No, he’s not qualified either.

So the guy who wasted 44 billion dollars on a stupid website will audit the entire federal government? I can see how he’s totally qualified to call unnecessary spendings when he sees them.

Someone is making money off of the surveillance and that someone knows someone else in the board of education. That’s why it exists. It has nothing to do with sudent safety.

I would cancel and tell the restaurant why.

Businesses need to know why they lose customers, because if enough of them report the same reason, they might do something about it.

Free software (not open-source, it’s really free software that’s important) that depends on a single for-profit vendor is not free.

MicroG is open-source but it’s not free. It fails to address two problems:

• What do I care looking at the source code of a Google Play Services replacement when Google still holds my cellphone by the balls for certain critical functions?
• Why do I need permission from Google for apps to function properly on my cellphone?

I don’t think OP cares about getting the source of the apps they run so much as the apps being free-as-in-libre in his original question. Many people mistake open-source for free software and MicroG is not truly free.

MicroG works well if you let it leak some data to Google.

I would like a free-as-in-free-from-Google Google Play Services reimplementation that lets me use any app that depends on it without hitting any Google server.

Google Play Services

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I’m a kid of the cold war.

It’s behind a firewall. The only thing exposed to the outside is port 22 - and only pubkey login too.

And gee dude… It’s been running for 18 years without being pwned 🙂

“In the West Bank” is the key to understanding this story.
Had he been shot anywhere else, it would have been a different story.

Sure it is. There’s a button labeled “Manage exceptions” that does exactly that.

It’s not the only thing that leaks timezone data, and the fix is identical: have the machine pretend you’re in UTC.

For example: if you enable Resist Fingerprinting (RFP) in Librewolf, it will lie to websites and pretend your timezone is UTC - because of course timezone is one of the factors used to fingerprint you - and all the sites you visit that show you your local time, or depend on your local time for something or other, will show you the wrong time. And that’s how you know it works 🙂

There is something I don’t understand with people who rant about Reddit: if you hate it so much, why do you stay there?

I had a Reddit account myself. I wasted it and moved on. I certainly don’t torture myself with it anymore: the communities here on Lemmy are smaller but they’re a lot nicer to be a part of, so it’s a no-brainer.

tl;dr: your money does not go to Google and the ppl you get it from would have purchased it anyway. The device just ends up in your hands instead of the land fill or being recycled

It all depends on how you look at it. You choose to see it as your money saving an object from the landfill, and I choose to follow the trail of my money going all the way to Google’s pocket ultimately.

But those two outlooks are not incompatible: they both hold true. You just choose to disregard the latter while I can’t get past it.

Really?

Say I buy a pack of gum at the supermarket. The supermarket got my $2. Then I resell the pack of gum to my neighbor for $1.50. Who do you think has my neighbor’s $1.50 in his pocket? Me or the supermarket?

Hint: it’s not me. I’m still down $0.50 from the moment before I bought the pack of gum. And even if I had sold it to my neighbor full price because it’s new and unopened, it’d like I never bought it in the first place and my neighbor did.

Nobody talked about Calyx

I did, and you replied to me 🙂

if you wanted to avoid anything primarily made by Google you’d have a Linux phone

That’s true.

Unfortunately that’s not possible: I live in a country that delegates secure authentication to banks, and banks only supply 2FA apps that work in Android or iOS. If I had a Linux phone, I’d still need another phone with Android just for the purpose of banking, interacting with social services, logging in my work hours, getting notifications from the post office…

That’s the misery of Android: Google is such a pervasive monopoly that even if you want a fully deGoogled OS, the basis of it has to be 95% made by Google anyway because the rest of society goes along and reinforces their monopoly. And at some point, even someone like me has to make compromises to simply live normally.

I would gladly buy a Linux phone and I’d even put up with their quirks (I tried one once so I know they’re not as polished an experience as Android). But I am also a practocal man and it’s just not an option.

I think GrapheneOS should come with a no-compromise-security branch that only supports Google Pixel phones and an “ordinary security” branch that supports a wide variety of less-secure but non-Google hardware for people who can’t stomach the idea of buying a Google phone.

GrapheneOS would reach a much wider audience, and not everybody needs perfect security. I for instance am a low-value target and I have no need for GrapheneOS-level security.