Purism makes premium phones, laptops, mini PCs and servers running free software on PureOS. Purism products respect people's privacy and freedom while protecting their security.
Yikes this really doesn’t look good. Is there any reporting on it from independent journalists (or anyone else who isn’t also advertising their own competing operating system)?
Not that I’ve seen and I’d take what Purism say with a grain of salt: they’ve acted like pretty shitty gatekeepers themselves. Nothing they mentioned in the article seems too egregious in truth and they’re exaggerating the scale of it: Play Store app DRM exists already, and the restrictions on browser-downloaded apps they mention can be bypassed (albeit by having to go into settings) and don’t apply to apps installed through other apps stores (F-Droid, etc).
Nothing they mentioned in the article seems too egregious in truth
Doesn’t it? To be honest, if the article is telling the truth and not exaggerated, I find this pretty egregious. How you installed an app should be irrelevant, so the idea of an API to say “did this come from the Play Store” is fucking shit. And the ability to block installation of apps that call certain APIs entirely is even worse.
Lots of things that have very valid reasons on paper that also just happen to give Google a stupid amount of control and will backfire for a somewhat small percentage of people in very bad ways. We’ve been at “you can’t use pretty much any bank unless you agree to either Google or Apple terms” for quite some years now, now we’re giving those same app developers ways to detect if their device has accessibility APIs enabled (useful to protect against bot farms, but also a functional check for “you’re able-bodied”) or is in security support (also a functional check for “not reliant on hand-me-downs”).
Lol. So this API for ‘security’ and ‘integrity’ basically has a built in malware trojan:
Avoid caching integrity verdicts
Caching integrity verdicts increases the risk of proxying, which is an attack where a bad actor reuses a verdict from a good device for abusive purposes in another environment. Instead of caching responses, you can make a standard API request to get a verdict on demand.
Yikes this really doesn’t look good. Is there any reporting on it from independent journalists (or anyone else who isn’t also advertising their own competing operating system)?
Not that I’ve seen and I’d take what Purism say with a grain of salt: they’ve acted like pretty shitty gatekeepers themselves. Nothing they mentioned in the article seems too egregious in truth and they’re exaggerating the scale of it: Play Store app DRM exists already, and the restrictions on browser-downloaded apps they mention can be bypassed (albeit by having to go into settings) and don’t apply to apps installed through other apps stores (F-Droid, etc).
Doesn’t it? To be honest, if the article is telling the truth and not exaggerated, I find this pretty egregious. How you installed an app should be irrelevant, so the idea of an API to say “did this come from the Play Store” is fucking shit. And the ability to block installation of apps that call certain APIs entirely is even worse.
I haven’t seen proper reporting but the Play Integrity install source thing is accurate. There’s a reasonably good overview straight from the devil himself.
Lots of things that have very valid reasons on paper that also just happen to give Google a stupid amount of control and will backfire for a somewhat small percentage of people in very bad ways. We’ve been at “you can’t use pretty much any bank unless you agree to either Google or Apple terms” for quite some years now, now we’re giving those same app developers ways to detect if their device has accessibility APIs enabled (useful to protect against bot farms, but also a functional check for “you’re able-bodied”) or is in security support (also a functional check for “not reliant on hand-me-downs”).
Lol. So this API for ‘security’ and ‘integrity’ basically has a built in malware trojan: