Why Did Google Disable this Security Feature?

Our top stories this week:

GrapheneOS Unable to Complete Pixel 11 Port Due to Cut Security Feature
Pixel 11 Has Hardware MTE Support, "May Still Be Usable" for GrapheneOS
Trump Goes After Anonymous Email Provider in Italy. The Real Target Is Free Speech in the U.S.
Brave launches Email Aliases to keep your personal email address private from websites
Introducing Ad Blocker for Firefox on iOS: More Control, Fewer Distractions

TWIP Live 🔴

Updates from the Team

Site Updates

This week we committed a few small but important updates to the website. We fixed a few dead links on the page about Privacy Guides' origin story, updated our advice about how to use Arch Linux properly, and removed Mullvad DNS from our list of recommended DNS resolvers since Mullvad has announced their intent to shut down the service.

News Briefs

This week, Fria covered the highlight stories as they happened, so remember to subscribe to our news briefs to get updates ASAP without having to wait til Friday. Besides that, we also covered stories about the new Signal Android beta that has support for accounts without phone numbers, a bug in Google Messages sending old texts to random people, a router manufacturer found with multiple backdoors in the products, and more!

Sources

Pixel 11 & Graphene Updates

When the Pixel 11 was released a few weeks ago, we asked the same question many privacy enthusiasts did: when will GrapheneOS support it? Much to our shock, this week the Graphene team announced that during their investigations, a critical security feature present in all previous Pixels (starting with the 8 series) called Memory Tagging Extension (MTE) was removed. MTE is a foundational part of Graphene. The team announced they were considering skipping support for the 11 series, but then later announced the next Android 17 Beta had re-added MTE support. They haven't officially announced if they will support the Pixel 11 or not. This is an ongoing story, so subscribe to our news briefs and stay tuned.

Show Hosts

Nate is a member of Privacy Guides' video and news team. He has been advocating for privacy on his own website The New Oil since 2018, and is the former host of Surveillance Report, a popular cybersecurity podcast he published with Techlore.

Jordan is the creator and editor of many videos on Privacy Guides' channels. Previously working with Techlore, they have extensive experience in video editing, motion design, and photography.