You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly. You should upgrade or use an alternative browser.
Daniel Micay / strcat / strncat / thestinger / GrapheneOS - Schizo software programmer and developer of GrapheneOS Android ROM. Starts drama with everyone and accuses them of harassment. Chronic brigader and bridge burner.
On the one hand, I hope they Ol'Yeller'd Daniel and put the project back in the hands of sane people, because it's a fundamentally very important one and something the world needs not to be shat up by a schizophrenic.
On the other hand, I'd miss his spergouts, he's like if Patrick Tomlinson swapped booze for Adderall.
I take back everything I said about the GrapheneOS twitter account being taken over by someone sane. Daniel has been on the warpath, and has finally started publishing articles on his site detailing all the abuse and harassment he has endured. Just kidding, it's more of the usual baseless accusations, along with calling people scammers, grifters, etc. I'll document more later when I have time, unless someone else gets to it first.
One major thing - the license for GrapheneOS has now been altered to explicitly exclude CopperheadOS and it's former CEO (who is engaged in mutual litigation with Micay).
"Copperhead Limited (Canadian security company formerly sponsoring our project prior to 2018 ) , Copperhead business partners and James Donaldson (CEO of Copperhead) have consistently violated the terms of our licenses (including but not limited to lack of attribution, lack of compliance with copyleft licensing and more) and fraudulently claimed to have written our code. Our open source licenses are not extended to them, and they have retroactively lost all rights to use any GPLv2 licensed code via the GPLv2 termination clause. This is the result of their continued fraud, baseless lawsuits and involvement in harassment targeting the GrapheneOS team including spreading fabricated stories and engaging in doxxing which have directly led to serious swatting attacks aimed at killing the founder of GrapheneOS."
Of course, the MIT and GPL licenses don't just let you pick and choose who they apply to.
This means GrapheneOS is in violation of the GPL, which states that you must grant all rights given to you if you incorporate other GPL-licensed projects. Since none of those other projects bar Copperhead from using their code, GrapheneOS can't do it either.
The MIT license is much more permissive and said anybody can use your code anywhere for any reason without limitation.
If GrapheneOS wrote every line of code, sure. But if you modify GPL code from someone else or you have contributions from people who did not assign you copyright you can't then try to license it as GPL-PeopleIHATE. It's unclear which they're trying to do.
Given that a child can build a tablet kiosk with an SPA and just use Armbian for this, what's the real market value he's sqabbling over in court; I would think an aging hooker that also accepts payment in glassine packets of heroin probably has more earnings potential.
If GrapheneOS wrote every line of code, sure. But if you modify GPL code from someone else or you have contributions from people who did not assign you copyright you can't then try to license it as GPL-PeopleIHATE. It's unclear which they're trying to do.
GrapheneOS is not opposing to CopperheadOS's use of AOSP. They are against them taking their work which they would have been the ones who wrote it. They also are continue to license as the regular MIT and GPLv2 license. They just are not licensing the software to CopperheadOS under those terms. Of course another party could redistribute the work to CopperheadOS, but CopperheadOS would not be able to directly obtain it.
You shouldn't get your hopes up on Daniel Micay abdicating and GrapheneOS ever improving. Not only because Micay is unlikely to abdicate, but because his replacement could be just as bad if not worse. I'm gonna highlight a couple Graphene people who repeat Micay's lies. First up is TommyTran732, aka the PrivSec.dev guy.
Tommy is a Graphene community moderator and used to be at Privacy Guides, but then left for whatever reason. (Daniel Micay uses this fact to against PG to imply that it's bad and horrible.) He founded his own site called privsec.dev as a competitor to PG but it's really just a collection of Tommy's own blog posts (along with some other contributors).
He inherited Micay's habits of getting into Internet slapfights and hiding behind a project account rather than taking responsibility in his own name. But instead of using GrapheneOS, he uses PrivSec.dev. Here he is continuing the fight against F-Droid by accusing them of making "very misleading and quite frankly, toxic statements" and alleging that the original author of the anti-F-Droid article was receiving "endless harassment".
Bonus: The original author is Wonderfall, who is a GrapheneOS developer contributor. He says he has "witnessed" "harassment" towards "many security researchers", inheriting Micay's trait of alleging bad faith activity with no specific details so it's hard to fact-check.
It should come at no surprise that Daniel Micay promotes Tommy's site at every opportunity. When he lashed out at Jonah Aragon for supposedly saying privacy/security are for criminals (he didn't), he advertised PrivSec as an alternative.
It should also be no surprise then that TommyTran732 continues Micay's grudge against Privacy Guides and has made allegations that PG is spreading misinformation.
Did Jonah actually make these statements? Let's see.
> Disable the ME! ME bad!!! This will definitely not increase your attack surface!
Kudos to Tommy, he provided a screenshot of Jonah making this statement in the replies (a), which I can confirm matches with this PG post (a). Note: I will give Tommy the benefit of the doubt and assume his technical claims are true.
> AMD PSP has full access to your memory, therefore bad!!! Nevermind the fact that it is the component providing memory encryption!!!
Yes, Jonah did say this. Here's the post. (a)
Jonah Aragon said:
Contrast Apple’s approach here with AMD PSP, which has full unrestricted access to the same user memory space that all your applications run in (yikes).
And then Tommy dropped the ball a little. > Use Windows 10 instead of Windows 11! Microsoft bad!!!!
I can't find Jonah ever saying Windows 11 is worse than 10, but I did find this mention of them running Windows 11 in a VM on their Mac. (a) If they so strongly prefer 10, why wouldn't they run 10?
Jonah Aragon said:
Windows 11: I run this in a Parallels VM on my MacBook Pro in case I need to run something on Windows. Running Windows in a VM on Apple Silicon is unironically better than running Windows natively on x86 so it works great.
But he majorly dropped the ball by repeating Daniel Micay's lie that Jonah Aragon ever said or implied that GrapheneOS was for criminals. > Duress passwords are only for criminals!!! Ur providing duress password therefore you must be pivoting to criminals!!!
No, you retard, Jonah has never said this and you're a faggot if you think that was ever said. In fact, I'll do you one better. I've found a statement that contradicts this narrative that Jonah thinks a duress password is only for criminals. Here: source (a)
So Tommy got 2 out of 4 statements right (assuming the technical claims check out). A success rate of 50% is literally just as bad as random chance. Why should I trust anything TommyTran732 or PrivSec say? Another person who follows in Micay's footsteps is Metr0pl3x, a GrapheneOS community moderator. Here he is calling CalyxOS users "the green eyed horde". source (a)
Since he's such a goody two-shoes and hates it when others make non-technical claims, here he is repeating Daniel's non-technical claim about Privacy Guides saying privacy is for criminals (which are wrong and was never said). source (a)
I hope it's clear enough that GrapheneOS has a huge problem in their culture where Daniel Micay's orbiters not only don't challenge his behaviour and the various false claims he makes, they also want to act like him too.
I used to think that GrapheneOS isn't the problem and it was just Micay... but no. It's GrapheneOS. Everyone involved in it is like this. We have some new enemies to document.
First up, Fairphone. Daniel Micay says they are "heavily supporting and promoting scammers who are heavily involved in attacks on GrapheneOS." One of their "major business partners" is allegedly engaging in "extreme Kiwi Farms style harassment." source (a)
Which business partner is he talking about? Why, Murena of course, who is the company behind /e/OS. source (a)
Murena and /e/OS are both known enemies of GrapheneOS. So sorry, Fairphone, you are charged and convicted of collaborating with an enemy of GrapheneOS. Enjoy prison, stalker company.
Next up is Aurora Store, the alternate frontend for Google Play. If you believe Daniel, they are "being taken over by a group heavily involved in attacks on GrapheneOS." source (a)
Who might this group be, you ask? If you look at the bottom of their website: source (a)
Oops. Should've asked GrapheneOS before collaborating with the Calyx Institute, stalker.
Honestly, a lot of this comes off as seething on Daniel Micay's part that nobody wants to collaborate with GrapheneOS because he has burned every single bridge in the tech/privacy/security community he can manage to. He must be jealous that others can collaborate more easily because they don't randomly falsely accuse each other of harassment. According to Daniel Micay, the "Android modding community" is engaged in a grand conspiracy of swatting, doxing and harassment against GrapheneOS and DivestOS, and no less than 8 different people/groups are implicated:
- Techlore
- CalyxOS
- F-Droid (5 core members)
- microG
- LineageOS
- /e/OS
- Jonah Aragon, aka "one of the Techlore people" (lmao)
- Louis Rossmann (not explicitly named)
source (a) "They feel threatened by us" Wrong again, retard. They just laugh at you. I doubt any of them feel threatened.
He's apparently (still) working on articles debunking Techlore and Louis Rossmann's videos. Good luck with that.
I also want to note his claims that CalyxOS was started from the CopperheadOS incident in 2018. He's claimed before that Nicholas Merrill was a Copperhead employee. I've avoided talking about it because I can't find any evidence for this assertion. None. Nada. Zilch. There's nothing I can find to substantiate a link between Calyx and Copperhead, at all.
And I'm thinking he's just full of shit, because if he knew that Calyx was somehow involved with Copperhead, why did Graphene form the AOSP Alliance with them? Seriously, if anyone can find a link between Calyx and Copperhead, let me know. And lastly, Daniel recently decided to start (continue) a couple of spats. First is with Private Phone Shop, a reseller of phones with private OSes: source (a)
Daniel refuses to provide receipts in public because he doesn't want to "spread their libel/harassment content" (a convenient get-out-of-jail-free card). Kiwi Farms is mentioned. source (a)
If you actually look at Private Phone Shop's article (a), all is made clear. What happened was that PPS was selling phones that were end-of-life (Pixel 4a series), along with selling CalyxOS phones. Daniel Micay hates Calyx and is also extremely autistic about not supporting EOL devices, so he asked them to stop, but they refused.
Daniel did the sensible thing and took a step back to de-escalate the situation just kidding, he accuses them of being scammers in retaliation.
In response, PPS took the sensible business decision and just stopped selling GrapheneOS phones. As a business owner, why deal with a schizo like this? But they were concerned by his defamation so they wrote an article to counter that misinfo.
Too bad for Daniel, it links to both Techlore's and Louis Rossmann's video. A shame. Maybe next time don't randomly attack people who are literally selling your product. Next spat is with /e/OS and he did this by accusing a new location service named Positon of being secretly ran by them, so the people involved in it "have supported doxxing and swatting attacks." source (a)
Daniel also wrote a new article on the GrapheneOS site. There's really no proof in it, it's just claims made without evidence. Especially the parts about them allegedly harassing GrapheneOS team members. source (a)
He somehow has knowledge (allegedly) of the intentions of the people behind Positon to lock out open source data, but he never explains this in the article. If we are to believe what he says on the forum, it's that he somehow obtained access to "private chat logs" (also microG is involved, go figure).
So let me get this straight... some whistleblower found out that the Positon people are evil and going to turn the location data proprietary, and instead of writing their own article and staking the claim on their own reputation and credibility, they went to GrapheneOS instead, notoriously known for missing the ball on social claims and falsely accusing people of harassment.
Or alternatively one of the Graphene people somehow wormed their way in to private chats with them? Also, you can't see the chat logs, or any other proof, because reasons.
Yeah, real convincing stuff. I am very skeptical of the claims in the article being true. It's likely he found proof that /e/OS is behind Positon, but beyond that no way am I believing anything else in there. Especially the bullshit about swatting and doxing.
What I will believe is that Positon does seem to be created by Marvin of microG, and used in microG. A cursory search reveals this:
Anyways without more proof, this comes across as Daniel intentionally sabotaging a competitor's location service because he's jealous that he doesn't have his own.
In all seriousness though, even if GrapheneOS isn't completely compromised (which I am still inclined to believe that it isn't despite the community's behavior), I'm still strongly considering switching over to CalyxOS only because I find that being constantly reminded that this project is being run by gigafaggots like this to be extremely irritating.
Ok I am going to openly question this dude's coding skills.
The biggest tell is him screaming about some Obamaphone dealer putting his kit on their old hardware. You are shipping the fucking OS, you moron. So if it bothers you so much then why don't you maintain a supportability database and whitelist, and if you want to be nice to your sperg audience, leave a killswitch in.
And you have fanbois, so you can throw the work of maintaining the list on to them, and carry it back to the build in cicd.
Every single fucking dev would take this route, but not him.
That's because at the end of the day he's sperging because he's still mentally stuck in the realm of an aged-out script kiddie, instead of fucking putting in the kernel patches (or wherever you want to put the cockblock in init, so the phone dealer will stop loading it), necessary to do this work.
The OrangePI people who can't even speak Engrish do their own naked Android packaging, and if they wanted to they could wipe out Graphene and blow past it.... if they sensed there was any money to be made on paranoid spergers who want takeapart killswitch phones.
In all seriousness though, even if GrapheneOS isn't completely compromised (which I am still inclined to believe that it isn't despite the community's behavior), I'm still strongly considering switching over to CalyxOS only because I find that being constantly reminded that this project is being run by gigafaggots like this to be extremely irritating.
that sperger has pretty much killed whatever growth interest there was in naked Android. If it's a tablet why fucking do it when you can put on Armbian and do an SPA.
and whatever interest there was in "secure" phones is gone when the leader of North Korea is more stable and trustworthy than that guy. Fuck GrapheneOS.
They are against them taking their work which they would have been the ones who wrote it. They also are continue to license as the regular MIT and GPLv2 license. They just are not licensing the software to CopperheadOS under those terms.
I'm sure it will be similar to the article he already posted. "Louis Rossmann is a verified Kiwifarms user who has conducted severe harassment against our former lead developer, resulting in death threats and attempted murder... blah blah baseless_accusations.txt" Evidence? Nah, why would anybody think you need that?
Daniel also wrote a new article on the GrapheneOS site. There's really no proof in it, it's just claims made without evidence. Especially the parts about them allegedly harassing GrapheneOS team members.
What is it with these retards and conflating their anger with supposed claims of "harassment"? Everytime I've read back on what this guy does, it's just this, over and over again.
The Signal team and Graphene team seem to really like eachother, too. Makes me really concerned with Signal's true MO.
I had to flick back through this thread..... and I still can't figure out how, exactly, did F-Droid turn into a dealthcult out to kill Daniel?
Seems like Daniel's MO when he wants to work on something for which there are 800 other things like it already out there (package stores), is he thinks he can scream it into nonexistence so he doesn't have to complete with it, instead of just making the fucking thing and putting it out.
Big fucking news guys: I found Daniel Micay's facedox!
Oh, and for completeness here's James Donaldson's too.
I was poking around old Wayback Machine archives on copperhead.co and it turns out in the blog posts they were using profile pictures for their blog posts (now the authorship has been anonymized to "Team Copperhead"): source (a)
I always welcome more coverage of GrapheneOS, but its community obviously doesn't. On Twitter, known GrapheneOS defender elliasdev, who seems to obsessively namesearch GrapheneOS on Twitter, found this tweet and insulted the author before blocking him. source (a) Also on Twitter, Daniel Micay whines about losing resources due to negative PR from Louis Rossmann's video. source (a)
He says he's submitting less vulnerability reports to Google solely because there are still GrapheneOS criticism videos on YouTube.
Besides repeating the usual lies about Rossmann (like that he knew about the swatting, when he didn't, or that he still uses GrapheneOS, when he doesn't), Daniel Micay claims that he "has been unable to be productive again due to increased harassment." source (a)
If I were him, I would just log off and forget about the Internet to work on my project but apparently Daniel can't do that.
Lastly, and this seems to be a brand new weird allegation, he implies that FUTO has a "closed source product based on our work"? I don't know what he's talking about, because FUTO doesn't sell phones or phone OSes or anything like that. source (a)
He looks exactly like the type of autistic Internet tough guy nerd faggot. It's from a long time ago though, who knows what he looks like now, maybe trooned out even.
I was poking around old Wayback Machine archives on copperhead.co and it turns out in the blog posts they were using profile pictures for their blog posts (now the authorship has been anonymized to "Team Copperhead"):
The fact that Copperhead didn't ask the Wayback machine to expunge this data is proof that they're part of the harassment campaign against Daniel's life.
