I stand corrected, but do you need a Google account at any point for activation etc.? I’ve had increasing difficulty creating a Google account at all without a phone number

Apple devices aren’t the best but theyre definitely not the worst. If the leaked Cellebrite documentation is to be believed then the newest devices running the latest iOS builds are well protected against hacking tools, second only to GrapheneOS. The iOS permissions system is relatively robust, lockdown mode is a good bit of extra protection too. And iirc full-disk encryption is enabled by default on iOS these days. Advanced Data Protection lets you E2E encrypt (most) cloud storage too. These are all good things

For the most part, you can set up an Apple Account without using genuine information (though the age verification thing might change this, but Google is implementing that too). For both iOS and GrapheneOS you need to either trust Apple or Google with your phone number to set up an account.

I’d be interested to hear people’s criticisms so long as they’re not just random claims with no elaboration or evidence

TikTok was a data harvesting surveillance tool from day one. It didn’t need to be ‘got’

Their Online Safety Act is stupid ever since it was enforced last year as that has done nothing except for making people bypass it entirely

It’s had worse outcomes than that. People who do decide to follow the law are having their IDs stolen and leaked and the UK gov (and others worldwide) don’t care. They designed and forced on us a law a ‘Safety’ Act that does nothing but actively compromise people’s safety. I realise I’m preaching to the crowd here but if this shit doesn’t destroy what’s left of people’s faith in government then I don’t know what will

CCTV is the problem. Mass surveillance has to be stopped at the source. Just like the only way to guarantee a company won’t leak your ID or other personal info is to not let them have it in the first place, the only way to ensure a recording of you isn’t used for tracking or other malicious purposes is to not be recorded to begin with

How to actually do this I have no idea. But even if a company or government is legally bound to not use CCTV footage for nefarious purposes, there’s little actually stopping them

Doesn’t even need to be intentional when there are virtually no consequences for leaking that info

The advice I’ve always read is to avoid forks because they usually get security updates slower than the main browser. Is that true of waterfox?

I still remember the Mozilla Internet Application Suite before the browser part was spun off into Firefox and the email into Thunderbird. Some of their moves have been disappointing but I’ll still never use Chrome

Then this post is irrelevant to you. This is about a policy implemented into iOS. The only two options are credit (not debit) cards and drivers’ licenses. If you have neither then you can only use iOS in child safe mode.

I’m assuming the name, birthday and address on the ID have to line up with your existing apple account info or it won’t accept the card. In theory you could just change your details though

It’ll be baked into the ToS somewhere but I agree it’s bullshit. Years ago I bought a youtuber downloader app (I know I should’ve just used yt-dl) and they released an update that removed support for half the websites and locked them behind a new higher-priced tier. None of it was mentioned in the changelog, just a prompt that came up after you’d installed the new build. I was able to reinstall the previous version and keep using it but I was still so pissed off

So you need a phone number these days? That’s something I’ve read a lot of mixed reports about

I sure as hell didn’t vote for them. But regardless of the government these laws always seem to have bipartisan support. I’ve avoided this crap so far with VPNs and fake IDs but something baked into the OS like this I haven’t been able to fool. Yet

You think this isn’t coming to other devices? Google will presumably add this to Android and apps will follow suit by looking to the OS to verify your age so other forks will probably have to add it. Linux on smartphones is dead in the water so what’s the alternative?

Phone companies are required to collect and retain IDing info of customers to activate a phone number in Australia. There’s no way around it unfortunately

From what I’ve read online it’s going to be worldwide

26.3.1 will be the last version without the mandatory verification

I mean some shit you find online is pretty grim but when I was a kid I knew the internet was for adults and didn’t expect everything to be catered to me. Now the status quo seems to be “every website must be kid/advertiser friendly and PG13 by default, everything else must be locked behind a verification prompt”. How did we get here?

This might be a stupid question but when using ashai can you run any normal linux software or does it have to be specifically built for arm64/apple silicon?

All the big supermarkets already share surveillance data with each other. If this is coming to Coles it’s probably coming to every big retailer in the country