Host Cryptowires opens Episode 25 with the story of GrapheneOS being shadowbanned on Hacker News. The privacy-focused Android ROM's team publicly revealed that nearly all their recent posts were flagged and hidden by default, while years of harassment and libel against their developers went unmoderated. The host questions whether Hacker News — funded by Y Combinator and populated largely by engineers from surveillance-heavy companies like Palantir, Meta, and Google — can ever be a neutral forum. He recommends Lobsters as a less manipulated alternative and urges users to enable "show dead" in settings to surface suppressed content.

The episode shifts to cryptography with a new ETH Zurich paper, "Why Johnny Should Not Delegate Email Encryption to Gateways," which analyzed four S/MIME and PGP gateway products and uncovered 29 attacks enabling  ...