It’s true. Pretty sure I read that on an Andrew Tate post before I left Twitter, I believe he is some kind of gay authority?

Yeah, means Signal would just not have a presence eg an office or local routing/CDN servers in the countries that demand backdoors.

It would mean slower service for anyone in such countries, but the service would not stop working or become less secure.

It’s negative either way, as it chips away at the legitimacy of private E2E chat, and legislators the world over seemed determined not to learn that there’s no such think as “backdoors, but just for the good guys”. You either have a resilient end-to-end zero trust encrypted system or you don’t.

Yes, agreed. And calculators are essentially tabulators, and operate almost just like a skilled person using an abacus.

We shouldn’t really be surprised because we designed these machines and programs based on our own human experiences and prior solutions to problems. It’s still neat though.

Not sure if you’re being sarcastic but boats splitting in half is not uncommon, as far as boat structural failures go it’s a relatively common one.

Stats on such a thing are unavailable but there are many news articles regarding boats splitting in half. I’d hope the safety factor on a fission reactor is several orders of magnitude higher than a seafaring vessel.

https://www.marineinsight.com/videos/why-do-ships-break-from-the-middle/

So, uh. What about Lemmy?

They can also crawl this publically-accessible social media source for their data sets.

I’m on board with abandoning mainstream social media, but my point is that your suggestion would not solve the problem just relocate it. A better solution to the AI conglomerates stealing everyone’s data from the open Internet is legislation and regulations - ie tackling the whole ‘stealing data’ component, along with stronger privacy regulations for everyone to make it harder for them to do the same in the future. It’s nice seeing the EU taking some positive steps, but we will not see the US take any steps in that direction anytime soon, due to corporate capture of their politicians and the AI companies all being in the top 10 most wealthy companies in the US.

I’m bummed about this, but it’s not a shock given they retired the brand back in 2021. So much for “we will support these devices for as long as they continue to be used” however. This will generate a lot of e-waste.

I have an 880 that my family use regularly with the TV/AV/etc. I don’t mind so much navigating the three remotes and several buttons to get movies or TV running, but it’ll be annoying having all the extra remotes out on coffee tables all the time now, and repeated instructions to the rest of the fam on how to use them 🥲

Their app is predominantly a web front end. You could previously program your remote entirely via their website years back iirc. They had to program this component as you say for getting new remote profiles.

To be fair, why would they bother programming a ‘local only offline mode’ for your specific use-case when Internet connectivity was ubiquitous long before these devices were released?

Like yeah in retrospect it would be helpful now, but as a business decision it would have made very little sense to Logitech.

Uh… these remotes connect to Logitech servers so they can get infrared codes and button configurations for new devices from Logitech’s (constantly updated) device database - and also so that people who have taken the time to manually ‘learn’ and label a new device’s remote functionality can upload it to the central service for others to use. I can’t add a TV released last year to my 10 year old Harmony remote without such a service.

So yes, there’s absolutely a reason for them to need to connect to a server. They also do not need ‘24/7 network access’, instead they connect once in a blue moon if and when you wish to modify your remote’s config… via USB.

Organic Maps is not at feature parity with paid options but it is pretty damn good for FOSS. I use it almost daily for driving around city/suburban Australia and it very rarely gives me bad directions - certainly no more than the paid option i previously used (Sygic).

Using a Pixel 5 on Calyx OS. I was attracted to CalyxOS and Graphene as they both use a locked bootloader allowing OTA updates and keeping the boot process secure. I’d say either are good choices. I’ve been very happy with CalyxOS, only a few minor issues in the few years I’ve been on it (a tile button not working in one update, that kind of minor stuff).

This phone model is EOL now and only getting security patches, so im on the lookout for a Pixel 8 to move to (going second hand for costs). I’m planning to give GrapheneOS a try for a few weeks when I upgrade as I’ve read good things about it and will have a good yardstick to compare it to now with my time on CalyxOS.

P. S. I think the Proton CEO thing is overstated - he praised an anti-big-tech pick for the (iirc) Assistant Antitrust Attorney General (that is objectively good), and then backed it up saying he is very hopeful this person with a proven track record litigating against big tech will take on their monopolies that have been hindering players like Proton heavily over the years. His statements were always going to be taken poorly though (any Trump action being praised - even if the action was good, is a red flag because Trump is a disaster for a thousand other reasons and people are understandably on edge), and the follow-up comments should never have been done from the official Proton social media account - which is something Proton also stated, and said wouldn’t happen again. Me: OK that’s strike one. I’m not throwing them out after 9 years of very positive work for one failure, I think there’s a tendency in the privacy community to ‘let perfect be the enemy of good’ and for me at least this is an example of that.

The thing people often dont realize is that if you do end up caving in and installing Google app services back onto your de-googled phone and logging into your old Google account - well, you’re almost back to square one. Google now ties all the identifiers of that phone/OS to your old Google account and will continue tracking it as much as possible whenever it sees those identifiers accessing anything. So I’d avoid that if your goal is de-Googling, but I understand why some need it as a stop-gap.

I thought the same initially re: sunk costs, but when I actually sat down and made a list of the apps I had on my old phone and what I used them for, I could quickly see that almost half of them were already FOSS. Then checked what alternatives are available for others and realized i could actually replace almost everything. The only premium apps I ended up “needing” were Poweramp*, and a couple others I actually forget now without finding my list. Almost everything can be replaced by using the website as a web link or web app, or using an open source alternative.

A big bonus of that process was seeing on the Aurora Store how many trackers were detected in each of the old apps while i was reviewing them and it was insane. I remember one Sudoku app I’d installed years back had like 16 trackers… Wtf. Checked FOSS options on F-Droid and found several alternatives.

*Poweramp can be bought direct from the developer, no need for Google apps, so I repurchased it via that method so I could avoid using my old account. I don’t mind buying things a second time if the devs have made the facilities available to avoid Google. I recently did the same for Symfonium.

The only ones that stung a bit to abandon was Sleep As Android which I’d paid for (I use their limited free version now and block it on the firewall to prevent ads/tracking); and Sygic (gps app) I’d paid lifetime maps for… I just use Organic Maps now, and while it’s not as fancy it navigates just fine and I use it regularly for car GPS.

Things like Shazam that there’s not really a FOSS alternative for but are free (with questionable tracking) you can install as a ‘work profile’ app via Shelter, which means it has no access to your real contacts and personal data, and can be set to auto-freeze (deletes cache and pauses app, keeps personal data). So you can use it and expose minimal data, and it can’t tie it back to a Google account to profile you as it doesn’t see one.

So far I’ve never needed a Google account on this phone, which means it’s been a clean break from Google entirely. 3 years now and very happy with the results.