> It's essentially almost impossible to create a Google account without giving up your identity, and your phone number often leads directly to your real-life identity.

I had a Gmail account before they required phone numbers. One day, Google stopped allowing me to log in, demanding my phone number if I wanted to continue. Nothing was wrong with my credentials, or behavior patterns, or IP address, or anything at all. My already-registered recovery email address didn't help. There was no way to appeal.

I'm not willing to have my phone number extorted from me, so I sighed and accepted that I'll never again have use of that account. It remains a constant source of irritation, because it still forwards incoming messages to my home email address, and Google doesn't do a very good job of filtering out all the spam before they forward it my way.

Adding insult to injury, Google still (years later) hasn't made good on their announcement that idle accounts would be deleted. I wish they would. I'm done with Google.

> Google still (years later) hasn't made good on their announcement that idle accounts would be deleted.

They should be after 2 years, I occasionally get emails, linking: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/12418290

Not OP and loving that the upper part of that linked page comes with a warning message:

> Your account, @gmail.com, doesn’t have a recovery phone number. If you’re locked out of your account, a recovery phone number helps you get back in. [Add recovery phone]

You could get a burner number for $5 to use for the SMS verification. You might want to do this before your inbox fills up and you become unable to receive emails, and before they disable SMS verification and require an Android phone verification.

I could, but as I said, I'm done with Google.

Or maybe expose the LPC bus to a VM, and wire the relevant lines to an ISA bridge?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Pin_Count#ISA-compatible_o...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=putHMSzu5og&t=208s

https://github.com/rasteri/dISAppointment

I wonder about the dependency graphs of all these replacement utilities.

The vast majority of Rust projects I've seen pull in hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of external projects. If Ubuntu's rusty tools do the same, any memory safety gained would come with a greatly increased supply chain risk.

Doesn't attack surface matter?

Avoid the Hakko FX-888D soldering station. This device has one of the most bizarrely obtuse interfaces I have encountered in ages, seemingly designed to make basic adjustments as difficult as possible, and to encourage accidental decalibration of its temperature settings with no indication to the user that it has happened. I wish I had returned mine while I had the chance.

> On 14 January 2026, it emerged that archive.today had silently modified its CAPTCHA page to send repeated requests to Gyrovague, thereby causing visitors to unwittingly contribute to a DDOS attack against the blog.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today#2026_attack_on_G...

It is telling that HN moderators allow links to archive.is/today

Rather than telling us that it is telling, perhaps you should tell us what it tells you and why?

Better to just ignore the anti-Russian and hasbara spam. It's being posted opportunistically. The chance to attack archive.is in an organically posted thread is probably the only reason an intermittent outage (common) of archive.is was upvoted enough to make it to the front page. Look at the top comment.

Why does it feel like everyone has just ignored/memory-holed this?

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-a...

That whole debacle is even specifically relevant to this thread because the operator of archive.today (aka archive.is) was caught using a script on its captcha page to make visitors' browsers connect to the blog they were mad at. That's how their DDOS attack worked. They used their own visitors, who naturally trusted the captcha page, to commit a crime.

For whatever reason, with the exception of Wikipedia (bless the editors), they seem to have gotten away with this, as well as with deliberately falsifying the content of "archived" pages (as described in the arstechnica article), without consequences.

So, call me crazy or a Russian bot if you want, but I think it's reasonable to be suspicious of any weird captcha behavior from this website in particular.

And HN users are being used as part of these attacks?

It tells us that the moderators of HN support copyright infringement and DDOS attacks. They are actively moderating this forum and choosing to do nothing.

They also choose to do nothing about uncharitable interpretations of their inactions. Should they act there too? Or do you prefer the hands-off approach when it suits you?

I can't control their behavior nor can you. But if you don't want to respond to the substance of my comment then perhaps you shouldn't respond?

I don't think it's very interesting even if true. I'm not that fussed about copyright infringement myself and I don't consider using archive.is (infrequently) to be condoning their DDOS.

Presumably you are and do. We differ.

This isn't about you personally. There is a public interest here.

Until adoption expands beyond Facebook to services that we want.

Or to things that we need, like medical care, government interactions, and financial services.

People shouldn't have to choose between safety features like those in Graphene OS and participation in society.

That will help teach people some compartmentalization. Need to access government service, or use facebook for work? Use a separate cheapo smartphone.

I wonder how feasible is it to use a separate phone and access it remotely from the main phone.

I wonder how much more surveillance they can feasibly justify to prevent remote access to new secure phones from old, insecure, non-compliant devices used by Elucalidavah and other un-American activists.

Think of the children!

It would be frustrating, but the group that is excluded from online services today tends to be low status and may benefit greatly when a tech elite with connections, status and special interest groups finds itself excluded.

Let's be fair: At least some of the features you quoted do work in KDE connect in my experience, so I had the same question as GP. Even after reading the article.

Like I mentioned, I found KDE Connect to be lacking but mostly even the feature that it does have, don't always work.

So far (really only a couple hours), Tether seems a lot more polished.

This is not the Motorola (USA) that many of us knew for ages. That company doesn't exist any more.

The company working with GrapheneOS appears to be Motorola Mobility, owned by Lenovo (China).

> Motorola Mobility, owned by Lenovo (China).

Praise be the lord for Chinese Motorola Mobility if so, because they were the ones who launched and shipped the Motorola Moto G phone which was probably the best cheap Android phone available that could fit into my hand properly, until the 5th/6th generation, when I had to move away from them as they too became too large.

Hope they go back to their (Chinese) roots shortly and launch more "normal sized" phones again, if they'll be able to run GrapheneOS as well that'd be a huge plus obviously :)

The first three generations of the Moto G were developed under the US branch of Motorola Mobility, when they were owned by Google.

That "growing too large to be useful" was exactly when they were sold to Lenovo.

The original Motorola exists as Motorola Solutions in USA. Mobility was spun-off.

I got my first smartphone 14 years ago. It was a Samsung. It landed in trash after one year. Since then I've been on Motorolas because they're the only smartphones that tick these boxes:

- SD card slot

- audio jack

- cheap

- no shitty custom UI filled with ads and slowness

Well thankfully, because the original one was hopeless in shipping good mobile phones