I'm done for once the authorities know I have an account on HACKER News.
When I was in high school I brought in a copy of The Hacker's Dictionary to show a friend. A teacher saw it.
A few weeks later there was a hacking incident! The shared spreadsheet of every pupil's grades that every teacher had full access to was modified, boosting the grades of some students (including me) and lowering the grades of others (including people I didn't get on with). I was immediately sent home during the investigation. Nothing came of it in the end.
Years later my friend revealed the advanced technique of finding his music teacher's password (bassoon) on a post-it note under the their keyboard.
When I was in middle school I used to download keygens and cracks for programs from the school computer and take them with me home on a floppy disk because I didn’t have internet at home.
One of the websites I downloaded keygens and cracks from was called TheBugs.WS. Another pupil saw that I was downloading keygens and stuff and tried to rat me out to one of the teachers saying like “hey look at his screen, he can’t use the computer for that”.
The teacher had a brief glance at my monitor and read the title of the page TheBugs.WS and just said “nothing wrong about learning about insects” and then just walked away lololol. To this day I still don’t know if the teacher genuinely though the page was about insects just from the title, or if she just didn’t care as long as the briefest of glances at my screen didn’t show anything that seemed really out of place.
Either which way, my situation was kind of the exact opposite of yours. And the inconspicuous name of the site was enough that I didn’t get in trouble even though I could have if a teacher looked closely.
I remember trying to argue with the IT folks at school because hackaday.com was blocked for "hacking"... damn, guess all those fun electronics projects people were doing is Super Evil And Only For Criminals.
Hey, under the keyboard is an advanced technique. In those days it was usually on the monitor.
I went to a hackathon in another country and was worried about explaining that name to the border guard. To my relief, the topic didn't come up.
[deleted]
OI mate, you got a loicense for that operating system?
The only surprising thing about this story is that the user didn't get a visit by the police to be charged with a "non-crime cybersecurity incident". The UK has become such a shithole.
Non-crime hate incidents 1) never lead to people being charged, and 2) recording of them has been greatly reformed following a court ruling and new legislation
I agree there are a lot of problems (e.g. the online safety Act) but it look as though both the rest of Europe and the rest of the west is going the same way.
Yep, police can simply ask anyone for their passwords and if you don't give it up they can put you in jail.
I won't be visiting. Despite many flaws, the US has some damn good rights for its citizens compared to the rest of the world.
Yet swatting, making police kick in the doors and shoot the dogs of someone who was victim of anonymous slander, isn't really a thing here in europe compared to the US.
The US has a good constitution but worse policing.
The user you replied to was talking about UK, not Europe.
My first two sentences were about the UK. The third was general.
The UK is a part of Europe.
Is this satire?
That response looks like it is generated from boilerplate, so the 'reported to the authorities' part is as likely true as when sudo says the same thing.
A new age of piracy is ahead of us. When they come crying about "revenue", these days will be remembered.
Someone in the comments of that post linked to a long FAQ section for GrapheneOS about how apps can identify it and so forth [1]. I don't understand why it doesn't just attempt to spoof that's it's stock Android/Google everywhere it possibly can?
Because that would be pointless. If you have use-after-free exploit mitigations active, apps can test for its presence by simply trying to use after free. The only way to make the mitigation unnoticeable would be disabling it.
Superficial spoofing is pointless - any app that cares would just use the Play Integrity API (which can't be spoofed by GrapheneOS).
They are focused on making their users more private and secure, not trying to trick 0.01% of apps that give them problems.
It's a cat and mouse game that would require significant investment and could make things look more suspicious, better to focus on adoption so it becomes harder for companies to make stupid decisions like this. I've seen a banking apps that have expressly added support for GrapheneOS with their hardware attestation after customers mentioned it.
Even dedicated anti-detect browsers are constantly blocked and need patches. It's not something I would want GrapheneOS to focus on.
Because the GrapheneOS team takes security seriously, and spoofing would actually justify banning.
> GrapheneOS not only upholds the app security model but substantially reinforces it, so it cannot be justified with reasoning based on security, anti-fraud, etc.
I bet they would count that as a attempted fraud.
[dead]
This is not how authorities work.
They need to prove people guilty, not flag all “suspicious activity” then let people prove they are innocent.
This actually is how authorities work. If you do anything unusual at all, you are flagged as suspicious. You will find yourself being denied services without explanation. There is no appeal process.
Not where I live. If it's happening where you live then it's a sign you need to start protesting/organizing/get involved in politics/using whatever skills you have to improve matters before they get worse.
This happened in the UK, specifically, and from what we've all seen it's definitely sliding in a bad direction over the past decade. But it's also not in any way so far gone that you can't take action. If you're sitting here on HN complaining and yet doing nothing else, you're a part of the problem. Stop being complacent, take action before it's too late. You won't get thrown in jail for getting involved in politics there (yes, you'll find some specific examples of that happening but if you look deeper they'll all unravel and show there was a deeper reason that's being misrepresented, usually by tabloids/social media).
If you show up to a protest then you automatically get put on a police database via facial recognition.
Not sure if you've read the news during the past couple of months but things are no longer normal
watchlists existed for decades
That's in countries that have a constitution, a Bill of Rights that can't be revoked by a simple vote of the legislature, separation of powers and the rule of law. None of which applies to the UK.
3 of those factors are nothing more than bits of paper. Everything hinges on separation of powers, and the one you omitted: a thoroughly established sense of democracy. If either of those fails, any report to the authorities is a threat.
This isn't how the UK works. There is a vast ecosystem of pre-crime authorities and the police are able to investigate things which aren't crimes and add "non-crime" incidents to your criminal record. It may not surprise you to learn that almost all of the cases in which this is used are "social" crimes. In cases of actual crime, custodial sentences are sometimes not applied at all...again, usually for reasons of social order.
Ironically, I also can't read most of the screenshots because all sharing sites are blocked in the UK because of the threat image sharing represents to the social order.
All sharing sites are not blocked, postimg and Reddit image hosting and Flickr and many more are not blocked.
The uk didn’t block sharing sites because of a threat to the social order, sharing sites blocked uk viewers because they don’t want to comply with uk laws like “don’t gather children’s personal data”.
Might as well report all users of internet to authorities for using internet because internet can also be used to commit fraud.
Exactly, don't forget, if you own or drive a car you must be a criminal, because cars are used as getaway vehicles in serious crimes.
You can also murder people with your car including children.
While most people who use an unbackdoored OS aren't frauds, presumably it's correct at a slightly higher rate than assuming someone is a fraud because they use the internet.
- Heavy censorship
- Two-tier justice system
- This
How did it come to this? The UK is arguably the country that has done the most for the cause of freedom, having led the way in abolishing slavery.
> the country that has done the most for the cause of freedom
Need a history refresher. Let's skip the Magna Carta since that was really about giving power to feudal lords. Do you mean British empire being the unwitting and unwilling cause of United States?
When, in God's green Earth, have the "lords" that lord it over the "subjects of crown" common people of that island have been vanguards of "freedom" when it did not serve their own class interests?
Have you read parent‘s comment until the end?
> having led the way in abolishing slavery
> How did it come to this?
Trying not to get my account banned...
The British elite allied with non-British people and betrayed their own.
Eric Williams: “British historians write almost as if Britain had introduced Negro slavery solely for the satisfaction of abolishing it.
Totally agree, the British Empire has a lot of blood on its hand,
but compared to its forebears and contemporaries it did abolish slavery, a tradition that has roots as old as humanity itself.
[deleted]
Compared to its contemporaries, only Portugal transported more African slaves across to the America's.
But hey, they stopped doing it, after a couple hundred years so let's everyone give Britain credit.
There were times when there were more slaves in Athens than citizens.
The Arab led slave trade flourished for much longer, by some records it is alive even today.
The words Slav and slave have the same root.
There were times when 30-40% of the Korean population were slaves.
The Mongols killed and enslaved half of the known world.
I'm not sure what point you are trying to make here.
My point is this, none of these people ever make a point of how much freedom they had, because after a couple hundred years they stopped, quite like the the brits like to.
It's pretty baffling tbh.
Anyone: criticises the British empire.
Brits: after several hundred years of brutal trans Atlantic slave trade, we stopped. Hurrah!
There is a reason both 1984 and V for Vendetta are set in the UK
Though the slide ever since Brexit is indeed astounding
For whatever reason the British underappreciate Brave New World.
Can we stop it with this two tier justice system nonsense?
I wouldn't call it two-tier justice, because generally the courts do the right thing, but there's a shamefully obvious two-tier policing.
From the Jay Report [0] showing crimes swept under the rug according to ethnic/socioeconomic background of perp and victim, to arresting people for opposing genocide (sorry: terrorism!) [1] to the recent case of Henry Nowak [2], it's really hard not to see a two-tier policing in the UK. And this very submission; caring about privacy is seen grounds for being reported and potentially investigated, by a private company! Which suggests it's something already internalized, too, for people who resist big corp surveillance.
Back in the 90s and before, the two-tier heavily punished the minorities, and in an overshooting overcorrection, now it's the other way around. Nowak getting handcuffed by cops going "I don't think you have [been stabbed] mate!" says it all. Unless it's regarding opposing/supporting Israel, then the two-tier flips and people with basic human decency and actual antisemites are pigeonholed together, nevermind their background.
You're spreading disinformation broadcast by the far right.
The bodycam literally shows a police officer responding to a man who's been stabbed with "I don't think you have mate", just because his killer said the man was racist.
I'll make this simple for you.
The behaviour of one officer does not mean that we should no longer live in a diverse society.
This is one incident. The officer is question made a terrible call.
The fact that people like you are using this as ammunition to further frankly racist aims, is an egregious afront to everyone living in the UK.
[dead]
[flagged]
It’s an undeniable fact. So.
It's not a fact at all, it's a lie spread by people who want to stoke anger for their own benefit.
How many chief constables aren't white? Cognitive dissonance isn't a fact
You will need to explain this in more detail so people without racial prejudice can understand why someone's race impacts their ability to do a certain job.
If they were not white, you would still have to claim there is discrimination? Or do you believe that non whites are inherently better at policing? Unclear. Also, in the UK there has been central directives to discriminate in favour of ethnic minorities for nearly three decades, discrimination is part of policing policy, there is an extensive body of training given to police to effectuate that (and that extends beyond policing into the court system).
It's really not that complicated.
If we have fewer non-white police officers, our ability to keep the whole of our (gratefully diverse) population safe is at a disadvantage. We need a police force that accurately represents the full range of diversity in our country.
Occasionally members of the police force will f*k up badly. This is a fact.
In the case of Henry Novak, a police officer made an incredibly bad call and this added to Novak's tragic passing.
The misdemeanor associated with one person does not mean that our diverse society should be made less diverse.
The very fact that people like you are calling for this type of change is ignorant, opportunistic and frankly wrong.
I will not stand for it.
A friend of mine told me that Yoti is used as an age verification system in so many porn websites. That’s such an issue, this information should never be owned by private companies.
Or you could just choose not to use pornography. Then you don't have to verify your age to these websites.
I get that some people have a behavioural addiction to this harmful content but perhaps the age verification is an opportunity to step back and reconsider.
Greetings stranger! Your comment has been shadowbanned. In order to prove you are a legal adult, please email a selfie, holding your username on a piece of paper, and your government ID to hn@ycombinator.com. Alternatively, you may use this opportunity to step back and reconsider whether you still wish to remain addicted to Hacker News.
So we shouldn't be using GrapheneOS neither nor any Sony products if we follow your logic right? Because obviously it means we are addicted to both.
Or they can be pushed to watch on less regulated platforms to avoid the age verification, which is far more likely and has negative consequences.
First they came for the porn watchers
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a porn watcher
I guess this user gets to sue Sony for a full refund.
I would take "automatically reported to the authorities" with a pinch of salt (in this sphere, "nudging" people with lies is de rigueur [0]).
Not that I'm arguing the UK isn't accelerating further into an authoritarian nightmare.
If anything, from an age-verification perspective those using GrapheneOS are probably more likely to be adults, mentally mature, or otherwise smarter than the average sheeple.
But it's not about checking age, it's about enforcing control.
I'm done for once the authorities know I have an account on HACKER News.
When I was in high school I brought in a copy of The Hacker's Dictionary to show a friend. A teacher saw it.
A few weeks later there was a hacking incident! The shared spreadsheet of every pupil's grades that every teacher had full access to was modified, boosting the grades of some students (including me) and lowering the grades of others (including people I didn't get on with). I was immediately sent home during the investigation. Nothing came of it in the end.
Years later my friend revealed the advanced technique of finding his music teacher's password (bassoon) on a post-it note under the their keyboard.
When I was in middle school I used to download keygens and cracks for programs from the school computer and take them with me home on a floppy disk because I didn’t have internet at home.
One of the websites I downloaded keygens and cracks from was called TheBugs.WS. Another pupil saw that I was downloading keygens and stuff and tried to rat me out to one of the teachers saying like “hey look at his screen, he can’t use the computer for that”.
The teacher had a brief glance at my monitor and read the title of the page TheBugs.WS and just said “nothing wrong about learning about insects” and then just walked away lololol. To this day I still don’t know if the teacher genuinely though the page was about insects just from the title, or if she just didn’t care as long as the briefest of glances at my screen didn’t show anything that seemed really out of place.
Either which way, my situation was kind of the exact opposite of yours. And the inconspicuous name of the site was enough that I didn’t get in trouble even though I could have if a teacher looked closely.
I remember trying to argue with the IT folks at school because hackaday.com was blocked for "hacking"... damn, guess all those fun electronics projects people were doing is Super Evil And Only For Criminals.
Hey, under the keyboard is an advanced technique. In those days it was usually on the monitor.
I went to a hackathon in another country and was worried about explaining that name to the border guard. To my relief, the topic didn't come up.
OI mate, you got a loicense for that operating system?
The only surprising thing about this story is that the user didn't get a visit by the police to be charged with a "non-crime cybersecurity incident". The UK has become such a shithole.
Non-crime hate incidents 1) never lead to people being charged, and 2) recording of them has been greatly reformed following a court ruling and new legislation
I agree there are a lot of problems (e.g. the online safety Act) but it look as though both the rest of Europe and the rest of the west is going the same way.
Yep, police can simply ask anyone for their passwords and if you don't give it up they can put you in jail.
I won't be visiting. Despite many flaws, the US has some damn good rights for its citizens compared to the rest of the world.
Yet swatting, making police kick in the doors and shoot the dogs of someone who was victim of anonymous slander, isn't really a thing here in europe compared to the US.
The US has a good constitution but worse policing.
The user you replied to was talking about UK, not Europe.
My first two sentences were about the UK. The third was general.
The UK is a part of Europe.
Is this satire?
That response looks like it is generated from boilerplate, so the 'reported to the authorities' part is as likely true as when sudo says the same thing.
* https://postimg.cc/3kVXKzhk
Re sudo: https://xkcd.com/838/
A new age of piracy is ahead of us. When they come crying about "revenue", these days will be remembered.
Someone in the comments of that post linked to a long FAQ section for GrapheneOS about how apps can identify it and so forth [1]. I don't understand why it doesn't just attempt to spoof that's it's stock Android/Google everywhere it possibly can?
[1] https://grapheneos.org/faq#:~:text=Apps%20can%20detect%20tha...
Because that would be pointless. If you have use-after-free exploit mitigations active, apps can test for its presence by simply trying to use after free. The only way to make the mitigation unnoticeable would be disabling it.
Superficial spoofing is pointless - any app that cares would just use the Play Integrity API (which can't be spoofed by GrapheneOS).
0: https://developer.android.com/google/play/integrity/overview
They are focused on making their users more private and secure, not trying to trick 0.01% of apps that give them problems.
It's a cat and mouse game that would require significant investment and could make things look more suspicious, better to focus on adoption so it becomes harder for companies to make stupid decisions like this. I've seen a banking apps that have expressly added support for GrapheneOS with their hardware attestation after customers mentioned it.
Even dedicated anti-detect browsers are constantly blocked and need patches. It's not something I would want GrapheneOS to focus on.
Because the GrapheneOS team takes security seriously, and spoofing would actually justify banning.
From https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-gu...:
> GrapheneOS not only upholds the app security model but substantially reinforces it, so it cannot be justified with reasoning based on security, anti-fraud, etc.
I bet they would count that as a attempted fraud.
[dead]
This is not how authorities work.
They need to prove people guilty, not flag all “suspicious activity” then let people prove they are innocent.
This actually is how authorities work. If you do anything unusual at all, you are flagged as suspicious. You will find yourself being denied services without explanation. There is no appeal process.
Not where I live. If it's happening where you live then it's a sign you need to start protesting/organizing/get involved in politics/using whatever skills you have to improve matters before they get worse.
This happened in the UK, specifically, and from what we've all seen it's definitely sliding in a bad direction over the past decade. But it's also not in any way so far gone that you can't take action. If you're sitting here on HN complaining and yet doing nothing else, you're a part of the problem. Stop being complacent, take action before it's too late. You won't get thrown in jail for getting involved in politics there (yes, you'll find some specific examples of that happening but if you look deeper they'll all unravel and show there was a deeper reason that's being misrepresented, usually by tabloids/social media).
If you show up to a protest then you automatically get put on a police database via facial recognition.
Not sure if you've read the news during the past couple of months but things are no longer normal
watchlists existed for decades
That's in countries that have a constitution, a Bill of Rights that can't be revoked by a simple vote of the legislature, separation of powers and the rule of law. None of which applies to the UK.
3 of those factors are nothing more than bits of paper. Everything hinges on separation of powers, and the one you omitted: a thoroughly established sense of democracy. If either of those fails, any report to the authorities is a threat.
This isn't how the UK works. There is a vast ecosystem of pre-crime authorities and the police are able to investigate things which aren't crimes and add "non-crime" incidents to your criminal record. It may not surprise you to learn that almost all of the cases in which this is used are "social" crimes. In cases of actual crime, custodial sentences are sometimes not applied at all...again, usually for reasons of social order.
Ironically, I also can't read most of the screenshots because all sharing sites are blocked in the UK because of the threat image sharing represents to the social order.
All sharing sites are not blocked, postimg and Reddit image hosting and Flickr and many more are not blocked.
The uk didn’t block sharing sites because of a threat to the social order, sharing sites blocked uk viewers because they don’t want to comply with uk laws like “don’t gather children’s personal data”.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gzxv5gy3qo
[dead]
[dead]
Might as well report all users of internet to authorities for using internet because internet can also be used to commit fraud.
Exactly, don't forget, if you own or drive a car you must be a criminal, because cars are used as getaway vehicles in serious crimes.
You can also murder people with your car including children.
While most people who use an unbackdoored OS aren't frauds, presumably it's correct at a slightly higher rate than assuming someone is a fraud because they use the internet.
- Heavy censorship
- Two-tier justice system
- This
How did it come to this? The UK is arguably the country that has done the most for the cause of freedom, having led the way in abolishing slavery.
> the country that has done the most for the cause of freedom
Need a history refresher. Let's skip the Magna Carta since that was really about giving power to feudal lords. Do you mean British empire being the unwitting and unwilling cause of United States?
When, in God's green Earth, have the "lords" that lord it over the "subjects of crown" common people of that island have been vanguards of "freedom" when it did not serve their own class interests?
Have you read parent‘s comment until the end?
> having led the way in abolishing slavery
> How did it come to this?
Trying not to get my account banned...
The British elite allied with non-British people and betrayed their own.
Eric Williams: “British historians write almost as if Britain had introduced Negro slavery solely for the satisfaction of abolishing it.
Totally agree, the British Empire has a lot of blood on its hand, but compared to its forebears and contemporaries it did abolish slavery, a tradition that has roots as old as humanity itself.
Compared to its contemporaries, only Portugal transported more African slaves across to the America's.
But hey, they stopped doing it, after a couple hundred years so let's everyone give Britain credit.
There were times when there were more slaves in Athens than citizens.
The Arab led slave trade flourished for much longer, by some records it is alive even today.
The words Slav and slave have the same root.
There were times when 30-40% of the Korean population were slaves.
The Mongols killed and enslaved half of the known world.
I'm not sure what point you are trying to make here.
My point is this, none of these people ever make a point of how much freedom they had, because after a couple hundred years they stopped, quite like the the brits like to.
It's pretty baffling tbh.
Anyone: criticises the British empire.
Brits: after several hundred years of brutal trans Atlantic slave trade, we stopped. Hurrah!
There is a reason both 1984 and V for Vendetta are set in the UK
Though the slide ever since Brexit is indeed astounding
For whatever reason the British underappreciate Brave New World.
Can we stop it with this two tier justice system nonsense?
I wouldn't call it two-tier justice, because generally the courts do the right thing, but there's a shamefully obvious two-tier policing.
From the Jay Report [0] showing crimes swept under the rug according to ethnic/socioeconomic background of perp and victim, to arresting people for opposing genocide (sorry: terrorism!) [1] to the recent case of Henry Nowak [2], it's really hard not to see a two-tier policing in the UK. And this very submission; caring about privacy is seen grounds for being reported and potentially investigated, by a private company! Which suggests it's something already internalized, too, for people who resist big corp surveillance.
Back in the 90s and before, the two-tier heavily punished the minorities, and in an overshooting overcorrection, now it's the other way around. Nowak getting handcuffed by cops going "I don't think you have [been stabbed] mate!" says it all. Unless it's regarding opposing/supporting Israel, then the two-tier flips and people with basic human decency and actual antisemites are pigeonholed together, nevermind their background.
[0] https://www.rotherham.gov.uk/downloads/file/279/independent-...
[1] https://newint.org/action/2025/i-oppose-genocide-ok
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Henry_Nowak
Two words: Henry Nowak.
You're spreading disinformation broadcast by the far right.
The bodycam literally shows a police officer responding to a man who's been stabbed with "I don't think you have mate", just because his killer said the man was racist.
I'll make this simple for you.
The behaviour of one officer does not mean that we should no longer live in a diverse society.
This is one incident. The officer is question made a terrible call.
The fact that people like you are using this as ammunition to further frankly racist aims, is an egregious afront to everyone living in the UK.
[dead]
[flagged]
It’s an undeniable fact. So.
It's not a fact at all, it's a lie spread by people who want to stoke anger for their own benefit.
https://x.com/Keir_Starmer/status/1270374388488167428?lang=e...
Are we just posting irrelevant links? https://thedailywtf.com/
How many chief constables aren't white? Cognitive dissonance isn't a fact
You will need to explain this in more detail so people without racial prejudice can understand why someone's race impacts their ability to do a certain job.
If they were not white, you would still have to claim there is discrimination? Or do you believe that non whites are inherently better at policing? Unclear. Also, in the UK there has been central directives to discriminate in favour of ethnic minorities for nearly three decades, discrimination is part of policing policy, there is an extensive body of training given to police to effectuate that (and that extends beyond policing into the court system).
It's really not that complicated.
If we have fewer non-white police officers, our ability to keep the whole of our (gratefully diverse) population safe is at a disadvantage. We need a police force that accurately represents the full range of diversity in our country.
Occasionally members of the police force will f*k up badly. This is a fact.
In the case of Henry Novak, a police officer made an incredibly bad call and this added to Novak's tragic passing.
The misdemeanor associated with one person does not mean that our diverse society should be made less diverse.
The very fact that people like you are calling for this type of change is ignorant, opportunistic and frankly wrong.
I will not stand for it.
A friend of mine told me that Yoti is used as an age verification system in so many porn websites. That’s such an issue, this information should never be owned by private companies.
Or you could just choose not to use pornography. Then you don't have to verify your age to these websites.
I get that some people have a behavioural addiction to this harmful content but perhaps the age verification is an opportunity to step back and reconsider.
Greetings stranger! Your comment has been shadowbanned. In order to prove you are a legal adult, please email a selfie, holding your username on a piece of paper, and your government ID to hn@ycombinator.com. Alternatively, you may use this opportunity to step back and reconsider whether you still wish to remain addicted to Hacker News.
So we shouldn't be using GrapheneOS neither nor any Sony products if we follow your logic right? Because obviously it means we are addicted to both.
Or they can be pushed to watch on less regulated platforms to avoid the age verification, which is far more likely and has negative consequences.
First they came for the porn watchers And I did not speak out Because I was not a porn watcher
I guess this user gets to sue Sony for a full refund.
I would take "automatically reported to the authorities" with a pinch of salt (in this sphere, "nudging" people with lies is de rigueur [0]).
Not that I'm arguing the UK isn't accelerating further into an authoritarian nightmare.
[0] Kinda related https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioural_Insights_Team
If anything, from an age-verification perspective those using GrapheneOS are probably more likely to be adults, mentally mature, or otherwise smarter than the average sheeple.
But it's not about checking age, it's about enforcing control.
Exactly.
UK now, but that train is never late..
[dead]