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Nomad
f4e8a832885dfec3c114cd69a75c413d968a319cc52164666d13e5b42886faa8
FOSS Maximalist Running Knots Bitcoin is peer-to-peer money! PRO BIP444
Replying to Avatar waxwing

Warning: do NOT use travala.com any more, if you did.

They directly stole my money.

Here is my response to the customer service agent:

(Customer service agent),

> Sorry for the delay, im ahmed from compliance department, for refund or either processing the booking, the verification is a mandatory step, we require the minimum and basic info for that, and you can pass it easily through the following link :

Let's establish the facts: I have been a regular customer of Travala for years, have done probably a hundred or more bookings through your site - mentioning this *not* to claim some status as a customer (which I do not want, and do not have), but to point out that ZERO times on the website or through any of those transactions was it mentioned that you could simply keep my money and provide no service - i.e. STEAL my money - if I did not pass a verification process -handing over extensive and intrusive personal documents - that you never documented anywhere. And indeed for this booking, again, no such advance warning was given.

So you (that is to say Travala, not you personally!) act exactly as a kidnapper: to give me back the money which is mine, you insist that I hand over security sensitive information. Which I will not do. There are an endless stream of documented violent theft events of cryptocurrency holders, so spreading one's personal information is stupid, and any claim you make to "keep my data safe" is ridiculous, given the equally endless stream of reported hacking events. I do not trust your company with my personal information because I don't trust *any* company with it.

I have been doing Bitcoin development work for over a decade, I will make sure that a lot of people in the community know that Travala steals its customers money, directly, with no apology.

Feel free to pass this message to any management, I would appreciate that.

(me)

This is a scandal! Shame on Travala..

Isn't that what the European colonisers did to the native Americans, Africans and Asians? Many millions of natives were massacred..

The current migration issues in Europe are not as you portray it. But even if it's true, you can call it karma! ๐Ÿ˜‰

Replying to Avatar Final

#GrapheneOS is very distinct from other Android distributions and OEM configurations. There is a litany of Linux kernel and Android Runtime hardening changes and features powering GrapheneOS. This is very significant but often overlooked because most changes aren't visible to the end user.

The leading example of this is hardened_malloc, the hardened memory allocator used in GrapheneOS to protect against memory corruption vulnerabilities. You can find a technical article about it by Synacktiv, a French cyber security company:

https://www.synacktiv.com/en/publications/exploring-grapheneos-secure-allocator-hardened-malloc

Hardening in GrapheneOS are built on closing out commonly exploited attack surfaces, substituting them with more secure replacements, or giving them stronger security defaults.

If you are a blue teamer you'll already be familiar with the Pyramid of Pain:

For newcomers, this model is a layered pyramid that ranks indicators of compromise by a linear level of difficulty and cost for the threat actor to evade security measures to perform an attack; The bottom of the pyramid being very easy and trivial for the threat actor to change and the top being tough.

This model opens newcomers on how good security strategy is built: Techniques and capabilities over individual actors. Closing out tactics, techniques and procedures are far more important than blocking an IP address or a file hash. You want to protect against a type of attack, not against a particular actor who performs them.

The point of having extensive hardening features is that we need to ensure vulnerabilities that would affect Android are benign, harder to exploit or patched in GrapheneOS before they can be exploited. Android distributions carry the weight of vulnerabilities from upstream. To reduce that weight, we need to make sure a highly sophisticated exploit developer would have to uniquely design their exploit to target GrapheneOS, should they be able to at all.

Without that, GrapheneOS wouldn't be special. It would not be sensible to claim it is more security and privacy focused than Android if it was able to be exploited through the exact same mechanisms with little or no effort needed to port. An Android distribution that is just Android without Google services is mostly as exploitable as Android. Something that is "DeGoogled" (I don't use the term, it's Reddit tier buzzword nonsense) may not necessarily be safer to use either.

To earn the title of being hardened it needs more, but this isn't ever implemented well enough. Projects that have done so to the best of their ability also have died (DivestOS).

Our hardening features are available outside of GrapheneOS. Leading example of this is secureblue, a security hardened Linux distribution (https://secureblue.dev/) which is using hardened_malloc and Vanadium inspired chromium browser. A business also sells hardened Rocky Linux supporting hardened_malloc. If you are a maintainer of a leading project then implementing our hardening features and supporting is strongly encouraged.

When official production support for Pixel 10? Thank you for all the great work!

It's better to use a non custodial lightning wallet like Blixt or Zeus to onboard people.

Yes ecash is better in terms of privacy and ease of use for small amounts. Cashu mints or fedi federations can always rug people. Ecash should not be the first option for noobs..

I appreciate his work on privacy tech, but I now see him as a hypocrite. He calls out junk data on Cashu but says nothing about junk data on the Bitcoin blockchain...

Bitcoin is peer-to-peer money. Not a storage drive for arbitrary data and pics.