All of these photos are available under a Creative Commons license, free for you to use as long as you give me photography credit. South Park High School 2025 Norwin Band Festival Photo Credit: Kevin Gamin You can find all of the edited photos from this and other events on my Flickr site. South Park High School 2025 Norwin Band Festival Photo Credit: Kevin Gamin You can find all of my photos on my Smugmug site. South Park High School 2025 Norwin Band Festival Photo Credit: Kevin Gamin
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So, it's probably hard to believe this, given my user name, but sometimes I want to be sober instead of wasted or possibly overdosing... I do not consider myself to be in recovery or have a drug problem, but today is a bad day, and I feel like sobriety may be a better option than the alternative.
There are generally two options when it comes to recovery from drugs. One is Narcotics Anonymous and one is Smart Recovery. The difference is Narcotics Anonymous involves "high powers" as a step, which I view as religious baloney. Since I hate religion, but also want to be sober, Smart Recovery is the main alternative.
Both of these websites have canvas fingerprint tracking in them.
This is incredibly irresponsible and selfish and dangerous and either is a result of extreme technological ignorance or just willful disregard of people visiting those sites.
Smart Recovery seems to be much worse than NA in terms of data privacy because Smart Recovery is loading up things from content delivery networks and lots of external scripts, none of which likely care about the privacy of someone not wanting to be tracked.
Yes, it's "great" that NA and Smart Recovery can take a browser fingerprint of users and sell that to Meta who will then market this information to Rehab Facilities. (I'm not sure if that is what they do, but it wouldn't surprise me.)
But this information also is likely getting sold somehow to data brokers and that information could end up being looked at by a variety of people, including potential employers. If a large employer is looking at a potential employee, they can and often do get detailed information from data brokers. People are incredibly naive as to how much data brokers store about people. It's irresponsible and certainly not anonymous for these sites to track people like this, claim to be anonymous, and not even warn users prior to fingerprinting their hardware and identity.
Additionally, because na.org and smartrecovery.org are not hospitals or medical providers, this information is likely not HIPPA protected and certainly even if it were we have no way of knowing what data brokers do with these canvas profiles, which almost certainly link to real KYC canvas fingerprint profiles of naive users. And most users are naive users.
It's also so frustrating because many of these meetings are being done on zoom, so accessing the meeting is done by going to the website and visitors or former addicts or people attending meetings are getting canvas fingerprinted every time. It's disgusting, appalling, and another example of why it's just better to keep an addiction secret, try to detox on your own, and try to sober up on your own and stay sober if you can.
It's just infuriating. Thanks for reading my rant. And you can go to these sites yourself to check out the scripts in them. If I am misstating the privacy risks involved, I'd be happy to be told so.
Well I'm definitely not going to a meeting. Perhaps I can stick with coffee, although it's pretty late for coffee?
I'm a country coordinator for a SMART Recovery country other than the US.
This is highly unlikely, but I will check this out.
I find the idea that SMART would sell your data highly unlikely. SMART is privacy focused. Nick names are encouraged, you can enter zoom meetings with camera and mic silenced. SMART definitely does not collect personal data, only attendance numbers for internal statistics. SMART accepts donations from recovery organizations, but does not have any obligations towards them.
As I said, I will follow up.
Much of IT is subcontracted, so there may be the origin, and it will be looked into.
BTW, SMART's Financials are public. You are free to check if there is income from selling your data.
It’s almost certainly some traffic analytics package for the website.
They sound good in their marketing, they provide a bunch of useful statistics about visitors so the site can be tweaked for ease of access or to lower bounce rate.
The downside is that they often have rights to that data under their TOS because aggregation of data from multiple sites is how they provide a service.
The concern is that this data can be used to locate individual people and to learn of their associated identities. This is true even if they claim the data is “anonymized”, it’s a trivially simple process to use a second data set to correlate details and deanonymize the data.
Also, even if the TOS of their many "trusted partners" didn't specify selling it, and there's a huge amount of third party javascript on their site, taking a canvas fingerprint of a browser is highly sensitive and often is close to getting identification, since most people use Chrome for everything including online shopping sites. Why is a canvas fingerprint needed at all? What's next, adding Persona? Even if the canvas fingerprint is coming from cloudflare, US companies are allowed to lie to users in their terms and share data with the war-tech-bro-complex and lie to everyone. This is not a conspiracy theory; this was recently an admission made by Microsoft in regards to handling EU data with Azure; US companies can always be forced to lie. There's no way to verify that information isn't stored in a dataset, no matter who is obtaining the fingerprint, including for users of the site from other countries like those in the EU.
I have no reason to lie about this. Here's more proof:
Smartrecovery.org may be getting lower cost or free services by allowing these companies to collect user information and then sell it, which likely would not show up in a public financial statement.
As I said previously: "This is incredibly irresponsible and selfish and dangerous and either is a result of extreme technological ignorance or just willful disregard of people visiting those sites." I am not claiming smartrecovery.org is an advertising company.
I appreciate the effort to look into this but am skeptical that 6 months from now the third-party javascript will look any different, and for now I will continue to not use your site.
Also, for comparison:
This is from na.org which also has much less third-party tracking and no third-party google scripts, but still take canvas fingerprints which can usually uniquely identify users, unless the site is being accessed at a library or using a specialized browser:
aa.org, in comparison, does not use canvas fingerprint tracking in the site, but does have a google maps api javascript request and although I have no proof, I can't fathom google doesn't collect information from that api including the origination IP and the website it's embedded into, which is possibly tracking aa users as well for google. Why does aa need to call up a ad tracking and surveilance company api instead of something like openmaps which does not have a business model of tracking users?
My prediction is none of these organizations will have changed any of these things within the next year, if ever, despite the fact it could have real-world consequences for people visiting these sites.
I wish you the very best of success in your recovery efforts. It is a wise man who recognizes issues in his life, and takes steps to mitigate those issues. Much respect and solidarity. I am a recovering alcoholic of over two decades now. Sometimes when I'm at the store and wander by the alcohol isle, I think, 'Gosh I sure am glad I don't have to do that anymore.' While I would never preclude anyone from consuming alcohol, the consumption of alcohol wasn't my problem. It was that I allowed alcohol to consume me.
Li Chenggang, China’s international trade representative with the Ministry of Commerce told the media on Monday that the talks in Madrid are going smoothly and the US recognizes that “a stable China-US economic and trade relationship is of great significance to both countries and also has a major impact on global economic stability,” Xinhua reported.
this reads like copium on part of the chinese considering that the us & eu have been the one taking provocative actions this entire time.
The US is moving to reclaim the Bagram airbase from the Taliban after losing it during the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, Donald Trump announced.
“We’re trying to get it back, by the way,” Mr Trump told reporters during a joint press conference with Sir Keir Starmer in Aylesbury on Thursday.
The Bagram base was the largest operated by the US in Afghanistan and is strategically important in countering China’s growing influence in the region.
Mr Trump suggested that he was negotiating with the Taliban to retake ownership, adding: “We’re trying to get it back because they need things from us. We want that base back.”
I have never been to the USA and know too little about inner naunces to propose anything. But revolution is always a good way to explain to politicians who the people are, who the politicians are, and how it all works.
Here’s the thing: I’m with you. I agree as an American that the only thing that can stop this train is a wholehearted, full-throated rejection of everything this administration represents. That comes with a couple of issues, though, and the first is that the body politic here is intensely complacent; much too comfortable to be driven to action. The fact of the matter is that disapproval of Trump is the majority view, and even at the beginning of his second term that was still about a dead even split, but not even Trump’s atrocious performance in his first term was enough to galvanize a large portion of the US voter base in the 2024 election, despite it clearly being a critical inflection point. Unfortunately, if it doesn’t affect their life immediately and directly, a large portion of America simply doesn’t give a shit. Overcoming that apathy is likely going to require something large, noticeable, bombastic, demonstrably wrong, and personally painful, and by that point there’s a good chance it’ll be too late. Additionally, any revolution or unrest is likely to be heavily suppressed by the second issue: the US police state and its willingness to use deadly force, regardless of the severity of the situation. Between police forces, riot police, swat teams, the national guard, domestic surveillance, and now the might of the US military turned on its own populace, the Trump administration has all the tools to make any true resistance deeply costly and incredibly painful. Talk of resistance, of revolution, of taking up arms against this fascist takeover is easy, but the feasibility of a clean revolution in the face of the US police, military, and intelligence apparatus is doubtful. More likely we would end up with either civil war or insurgency, fighting an asymmetric campaign against an overwhelming force. We know that the US is vulnerable to such tactics (see: US expeditionary wars in Vietnam and the Middle East), but we also know that those tactics are incredibly costly, and require a populace that is highly motivated by what they perceive to be an existential threat.
The key here, in my opinion, is the military. Historically, he who controls the military, controls the state. The victors of coups and revolutions practically always have the military on their side, and for good reason; very few things are as persuasive as the threat of a bullet. Morale in the US military right now seems to be low, and if we can manage to break the trained obedience to hierarchy, we might just have a chance, but without them, I don’t see a way forward. Even every citizen striking and causing a complete shutdown of the US economy would just be likely to lead to threats being made to and examples being made of them, and getting people onboard for that is unlikely to be feasible from a fundamental level, given that the majority of America lives paycheck to paycheck.
I don’t want to be fatalistic or claim that this can’t be done or that we shouldn’t be doing anything about it; we should, and have a moral obligation to act, but the reality of the situation is that the time to act while avoiding discomfort was last November, and the viable options available to us now are going to hurt, and will likely only get more painful as time goes on. That makes people hesitant to act, and until such a time as they have more to lose from inaction than they do from action, I don’t expect that to change.
Nothing like letting the Taliban know "Oh yeah we are trying to take that back" on public channels so they can get everything nice and reinforced and ready for you and make it as much of a pain in the ass as possible.
And most likely no strategy is behind the killings.
Probably some fascist (not necessarily who we think it may be) has control over the military assets there and is making impromptu orders based on daily political and personal urges .
Based on the date, this is like reporting the second one, imo. A third wouldn't be at all surprising though, the Serial-Killer-in-Chief won't stop until someone forces him to.
Yemen's Ansar Allah movement, also known as the Houthis, carried out a hypersonic missile attack on Tel Aviv and a drone attack on Ilan and Asaf Ramon International Airport after Israeli strikes on the port of Al-Hudaydah, Houthi military spokesman Y…
"lemmy.ca" oh - completely unrelated tho - that reminds me of the horror the other day i had when i was browsing lemmy, as usual, and happened upon a COMPLETE TRAINWRECK OF A THREAD in the comments of a post, the absolute redditness of it making me wretch and fall ill on the floor, convulsing even. Unbeknownst to me i had straid far from my familiar circles to where a typical .world user was arguing on the semantics of ableism with an apparently typical .ca user. it was disgusting to say the least.
As in, responded to NATO - the most prolific invader in the world, involved in at least one high-profile genocide - doing a coup in Ukraine and trying to bring up its weapons to the border with its most populated areas? Also, it's cute how you are completely fine with Ukraine invading Iraq and Syria, so please don't pretend as if you care about anybody invading anybody.
You literally came here to shill for the invaders of Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Iran, and many other places, and to tell us how the rest of the world should roll over and die for your empire.
But hey, let's hear what you think Russia should have done in response to your empire's aggression.
Zelensky's actions only make no sense if one thinks he is doing what's best for Ukraine and ukrainians and is still intrerested in winning this war. In my opinion it's been quite obvious that Zelensky's and the goal of his close circle is to fight this war, not to make peace and ride this war as long as possible. Not to victory, because that seemed unlikely in 2022 and it seems almost impossible now. The goal is to stay in saddle until the collapse comes and then flee with the money and remain Ukraine's western recognize president in exile for life and keep living large with all the money he has and will have. If peace comes through peace agreement he will be the president that lost Ukraine and has to step down and the radicals who kept him in power will probably kill him as a traitor for betraying Ukraine.
Zelensky's goal therefore is not victory, but control. Control over the goverment and especially the military, ideological batalions and intelligence apparatus and such. Those will keep the war going, Russians away from Kiev, people in line and his political opponents silent. Those will help him ride out this war.
I didn’t have “possible nuclear exchange in the Middle East” on my bingo card for this year 😐
Edit: and yeah, that’d probably quickly spiral out of control into WW3. Maybe the Star Trek timeline is actually gonna pan out…? Sucks that we have to live through the horrifying part 🙁
Not really. With this defense pact, if Israel gets wild and decides to attack Saudi Arabia for some reason, Pakistan would go in on SA’s side… which would probably trigger all of Israel’s neighbors to attack Israel… which would probably trigger Israel to start nuking its neighbors… which would very plausibly include SA… which would trigger Pakistan to nuke Israel. And then you have WW3, because things would absolutely spiral from there.
There is a 0% chance Pakistan launches a nuclear missle to their west. India will launch their full aresenal yhe moment they detect a missle launch from Pakistan
I agree. Yet these defense pacts against a specific ‘enemy’ usually leads to a spiral of conflicts. We want LESS layers of emnity in the middle east. Not more.
sure but we have to be ok with pacts even if our propaganda and agitation have “sold” us that those are the bad guys. they’re likely no more bad than our “side” and progress like this is safer than not. look at nato keeping russia at bay?
No no when we do it it's a defense block to protect Freedom loving people when they do it it's a defense pack that's designed to spiral into war. Big difference.
Israel is comiting the final solution in gaza then they will take all palestine to finally start the plan for greater israel which some extreme visionaries include part of saudi. If you don't want more problem in the region you should keep cslling westetn countries to stop isrsel right now
Scientists have discovered a rare new cat coat color called salmiak, or salty liquorice, caused by a genetic mutation. This stunning shade is now explained.
I feel I should I comment on the title a bit. It's a genocide. And the 'Our Genocide' part is not a representation of Israeli sentiment, nor what the interviews showed, but a report of a specific group. The last part becomes clear in the video though.
Reporter Matthew Cassel speaks to Israelis in Tel Aviv, to see what they think of the war, famine and genocide happening next door, and the growing international condemnation against it
Wealthy consumers continue to account for a growing share of US consumer spending, highlighting the lopsided strength of the economy as a slowdown in hiring and wariness among other income cohorts raise fears of a slowdown.
Democrats also want the U.S. to officially condemn plans by Israel to construct settlements in the West Bank, which the letter says is "designed to end Palestinian and Israeli aspirations for a two-state solution.
What actions did dems do when they was in power to punish Israel for the settlement building and settler violence/terrorism?
A top Republican lawmaker in the House of Representatives is backtracking on a proposal that would have given Secretary of State Marco Rubio the power to revoke American citizens’ passports if he decides they have provided “material support” to terrorists.
Under Mast’s original proposal, the secretary of state would have been empowered to refuse or revoke passports of people they deem to have materially supported terrorists.
Activists were especially concerned the provision could be used against critics of Israel, given Rubio’s aggressive move to revoke green cards and student visas from noncitizens who have publicly demonstrated support for Palestinians.
A top Republican lawmaker in the House of Representatives is backtracking on a proposal that would have given Secretary of State Marco Rubio the power to revoke American citizens’ passports if he decides they have provided “material support” to terrorists.
Under Mast’s original proposal, the secretary of state would have been empowered to refuse or revoke passports of people they deem to have materially supported terrorists.
Activists were especially concerned the provision could be used against critics of Israel, given Rubio’s aggressive move to revoke green cards and student visas from noncitizens who have publicly demonstrated support for Palestinians.
A VPN that grants network-level privacy on mobile by routing app traffic through Tor, assigns each app a separate circuit for improved separation, bypasses app-level censorship, features per-app routing, security via Rust-based implementation, and awaits early adopter feedback.
Orbot is a free VPN and proxy app that empowers other apps to use the internet more securely. Orbot uses Tor to encrypt your Internet traffic and then hides it by bouncing through a series of computers around the world. Tor is free software and an open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as traffic analysis.
Yes, I know, there are several alternatives, I use InviZible Pro, which also use TOR, but it's always good to present also other OpenSource alternatives and the TOR VPN is a very recient release. El rest depends on the user which fits best his needs.
Looks slick, sounds sweet. Maybe there's deeper lore, but all I think of is the Librem 5 when I hear about hardware kill switches. Might consider it if it includes amenities like a decently replaceable battery, headphone jack, micro SD slot, and relockable bootloader.
So this kill switch will auto delete all the telemetry /e/ collects by default, including the Voice data Sent to OpenAI? right? RIGHT?
Btw, if you dont understand their text, let me translate it for you
We took out loans from a bunch of venture capitalists in order to make a phone with a weird gimmick which is completely unnecessary since our OS collects your Data by default and dosent care about your Privacy at all anyway, just so we can please a crowd of tech hippies who have no idea about actual privacy but want to look cool by switching off their Camera after posting their 24/7 location on facebook and letting ChatGPT analyze their breakup text. (Also btw we have to somehow pay back those millions by raising our stock prizes, so stay tuned for our cloud selling your unencrypted photos because we have to enshittify).
The only reason to have hardware switches is if you fear that you've been compromised. And if you've been compromised, why would you continue to use a compromised phone for things that need your location or access to your camera?
And if you go in with the expectation of „this phone is going to be compromised”, just remove the Camera and everything and attach a Webcam or Mic for whenever you really need it. This way you can actually verify easily if its on, instead of having a mm button that can be easily toggled while putting the phone away
They are worse then Linaege. Linaege at least supports local system backups. With /e/, you have to use their own unencrypted servers.
(Also btw they support Phones with not anymore updated firmware, which partially allows script kiddies with a flipper zero to exploit your chipset)
I can tattoo „privacy first” on the inside of my asscheek. Dosent mean it actually means anything.
Like I said, /e/ is not at all better than LinaegeOS, but instead takes the OK LinaegeOS, adds their own insecure services, removes everything that could be more secure, and misrepresents what is essentially a LinaegeOS Flavor as
As I was reading the Murena’s terms of use I discovered that the voice to text feature introduced with e/OS/ 3.0 is using the Open AI API. That means our voice is sent to Open AI so they can translate it to text.
Please tell me, where I can enable Seedvault or another local backup service without having to root my phone first or use apps like shiziku.
YES, I HAVE to use Murena services in order to back up my /e/ is phone without compromising security via root or shizuku. Prove me wrong, and send me a fucking video about it.
While I appreciate your desire to improve privacy for yourself and others, you are again inventing things (optional service as if everybody using /e/OS had it, relying on Murena services where not everybody does it) from your very narrow perspective as if it was the truth. Again I imagine your ultimate goal is to help people to find a better alternative (which is something I hope too) but I can't spend more energy arguing with made up problems. I hope others who do read your words and are exhilarated by your passion and the strength of your words do still go check the source of the claims you make but I don't want to have this kind of conversations again so safer to block. Take care of yourself.
Edit: to clarify, Google is the enemy. Meta is the enemy. Amazon is the enemy. etc, not you, not me, not Murena, not LineageOS, not whatever tiny project of the Internet is trying to do slightly less worst than BigTech and surveillance capitalism.
auto delete all the telemetry /e/ collects by default, including the Voice data Sent to OpenAI?
You are back with your FUD. I don't know what you have against /e/OS specifically or if you are genuinely paranoid but in this specific instance you are making stuff up! I clarified in lemmy.ml/post/35472063 so maybe a language barrier because the post you linked to was in French but the STT service is
NOT on by default
for paying customers only (0 chance that a random person would activate it and thus be shocked)
tries to anonymize the data
So... that's not even telemetry, that's like activating a service which the company explicitly said relied on OpenAI in the first place, people STILL paid for it AND activated it. They can't be surprised that it's sending anything to OpenAI then.
Come on, help us make this community better. We have enough problems with BigTech, small tech and more that we do NOT need to invent problems!
PS: also the reasoning about the presence on kill switch is ... just plain silly. The PinePhones are running Linux, no Android, no /e/OS/ or whoever actor you might dislikes, OSes built by others, e.g. PmOS, Ubuntu, etc and yet still have hardware kill switches.
/e/ OS does a little trolling and sends all your Text to Voice data to OpenAI for processing and Speech generation.
First of all, to anyone downvoting my Comments about /e/ being a piece of shit, because...
they advertise themselves as degoogled, but instead let you connect to Google/Microsoft/etc services
replace all the propriatery not at all Secure Services from Google, with.... Drumroll please.... Propriatery and not at all Secure Services from themselves and actively encourage it.
They are For-profit
and being MORE out of date then even Fairphones stock roms.
... I told you so. Dm your Instance admin, pay them to send the DB entries of your Downvotes on a Thumb drive (or anything else from SSD to 3.5 inchHDD, depending on your preferences), and shove it up your rectum.
But a TL;DR:
/E/ is not Private. They just switch one bad comany to another one.
This is a Private OS. They should not have this integration, since there are more than enough FOSS alternatives.
for paying customers only
Dosent change my point.
tries to anonymize the data
Tries. Tries. Tries.
They claim to be private. They incorporate a non private Service even though there are valid alternatives. Thats where this discussion starts and ends.
It being sandboxed doesn't prevent it from doing whatever the fuck it wants within the confines of the sandbox, and that sandbox has to be pretty wide to be functional.
Like, which is worse:
An os that ships with an opt-in kinda privacy unfriendly locked behind a paywall.
An os that ships google play services, which you need to give all sorts of permissions for apps to function, and requires a google account.
To quote you:
They claim to be private. They incorporate a non private Service even though there are valid alternatives. Thats where this discussion starts and ends.
See how that applies to graphene shipping google play services instead of microG?
Not commenting on the other stuff but people should get used to the fact that anonymized private data is still private, so a so-called privacy app should not be leaking or disclosing or selling it. It might be LESS invasive than personally identifiable data, but it's not NON-invasive.
Who is willing to pay for it after all? Almost certainly, someone who is up to no good. And if you can think of a way it can possibly be misused, then enabling that misuse is invasive.
I'll preface my answer to clarify that I'm against surveillance capitalism and privacy Zuckering. I say that in the open, do not use Google services, Amazon, have my own PeerTube instance, IoT at home is HomeAssistant with ZigBee, etc. So my goal here is NOT to cut some slack to anyone.
I started with this because I'm not actually sure what you are referring to. Since my initial comment is about Murena STT I'll assume it's that but if not please correct me. This specific service... is not a compromise I would accept. So I'm in NO way advocating for me. The only thing I'm clarifying is that this service is not something one can "stumble upon" and enable without paying attention. That's why I put such recurring emphasis on it. It's not coherent with "sharing all data" or imagining a scenario where somebody buys an /e/OS phone Murena and somehow ending up getting their data leaked (due to the potentially imperfect anonymization) to OpenAI. One has to activate it and to do so one must be a Murena services paying customer. This is not the case when "just" installing /e/OS. So once again I'm not saying Murena is perfect, not even that it did the right choice (according to my own privacy preferences) my relying on OpenAI, and yet that problem is not relevant to most people who use /e/OS.
To make a quick a analogy it's like installing WhatsApp on a privacy OS phone. Sure you technically can do that but if you do and complain about how Meta is collecting your data then you did it on yourself, you can't blame the OS developers.
I don't understand what you're saying above, but my point is that disclosing any info to adversaries is invasive even if the anonymization is 100% perfect. The potential imperfection makes it worse, but that's a side issue.
An example is polling. Some terrible politician X wants to know what voters think of issue Y, like "35% in favor". So she hires a polling firm to call people and ask their opinions about Y, with the result being completely anonymized and aggregated, again, like "35% in favor". What will X do with that info? Something bad, of course! We said at the beginning that they are terrible!
So do you want to cooperate with such a poll, that X commissioned to serve an evil purpose? Of course not! Or at least, I hope of course not. In that case, what do you think of software that effectively enrolls you in such a poll against your wishes?
If your private activity is being statistically reported to your adversaries, your privacy is being invaded even if there is zero PII in what the adversary gets. This is infosec 101. A quotation due to Silvio Micali is "a good disguise does not reveal the person's height". Statistically summarized information is still information, and calling it otherwise is self-serving nonsense. You want to give the adversary NO information. Anonymization is irrrelevant.
My point isn't really about the implementation per se (I'm aware of the limitation since at least 2011 by reading then Link Prediction by De-anonymization: How We Won the Kaggle Social Network Challenge so more than a decade ago) but rather that the "solution" Murena offers is not a mandatory service. If people want to use it, they can. I do not want to, I do NOT have to. I'm not arguing that their solution is good, or bad, only that it's optional.
This paper describes the winning entry to the IJCNN 2011 Social Network Challenge run by Kaggle.com. The goal of the contest was to promote research on real-world link prediction, and the dataset was a graph obtained by crawling the popular Flickr so…
Well they say "kill switches are located beneath the battery cover and can be switched with a paperclip or similar tool, so it is not easy to switch them regularly, but for shifting the camera and microphone OFF for longer times they are very suitable"
Got a CMF1 with /e/OS since ~February (cf my history of comments to see the ups and downs, overall happy with both) ... and I admit I'm tempted. I obviously don't need it and having a relative cheap (~350EUR) feels pretty nice to me. Maybe if I want an upgrade later on but for now I'll stick to what I have.
Murena SHIFTphone 8: The sustainable, modular smartphone with privacy-focused /e/OS and a hardware kill switch. Enjoy a 6.67″ AMOLED display and expandable storage up to 512GB.
Jesus, the constant attempt at undermining murena by some users with falsehoods and misrepresentation is quite concerning here. Reminiscent of certain private OS devs having public mtdowns.
Indeed, it's quite tiring especially when IMHO the goal is to decouple from large dominating actors that are obviously worst. I think the initial motivation is positive, namely genuinely improve privacy, but it goes to such extreme that no compromise is possible (which even that is fine) to actually inventing scenarii that aren't real to make the point.
TL;DR: let's focus on doing better than the popular worst offenders (random recent example) and eventually keep on improving without pushing imperfect projects down
Google misled users about their privacy and now owes them $425m, says court
A court ordered Google to pay $425 million after finding the company misled 98 million users about data collection through its "Web & App Activity" setting1. The case revealed Google continued gathering user data via Firebase, a monitoring database embedded in 97% of top Android apps and 54% of leading iOS apps, even after users disabled data collection1.
Google's internal communications showed the company was "intentionally vague" about its data collection practices because being transparent "could sound alarming to users," according to district judge Richard Seeborg1.
This ruling adds to Google's recent privacy settlements, including: - $392 million paid to 40 states in 2023 for location tracking violations - $40 million to Washington state for similar location tracking issues - $1.38 billion to Texas in 2025 over location tracking and incognito mode claims1
Google plans to appeal the $425 million verdict, with spokesperson Jose Castaneda stating "This decision misunderstands how our products work" and asserting that Google honors user privacy choices1.
Please just officially support Linux mobile on it as an option. I don't care if it buggy and barely usable, most Android phone companies actively make it almost impossible to install anything other than Android.
They all use the base package from the chipset vendor. It only supports android and only for a given number of years. I wouldn't be surprised if the license was massively invasive.
Basically, there's no drivers and no documentation for most mobile hardware outside of manufacturer contracts.
Can someone clarify: according to Murena's website, they use /e/OS, which is what they call "degoogled" Android. I would assume degoogled means no Play Store. If that's the case, what's going to happen next year, when Google starts blocking installing .apks by unverified developers? Which, I'm assuming, is a good chunk of developers who have apps on F-Droid.
Indeed, by default AFAICT they provide ~~Aurora Store and F-Droid~~ App Lounge (edited: was a little while so I forgot, I install F-Droid on every Android device I have as a reflex).
Regarding the consequence... well I don't know the future. Maybe alternative stores will have a "trick" so that they are considered verified and thus can install other .apk, or maybe it won't matter for rooted phones anyway.
No worries Google's actions against installing apks from outside the Play Store will only influence Android, not any of the other operating systems that are based on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP)
Presumably google is going to block app installation via a google service. If you do not have google services in your phone there's nothing to block you.
When the West signs an agreement, it is mainly to better bend it, twist it... then throw it away—a reality that Russia must absolutely remember at every
geneva_convenience
in reply to TokenBoomer • • •