I hear, maybe someone can verify this, that US states not only can't enforce state laws on anyone outside state borders, but also can't even mess with post and delivery services so as to intercept (in the case of California, and far worse New York, age verification OS level tyranny) non-compliant respects-your-freedom devices as they cross the state-border.
> They will likely lose, but the goal is not to win, it's to score points with their political base and maybe bankrupt the defendants with legal fees.
Or the goal might be to lose, but to establish some precedent that will hamper states like Texas that have tried similar things with abortion providers.
But It would be nicer if they said
"If GrapheneOS devices can't be LEGALLY sold in a region due to their regulations, so be it"
keeping the door open for GrapheneOS to ensure it would still try to supply the residents of authoritarian hellholes with a secure OS, the same way that Signal has been quite open about how if they pull out of a country for legal reasons then they'll do all they can to ensure service is still avalable to users in such places.
Also: when they're partnering with manufacturers maybe they could get the manufacturers to guarantee that bootloaders on device sold everywhere (including in regions which ban freedom respecting software) will be unlocked, or if the manufactuer is banend from selling unlocked bootloader devices then make sure any bootloader locking is trivilally vulnerable to some means of easily achievable local bypass (shorting a pin or something which a user in posession of a device can do but which can't pose an atack surface for a remote adversary).
This looks interesting, but the main things being suggested still seem to run over existing networks owned by the governments and corporations which are willing to censor them. I think there needs to be a focus too on user-owned physical network infrastructure, the Reticulum project is one such example, other foundations for it could be cross-border laser optical line-of-sight links with immunity to RF jamming. When monsters like the Iranian regime shut off the internet completely, no clever Tor-like or VPN-like method works, you need alternative physical layers too.
So has this project actually curated an extra source of useful info for emergencies/off-gridding/civilisation-restart? or is this just an alternative bundling of existing resources (Wikipedia and so forth)?
Better would have been a statement "If GrapheneOS devices can't be LEGALLY sold in a region due to their regulations, so be it." . I hope that is what they meant, leaving open the possibility they'll have a secret drone delivery squadron bringing GrapheneOS phones in to Brazil and other equivalent places.
Also it would be nice if, where Graphene has partnered with hardware manufacturers, then said hardware sellers could issue a statement like "$Manufacturer promises that in regions where GrapheneOS is illegal we'll leave the bootloader unlocked, if users choose to break local legislation then that is on them" and furthermore a statement like "$Manufacturer fully swears on all honour possible that in any regions which ban unlocked bootloader devices then, oops, we found that if you short pins 3 and 8 of the third chip on the left together at any time during booting you'll permanently unlock the bootloader and absolutely nobody is allowed to know that. Which is why we've posted this on every social media channel. Afterall, all our users need to know that they're not allowed to know that the bootloader can be unlocked by shorting pins 3 and 8 (third chip on the left) with anything less than 20 ohms (nobody must know that a paperclip would do for this)".
