Guardian Project @guardianproject@librem.one

I'm honoured to have been elected to the Board of Directors of F-Droid, the most well-known #opensource alternative to the Google Play Store.

Imagine Microsoft deciding from now on what you can install on your laptop. No internet, you can only download things through the MS app store. Apps that MS has approved. Who wouldn't find that suffocating? Yet that is what Google wants to do on our Android phones (and what Apple already has - a closed ecosystem).

1/3

I am very happy to join the @fdroidorg Board of Directors for the upcoming two years.

F-Droid is in the heart of the Open Source community, which I see as a very important part of the shift away from the US big tech here in Europe. Success of Open Source on mobile is success we all can share.

F-Droid gives visibility to software developers who want to build experiences without predatory practices.

This is important.

https://f-droid.org/2026/04/28/board-appointments-2026.html

Thinking about FOSS, legal advice, and pro bono legal support.

What if there was a fund - be that from a funding body, or donations, or whatever - which paid (at reasonable rates, not Big Law Firm Prices) some lawyers to support FOSS projects.

So that it was free at point of use for those projects, but did not rely on lawyers working for free.

All outputs (subject to sorting issues to do with privilege) would be licensed under suitably open terms, with a goal of maximising re-use.

#FOSS #lawfedi

Apparently, #Google has lost track of their goal for #Android "We wanted to make sure that there was no central point of failure, where one industry player could restrict or control the innovations of any other. " https://web.archive.org/web/20120501080416/http://source.android.com/about/philosophy.html

That page is 404 Not Found now...

#KeepAndroidOpen

Privacy stalwarts in Congress just bought us a few more days to put together a bill that actually reforms Section 702. Keep pushing. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/keep-pushing-we-get-10-more-days-reform-section-702

On a train to #Dagstuhl, I finally got to read the nice write-up about on-device local-web-to-app tracking: https://localmess.github.io/assets/bridges-to-self-localmess-usenix-security-26.pdf

TL;DR summary: You might want to uninstall (or deactivate if pre-loaded) all #Facebook and #Yandex apps from your phone. That kind of behavior is pretty clearly malicious - not even just ethically wrong, but seems actually illegal (at least in the EU, though IANAL).

Google Play Integrity: what if Google dictated what software ran on your computer.

Open source implementations of attestation: what if a bunch of other people dictated what software ran on your computer.

Look, these handcuffs are permissively licensed!

No, thank you.

What if all public funding and all private donations to our efforts stop tomorrow?

Users should be fine for years thanks to the wonderful world-wide community of #chatmail relay operators 💜 Relays are dirt cheap to run. Also, our developments are much cheaper and less complex compared to what we know from comparable efforts.

No worries though!

We currently have moneys to help sustain ~15 contributors, with a sum similar to what other projects pay for their foundation president/CEO alone :)

“Meta on Thursday began removing advertisements from attorneys who were seeking clients that claim to have been harmed by social media while under the age of 18.” https://www.axios.com/2026/04/09/meta-social-media-addiction-ads

Schools should not be gateways to lifelong data surveillance. It is time to ask where these boundaries should lie, and who gets to decide.
https://privacyinternational.org/node/5696/

It would be really cute if it wasn't so costly: how so many people fall again & again for artificial hype creation in #AI:

1. Company says "our next model is super dangerous," we need to do this very responsibly. (But we'll sell it to whomever pays anyway. 🤷)

2. Journos blindly repeat industry claims without verifying them. "It'll destroy the world!"

3. Gov'ts demand "early access" & concede that "the future of our #security is now reliant on the future of AI."

#Anthropic #Mythos #AIhype

It appears one or more impersonators have already registered some of the #Android applications that I maintained, including @appmanager. I've reported this to #Google, but not sure what's going to happen. The Android developer verification is still in beta, and it doesn't have a lot of features now to deal with this kind of problems.

My #Wikipedia request for comment just closed, finally banning #AI content in articles! "The use of LLMs to generate or rewrite article content is prohibited"

Kudos to all who participated in writing the guideline (especially Kowal2701) and the whole WikiProject AI Cleanup team, this was very much a group effort!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Writing_articles_with_large_language_models/RfC

Using #RSS helps you control what you read, intentionally and algorithm-free. 🧹

No wonder the RSS reader #NextcloudNews is one of the more popular Nextcloud apps!

In his article on Medium, Cory Doctorow explains why using RSS is great:

“The one thing you can choose to do that will make your internet life better and make the internet better for everyone else, too.”

https://doctorow.medium.com/you-should-be-using-an-rss-reader-76aed31151f9

Thanks to @basernst for recommending the article!

Remarkable initiative by @wavesblog and Isa Stasi to give technologists a channel to talk about #DMA!

Pressing issues related to app stores in environments dominated by #Apple and #Google were discussed in details by @eighthave and @marcprux.

Take some minutes to hear it, it's worthy.

https://www.youtube.com/@DMAVOXPOPULI

Not sure where #Google asked for feedback about their developer verification program, but they surely didn't talk with #FLOSS devs, civil society, privacy organisations or their #Android users

#FDroid did since September, and interacted with folks in the Fediverse, forum, email and in person

They all voiced one opinion: "developer verification must be stopped"

@marcprux has written an open letter, signed by likeminded organisations who want to #keepandroidopen

Click: https://f-droid.org/2026/02/24/open-letter-opposing-developer-verification.html

See also the complementary blog post: https://f-droid.org/2026/02/24/open-letter-opposing-developer-verification.html

At @fosdem 2026, Neil Johnson explored why sustainability is critical for open source - and why it matters even more for decentralised networks like @matrix.

🌱 “Decentralisation without sustainability is just deferred centralisation.”

True resilience comes from long-term investment: maintaining infrastructure, investing in independent governance, and keeping core functionality open source.

▶️ Watch the talk and read the blog: https://element.io/blog/sustainable-decentralised-comms-at-element/