nobody is refusing to offer their sevices on linux because it is vulnerable
That’s not quite true, though in that case it’s about the service provider being unable to verify that the user isn’t running a operating system configured or modified to work against the interests of the service provider.
Maybe, but the archetypal non-technical user, my mother does want to run a third-party ROM. Her phone is out of its official support period, and she knows that security updates are important and would like a way to get them. Most people, at least in wealthy countries do have a technical person in their lives they can ask things like that. She doesn’t want to buy a new phone because it would be too big and lack a headphone jack, a position I share.
I had to recommend against running what I run (LineageOS, Magisk, Play Integrity Fix). Without PIF, too many apps will refuse to run on LineageOS. She doesn’t need root for much else (maybe adblocking) and doesn’t have the knowledge to make good decisions about whether to grant root permissions to an app that asks (Magisk doesn’t have an allowlist-only mode, but it should). Finally, keeping root through an update is fussy. It’s not hard, but it’s an extra step that has to be done in the right order every week or two.
Unlike Firefox in 2024, a third-party Android build that’s easy enough to install and isn’t sabotaged by Safetynet would something many non-technical users care about: an extended useful life for their devices.
Last time I used one was because I forgot my physical wallet and needed to pay for something. I don’t want to tell Google about my shopping habits, but I like to have options in case of emergency.
I’m running LineageOS (with GMS), Magisk, and Play Integrity Fix.
Can you cite examples of rooted smartphones leading to significant data breaches or financial losses? When the topic comes up, I always see hypotheticals, never examples of it actually happening.
It seems to me a good middle ground would be to make it reasonably easy (i.e. a magic button combination at boot followed by dire warnings and maybe manually typing in a couple dozen characters from a key signature) for users to add keys so that they can have a verified OS of their choice. Of course, there’s very little profit motive to do such a thing.
Google doesn’t want distributions of open source Android without Google services to be a viable option for mainstream users because that would reduce their ability to extract profits from the Android ecosystem.
While the focus is surely more on OEMs than end users at this point, I’m sure Google wants to keep the difficulty level for end users high enough that it remains niche.
I think the main reason third-party ROMs aren’t more popular is that Google and certain app developers fuck with people who use them. The article addresses the difficulties later on, but comes up short in my view on just how much of a hassle it is for someone who isn’t a tech enthusiast who wants, for example to keep an older phone up to date for security reasons.
I think the main motivation for Google is limiting user control over the experience. More user control leads to unprofitable behaviors like blocking ads and tracking, which is also the motivation for recent changes to the Chrome web browser that make content blocking extensions less effective. In all cases, companies that try to take away user control claim the motivation is security, usually for the benefit of the user.
Zero.
I mainly look at my subscribed feed, which contains mostly topics I want to see in communities moderated well enough I rarely see anybody being horrible.
When I try to recall the few non-gendered public bathrooms I’ve been in, they all had private stalls with real doors. It was nice. I’d be happy if all public bathrooms were like that.
You probably can’t fit a large enough explosive in a cell phone battery compartment to reliably crash a plane by exploding it anywhere in the passenger cabin, though that seems like more of an airport security thing than a customs thing.
typically portraits are taken with 50mm lenses
While photographers use a variety of focal lengths for portraits, the focal length that’s most associated with portrait photography is 85mm. This article from lens review site Imaging Resource illustrates the point; most of the lenses are 85mm or equivalent (e.g. 42.5mm on m43 with a crop factor of 2 making the field of view equivalent to 85mm).
There was a recent related discussion on Hacker News and the top comment discusses why this sort of solution is not likely to be the best fit for smaller organizations. In short, doing it well requires time and effort from someone technically sophisticated, who must do more than the bare minimum for good results, as you just learned.
Even then, it’s likely to be less reliable than solutions hosted by big corporations and when there’s a problem, it’s your problem. I don’t want to discourage you, but understand what you’re committing to and make sure you have adequate buy-in in your organization.
The fact that it’s been out for a year and federation is still only half-implemented suggests to me the decision to add it was pretty late in the development process, even if it was early in the marketing process.
Threads is for whoever Meta can sell it to, and I think it was pretty far along in its development before they actually committed to ActivityPub support.
I’m inclined to agree, and said so in the linked thread.
Basically, anyone who can read your home directory could decrypt your Signal database. That’s about typical of traditional desktop applications, but questionable for security-oriented software. Mac OS and (sometimes) Linux have more robust credential management options, and Signal signaled (yes, pun intended) its intent to adopt them.
As a practical point, saying it in English will almost certainly communicate what you need to communicate. Almost everyone who makes international calls will recognize that you’re speaking English even if they don’t understand what you’re saying, which suggests that the Russian or Korean speaking person they’re trying to reach is not at that number.
Apps on F-Droid are not using proprietary Google APIs and won’t be affected.
I haven’t been following the RCS story closely. My impression is it’s a standard core on which each provider can tack on nonstandard extensions, and somehow carriers are involved even though it’s internet-based. It sounds like people who won’t adopt third-party internet messaging apps are going to continue to have a bad time.
That’s probably what everyone using Lemmy would prefer to do, but some people believe it would negatively impact their ability to stay in touch with friends or family.
It’s probably more fair to call its claim of being decentralized fake or disingenuous. There doesn’t seem to be any way to participate in the ecosystem without going through the Bluesky relay, a central point of failure with strong incentives to eventually do something shitty.