I wanted to publish this a week ago, but my machine was begging for repairs and it gave up, so it stayed dead for a week. So, here we are.
Hello! The dust has settled. There is something I want to talk to all of you once again, something that I wrote approximately 23 months ago about, and has been stickied on this subreddit ever since. No, it is not the smartphone guide, and it is a lore that I do not think anybody except me has ever attempted to shed a light on, except until a month ago when BurungHantu, founder of PrivacyTools.io, did.
As always, my aim is to stay objective throughout, and drop my opinions separately in a section at the very end. I also want to mention that this is a lore that basically nobody other than me has tracked in this depth, and nobody else carries a record of these events in this manner to date or ever can.
REMINDER: NONE OF THIS WILL MAKE SENSE IF YOU KEEP ON READING WHILE NOT READING LINKED ARTICLES/SCREENSHOTS I MENTION AS I GO ON.
A BRIEF OVERVIEW
A lot of people seemed to appreciate BurungHantu's blog post, and openly saw the censorship attempted across subreddits r/privacy, r/opensource and r/PrivacyGuides. This last one is the new "privacy" cool hangout cafe of the mainstream privacy subreddit circle.
THE PLAYERS IN THE GAME
Before we move ahead, it is a good thing to make transparent the characters involved, so that we know who plays what role. A lot do not like this, apparently, because they want to fake objectivity.
TheAnonymouseJoker (shameless plug): the "arbiter of truth" , "false privacy prophet", wumao, 50cent, Chinese plant (https://i.imgur.com/vOyaidS.png), Putin bot these days... I am an independent privacy/freedom writer in the community with no donation/money channels and no links to YouTubers (Techlore, The Hated One, other privacytubers) and privacy communities in any form or way whatsoever. I am also a long term active user and promoter of the Fediverse platform Lemmy.
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trai_dep: A power moderator on Reddit. Moderator of r/privacy, r/PrivacyGuides, r/privacytoolsio (now defunct). I have spoken about him extensively in my 2 year old criticism writeup. One of the 2 characters in BurungHantu/PTIO's recent blog post.
Jonah Aragon: A power moderator on Reddit. Moderator of r/PrivacyGuides and r/techlore, and Techlore Matrix room. The other person and focal point of BurungHantu/PTIO's blog post with many revelations.
carrotcypher: Another power moderator of Reddit. Moderator of r/privacy, r/opensource and dozens of micro digital privacy/censorship subreddits.
Daniel Micay: Developer of GrapheneOS, a security focused AOSP-based custom ROM exclusively for Google Pixels. Known to submit hardened malloc() patches for Linux kernel. A very controversial figure in privacy and FOSS/Linux communities. Uses @strcat and u/GrapheneOS handles across various platforms.
madaidan: Admin of GrapheneOS, NoGoolag, SpiteChat communities/chatrooms across various platforms. The "insecurities" blog chap, notorious for a lot of misinformation in FOSS and Linux communities but opposite in a big chunk of mainstream privacy community. A staple of the "redditor hackerman" starterpack, for people who know nothing better.
anupritaisno1/clannad/Coooom Yuki Nagato/randomhydrosol: same user, multiple names over time. They are one of the GrapheneOS members who use a lot of sockpuppets and frequently change pseudonym username. madaidan's friend.
Note: clannad is seen changing username across Telegram and Reddit over time: https://i.imgur.com/V7McLFO.jpg
cn3m: a friend of madaidan, who regularly spreads pro-Apple propaganda in privacy communities. For the most part, the account serves as a sockpuppet of someone since it has stayed inactive since 10 months.
Lunacy: one of the newer GrapheneOS community parrots out there on Lemmy (now defunct). Comment activity was suspiciously similar to that of madaidan. An active member of GrapheneOS community.
akc3n: moderator of GrapheneOS community, and active on PrivacyGuides and GrapheneOS subreddits, as well as on XMPP hunting users.
Note:
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He is one of the GrapheneOS Matrix room moderators. This will be important information later on. Proof: https://i.imgur.com/Uq4Xfxk.jpg
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Notorious for practicing censorship beyond the Matrix room to practice censorship and/or suppress any GrapheneOS dissent, on Lemmy (https://i.imgur.com/4HtArcj.jpg) and XMPP (https://i.imgur.com/Hi089y6.jpg).
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Tommy_Tran/B0risGrishenko: New moderator of r/PrivacyGuides with suspiciously proven close links to GrapheneOS community. Did a hitpiece on me to gain recognition with PrivacyGuides team. Uses sockpuppets and identity obfuscation a lot on internet.
THE STORY. ONCE UPON A TIME...
GRSECURITY/SPENGLER SAGA
Let me dial back the time machine to a few years ago, when madaidan's "insecurities" blog came into existence. It brought in a fair amount of fandom to him for some bizarre reason, which nobody has been able to pin down realistically. I can pinpoint it down to one big reason - anti-Linux faction of FOSS community, a large part of which is Brad Spengler, head of grsecurity, a security team that makes Linux kernel patches but gets rejected due to very arrogant behaviour, and even got reprimanded by Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux kernel in a mailing list.
Some related threads on grsecurity:
madaidan's certain amount of influence comes from the kind of Reddit and internet community that revolves around a particular group, a faction that I see as very anti-Linux and anti-FOSS for the most part, not because criticism is bad, but grift in the name of criticism is bad. I will expand upon this more in a moment.
I am sure, most are wondering what does madaidan have to do with this. Apparently, there have been way too many instances where, upon criticisms in discussions, GrapheneOS community proponents often cite a bunch of URLs, among which grsecurity is one of them. And this is not a one off instance, so I will link a couple screenshot threads from Lemmy from 6 months ago, which is an exchange between u/Lunacy and me. I will cite this in a later part of article as well.
< Lunacy Lemmy thread pic> https://i.imgur.com/dgWcn2J.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/fRXHRoR.jpg
ENTER THE DANIEL MICAY
He is a very underrated but important part of this whole story. I assume many people have an idea of CopperheadOS company splitting between Micay and James Donaldson (u/darknetj on Reddit) due to a lot of controversies and tussle I have nothing to do with, and therefore I will avoid commenting on. After this tussle, GrapheneOS project was born, essentially a fork of CopperheadOS in layman terms, which was also developed heavily by Micay. GrapheneOS is largely an AOSP fork of a fork with some security patchwork on top of it.
Here I would like to mention a little anecdote from 2 years ago, something Micay always avoids acknowledging for some funny reason. This screenshot is from my reddit inbox, where I was messaged by CopperheadOS CEO regarding something.
COPPERHEADOS CEO MODMAIL
https://i.imgur.com/hujn4P1.jpg
I will let the readers interpret this on their own.
DANIEL MICAY AND MADAIDAN'S POWER OF FRIENDSHIP
Moving on, there is a thread and mailing list I want to mention, which will help connect the dots as to how Micay and madaidan are not just related, but intertwined into each other, like a grandma's woven sweater. Most have no clue about this, so I will share the mailing list URL and screenshot here.
In the below reddit thread/screenshot, Daniel Micay and madaidan argue together against Firefox. Before the Tor Project mailing list happened in August 2019, the whole anti-Firefox sentiment mysteriously used to not exist in GrapheneOS community.
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2019-August/013995.html
https://www.unddit.com/r/firefox/comments/gokcis/firefox_is_insecure_refuted/
Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/8nkO5Ll.jpg
A SERIES OF COLLECTED THREADS OVER THE PAST FEW YEARS...
I will now share a Lemmy masterlist I made, perhaps a collection of various conversations by madaidan and his friend cn3m. Here is the URL: https://lemmy.ml/post/73800/comment/66676
I will relink the Lunacy Lemmy exchange screenshot once again, since Lunacy's comments are important for context.
https://i.imgur.com/fRXHRoR.jpg
I have never explained anything about the comment threads in my masterlist before, so this should help.
https://i.imgur.com/UHhQRIU.jpg I think this is self explanatory and shows madaidan's argumentation that is otherwise deleted by him.
https://i.imgur.com/FiYhbkk.jpg: madaidan being very 4chan-y in terms of blaming the computer language for problems in particular software code (in this case Linux kernel), while dismissing everything when it comes to Windows. His blog page about Linux is a massive piece of "toilet paper" repeatedly debunked at this point. If you think the phrase "toilet paper" is mine, come, have a look.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220111035527/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25590079
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