This is where you clearly see Apple is all about privacy posturing and not much about actual privacy.

If they really cared about their customers’ privacy, they would require notification servers registered with APN to push notifications encrypted with a key that only the recipient apps have the private key to. This would be true end-to-end encryption, and Apple would only relay encrypted notifications across, enabling them to deny all subpoenas and any kind of snooping requests from law enforcement on the simple basis that they plain can’t even decode the notifications in the first place.

The very fact that they do have access to the notifications in clear-text is undeniable evidence that they actively want and do collaborate with law enforcement.

Meaning Apple’s stance on privacy is utter BS - something anybody with a modicum of critical thinking suspected from the start, but now the evidence is crystal-clear.

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

Powered by open web standards

That’s the state of computing in 2023: a browser disguised as a native app running 15 layers of Javascript is used as a friggin terminal. And nobody bats an eyelids, as if the utter insanity of it made any sense.

And the installer is 117M compressed. That’s MEGABYTES… For a terminal!

The mind boggles…

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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.

You don’t have to:

Create a work profile managed by Shelter. then install the sketchy Microsoft app - along with all the other sketchy apps you don’t trust - in the work profile where they won’t have access to any of your important data or contacts, won’t have any permission you don’t want to give them, and where you can freeze them and neuter them completely when they’re not in use.

Here’s a good howto for Shelter and work profiles. Work profiles are great: they’re just as good as separate accounts to keep unstrustworthy apps from accessing data you don’t want them to get at and putting you under surveillance, but they’re a lot more flexible than separate accounts.

Work profiles are a standard Android feature that everybody who cares about privacy should use.

If you’re in Linux and you want the same thing right now, scrcpy already offers to expose your cellphone’s camera as a video4linux device. See here:

https://github.com/Genymobile/scrcpy/blob/master/doc/v4l2.md

I use it every once in a while when I do a presentation in Teams at work and I need one webcam to show my mush, and another to demonstrate whatever device I’m presenting: I use the cellphone to capture close-ups of the device and focus on features people ask me to show, scrcpy sends the camera capture to a v4l2 device, and Teams uses the v4l2 device as a regular video source.

Super useful!

Isn’t not buying anything on Black Friday generally a good advice?

Just take a screenshot of the QR code and save the image somewhere

It was just a joke.

Although it’s true: they probably do know a lot more about stuff that matters to their generation than you do, just like you knew more than your parents about stuff that mattered to you as a kid.

And yes, I agree, they do get exposed to the Big Tech party line a lot. But don’t underestimate the kids: they’re smart, they can tell BS when they see it more than you think, and they’re not that easy to indoctrinate.

I know that because when I was a kid, we had our own tech overlords (in my generation, the phone company) and we walked all over them despite the propaganda and apparent overwhelming power. Why would today’s kids be any different?

Yeah, don’t: they know more than you.

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

Google loves open source too

Google loves open source when it suits their agenda.

For example, they created an entire OS almost from scratch. It cost them billions and the vast majority of it was open source, so people would be enticed to get onboard the Android ecosystem.

Now that Google has a virtual monopoly with Android, look at the state of AOSP: it’s a shell of its former self. Most of what’s left in it is becoming old and stale, because Google is quietly replacing the open-source bits that are now an inconvenience to them with their proprietary, more up-to-date counterparts.

I know what you did last summer…

…

Bwahaha! gotcha!

The fight for privacy is not new, and it predates the internet by far.

The problem is that, in the past, the state was on your side in the fight for privacy. Today, it sides with Big Tech and whoever offers it the most data to conduct its own privacy violations, or pays our elected officials the most.

It’s a bit overwhelming when giant, unchecked and unaccountable monopolies and your own country, both with almost infinite resources and legal ways to do whatever they want with impunity, gang up on you at the same time.

It’s not very likely, unless you’re a heavy sleeper who happens to sleep in unsafe places regularly - or your partner at home is up to no good.

Also, implants are kind of finicky with respect to reader placement, because they’re sitting under a layer of skin full of conductive water, and they’re usually not symmetrical, so the reader has to be positioned a certain way to score a good read. You as the implant owner know “the move” (in fact, it quickly becomes second nature and you never think about it anymore) but unless you explain it to someone or they know about this shortcoming, they’ll have a hard time getting a read. That’s assuming you don’t wake up because someone is touching you, because the read range is very short - like 1/4" when the reader is ideally placed - and you don’t hear the loud bing from the cellphone.

But yeah, you’re correct: strictly speaking, if you have a good memory, a long and complicated password - or a mental “recipe” to make one - and a healthy habit of changing passwords regularly is better. Or better: a password in your head and an implant as a second factor.

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

I don’t buy stuff from Youtubers. If they had a real business, they wouldn’t spend most of their time making Youtube videos.

/etc/hosts