Eventually we’ll hit big brother levels.
As someone who was born before the age of surveillance capitalism, I can tell you we’ve hit that level a long time ago. Anybody who thinks society has been running normally for at least the past 15 years is too young to have known what a normal society is.
To evade taxes of course.
Have you ever asked yourself how it’s possible that ALL the fucking ultra-rich almost without exception do philanthropy?
It doesn’t make sense: most of those millionaires and billionaires are psychopaths who essentially don’t give a shit about their fellow man, acquired their wealth by exploiting and shafting others for the most part, and don’t give a shit about how that makes them look: why on Earth would any of them do philanthropy, let alone all of them?
It only starts to make sense when you understand philanthropy is yet another tax loophole.
I would suggest we give him the 3,000 acres of Lana’i he doesn’t own, so the entire island belongs to him, then strand him there forever.
I have been hating this man’s guts since the mid 90’s and somehow it never lets off. Most hateful people manage to become a little bit more likeable as they age. Even this disgusting piece of human refuse Bill Gates might pass for a somewhat okay human being if you wilfully overlook why he truly does philanthropy.
But Larry Ellison? Hell no. He never changes. he’s just consistently the worst year after year, decade after decade.
Runbox, a privacy-focused email provider out of Norway. Our family has been using it for years with zero issues. The prices are very decent.
Free software (not open-source, it’s really free software that’s important) that depends on a single for-profit vendor is not free.
MicroG is open-source but it’s not free. It fails to address two problems:
I don’t think OP cares about getting the source of the apps they run so much as the apps being free-as-in-libre in his original question. Many people mistake open-source for free software and MicroG is not truly free.
MicroG works well if you let it leak some data to Google.
I would like a free-as-in-free-from-Google Google Play Services reimplementation that lets me use any app that depends on it without hitting any Google server.
Google Play Services
Sure it is. There’s a button labeled “Manage exceptions” that does exactly that.
It’s not the only thing that leaks timezone data, and the fix is identical: have the machine pretend you’re in UTC.
For example: if you enable Resist Fingerprinting (RFP) in Librewolf, it will lie to websites and pretend your timezone is UTC - because of course timezone is one of the factors used to fingerprint you - and all the sites you visit that show you your local time, or depend on your local time for something or other, will show you the wrong time. And that’s how you know it works 🙂
That is not the reason: Signai is very good but it’s not the best. The reason why it’s more popular is because it’s good, ubiquitous and easy to install.
In other words, it’s a well-known app you can confidently tell your computer idiot friends and family to install on their phone and start communicating with them 5 minutes later. What’s what makes it popular.
This danger is why I quit using the Purple Teams plugin for Pidgin: it works well enough (considering Teams isn’t exactly open to third-party clients, it works amazingly well in fact) it’s GPL-3.0, the source is provided and I compiled it.
So I believe it’s clean, but that’s not good enough for me to hit our corporate Teams channels with it and I don’t have the time to audit the code. Not to mention, while my company trusts my good judgment, I’m pretty sure running an unauthorized client is against IT policies.
So I dropped it, sadly. It’s a bummer because Pidgin uses a fraction of the resources needed by that pig of an Electron app - the official client - made by Microsoft.
So you really trust Google to release code that doesn’t do something it shouldn’t behind your back do you? How cute…
I am an embedded developer so please don’t patronize me. And I know enough about security to know that Google’s security model on the Pixel phones is the best yet. That’s not the issue. The issues are:
Google’s code is untrustworthy unless reviewed, and proprietary binary blobs can’t be reviewed. If Google codes anything, they have an ulterior motive and it’s rarely in your best interest. If that’s not a security shortcoming, I don’t know what is. Or said another way, there’s something deeply ironic in claiming to have the most secured deGoogled OS and the lynchpin of that security is Google itself.
Yes, using a phone other than a Pixel phone with a deGoogled OS other than GrapheneOS as I do (I use a FP4 with CalyxOS) is less secure than GrapheneOS on a Pixel phone - assuming you trust Google’s drivers aren’t doing other things unrelated to their driver function.
But as I said, my most important goal in anything technical I use is to not use Google. That’s my ideal. Some people have ideals and aren’t willing to compromise.
With that in mind, and considering that I’m a low-value target, I deem the security provided by CalyxOS on my FP4 more than adequate for my use case. Or said another way, GrapheneOS’ - short-sighted, in my opinion - obsession with security gets in the way of my main goal, which is to avoid Google.
Graphene is against GNU ideals getting in the way of security,
Funny, Graphene’s obsession with security is getting in the way of my ideals.
Fuck Google and their proprietary security updates. I want no Google in my life and if that means a bit less security, I’m okay with that. In fact, I’d argue that running Google code that does who-knows-what for your security is itself not a very safe thing to do.
Robots.txt is honor-based and Big Data has no honor.
I’m slightly disappointed that this isn’t about open source amphetamine.
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If you can live without all the apps that only exist on Android or iOS, then a non-Android-non-iOS phone is a great choice. But it only takes one of those apps to be essential to you and your non-Android-non-iOS phone suddenly becomes a miserable experience on a daily basis.
You say you don’t need a banking app. That’s great.
Me, I currently live in a country where banks are entrusted by the government to handle secure authentication online. If you can’t use the mobile banking app, you can’t interact with social services, the local equivalent of the DMV, healthcare system, police… And you can’t book a train ticket, change the trash collection schedule, check if your parcel has arrived at the post office… Everything is online here, and without the banking app, your life becomes very very difficult. Not impossible, but not a pleasant experience.
And my company requires me to use the Teams app. In fairness, if I can’t use it on my phone or I refuse to install it on my phone on principle, they will readily provide me with a work phone - and a pretty nice one too. But that means I’ll have to carry two phone and, well… I just don’t want to do that.
So if a Linux phone works for you, more power to you. It’s just that you’re a minority of extremely lucky people for whom this arrangement is at all workable.
Yes, an inept user can install it. I know because I am a fairly inept user 🙂
The key to a successful deGoogled OS installation is picking the most compatible phone possible for the AOSP flavor you want to run. If the phone is well supported and everything is reported to work, you’re unlikely to run into issues.
I chose a Fairphone 4 to run CalyxOS. Or rather, it went the other way in my case: CalyxOS was kind of imposed on me because my requirements for the phone was first and foremost not be Google Pixel phone (i.e. GrapheneOS was not an option) and good repairability second. CalyxOS is the only deGoogled AOSP distribution that runs on the Fairphone.
If you look at the instructions to install CalyxOS on the Fairphone 4, it’s nicely detailed and really simple. It went without a hitch for me. You can also install it on the Fairphone 5 and it looks simple enough too, but I haven’t tried it myself.
As to why I like it:
It emphasizes privacy over security (like GrapheneOS). Yeah it might not be quite as secure as GrapheneOS, but it’s more practical.
Enable MicroG and you basically have a normally-working phone. Yes, you still hit the Google server and that’s not great. But sadly that’s part of the compromises you have to make with your principles if you want to have a somewhat normal digital life in this day and age.
System-level integration with F-Droid and Aurora. The GrapheneOS people think it’s a liability. I think it’s a plus.
Comes with a work profile manager that works fine out of the box. You don’t need to install a third party manager like Shelter.
I know I’m gonna be shouted at for saying this, but… The Calyx Institute is always a little behind with Android updates unless they’re critical, and I find that to be a plus regardless of the OS you use - desktop or mobile: when your OS pulls updates as soon as they come out, it pulls screw-ups as soon as they come out too. CalyxOS’ delay in pushing updates means you let others play guinea pigs for you, and you only get updates after they’ve been thoroughly tested by a large number of users.
CalyxOS comes preinstalled with a nice set of apps. I especially like the Datura firewall: it lets you use sketchy app and deny them access to the internet. For instance, I use it to configure my TP-Link smartplugs with the TP-Link Tapo app without letting this hateful turd of a spyware app call the mothership. I don’t quite like how the SeedVault backup software follows the Android security model, because it prevents you from doing a true, full backup. But it does backups nicely and securely and that’s better than nothing. And the Calyx institute offers a free VPN: I only tried it once and it was kind of slow, but hey… it’s free.
Like I said, it runs on a non-Google phone. I hate Google with a passion and there was no way I was going to give them money to get a Pixel phone for the privilege of not being subjected to the Google surveillance. So most other deGoogled OSes weren’t even an option for me.
Here’s a little story that shows how much society has become dystopian:
Back in the 90’s, I worked in France for a while. When I was there, a case was brought up against the state that had violated a CNIL rule: some dude was cheating on his taxes by claiming he lived at some address. Tthe French fiscal administration sued him because they obtained a file from the electricity company and another from the water utilty company showing that the consumption of both electricity and water were so low it wasn’t consistent with the dude actually living there.
The case was thrown out, the dude walked and the state was fined because it had violated a rule that clearly stipulated cross-referencing files for the purpose of extracting secondary information that wasn’t available in each single file was a violation of privacy and civil liberties.
I shit you not. This used to be a thing.
Can you imagine this today? All the Big Data sonsabitches cross-reference billions of files ALL THE TIME and nobody bats an eyelid anymore.
If you’re old enough, you remember sovereign states taking privacy seriously. If you’re not, you don’t. And that’s how Big Data gets away with what they do today because fewer and fewer people remember a time when it was unacceptable.