Why was I banned from GrapheneOS? That’s a good question.
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| Why I was banned from GrapheneOS by Daniel Micay) |
Hello everyone, I want to preface this by disclosing that I am part of the GrapheneOS team. My account is not freshly created by the way, since that seems to be such a hot topic here. We asked our community for help with dealing with this mess since the self proclaimed open-source “enthusiast”, who is supposedly so eager to help, has gone out of his way to spread this literally all over the internet in order to harm an…open-source project. Here on Lemmy, Mastodon, Reddit, LinkedIn…even Facebook and elsewhere. That’s where the “suspicious” new accounts come from. That said, yes you can go ahead and verify they are in fact members of the community. And you can verify mine too if you wish, on the GrapheneOS forum, our reddit, discord, matrix, github. I don’t know what else I could tell you on this front honestly.
Now this person filed a duplicate feature request on the issue tracker regarding 3-button navigation. We closed it and provided an explanation on why it’s not wanted, primarily because 3-button navigation is really just a legacy mode and only kept around for compatibility reasons. Any feature that aims to provide a quicker way to force kill apps should be done in a way that’s not specific to it, but can be applied to all navigation modes. I hope this makes sense until here.
About a year later some people picked up on this feature request and started discussing it further. We have a rule where if you want to express your support for something you should react to it with a thumbs up emoji. That’s because each mention and reply sends an e-mail notification to multiple developers. We opted to delete the issue in order to stop the noise. In hindsight yeah that was a mistake, since apparently there are individuals around who are just waiting for an opportunity to act in bad faith as seen here.
This person kept insisting on it and continued to file more issues regarding this matter, even going as far as cloning our repository and continuing the spam there. We repeatedly asked them to stop and take it to dms instead but they didn’t do either of these things. Now what they did do is dig this up over a year after our last interaction with them and make a mountain out of a molehill.
There you go, that’s the gist of it.
Jonathan Corbet from LWN also got accused of various things on Fediverse for writing an article on GrapheneOS recently.
Unfortunately, it seems I’m not the first person to be attacked by Daniel Micay
Oh, honey… LOL there isn’t anyone in the FOSS/INFOSEC community that hasn’t been attacked by Micay/GOS (myself included).
I do use and love GOS but it’s the single most toxic leadership in the space. And it’s unfortunate because it’s to everyone’s detriment.
There are many open soruce project who are on very good terms with Daniel Micay and GrapheneOS. The project with which there are conflicts often have people in their circle who are also part of the other projects with which there are conflicts. The conflicts are often related in that way. Besides that, there are no issue, GrapheneOS is on very good terms with most open source projects. Care to explain why you felt attacked?
Anyone who speaks publicly about GOS, even in a positive light, is accused within a matter of weeks of “harassment” and “SWATing” without any evidence. Just look at their feeds. Every single day they’re accusing some new person or project of “harassment”. It’s The Boy Who Cried Wolf long long long after everyone stopped believing them.
There is evidence of the swatting. You can look it up in the police records of Canada. The harassment is evidenced by many social media posts, including things that are said in this very thread. The project gets attacked a lot, so almost every day there will be a defensive reply, that’s true. If the harassers stop those replies will also stop. Easy.
No, you look it up. I haven’t seen it because they haven’t shared it. I’m not wasting my time looking it up.
There’s no way you’ll ever get me to believe they have daily harassment campaigns from new attackers, all who are well-respected in the community.
Just so you know, the person you are replying to created that account today purely to respond to every single thread about this issue. It’s highly likely they are associated with GrapheneOS.
They created mutiple accounts even. Sounds about as deranged as strcat/Mackay.
I only have one account I’m using on shitjustworks, I also have unused accounts on lemmy.today, lemmy.ml and techncs.de. I use shitjustworks because I feel like the most posts from other instances are visible there. The name is always tranquil_cassowary. I don’t go by other names in the privacy and security communities.
No doubt.
They posted the same blog post in about 12 different threads on Lemmy. I want to join the discussion about it so I reply in multiple threads. If this was a centralized platform I wouldn’t have to do it like that. I would have preferred to reply one time but I feel like the explanation about what actually happened and about how it’s a falsehood (not a contributor, not banned from GrapheneOS …) should be seen by the people reading the post. Given that some people might only see the post on one of the lemmy instances where it got posted, I deemed it desirable to answer in mutliple threads.
The report would contain personal identifiable information like the address etc. Their address was already leaked of course because it was used for the SWATTing attacks but I don’t want to link it so directly on a public post. The events occured in April 2023. If you want information about it and also some more evidence about other harassment you can ask GrapheneOS or the community manager (matchboxbananasynergy) on social media whether they would want to DM you information. If you are in good faith they will send you some info, they also did for other people.
This is you right? Daniel?
Hi Daniel, nice to see the anger management classes are working. Keep on keeping on, champ!
the GrapheneOS guy is clearly a high-conflict personality, but I’m still considering it for whenever I have sufficient $ to get a new-to-me phone.
If you’re considering Graphene, I would recommend checking out Calyx instead. They support basically the same devices. Except one isn’t led by a dickhole.
Responding to attacks is not being high-conflict personality, that’s reversing the roles. People who are harassed and attacked are allowed to defend themselves. Having been part of the GrapheneOS community for almost 2 years, in which Micay is often present, I have to say he is not looking for conflict at all. His messages are often direct, without any bullshit wrapped around it, but he’s a nice and patient person. Note that you can install grapheneos on a second-hand (used) phone or refurbished phone perfectly fine, just make sure it’s not carrier locked. You can verify the integrity of the OS and firmware via the verfied boot hash and the auditor app. That way you don’t really have to trust the seller especially if you buy from a random seller you contact yourself, who is unlikely to target you.
Responding to attacks is not being high-conflict personality, that’s reversing the roles. People who are harassed and attacked are allowed to defend themselves.
That’s mostly true, but misses the point.
Point of order; a ‘high conflict personality’ is not a bad thing on its own. If we didn’t have people with them, open source would not exist as a community. Linus is infamous for his ‘high conflict personality’, although he has for sure cut back on it in recent years. People who get mad and fight back are a blessing and a requirement for humanity to succeed.
Everyone chooses to fight, de-escalate, or to not engage at all. The people who choose to fight, often and regularly, don’t have to be wrong to have a ‘high conflict personality’. They just have to semi-constantly choose to fight instead of the other options.
I looked at the only available evidence (which is from the posted article, because all of the github conversations were deleted) and it’s pretty clear that, of the available options, Micay did not choose to de-escalate. You could argue that deleting the feature request counted as an attempt at disengaging from the issue, but it pretty quickly changed from that to fighting about it.
I get that this is a pretty important issue to you tranquil, I see it in all the comments you’ve made here. But ThorrJo wasn’t making a moral accusation, but casual observation. Micay gets into drama, real or otherwise, enough to show up on a semi-regular basis.
For what it’s worth, I’ve been a regular user of grapheneos for the past year and I genuinely love what has been created. The work done on this software is incredibly important in this day and age, and I’m incredibly grateful to the people who made it.
What a childish response to someone who just wants to contribute. Very sad.
Your blogpost is highly inaccurate and a heavy misportrayal of the events that occured. The title is completely wrong already. You did not get banned from GrapheneOS. GrapheneOS is a free and open source operating system, you can’t be banned from using it and the developers would also not wish to do so. You were instead banned from the OS issue tracker on GitHub because of spam and inapprioriate behavior. You were also blocked by multiple GrapheneOS developers on GitHub, not solely Daniel Micay, for continuing to mention them and sending notifications their way even via other repositories than the official GrapheneOS issue tracker. Also, you are not a contributor at all. You have never contributed to GrapheneOS, not a single line of code. Unless you will call issue tracker spam a contribution, but that’s a very big stretch.
Now, as to what actually happened. You wanted GrapheneOS to implement a certain feature, they did not deem it desirable. Instead of accepting this, you kept spamming the issue tracker. The issue got deleted because it caused too much spam from other accounts as well who kept saying they also wanted the feature instead of following the rules of the issue tracker that you should upvote a post if you agree. After getting banned, you forked the issue tracker and started pinging a bunch of GrapheneOS developers. This behavior is insanely inapprioriate in the FOSS world. GrapheneOS is free, yet you act insanely entitled, as if the GrapheneOS developers owe you anything. They also clearly explained to you on multiple occasions why the feature you proposed is undiserable.
If you disagree, the solution in open source is to fork GrapheneOS and make your own changes to the source code instead of endlessly complaining to the developers of the original project, who can’t be forced to follow your opinion. They had every right to ban you because you kept making a scene out of something minor like a non-accepted feature request. Many feature requests get rejected, yet you make this whole drama about it and continue to do so.
On top of all that, you link misinformation and harassment about the GrapheneOS project in your blog post. The videos you link from content creator containg bullying and fabrications about the project and the founder. They are also entirely unrelated to how they dealt with your issue on the issue tracker.
If you are part of the Graphene team and want to defend yourself, at the very least just be honest and say so. OP seemed good intended and just wanted to talk, he got banned.
I’m not part of GrapheneOS. I’m a community member. I’m very active in the GrapheneOS chat rooms. I’m not a moderator, nor a developer nor do I have any other role in the GrapheneOS team. I’m passionate about the project, given that I use it a lot, see that there is misinformation being spread, and want to contribute to correcting that. You seem to not understand that there is a community and user base around GrapheneOS that cares about the project and is willing to help issue corrections about stuff in online discussions.
I doubt the OP had good intentions. The title is a complete lie, as I have explained in other comments. They got banned because of the way they kept pinging and tagging GrapheneOS project members on GitHub because their feature request was not considered and the issue got locked and deleted because there was too much spam on the issue. If they would’ve just stop doing that, in order to avoid the developers inboxes being flooded about one single issue, there would have been no conflict. if developers inboxes get flooded about one single issue, other more urgent issues might get burried under the noise, which is not good. It’s reasonable that the team decided to shut the discussion down.
Thanks for setting the record straight!
