Everyone telling you email isn’t private is right.

Don’t use it for things you don’t want to be public knowledge.

What is your desktop environment?

May I interest you in the “ln” command?

Usually if you wanna access a file (or a directory, that’s a file too!) from some place other than where it is in the filesystem you make a link using ln like “ln /mnt/target link_name”. Which would give you a link type file (that shows up as a link when you give -l to ls) called “link_name” which references “/mnt/target” when you try to do something to it (Like ls!).

Six gigabytes are plenty for even full desktop Ubuntu.

I for one welcome our new public security mailing list!

It depends on what they want. The op and title are pretty vague and general, so I offered a very easy solution that could meet their needs.

That’s exactly what I mean. It all depends on what makes a company big tech.

If it’s just having lots of money or capital then it’s really hard to divest oneself because of the phenomenal heights of industry required to make chips. Like, on some level you gotta accept that no one’s doing 14nm lithography in a shed out behind their house (people who do home lithography are in the micrometer range last I looked).

LPIC-1 my butt, op!

Waze, aka freemap Israel, founded by two veterans of the idfs electronic signals formation, unit 8200.

You can always just use an m series mac if you don’t want to support Intel or amd.

It all depends on how you define big tech.

The framework risc v board, for example, uses the StarFive JH-7110 which is manufactured by tsmc. Doesn’t get much bigger than that!

Specs for what?

The hardware you run it on will have a range of specs.

The model you try to use will have a bunch of measurements that can be called specs.

Once you pick some hardware, the measurements of the model you run on it can be adjusted for “accuracy” or speed.

Of course, the range of hardware that’s available to you informs that calculus.

The alternative to answering this post is to get a Mac mini or whatever they’re selling as a desktop llm device now and not mess around.

There are about a million ways to do what you’re asking. Which one is the right choice depends on the particular hardware you’re using and what you want to accomplish.

Yes it works good if you read first and plan and follow the instructions. If you just yeet it into your computer you will have problems.

You may end up doing a reinstall as opposed to a patch or upgrade.

You may find that dynamic wallpaper not working, needing to update with command line, photos app can’t edit and needing to use a third party browser is an okay set of tradeoffs to get to sequoia (macos 15) which still gets point updates and security patches (grimly: for now).

If I was using a 10,1 I’d back up my system and jump straight to sequoia with oclp. If you can get by long enough to save up for a more recent computer (m1+) then that’s a win. Sequoia is the last version of macos with support for Intel processors. Now is a bad time to be running old versions.

E: before oclp the linux wisdom for these models was to go in with a soldering iron or a chip clip and disable the dedicated gpu in order to avoid problems with it. Often it would break the hdmi or DisplayPort or whatever video out port was on the side of the laptop because while the integrated display could run off the intel processors gpu the video out was hardwired to the dgpu.

Your computer is MacBook Pro 10,1 and pro 15” retina mid 2012 a1398.

The relevant technologies are ivy bridge, intel hd 4000 and nvidia Kepler.

According to opencore legacy patcher, you can use Ventura (osx/macos 13)with broken live text if you go the opencore route.

That will most likely offer a better experience than linux on your hardware.

Buttlocker

If you were to provide concrete proof that these devices that are currently on sale are vulnerable, then we could have a discussion about that https://consumer.huawei.com/en/phones/

The xiaomi 15 ultra that was released in February of last year and still in current production and offered new (and at new prices!) uses the explicitly claimed as brute forceable qualcomm snapdragon 8 elite.

You asked for huawei though, and their most recent stuff like the mate 80 pro and whatnot runs the kirin 9xxx chips. Kirin chips have historically been considered pretty trash security wise, but a lot of that is from people’s experiences with the three digit families of soc from 2020 and before. they’re supposed to be getting better since the 8xxx and 9xxx series. Still, the 2025 leak table 2 states “Huawei (Kirin/Qualcomm/MTK)” are partly brute forceable in cold state and fully brute forceable in hot state. Considering the 8xxx and 9xxx chips had been out last year at the time of the tables publication and the way that pixel devices are treated in that same table (big red “not supported” X mark actually means sometimes it’s supported depending on the precise version and what you’re trying to accomplish) I think it’s safe to say that by 2025 there was compromise on the 8xxx or 9xxx Kirin chips out there at that time.

Which would of course encompass the x6 and p60s listed in huaweis current lineup.

Remember though that I’m not claiming these leaks represent the extent of le capability today, but the extent of their capability then. Over time we can expect (and can see based n the expansion of their claims and the capabilities asserted in their leaks over time!) that they would get access to new methods of compromising phones, we just can’t know the exact extent until something leaks.

Again, I am trying to show an evidence based analysis as opposed to the one you’re suggesting that relies on assumptions. There’s nothing wrong with the way you’re looking at the world, but when actual evidence is present those ideas have to be examined and maybe even changed to accurately reflect the reality we see.

Phone security analysis with Chinese characteristics lol.

I literally just pointed out that while there is a note about a four year old device on the 2025 leak, there is also brute force support listed for socs that came out just a couple of months before the documents date.

I pointed it out in the post you just replied to.

My assertion is that pixels, graphene and iphones are safest against the hardware/software tools the police have. I’m using leaks of the capabilities of those tools to back that assertion up. While a leak from 2024 or 2025 might not have phones from 2026 on it, it provides a really clear picture of the capabilities of the police at those points in time.

I don’t think saying “look, there’s evidence that pixels, graphene and ios were best at foiling the cops a year ago and a couple years ago and five years ago and ten years ago, it stands to reason the same situation is true now” is all that contentious.

In lieu of actually having access to that software database to look up specific devices and os versions, which neither one of us have, the leaks seem like a pretty solid basis upon which to establish an understanding of police capabilities. The alternative that you’re proposing is literally assumptions.

So what would convince you of my point? It’s vanishingly unlikely that they’ll be a leak soon that will let us talk about the current latest and greatest, but would a leak that claims the ability to brute force a phone that was new back when the leak is dated be convincing to you? Do you need explicit model numbers or is just the chipset/family enough?

It’s really tough to hear you imply I’m not reading the things I post when I made reference to the same p40 model fact earlier today.

In that same page, on the bottom row the same column that had the p40 comment referenced recently added support for the snapdragon 8 elite.

On the unlocked devices support matrix (they become unlocked devices once brute forced) support for the dimensity 9400 is referenced.

Those are both chips used in q4 ‘24 and forward phones and the cop hardware brute forces and extracts them in February of ‘25. That’s not ancient at that time by any measure and not even ancient by the standards of today.

On that same page support for private space and 2nd space are referenced (those are the name for containers that harmony and hyper use) indicating support for extracting and decrypting harmonyos and hyperos containers indicating support for cracking harmonyos and hyperos. I pointed this out earlier today.

The fact that older devices have notes on them does not mean newer devices are not supported.

We are indeed going in circles.

Okay, to address just the request for proof that the security order is graphene, stock pixel then everything else, look at the 2025 link I posted, table 2, android access support matrix - locked devices:

Huawei - cold and hot brute force extraction at least partially supported

Pixel - second column of both cold and hot sections, brute force password to decrypt user ce and brute force password are marked not supported.

Xiaomi - bottom row, hot and cold extraction and brute forcing supported.

So there you go, pixel over xiaomi and huawei. If you need proof that graphene is at the top, compare the standard android and graphene columns in table 3: android os access support matrix - google pixel in the same most recent link.

I understand that you’re saying something else may be out there. You’re right, unknown security vulnerabilities might be around that have serious effects on non Chinese phones.

Im saying there are security vulnerabilities in the hands of police which are least effective against iphones, pixels and graphene and that it’s best to choose devices based on what you know as opposed to what you assume.

It really seems to me like I’m posting exactly what you say you need to see over and over again, what am I missing?

So we don’t have access to the most up to date information on the most recent iteration of cop hardware and software for breaking into phones.

If either one of us did, it would be a very bad idea to say that we were basing our argumentation on that.

Based instead on historical data points, like the ones I’ve provided, we can consistently see that at those points in time the latest stock pixel and iphone devices were preferable to anything else including the latest huawei and xiaomi devices for the purposes of avoiding cop access.

The reason I’ve been engaging with your argument that the latest xiaomi/huawei stuff is preferable to the pixel/iphone equivalent is that I’m concerned someone worried about cops might make a decision about how to use their limited resources based on that argument.

They’re not bad phones or bad companies and China isn’t a bad country. There’s just real world evidence that the devices aren’t as secure as some alternatives.

My whole point separate of yours (that I’m paraphrasing here, apologies) that devices made outside the amerisraeli apparatus are inherently safer is that we need to pay attention to the wealth of information about phone security rather than base our decisions on assumptions.

Heres yet another data point to go by, in this case presented as a blog analysis of the 2025 leak (only a little over a year old at this point!). there’s a million great bits of knowledge in that page if you’re interested in learning a ton about android security but the long and short of it for android devices is about the same as before: graphene is at the top, then stock pixel then literally everything else.