This is the third person advocating button squeezing, as a reminder: IF a gun is on you the jig is up, you can be shot for resisting or reaching for a potential weapon. Wireless detonators do exist, don't f around please.
Sorry I explained it poorly and emphasized the wrong thing.
The way it would work is not active destruction of data just a different view of data that doesn’t include any metadata that is encrypted in second profile.
Data would get overwritten only if you actually start using the fallback profile and populating the "free" space because to that profile all the data blocks are simply unreserved and look like random data.
The profiles basically overlap on the device. If you would try to use them concurrently that would be catastrophic but that is intended because you know not to use the fallback profile, but that information is only in your head and doesn’t get left on the device to be discovered by forensic analysis.
Your main profile knows to avoid overwriting the fallback profile’s data but not the other way around.
But also the point is you can actually log in to the duress profile and use it normally and it wouldn’t look like destruction of evidence which is what current GrapheneOS’s duress pin does.
The main point is logging in to the fake profile does not do anything different from logging in to the main profile. If you image the whole thing and somehow completely bypass secure enclave (but let's assume you can't actually bruteforce the PIN because it's not feasible) then you enter the distress PIN in controlled environment and you look at what writes/reads it does and to where, even then you would not be able to tell you are in the fake profile. Nothing gets deleted eagerly, just the act of logging in is destructive to overlapping profiles. This is the only different thing in the main profile. It know which data belongs to fallback profile and will not allocate anything in those blocks. However it's possible to set up the device without fallback profile so you don't know if you are in the fallback profile or just on device without one set up.
Hopefully I explained it clearly. I haven't seen this idea anywhere else so I would be curious if someone smarter actually tried something like that already.
What you say makes sense, just like the true/veracrypt volume theory. I can't find the head post to my "that's why you image post" but what concerns me is differing profiles may have different network fingerprints. You may need to keep signal and bitlocker on both, EVERYTIME my desktop boots a cloud provider is contacted -- it's not very sanitary?
It"s a hard problem to properly set up even on the user end let alone the developer/engineer side but thank you.
I'm specifically talking about Chinas' lack of freedoms... which is entirely different then Brasil or Argentina.
I don't have the freedom to own a gun in China, but it's safer in China to the point where you don't need a gun. Practically speaking I prefer to have less freedoms simply because you need less freedoms for society to function better AND most of these freedoms that are taken away by China are freedoms most people never exercise.
Yes, the event is Tiananmen Square. And on the moral axis, there is no ambiguity. It was a tragedy. People were killed for demanding political change. History does not need softening there, and I am not interested in doing that.
But morality alone does not explain how the world actually unfolds. And using morality as a trump card to end the discussion only works if we pretend the world is clean, fair, and reversible. It is not.
The uncomfortable reality is that history does not grade outcomes on intentions. It grades them on stability, continuity, and what comes after. The question is not whether Tiananmen Square was morally wrong. It was. The harder question is whether allowing that movement to succeed would have produced a better long term outcome for China, or whether it would have fractured the country into something far worse.
At that moment, China was not a mature liberal democracy waiting to be unlocked. It was a fragile state emerging from famine, revolution, and internal collapse. Power vacuums do not fill themselves with enlightenment. They fill with chaos, factionalism, and often bloodshed on a scale that makes a single atrocity look small in hindsight.
The leadership chose order over moral legitimacy. They chose continuity over uncertainty. They decided that dissent, even righteous dissent, was a risk they could not allow. The cost was horrific. The result was a state that remained intact, centralized, and capable of executing long term plans.
And execution matters. A lot.
Today, you can live in China and experience a society that functions at scale. Infrastructure appears where it is planned. Cities are built. Systems work. The future arrives on schedule. For many ordinary people, daily life feels stable, predictable, and materially improved compared to what came before.
Now contrast that with San Francisco. A city that prides itself on moral clarity, individual rights, and moral signaling. A city that debates endlessly and acts reluctantly. A city where compassion has become so fragmented across competing claims that enforcing basic order is treated as cruelty. The result is visible on the streets. Not theoretical. Not symbolic. Real decay, real suffering, real dysfunction.
This does not mean repression is good. It means the world forces tradeoffs whether we consent to them or not. There is no system that gets everything. There is no button you press that yields justice, freedom, stability, and progress simultaneously.
China accepted moral debt to buy coherence and speed. The West often accepts paralysis to preserve moral self image. Both choices carry costs. One is just easier to condemn from a distance. The other is easier to live with emotionally while things quietly fall apart.
If you want to argue morality, you will win the rhetorical point immediately. Tiananmen Square ends the conversation. But if you want to understand how nations actually become what they are, you have to step into the grey zone where history operates, where choices are made under uncertainty, and where the alternative paths are not clean, heroic, or guaranteed to be better.
The world is imperfect. Every society is built on compromises it would rather not examine too closely. The honest discussion is not about pretending one side is pure. It is about acknowledging that values shape outcomes, and that no outcome is free.
I love the opening of this comment, very poignant. I’m not convinced however that the conclusion follows from the setup. “The West” is more than just America. And America is very easy to condemn from a distance. Actually everything is easy to condemn from a distance.
There’s more to disagree with in the second half, but I’ll stick to my biggest gripe: America’s founding is steeped in moral principles, from its very founding document. In fact it is a two and a half century experiment on building a society around transparency, with the question of what is Right and what is Just at its core, and how does a society follow from that. And compared to where the world was when it was conceived, the experiment has certainly yielded vastly more results than your comment gives it credit for, by only looking at San Francisco today. It is evidence that the dichotomy between morality and building a society is a false one.
Meanwhile, tian an men square was in 1989, and the tension of “moral debt” is ever present, evidenced by its persistent censoring. When will it be paid off? And will the Chinese then say, “ok, we get it, that’s the price we had to pay”? Because if the ball suddenly drops and they rebel after all, as soon as censorship is lifted, you didn’t buy anything for that debt. So what then—keep taking out more moral debt? Forever?
China’s moral debt feels much like America’s national debt :)
Anyway like I said I loved the opening half of your comment though.
>America’s founding is steeped in moral principles, from its very founding document.
The same founding documents that insisted that all men were created equal, and that America was for, of, and by those men
but not THOSE men?
The same document that spent a significant quantity of it's rather short length handing out provisions to literal slaveowners?
Those same founders thought it would be better to split off the whole list of inalienable rights to a separate document that possibly could have failed to be adopted?
Nothing is more American than ignoring the history of what actually happened in favor of some totally rose tinted propaganda.
> 1989, and the tension of “moral debt” is ever present, evidenced by its persistent censoring.
IMO mistake to frame censorship as a debt, when it's domestic investment in stability, just like policing or infra, or epidemiologic pathogen control. You don't stop investing in essential nation building. Simply part of domestic infosphere management against unwanted influence, which essentially all countries have recognized PRC is prescient. As for 6/4 specifically, future gens will look back and realize 3-4 digit deaths less than rounding error in terms of Chinese history, having 1000s yrs of events/context sharpens evaluation. Like how Mao 70% good, 30% bad evaluation will turn to 90% good, 10% bad, because what's a few 10s of millions starved to death when his engineering projects and industrialization efforts actually ended 1000s of years of reoccurring famine / Malthusian traps. It will be recognize as "price of future", i.e. retrospectives tend to evaluate empires less on carnage (which is assumed) but on the frameworks they leave behind.
>“The West” is more than just America.
The west is generally built on the same template as America, extractive exploitation of not only itself but others, aka, built off surplus blood and treasure from colonialism, except society indoctrinated to believe such is natural order and just. Generations pass, surplus snowballs to buy more rights and freedom and enable more introspection, where colonialism can be acknowledged as stain, but on the margins. West rarely acknowledge that often the fine line between able to experiment vs subsist is funded by foreign extractive surplus. Skewing global balance sheet of energy and resources enable building and experimenting and bribing peripheries, liberalism = luxury experiments derivative product of colonial surplus. We see how fast it erodes when physical resources contracts.
Regardless, when looting from another, the geopolitical balance sheet no longer remains domestic, like America, it starts geopolitical debts that likely can't be default without eventual consequence. Mistreated countries have long memories, and being mistreated, humiliated if you will (and we're not talking bout only PRC), those memories do not tend to soften with time, and can really only repaid in catharsis. AKA there maybe a day when global south develops/catches up and coerce the west pay their debts. It could be 100s of years from now or current events could hint interregnum where power shifts and debts are soon collected.
I heard him talk about GPLv3 someday, and what he said was that it was a mistake to call it "GPLv3", as if it was the evolution of GPLv2, because for him it should have been a totally different licence.
Which I find fair: there are different kinds of copyleft (like MPL vs GPL), it makes sense to say that GPLv2 is a different concept than GPLv3. Whereas I don't know if anyone should use GPLv1 because GPLv2 sounds like it fixed GPLv1 without changing its spirit.
GPLv2 was clearly intended to let you change the software on your devices. In some countries, GPLv2 already prohibits tivoization.
However, big tech found an exploit: In some countries, GPLv2 allows tivoization. This was not intended by the authors of the GPLv2. There was another exploit involving patent licenses, and a reverse exploit about license termination that allowed some developers to extort some users. They fixed these and made it the GPLv3. It's a bugfix release, not anything new. You only don't like it if you relied on the bugs.
Well, that's not really mutually exclusive with what I said. Those who called it GPLv3 consider it's a bugfix, those who decided to stay on GPLv2 consider it's a new licence.
Imagine the power grid fails in an entire city for 48 hours. How many apartments or shops have backup power for 48 hours? What about hospitals or cellphone towers or traffic lights?
How long before someone cannot make a 911 call or hits another car at night or dies in intensive care because the machines don’t work anymore? What about all the food in a refrigerator, or CCTV cameras, or POS payments or a thousand other things? And if sometimes physically fails, how long before a technician (who was himself relying on that power grid) is able to reach the place, carrying whatever spare part they have, and fix the thing?
Or, take a dam. I’m no dam expert, but how long does it take before a flood happens? And when water starts flooding the streets, how long before people can’t get out of their homes, cars are swept away, and so on? How long before standing water starts carrying diseases?
Can you give some examples of? I can imagine that under the right circumstances you might succeed in blowing up some transformers or even a turbine, but it seems like you’d be up to speed within a month or two on the outside? Or am I missing the gravity somehow?
Pardon? A month or two without power does not seem like an enormous crisis?
Stuxnet destroyed centrifuges. It does not seem impossible that a sophisticated attack could shred some critical equipment.
During the Texas 2021 outage -they were incredibly close to losing the entire grid and being in a blackstart scenario. Estimates were that it could take weeks to bring back power - all this without any physical equipment destroyed or malicious code within the network.
Edit: Had to look it up, the Texas outage was "only" two weeks and scattershot in where it hit. The death toll is estimated at 246-702.
A month or two of isolated outages should not be a crisis in a developed nation with resources and infrastructure.
The fact that the Texas outages killed anyone is a testament to the fact that the USA is, apparently, a developing nation, possibly going through a rough patch.
It’s not like there wasn’t enough generators or fuel in the nation to ameliorate that crisis. It was that, like all developing nations, resources are not available at the point of need despite their widespread availability.
Yes, there is the risk of cascading failures, some industrial processes are very hard to re-start once interrupted (or even impossible) and the lead time on 'some transformers' can be a year or more. These are nothing like the kind that you can buy at the corner hardware store. A couple of hundred tons or so for the really large ones.
Grid infra is quite expensive, hard to replace and has very long lead times.
The very worst you could do is induce oscillations.
Consider that if a cyberattack could destroy a major power grid transformer, for a marginal cost approaching zero, versus the low-end US$10 million a Kinzal ballistic missile would cost to do the same thing (presuming you only need 1 which is...unlikely), that that might be a significant military capability.
> Transformers and turbines of any significance are not off the shelf parts and can have lead times of years
Bloomberg had a decent article[0] about transformers and their lead time. They're currently a bottleneck on building. It wasn't paywalled for me.
"The Covid-19 pandemic strained many supply chains, and most have recovered by now. The supply chain for transformers started experiencing troubles earlier — and it’s only worsened since. Instead of taking a few months to a year, the lead time for large transformer delivery is now three to five years. " [0]
Enough for the entire grid? There are some amount of reserves on hand (eg drunk runs into a telephone pole), but nothing that could replace a targeted attack with the explicit goal of taking out the most vital infrastructure.
And those pole mounted transformers are tiny. The big ones require special transports and can weigh a few hundred tons. Some are so large they are best transported via boat if possible.
These attacks are not at the level of 'flipping a switch'. If they succeed they can destabilize the grid and that has the potential to destroy gear, and while not as costly as blowing up a dam it can still be quite costly.
The reason everyone used carpet bombing in WW2 was the inability to aim competently. This even persisted after WW2, leading to some tests of air-to-air nuclear weapons just to give the missiles a decent chance to actually disable the target they were fired at.
The counter-strategies that the British used to defend against German strikes included "switch off all the lights at night so they don't know where they are" and "order newspapers to lie about which part of the city was damaged in order that spies reading British newspapers and reporting back to HQ said missiles fell short/went too far, causing HQ to incorrectly compensate on the next strike". I don't know if the reverse was true, despite now living in Berlin.
Everyone's supply chains were also much shallower, and equipment much cruder and therefore easier to make (though also less efficient). Half of London or Berlin losing electricity makes a much smaller difference when far less was electrified in the first place, e.g. loss of electricity for a heat pump doesn't matter so much when the terraces and apartment blocks have internal fireplaces and regular coal deliveries.
I was not speaking to just one case. Today's incident, is _the norm_.
These attacks are widespread, damaging, and the repercussions are felt for decades in their wake. We _are_ being carpet bombed, and the costs for the victims are ongoing and growing. The collateral damage is everywhere.
Do you really think there's no impact?
> Cyber units from at least one nation state routinely try to explore and exploit Australia’s critical infrastructure networks, almost certainly mapping systems so they can lay down malware or maintain access in the future.
> We recently discovered one of those units targeting critical networks in the United States. ASIO worked closely with our American counterpart to evict the hackers and shut down their global accesses, including nodes here in Australia.
I guess I shouldn't be drawn by someone calling me an idiot...
But one last try.
You suggested that the cost of cyberattacks on industry, is not so great as when we were destroying it with bombs instead.
However, every time we have power outages, people die. Then we have the cost of securing the infrastructure. And the cost of everyone else affected, who has to increase their resilience.
Your bank is collateral damage, as is the people freezing to death in their homes. Entire industries are on the verge of collapse - getting a new turbine to help stabilise your grid has a lead time of _years_, not days or weeks. And if you hit weeks, people die.
Insurance responds to attacks, and that trickles out to everywhere that is touched. VISA and MasterCard have to prepare for eventualities, because of attacks not aimed at them, but at power infrastructure.
When power is hit... There is nothing unaffected.
Volt Typhoon hit the US power grid, and required a massive multinational effort to extract them, that took almost a year... And VT wasn't intended to do damage, just look for weak spots. So that next time, they can cause damage. As part of that survival process, various hardware partners were kicked to the curb, and the repercussions are still in the process of being felt. Half the industry may have issues surviving because of it.
Industroyer is one of the reasons that Kyiv got as bad as it did. Malware is not some hand-wave and fix thing. Half the city's relays were permanently damaged.
Then of course, there was Stuxnet. Which blew up centrifuges, and the research centres hit are still trying to recover from where they were, then.
Cyberattacks are a weapon of war, people die, industries die, and there is no easy path to recovery following it.
An entire industry exists, just to defend against these kinds of attacks. The money spent on that, is counted, which means it has to be less than the cost of the attack succeeding. Trillions are spent, because there is absolute weight behind surviving these attacks.
If things were easier, it'd be an industry solely focused on backups and flipping a switch. But it's not.
I was thinking the other day that ALL drones SHOULD be considered LIVE explosives. It's probably never a good idea to handle one if you're not trained.
Last march i was at SxSw and the police drones over head were a first for me. I was in this large crowd of people, and thought "yeah i dont like this". How do i know they're not just some bad actors drone with red and blue lights?
I think my exposure to casual discussions of how to arm drones with my Ukrainian friend, and the videos we've all seen on Reddit about drones in Ukraine, have really made their presence feel unwelcome.
It depends on a number of factors about legality, but the hardware to make a drone that doesn't have software forcing it to follow the law is cheap and plentiful. Its not particularly hard to get either, even with the drone ban.
For ~$200 you can build a very good FPV drone that can carry a dangerous payload and travel at highway speeds. Another ~$200 buys you the video receiver and a controller.
Warfare yes, but that's all warfare that's terrifying. Similarly you can make a point that for $10 you can buy a knife that can be used in all different morbid crimes.
FPV drones as a fun hobby in the rest of the world has had, in the last 10 years since it became somewhat popular, a total of zero fatalities or serious injuries. Don't let the irrational fear guide you towards further unnecessary regulation that makes others' lives worse.
A toddler lost an eye, several hospitalizations of unrelated bystanders, multiple aircraft damaged in midair collisions, and an attempted assassination of a world leader are some of the highlights. Not exactly a squeaky clean record with no “serious injuries”, even if you ignore the intentional assassination attempt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unmanned_aerial_vehicl...
I think FPV and drones are awesome, and have built several myself. It is pretty hard to argue that they are not also very dangerous in the wrong hands. Are there more dangerous things in the world? Sure, but that doesn’t mean people should ignore an easy attack vector. Given the temperature of things currently, I would be incredibly nervous to hear a drone at a protest or political event.
Regulations are coming whether regular Joe wants them or not. Drones had moved from toy hobby to dealing with weapons and explosives level of scrutiny and this is not reverting anytime soon.
I saw writing on the wall and donated in 2022 my dji drone to Ukrainian army, hopefully it was used well for defense of their homeland. I don't want to have a hobby that I need to do covertly and illegally, and last thing I want to do during vacations is dealing with bureaucracy.
reply