very difficult to break into when you do things like encrypt the entire drive. HSMs Are far more effective at securing your phone than the standard baseline security that you get from a CPU. This isn't an opinion. This is a well-researched fact.

You also are, I think, maybe conflating technological vulnerabilities? Also, you said phones call back to Big Brother intentionally. What you're talking about are vulnerabilities that can be exploited that are not intentional features of the chip. Intel is kind of famous for their insecurity. There was a big fucking vulnerability their CPUs had due to a hardware bug like a decade ago that AMD managed to get by because they don't use the same architecture. Now I do get what you're coming at that these vulnerabilities probably exist on every model of phone, but it's best to go for a phone os that's actively trying to close all of these vulnerabilities rather than one that says they "exist on all phones, I don't care".

I disagree with your assessment that the government wouldn't shoot themselves in the foot by giving people a technology that would allow them to hide shit from the government. They have, and they do constantly. I mean, the US is kind of famous for having more firearms per capita than people. Also somebody has clearly never heard of the legend of TrueCrypt. There's a reason the original developers ended up fucking off somewhere to obscurity, and the project is now VeraCrypt.

Also, the government does want corporations to be able to protect their private information from foreign entities. That seems like it would be prudent for the US to be able to do. You know what I mean? They don't want China all up in their business. In fact, it's a big concern from the business perspective. So having something like a TPM chip on every laptop to encrypt all of your data is a good thing. And typically, that's what the US wants. They just want a software backdoor To get at the data they want. They also have so much monitoring that it's almost a moot point.

As far as graphene users go, it's secure enough that Various governments consider graphene phones a dead end when they collect them And I'm pretty sure the US has never been able to crack one As far as we are aware and we would definitely be aware because they would be stupid enough to sing it from the fucking mountaintops with this administration.

I understand you're skeptical, but there is a reason that Graphene is preferred by the security community. There is no competition for security. They are the best hands down. When you have various Western governments admitting that they can't get into these phones, that's as Good as a recommendation you can get. Notice how they aren't bothered about Apple phones and Google phones. The governments hate graphene phones and are making it harder to get a hold of them.

This is so devastating to hear about. I feel for these companies, a loss like this hits so hard and can be so, so hard to recover from.

Microsoft deserves all of the shitty PR for this shit.

This should also be a gentle lesson about not leaving all of your eggs in one basket, especially if it's a free product.

No, it's really not. Just go buy any of the old Pixel phones and they all work with lineage. I mean, it's not that big of a deal. You're making it sound like it's a huge effort to find a new phone, and you just have to accept the fact that you're going to have a couple of generations older to run these type of OSes.

A phone will only call out to Big Brother if it has the code to do so. It needs the code. If the phone is flashed a certain way, it won't call out to Big Brother.

It's not exactly a fun experience, but I wouldn't call it a massive problem either. More of a small headache.

As far as Graphene goes, it goes down to literal hardware chips in your phone that drive security that are only found in certain devices, typically enterprise-style devices. It's like a TPM chip in your computer.

As far as security goes, there's no competition. Graphene OS is the best, and that includes current modern OSes. Governments really fucking hate this OS and have been targeting people that have it on their phones Because there's absolutely no backdoors and there's no way to get the data off the phone, unlike a Google or an Apple device.

Fair, but they're the only OS project that's working with a hardware distributor right now.

And the security on the graphene phones is genuinely top-notch. So these are the ones I'm most hopeful for.

As far as lineage goes, there's lots of phones that already works on. You do have to go through some steps to make it work on a lot of phones. But you know, it should work on most phones.

Yes, if you ask the graphene developers. They are known to be rather persnickety about their security features. They are highly critical of devices and security, and if it doesn't meet their standards, they're not going to do it. And most phones don't meet their standards, which is why they don't make graphene OS for anybody else. If you want an OS that's going to run on everybody's phone, you're going to be looking at, like, lineage OS or one of the Linux distributions But unfortunately, there's just not a lot of money and momentum behind these projects. There's people that want them, but nobody really has the capital to really fund and push them and give them a lot of momentum.

Great question. It's not actually because graphene is all that demanding on the phone hardware. It's because they have specific security requirements that demand certain class of hardware to be installed that's not found in every phone. That's why they require Pixel phones because they come with this required software. They stopped being able to do this with the Pixel 10 because Google stopped releasing The Pixel build with the Android open source code.