Yes. Unfortunately, these systems are also a great gift for any upcoming fascist regime (like the Trump junta currently) which will not only happily continue using the existing infrastructure but also extend it like mad.

Maybe humanity’s greatest weaknesses overall: the lack of foresight and the lack of wisdom learned from historic precedents (e.g. Nazi Germany? Forgotten by now). Everything’s always about short-term goals, ignoring any long-term disadvantages. See also: climate disaster.

Its popularity.

In other words: Users of proprietary OS like Windows have so little control over their own devices that it’s newsworthy when the vendor allows you to uninstall 2-3 bundled things out of many more. It’s pathetic.

Thanks, didn’t know. It’s indeed a well-established myth then. Corrected my post.

It’s inherited from a historic convention from the UK. Historically the rationale was that the month was more important than the year, so they put it first, although this has no useful consistency or order to it.

Unfortunately, kind of dumb decisions from the past tend to stick and keep existing for an unnecessary long time because people get used to them and then never change them. Popularity or habit can beat reason, objectivity etc…

• Tor browser for anonymous/private regular browsing (without logging into personally-identifiable accounts)
• Vanadium (GrapheneOS’ Chromium-based browser, maybe it’s usable on non-GrapheneOS as well?) in combination with a good crap-blocking DNS server
• Brave is decent but has some bad default settings, can probably be configured to behave well (similar to regular Firefox)
• Firefox + forks are generally not that great (at least on Android?) because their sandboxing capabilities (and maybe other security features) are weaker compared to those of Chromium-based browsers. See also: https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing
• Proprietary browsers like Chrome, Edge, Opera, and so on all contain loads of on-by-default-spyware and should never be used

An easy analogy that common users can understand is e-mail. E-Mail is also decentralized, everyone has an e-mail address but everyone uses a different e-mail host (the domain name after the “@”). So e.g. “john.doe@gmail.com” has an account at gmail.com but “jane.doe@mailbox.org” has an account at mailbox.org. Both are completely different, yet they can communicate with each other. There’s not one company controlling or storing every single e-mail account or inbox. It’s spread out and everyone can choose the mail provider they like or trust the most.

Then you use that as a bridge to explain Lemmy, or Mastodon, or other Fediverse social media platforms. And remind the listener that single companies having full control over everyone’s accounts is generally bad and opens the door for all sorts of abuse and manipulation or arbitrariness.

Sure.

• https://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/apple_google.pdf
• https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/Android_privacy_report.pdf … and when you use for example Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei made mobile OSses, it’s even worse of course, because then their own telemetry comes on top of that from Google as well. They want to have pieces of the cake too.
• https://www.kuketz-blog.de/google-play-services-die-ueberwachungswanze-von-google/ (you might have to translate that page. That guy is a well-known privacy and data protection researcher, white hat hacker and also a data protection official in a federal state in Germany. He’s very objective)

Just for reference, this is what the Google Play services app transmits roughly every 20 minutes to Google if it has network access:

Phone #
SIM #
IMEI (world-wide unique device ID)
S/N of your device
WIFI MAC address
Android ID
Mail Address of your logged in Google account
IP address

And that is when you have disabled ALL telemetry in ALL of the options, even the most hidden ones. So this is the minimum amount this app is always gathering from every Android user using the Google Play services app, no matter what you selected. Other Google apps (like the Play store app) could then contain additional telemetry on top, this is just the common base of all Google proprietary apps. Or the minimum amount of privacy violations you get when using proprietary Google apps on your phone, no matter what.

If you use GrapheneOS, I’d recommend not installing/using ANY Google apps at all (not even Play store or Play services). To get apps, you should use (roughly in this order of priority): 1.) GrapheneOS’s app store for the built-in apps 2.) Accrescent app store (has several good open source apps, is intended to be more secure than F-Droid) 3.) Obtainium (for getting open source apps directly from their source repos) or if you really can’t get into Obtainium, use F-Droid instead 4.) Aurora Store (for getting apps from the Google Play store without sending too much data to Google. Only do this if there is no open source app available for doing the same thing).

To fully mitigate the removal of the Play services app, you also should probably install/configure something like ntfy with UnifiedPush to get battery efficient push notifications and ideally use apps which also use that, e.g. the Molly fork instead of Signal. It’s quite easy to do, just something to be aware of. Otherwise your battery drain might be a bit higher. Then you’re also independent from Google’s push notification infrastructure. But you need a UnifiedPush server to go along with it, either self-hosted or use a public one. There are some privacy friendly ones public ones out there.

“AI” is good for pattern matching, generating boiler plate / template code and text, and generating images. Maybe also translation. That’s about it. And it’s of course often flawed/inaccurate so it needs human oversight. Everything else is like a sales scam. A very profitable one.

Thanks for clarifying, as a German I did not know and was confused by this. Now I know but am still confused.

Haven’t read anything bad about Tuta so I guess it’s fine. Other good ones are Proton, mailbox.org or posteo.de. Anything that’s not by Google, Microsoft, and so on.

In theory, the law applies to everyone. In practice, it doesn’t apply to rich entities.

It’s nice to see a significant portion of people (probably still not enough though) leave proprietary social media. Unfortunately, it took them extremely long to realize why that’s a bad thing to use.

So that’s one step in the right direction I guess.

On the other hand, there generally isn’t much hope for humanity left because we haven’t learned from past mistakes, haven’t listened to science, and haven’t ensured ourselves a decent future on this planet.

I use Aegis for personal and work stuff. Works great, is open source and initiates no network connections anywhere.

Some time ago I would have recommended Mullvad and Proton, but after Proton’s CEO publicly mentioned Trump favorably in some way I’d say just use Mullvad.

Don’t read too much bad news, it’s bad for the general mood. But still expect everything to go to hell, because it absolutely will, and sooner than anticipated. But you can still enjoy some amount of non-hellish time. And then make some preparations for an upcoming fascist government, rising crime/vandalism, and for climate change hitting everywhere with full force. Existing systems might not stay functional. Start building up local communities to support each other. Make the best of any situation and make forward-looking decisions. Don’t despair, but also don’t have false hopes. It will get much worse before it will get any better.

1-2 decades earlier maybe (meaning: 60s or 70s). Location… I don’t know. Maybe Norway, I’ve never heard anything bad about Norway. Might just be random selection bias though.

Portal 2 is THE highest rated game on Steam.

Doom or Tetris were probably the most influential ones?

Using it since many years on many Pixels and loving it.

Main pros: zero bloat, efficient, highly secure and highly private (about as private and secure as it can get on any smartphone), and it’s an Android without any of Android’s typical weaknesses (privacy issues, bloat, etc.). You get to utilize the advantages of Google (its security) and completely avoid the disadvantages (its many privacy issues). You get to use all the advantages of an Android mobile OS while completely avoiding all of its disadvantages. It’s like getting your cake and eating it too. You’re much better off in terms of security and privacy than almost(?) all other smartphone users. According to leaked documents, Cellebrite for example can’t crack GrapheneOS on Pixels at all. They can crack almost any other smartphone if they have physical access to it. Most smartphones are really easy for them to crack. iPhones may pose some trouble depending on model/OS. And Graphene on Pixel is the literal brick wall. And even on top of that it has tons of great security features, like auto-reboot after X hours of inactivity, charge-only-mode for USB-C when locked, distress/duress PIN entry to immediately wipe the phone, many things like that. On the privacy side it’s looking great as well: Some folks have analyzed Graphene’s network traffic and there’s zero privacy issues from the OS or its built-in apps. And the few connections it does make (for updates and so on) are all documented and work exactly like they documented them, and they only transmit the exact least amount of necessary data without anything beyond that (guess what - that’s super rare). And on top of that there’s even more great privacy features, some of which are invisible but well thought-out, for example any SUPL request goes through a Graphene proxy server first (configurable) which strips all personally-identifiable data from the request and then redirects it to your provider’s SUPL server (which is most likely Google’s SUPL server in the end). I’m seriously impressed by the quality of the GrapheneOS project. Maybe you don’t realize how good and rare such things are nowadays. Also the documentation is very good and actually answers most of your questions and doesn’t contain any marketing blurb. The social media feeds and forums are a great source of info as well. On top of all that it’s even easy to install GrapheneOS.

Main cons: it’s only available on Google Pixel phones, so if you truly despise Google and don’t want to buy or use anything from them, it’s not the right device/OS for you (or maybe buy it used?). However, the reason GrapheneOS is on Pixel is purely a technical one: Pixels do offer very high hardware based security already (probably the most, although iPhones have good hardware-based security as well. As is known, Apple tends to be produce good quality hardware, not quite so good software) as well as a very high degree of “platform neutrality”, i.e. it’s supported by Google to flash a different OS on it or use more advanced tools like adb without any sort of tinkering or unnecessary danger involved. Also you don’t have to register to unlock your phone or anything, you only need to be online once to enable the OEM unlocking feature (I think this is because Google needs your IMEI to check whether the phone is carrier-locked (cannot ever be OEM unlocked) or can be unlocked, and they will immediately receive some device data including the IMEI as soon as you go online with the preinstalled Android OS once [of course they will receive some more device data than just the IMEI]), so it’s best to not insert your SIM yet (and not do anything with the preinstalled OS) before you’ve installed GrapheneOS on your new Pixel. Do the OEM unlocking step on WiFi only, best on a public WiFi so Google has much less of a chance to identify you based on your IP or related data. Then install Graphene, then insert your SIM and start using your new phone. Other cons exist but they’re rare or pretty much irrelevant in daily use. If you have to hear them, read an older post by me about some potential downsides: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/19867254/12069767