Comment by piaste | Hacker News Reader

Comment by piaste | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> What I'd hope to hear is that Daniel Micay is in better mental health, but they made the almost-certainly wise choice to stop engaging with social media, and I can't find much information about what actually went down, so I guess it's a question mark.

I mean, it sounds like you have pretty much all the relevant information already?

strcat's technical chops were AFAIK never in question, but he had a tendency to pick up loud internet fights - to be fair, sometimes the other party were also being hostile jerks, but sometimes they weren't and he'd just swing at shadows.

After he pissed off Rossmann, he either realized or someone close to him made him realize (doesn't really matter which) that he should step away from the public square, and he did. Now he's just an ordinary, and I presume highly valued, contributor to GrapheneOS and to upstream AOSP.

Whether he still lurks the GrapheneOS discussion threads or not, or whether he is currently undergoing therapy or just chilling with a good book isn't really anyone else's business.

What else do you need to know?

I was curious if that actually happened or not. However, I didn't actually see anything about GrapheneOS's leadership structure, or any kind of blog or anything where news like this would be announced.

So if it happened, who replaced them? Are they trustworthy? At least in my cursory searching, I didn't figure out an answer to that.

I assume the answer is actually out there, but I don't have it.

> Whether he still lurks the GrapheneOS discussion threads or not, or whether he is currently undergoing therapy or just chilling with a good book isn't really anyone else's business.

Sure, whatever. But failing any information about whether or not anything happened, I assume they still have root access to critical infrastructure. If so... I mean, naturally, the problem of trust hasn't changed much. If that's the case, then you still need to trust them to trust GrapheneOS. Can you? Don't know.

> So if it happened, who replaced them? Are they trustworthy? At least in my cursory searching, I didn't figure out an answer to that.

https://github.com/thestinger/daniel.micay.dev/commit/79e44b...

They just stepped down as the official head and stopped making public comments. They still are a major developer for the project and still seem to own/run parts of the project.

That's an orphaned commit on their personal website (and that text doesn't appear anywhere on it), and still nobody seems to have any idea who has taken their place. I don't believe that someone should be eternally punished because of making poor decisions, and with time even a pattern of poor decisions can be forgiven, but as it stands from the outside there's zero clarity on what, if anything, actually happened, no apologies, and ultimately no way to know who you're trusting when you install GrapheneOS.

On one hand, the track record for the actual OS is still completely fine as far as anyone knows. On the other hand, the stuff said and done on record is pretty tough to swallow for someone you are investing a lot of trust into, for an OS that is meant to be privacy and security focused.

Like. It's one thing if you are a casual user running random ROMs off XDA, the risk is high and the only real assurance you get is online reputation and the normal assurances of social pressure. But this is software endorsed by Edward Snowden and many others whose opinions regarding security and privacy are well-regarded. The stakes could be quite high for some users. In the light of that, I really don't like the situation here at all.

Dismiss it if you want to, but there's really absolutely no good reason for this to simply remain effectively unaddressed indefinitely.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com