Buy used. Google meets their security standards.

Or just wait for the Motorolas with preinstalled Graphene. We’re unsure of when they’re coming though.

Man the custom ROM life just reinforces my idea that stock Android is a fucking nightmare. I use Graphene and it just asks, “Hey, do you want to install this app (+ without network access?” Yes? Neat, it’s on your phone now. The literal only roadblock is enabling installs from non-appstore apps like browser or files, which makes sense. No fear mongering, no developer mode, no wait a day to do it.

So… can I still flash custom firmware like OPNsense and Openwrt on them? Cause I literally just posted about hardware decision a few days ago 😭

Edit: It seems the article and actual FCC document will leave previous router models alone, but anything newer is cooked… Even the US brands like Cisco aren’t actually manufactured here because we fucking outsource evrything. I hate this government.

I say it like waffle + urn (or fern) = wahfern

I just know it’s supoosed to be an acronym for “We Allow Female Representing Nipples” as a joking response to Tumblr’s porn ban, which removed posts with “Female Representing Nipples”

Two: having the enter the address in a non-standard way (for the US) City, Street, Building Number, makes finding things even harder.

THAT’S why i always struggled to look up buildings on Comaps! Hell, I wondered why the sesrch was so hard!

My main issue is the lack of traffic data. I wish I didn’t live in a car-centric society, but i do, so I need to know if the route I’m taking is going to be shit.

I’m no heritage Tumblr user, I didn’t have an account until about a year ago, but I used to browse the site every now and then. I’d say the current userbase is a joy to be around, but the bots are everywhere. Every comment section on an artist’s post eventually will get a “Are you open for comms?” post. We still get the porn bots funnily enough. Also the occasional account takeovers and then bots DMming people.

But like in terms of real people posting? I don’t even know if I’ve ever had a bot post come up on my feed, for both the following feed and “for you” feed. Plus Tumblr does have an option to look at chronological posts and you can actually reach the end of the page eventually!

We all recently rioted and got the staff to revert a shitty twitter-like update within a day or so, which was nice. I still want wafrn to improve and replace Tumblr so we can escape the PoS CEO, but alas.

I’ve been using YT music anyway, but I recently started using my Navidrome server by just yt-dlp’ing albums + tag with MusicBrainz picard and boom. A bunch of songs I can own until my server burns down.

I feel a little bad about pirating, but I’m a college student who hasn’t even gotten a job yet… But I will be buying merch or music off bandcamp in the future when I know I have the budget for it!

I used to use the ListenBrainz app to scrobble from YT music until it had a stroke around December, so now I use Pano Scrobbler on Android. You can tell it what apps to monitor/scrobble from.

I found a web scrobbler extension that seems to be pretty popular on github that’s available for like every browser and supports multiple services. But I haven’t tried this before yet.

Okay how good is Smart Tube for ypu? I downloaded it to my family Fire TV but my mom just refuses to use it, so we watch long, loud, unbearable ads all the time. I get that there’s no algorithm to find videos, but can you import subscriptions? My mom has noticed YT never shows her a few of her subscribed channels in her recommended anymore.

I mean, yeah, I didn’t necessarily mean forever. And you’re right. But I hope you get some sort of law that is actually enforceable and has a chance of being useful for as long as it lives to defend you right to privacy.

Do install both the Play Store and Play Services if you want to use any Google app like YouTube or Maps (even some non-Google ones will need it). Then use a more private app store like Aurora and remove all permissions from the Play Store to strike a good middle-ground.

I unfortunately use play services on both my main profile and gaming profile (I had to make a seperate non Premission Manager X profile to be able to play games), but if you’re smart like Veronica in her GrapheneOS video, you can do a degoogled profile and a sandboxed profile!

If I could convince my family to contact me through Signal/Molly rather than Google Messages, maybe I could go completely degoogled on one profile. But alas.

Yay for the EU! Hopefully you guys get a law that will permanently enshrine your privacy rights (or rights to encrypted chats at least).

As a gen z, what school that uses online classroom environments and resources doesn’t give kids school-monitored tech? And for my district, our Chromebooks were HEAVILY locked down and monitored. I remeber trying to search the term “guitar latina” for a music project once and getting my search flagged because of “latina.” Most popular sites were firewalled/unaccessable (so .xxx domains were most likely blocked too). The terminal was literally disabled. Several system settings were disabled or unable to be edited. We couldn’t download programs, and most extensions were blocked (I think they eventually blocked them all). Hell, we couldn’t even change our desktop wallpaper.

Basically, at least at my middle and high school, it was very hard to access inappropriate material, and if you did, you were likely to get caught. Use cloudflare’s family dns (they have a whole setup guide) for your home network and any devices that aren’t fully locked down by the school (includes personal devices that aren’t school owned), and put parental control on so your kids can’t touch it.

If they get past all that, then congrats! You have kids who are very good at problem solving, searching the internet for info, and experimenting. All of which are great qualities for future cybersecurity professionals.

Damn, I was gonna say just use web version, but they do often have missing features compared to app, so I understand why you had to download it…

If you’re looking for something to use with actual accounts (like banking), use hardened Firefox (with arkenfox) or a hardened chromium browser. Neither Mullvad Browser nor LibreWolf (and especially NOT Tor) are designed for that use case.

I wonder if my one bank doesn’t like Librewolf. I logged in no issue on Ungoogled Chromium, but got a “security warning” on LW. Meanwhile Discover doesn’t give a fuck and works when it wants to on either (read: never). Paypal worked fine on LW. I do use a Banking container on LW and turn off VPN, but banks are making it harder to go no app…

Can’t you just use Ublock with advanced mode on and have the same thing as NoScript?

Yeah, my brain dumb. Edited the original post to say 4.

Thank you for the wonderful response! I figured it was kinda like Fediverse, but I was lost if the difference in features caused issues with where your account was made. I made an account on conversations.im and now use Movim on browser and Conversations (from F-droid) on my phone. I need to start finding communities!

There’s this god forsaken fucking channel that keeps coming up on my YT music that is some AI generated slop parody songs of real songs, and they all have raunchy/18+ themes and names. I used to have a screenshot cause I thought I would post it but then I never did.

Anyway fuck them, and fuck YT Music for recommending me them.

Thanks, this article was great. I guess I’ll finally check out XMPP, cause Matrix was… really mid when I tried it a few months ago and put me off. SimpleX was a mess too.

Side note, I get that the movim UI/Client is web only, but does that mean I can’t access Conversations.im (I know the app/client itself is Android only) on movim? I feel a little ashamed that I can’t understand this…