I’m a good 15 years younger than Steve Wozniak, but Steve Wozniak has always been a person I’ve aspired to become more like. He’s one of my personal heroes, and I hope to die a man as close to what the man he’s always been.

Is it in the game vendors’ interest to do that? No. And they have more money than the gamers.

So… Cute petition, but sadly you can be absolutely certain it ain’t going nowhere.

I run CalyxOS on my Fairphone4 and have zero issues.

Same old broken record as with previous Fairphones.

Their holier-than-thou attitude towards security backed them into the corner of being virtually unable to run GrapheneOS on any platform other than Google’s own Pixel phones, and now Google is pulling the rug from under them.

The GrapheneOS people were tedious when Micay was there, and they haven’t really changed.

Standalone slop. Woohoo!

Why gee, nobody saw that coming…

Well yeah but as long as the price of eggs goes down, it’s worth any sacrifice.

They’re all in the business of exploiting addiction, so no surprise there.

A small company called Stellar Defense & Cyber Intelligence is ready to help by deploying AI technology to identify anonymous, masked pro-Palestinian protestors

And now you know why privacy was important and Big Tech was a threat to democracy. Those of us who know history saw the danger coming, have been warning people right and left and been called crackpots for a quarter century.

And now that democracy is living its final days in America, it’s happening.

And now it’s too late.

Welcome to the dystopian future you complacently let yourself get trapped into.

I certainly hope a majority of Fediverse operators will decide to defederate Threads. I always thought it was important not to help Zuck grow his walled garden for free, but now it’s clearly a matter of decency.

“Reactivating dormant IP” aka “Milking old franchises”, because it’s cheaper and safer than coming up with innovative stuff.

F-Droid apps are probably safe from this shit. Unfortunately, most people need proprietary apps too. Banking and official ID apps (for those in countries where the authorities have strongly adopted the internet for identification purposes) come to mind. Or the app from the provider your company chose to report working hours or input expense reports. Or Teams (again, mandatory for many jobs).

If you can’t install those apps on your deGoogled cellphone - segregated in a work profile to prevent them from vacuuming your data of course - then you need a separate cellphone running the full Google spyware stack just for them, which is all shades of dystopian.

I have neither Google Play nor Google Play Services, as I run a deGoogled OS.

However, I fear that I might not be able to escape the Google monopoly much longer.

Password are routinely stolen, then bought and sold on hackers’ marketplaces. That’s how.

2FA is great. It’s the best tool there is against impersonation and account takeovers.

But it’s only great PROVIDED

1. It’s a real, proper second factor like a hardware token or - less great but okay - a “secure” cellphone app. When it’s a totally insecure factor like SMS, 1FA is preferable.
2. It’s not such a PITA that you hate using it.
3. When it’s a proprietary app from one of the big data sonsabitches, it’s also an app to spy on you and your activities.

SMS is fine for 2FA, as long as you can’t use it for anything else

Oh yeah? Post your bank customer number and your telephone number on here and see how fast your account gets drained without you even getting a single confirmation code SMS.

It’s been known for years that SMS-based 2FA is terrible, terrible security. The sites that use them have no interest in their users’ accounts’ security: all they’re interested in is harvesting their phone numbers.

What if you don’t want a Pixel? Or a Fairphone? Or one of the very, VERY few cellphones that you can install a deGoogled OS on?

There are precious few ways of escaping the Google monopoly. I own a Fairphone running CalyxOS, and it happens to be the phone I want because of its excellent repairability. So lucky me. But if I didn’t want a Fairphone, nor any Samsung phone, nor any Chinese cellphone, and certainly not a fucking Google phone - because I’d rather cut off my left nut than give Google money to escape Google’s surveillance, that’s just too rich for me - then I’d be SOL.

My point is, if you refuse to be Google’s bitch, Google backs you into a corner. Just because you’re happy with the corner doesn’t mean you’re not stuck in a corner.

Google “might let me” do something…

If that doesn’t summarize everything that’s wrong with this fucking monopolist, that controls YOUR device that you paid with YOUR money but ultimately isn’t yours to do as you please, I don’t know what does.

The only thing that makes Google a bit tolerable in the mobile space is Apple, because Apple is even worse. At least you can (still) sideload stuff in Android - although Google is about to make that impossible very soon too.

Fuck the monopolists.

It’s a problem if you need a fucking banking app for example, and the bank won’t let you sideload it and you’re running a deGoogled OS. Then you suddenly need a backup phone with the full surveillance Android just to do banking.

I trust my kids to mostly only use the devices how I say. The security is mainly to keep their mum happy

It sounds like you should simply trust your kids and convince your better half that she should do the same.

If there’s one thing I learned both as a kid and as a father, it’s that restricting kids’ access to computers - or anything really - just doesn’t work: software solutions that exist for that purpose are almost always defeated by kids, who are reliably more clever than the adults who try to restrict them, and only exist to falsely reassure their parents.

If you’re serious about controlling your children’s cellphones, I’d suggest buying them Linux phones, or phones that you can install a mobile Linux distro on: nobody makes Linux apps, so good luck getting malware or shitty social media apps on them. And of course, you can keep the root password to yourself and set up your kids as non-privileged users.

Either that or feature phones - if you truly hate your children.

It’s not technical news, It’s newsworthy because of the context.

Kind of like when people in the Soviet Union were allowed to grow vegetables in their own tiny plot of land for personal consumption: it was important because the Soviet Union denied people private ownership, but simply because everybody in the USSR was on the verge of dying of starvation any minute, the Soviets carved out a teeny tiny exception to the rule.

Everybody in the free world was completely nonplussed by the ability to grow your own veggies. But it made the news because it was the Soviet Union.

In this case, the stifling Google mothership implemented a teeny tiny something trivial on their platform, and it’s newsworthy because Google is the Soviet Union of the internet in more ways than one.

Of course, people with any sense of freedom and sanity consume Youtube videos with FreeTube, Grayjay, NewPipe, LibreTube, Piped, Invidious or whatever else and look at this thinking “So…?” But it’s newsworthy because it comes out of Google.

I didn’t know anybody still used the official Youtube client. Or cared about it.

The fastest touchscreen keyboard I’ve ever found is OpenBoard with Gesture Typing: it’s both a regular keyboard and a super-fast Swype-like keyboard. It’s open-source and it doesn’t connect to the internet, so you don’t need to freak out because the APK is 2 years old.

I look forward to Australians answering that one…

AOSP was never about consumers. Google used it as a trojan horse to gain massive marketshare and use it as a platform to run their surveillance software on the biggest possible scale.

The fact that it’s open source helped AOSP succeed at first and gave Google a good corporate image. Then, slowly over the years, Google moved more and more open-source features behind their proprietary stack, and now AOSP is only nominally open source: look at the state of the dialer, the contact list… in a vanilla AOSP installation, like on most deGoogle phones: it’s quite pathetic compared to modern, privacy-invading phones.

So yes: AOSP has failed consumers because it was designed to serve Google and nobody else from the get-go.

Now you can let Google plunder your contacts without an account. That’s progress!

My Nokia 3210 definitely was louder. But then I didn’t have a hearing aid yet back then.

We havent “lost” F-Droid. But it’s going through a crisis.

TLDR: two third of the board has resigned over Hans-Christoph Steiner taking controversial decisions unilaterally.

All the details here: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/admin/-/issues/447

In case you haven’t followed the recent developments with Simple Mobile Tools: the entire set of apps was forked by Naveen Singh and is now called FossifyX - at least for now, there is a debate going on for which final name to adopt.

In other words, stick to the F-Droid version of Simple Mobile Tools until F-Droid picks up the FossifyX branch, and continue from there. With any luck, you won’t have to change any of the tools you’re currently using.

Etar lacks features compared to SMT Calendar - mostly for me, the ability to assign different notification / sounds, and of course the ability to export the entire calender as ICS.

Re your question: no. If you try to import an ICS calendar generated by SMT Calendar, Etar only imports the oldest event.

Etar isn’t as good as SMT Calendar but it has suddenly become very attractive. I’ve uninstalled SMT Calendar, and CalyxOS comes with Etar preinstalled. So now I rock Etar. Not super happy, but it’s better than nothing. The next step for me is to install a CalDAV server on my home server. That way I’ll never get caught unable to import my calendar into a new app. And I’ll live with a single notification sound for all my events / appointments.

I use iCard. It works fine. You do need to open an iCard account though. I’ve had mine for years without any issues.

What a surprise… What isn’t run in the cloud these days? The cloud makes data collection and forced subscriptions easy.

I have a Fairphone 4 with CalyxOS loaded on it.

I bought it new and immediately flashed CalyxOS after taking it out of the box, using the Calyx Institute’s instructions: it was easy and it went smoothly.

Don’t listen to some of the GrapheneOS fanbois: you CAN relock the bootloader after CalyxOS is installed on the Fairphone. In fact, it’s recommended.

As for buying a used Pixel phone and arguing that’s a better use of the Earth’s resources than landfilling it and buying a new Fairphone, that is a valid argument depending on how you look at things.

However, what isn’t a valid argument is saying buying a used Pixel isn’t giving money to Google because it’s used: if someone bought a Pixel and gave their money to Google, they got some of that money back when the second owner bought the Pixel used for cheaper - meaning the second owner took on part of the original purchase, meaning the second owner gave their money to Google in lieu of the first owner.

I’m sorry but the only Pixel phone you can buy that won’t indirectly give money to Google is a stolen Pixel, and I ain’t no thief. I refuse to give money to Google, and I refuse to support Google in any capacity, therefore I refuse to own a Pixel phone.

Refusing to patronize Google by not buying a Pixel phone - 1st of 2nd hand - and refusing to be part of the Pixel ecosystem is also a means to fight for your rights to privacy, because anything that hurts Google is good for privacy.

Hence sideloading.

I use this OpenBoard fork:

https://github.com/erkserkserks/openboard/releases

It has Swype-like gestures and it’s very accurate even if you swipe fast and without paying too much attention.

No. Sadly I never found out why my phone is misbehaving. But this isn’t my primary device: it’s just a test cellphone so it doesn’t matter too much to me. It would certainly be a showstopper if it was my daily driver.

Wow… 15 years of mobile corporate surveillance and erosion of privacy already. How time flies…

GrapheneOS itself is great, but the GrapheneOS community is toxic. Something to consider. If you want deGoogled Android without the drama, consider CalyxOS.