336
This news sparks joy. It’s a shame the FBI is wasting their time on petty political bullshit like this instead of going after real crime. What a shameful chapter for the FBI, and that’s really saying something given their illustrious history.
this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2026
336 points (99.4% liked)
Technology
80478 readers
4234 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
You act like there's a cabal of kid rapist running the world.
If they had any decency at all they should be arresting the president.
But hell would need to freeze over first. 😡
They did that, twice. Even got a trial and 34 felonies. Repercussions? None. Honestly if you do your job and not only see nothing come of it but said felon has an impact on your job now I can sympathize a bit.
He would have been fucked if he had lost the election, and money won the election, money and the markets is the only thing Trump cares about.
Scott Galloway has the right idea
It’s really great, isn’t it? But I’d leave you with one theoretical angle to consider…
What if the FBI actually did get into the phone? If so, then why would this information have been made public?
The only reason why, that I can think of right now, is that the FBI wants more people using Lockout. If so, the only reason I can possibly imagine for that is—there are actually some good commonly available techniques to keep them out of your devices, of which Lockout is insufficient. They’d want more people assuming that it is sufficient, and this news could accomplish that.
Purely theoretical… but the bigger point here, whether that framing is strategically true or miraculously over-thinking things, is that something does work. No matter what, you know something works.
You create a great story but violates K.i.S.S.
- not saying they got in means they can’t use it as evidence. Sometimes there’s still due process
- even if they can get into lockdown mode, it’s clearly harder than not lockdown. Why conspire to make it harder?
I don't think that's a rational line of thinking, because there are documented filings of attempted file access into FOSS programs that the FBI are unable to influence and are completely unable to access, such as Veracrypt/LUKS encrypted PCs and GrapheneOS in BFU/Duress password entry status.
Now, Apple is indeed a proprietary ecosystem, and as such unable to have community outside assurances that their system is completely trustworthy. However, Lockdown has now joined the ranks of other systems of data security that have been proven effective against a warrant, perpetuating the cycle in which nations such as the UK (and the US during the Crypto Wars) have tried to overtly undermine the technology through public actions after failures to covertly crack them. You cannot classify mathematics, physics, or cryptography, and there is no such thing as a perfect backdoor (despite some senators' opinions).
With all that being said, I still wouldn't trust an iPhone, but I don't think that proposed line of thinking meshes with the FBI.
It’s not like it was a press release, it was gleaned from a court document. I suppose they could be happy with what info they got off of it enough to let this prosecution fail if they can follow up the chain, but I’m still skeptical. Who knows, maybe they have a functional quantum computer they don’t want to advertise
load more comments
(2 replies)
Remember, if it were an android phone, Bezos would have rolled out a welcome mat to it.
Android also has lockdown mode.
Also Bezos has nothing to do with Android aside from their tablets.
As another said, a Pixel with Graphene OS is likely the most secure device you can have, even against an Apple product. Cellebrite, the software a lot of companies use to break into these phones can't get into a Pixel device before first unlock with Graphene OS. I believe a number of Apple products are the same thing as they can't be accessed before first unlock or lockdown mode, but your data is more secure in the hands of an open source developer than a massive capitalist company.
Also, a notable feature of GrapheneOS is automatic reboots after no use for any arbitrary time value you want, so your phone will always be in a "before first unlock" state if some steals it like the government. They also have lockdown mode as well, not sure how that works technically on Android beyond disabling biometrics.
not if it was lineage, calyx, graphene.
No, donkey, no.
Do we know of instances them doing it? Assuming they can, I don't actually know.
Best advertisement I've heard for an iPhone ever. Now that Android moving to the same walled garden business model...
Android phones have lockdown mode too. Hold the power button to show the shutdown menu and click lockdown.
Having it and it working as well are two different things. historically Apple has been ahead in security that can slow down or stop law enforcement. And before before you jump to the same conclusions as someone else, I never have owned an iPhone, nor wanted to.
That's incorrect. Google's Android has several industry leading security features the iPhone doesn't support.
That’s… not what they said.
GrapheneOS is ~10x more private and secure than iOS.
I want a phone, not a hobby.
Well well well, look who likes using banking apps and tap-to-pay.
Up voting because you made be lol, not because I agree with you. Been on GOS for over a year, it's not that bad. A few apps don't work, it's only slightly inconvenient.
It's not a hobby.
Don't confuse Graphene with a tinker box, or some ROM you once rooted.
It's a professionally polished and very secure fork of Android.
There are some minor limitations with a handful apps that can't pass their Google specific internal security checks, but there's lists of them that you can check to see if any are a deal breaker for you.
Safely using an insecure device swiftly becomes a hobby, unless you give in to the default experience.
I installed GrapheneOS, installed my apps, and I'm done. If I want to deny telemetry or to set up something like the duress password, it's one to two taps.
iPhone users, man... stop drinking the fucking punch.
load more comments
(1 replies)
I've used GOS daily for years. Your characterization of the OS as a "hobby" could not be further from the truth. After some basic initial configuration, it simply works like any other phone. My bank app works. Every app they told me would not work, works fine. Honestly, I'm beginning to wonder if all this FUD is a result of personal lack of willingness to do the research or something more nefarious like intentional misinformation.
Discounting some minor comparability issues, the process just requires a computer, an internet connection, a cable, and the ability to read through a couple paragraphs of instruction.
I'm talking about daily use. I have a good friend, we've both been computer nerds since The Apple II era, we both used to put custom roms on our android phones, we're avid self hosters, etc... He recently switched to Graphene and wants to switch back to something that's less of a pain. His complaints are pretty much the same as reasons I haven't switched. I warned him it would be an adjustment.
As someone who uses GrapheneOS with sandboxed GooglePlay on his only smartphone (with daily usage for years at this point): I don't know what kind of adjustment you are referring to. I never had to adjust to anything, because I never encountered anything that GrapheneOS couldn't do that stock Android could. Follow the installation process and after that the phone behaves like a regular phone, except you have way more options regarding security and privacy.
Is your friend trying to use GrapheneOS without any Google services maybe?
I had to fiddle with some stuff to get the Google location history and Android Auto working. But if you're using it for privacy-from-Google purposes you probably don't care about those.
Edit: also RCS and tap to pay with credit/debit card. Those require your carrier and Google to allow them, respectively.
My own personal experience over the past year with it has... Largely not lined up with that? The install process was easy, I do have gplay enabled but rarely use it, favoring fdroid, and it's... Been fine? It's felt mostly like stock android tbh
That’s the same thing stopping me from switching my friends from Linux. I know one of them would if I pushed.
I’ve been daily driving Linux for almost 2 years and also always have a minor issue daily. “Oh. Bluetooth module decided it just didn’t want to work. Better reload. Oh. Reloading doesn’t work? Got to restart. Oh. Now my Wi-Fi has completely crapped the bed and restarts every 5 seconds”.
Then the major issues are catastrophic, even though rare. I once had a system just start… filling up empty storage at a rate of 1 GB a second with an empty log file. I couldn’t figure out why. Ended up reinstalling everything.
I don’t mind fixing these issues. And hell, I have fun, but I’m the only computer guy in our group though so I’d be playing tech support for these people if they ever changed.
What distro are you using? This seems bizarre and the sort of thing you see on a less stable rolling release.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(7 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(5 replies)
Yes, that's advertising allright.
load more comments
(8 replies)
Here are the instructions to enable and description of how it works. Seems really complete.
Feature set seems like an improvement, honestly. In particular:
Game Center is also disabled.
they’ll just lay israelis (cellbrite) to crack it
One shortcoming of lockdown mode, as far as I can tell: you can pair your phone and watch so locking your phone will lock your watch as well, but you can’t do the reverse. It seems more likely that a hostile party would get access to your phone first while you still (temporarily) have control of your watch, so being able to lock your phone from your watch would be extremely useful. (Or for that matter, set lockdown mode to trigger automatically if your watch is removed or your watch and phone move to different locations.)
load more comments
(4 replies)
view more: next ›