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Comment by bserge | Hacker News Reader

Is this a new law enforcement startup? :D

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/06/fbi-sold-phones-...

I think it's legit. They're simply just trying to make a few bucks on asking ~€220 for pre-installing GrapheneOS for you and optionally removing the microphone.

Nitro has been around for a while: providing products in a similar space to yubico. Not particularly competitive on price or form-factor but I gather the "Made in Germany" tag has made them popular in Europe.

They are kinda doing assembly arbitrage with existing devices and support for them. Which is kinda good because it keeps talent in germany which might some day get to be able to produce their own hardware. And they support free software projects afair.

Nitrokeys: Smartcards + MCU and rather shitty GUI software for controlling them, compatible with standard crypto tools like gpg-card. Gen < 3 is missing the hardware button that Yubi has. The HSM model has a fancy smartcard. The Start is a triple GnuPGCard with usb.

The Pro can be used for attestation with HEADS firmware.

The Nitropad is just a refurbished x230 with coreboot and heads. Kinda pricey for my taste.

I'm not sure about your price comment, but they are pretty the same price as Yubico's in Europe (maybe you compared US prices with European prices?). Also their software and firmware is open source in contrast to Yubico, which for me means I always will choose them over Yubico.

That's fair. My comment was mainly in relation to the price point being similar to yubi for a vastly inferior form factor (there's e.g. plenty of large blocky U2F keys on the market for much cheaper).

The open-source nature of a lot of their offerings is a big selling point though, you're right. I overlooked that

In case you think you may be targeted by law enforcement you, probably, should self-build.

There are many different treat models and I believe that most of the people just want to get their privacy back.

If you're targeted by LE, you should not use a smartphone for anything sensitive period!

OT but has there been any updates on that front? That “ArcaneOS” ROM on those phones probably hold some intelligence value to custom ROM communities.

Nah it is legit.

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