Hans-Christoph Steiner @eighthave@librem.one

The real #privacy protections of using a #VPN come from putting all your eggs in one basket: force all your DNS and traffic through the VPN provider. Then nobody else sees your real IP address, etc. As long as the VPN provider does everything right, doesn't get hacked, or doesn't have to comply with secret government orders, it does provide a real privacy improvement. But I have a real hard time buying into putting so much trust into one service. I wonder if it is possible to be so good

One thing I haven't figured out how to do well is to simultaneously laud good acts while blasting the bad acts. For example, #Google insists that Chromebooks be unlockable so users can install any OS. That's great! The same Google insists Chromebooks cannot allow "Unknown Sources" even though #Android always has. This looks like plain old monopolistic abuse. Or the #Chromium team works in public and behaves much more like a free software project, while #Chrome forces users to login. Any tips?

Just tagged v2.2.1 of #FDroid fdroidserver tools package, and uploaded it to pypi.org, #Debian, and our #Ubuntu PPA. This version has passed autopkgtest in Debian/bookworm, so it looks like it should make it into bookworm without further work https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/fdroidserver

The #AI #ChatGPT #Bard etc story repeats the #Bitcoin story in terms of how it will impact society. They are built on the kernel of a useful idea, but their structures heavily preference harmful use cases. #Bitcoin enabled #ransomware, tax fraud, investment scams, dodging sanctions, while only providing a slow, energy intensive payment system. #AI texts enable #disinfo, #cheating at school/work, #TechnicalDebt, devaluation of human labor, all to provide an #climate-damaging, error-prone search

@matthew_d_green services that do not require accounts https://f-droid.org/2022/02/28/no-user-accounts-by-design.html

@erikbtoots @matthew when I watched the video, it had the time of day, rather than the time in the video. So 14:00 means around 2pm the day of the hearing.

@j2bryson @1br0wn @spikebike Ah yes, the #Huawei aspect would explain it. I wonder how many 0-click Pegasus/etc infections they would have prevented by not mandating a single vendor for mobile devices. Back in 2018, #iOS was looking better than #Android in terms of security.

@debacle @rene_mobile @mobian This makes me think of how I used to be excited about working with #Android, now the only exciting thing about it is its market share. As a #hacker, I find #PinePhone a lot more exciting these days, despite all its limitations.

@rene_mobile Aspects of the technical structure of #Android magnify this because developers cross-compile and run in emulators/devices. Basically no one is doing Android dev on Android. #macOS and #iOS at least were very close to the same OS. I switched to #Debian #GNOME and #Android at the same time, around 2009. Back then, #Android was hackable and flexible. We took full advantage of that. Now my feeling is that #Android is focused on #security for #BigTech and no longer empowering users 2/2

@rene_mobile #Google is a #cloud company, and its users expect to have everything tied into the cloud. Fine if you want that. Before, #Android offered much more developer freedom and flexibility. Now, it feels like it is being locked into the cloud and pushed to prioritize consuming over creating. Same thing with #macOS, I used #NeXTSTEP since 1994, and stuck with it unbroken as it became MacOSX and even #iOS. #iTunes and iOS pushed #Apple to shift their focus from creating to consuming. 1/

@rene_mobile I haven't touched SAF code in a while now, so I can't remember details. I do clearly remember feeling that this API made it drastically harder to do what I was doing before. And in order to give any kind of consistent UX across the supported #Android versions, I had to have 3 parallel implementations with a number of per-version quirks. Plus it is biased towards pushing to the cloud. For many use cases, local storage still has advantages, including #privacy and resilience.