Fairphone and Huawei: Ky's big phone book

[kyller3030]

A phone-book is a big outdated all-encompassing way to contact people. It was also a bit of a privacy nightmare. Since smartphones are primarily a video-consumption device category, it feels appropriate that this material heavily relies on videos.

“Let me call my buddy, who’s an expert in…”

Welcome to my phone review. All of them.

Sensational !

• More ancient ads and coverage map: History of the very first mobile telecommunications operator in Romania

~“Cosmorom enters your life”

The oldest story is that phone signal was only in cities and near highways, so many people didn’t see much point in getting a GSM GSM phone, outdoors-people of the day were getting proper satellite phones for rescue calls.

MILKO KALAYDZHIEV - GSM / МИЛКО КАЛАЙДЖИЕВ - GSM (REUPLOAD + EN/BG LYRICS)

Motorola d460 (199x?)

“My” first phone was a brick with retractable antenna that I sort of made work with a 9 volt battery. It didn’t use SIM cards, but credit-card-sized payphone cartelas. It was retired because the charging dock shattered as if it was hit with a brick repeatedly. I had a couple calls-only Alcatel black and white bricks after that, the only thing of note was that Orange really wanted us to pay the phones upfront, even with a contract, because people in our area kept getting contracts and not paying them

~ Norihiro Haruta, Dincolo de 2000 Bucharest

Months before the iPhone

There were many clever phones hanging around, I remember being impressed by a SAGEM that could run PowerPoint on windows mobile, but they had awkward controls, or they used IrDA to transfer files, and were generally bulky and smart or tiny and black&white “just for calls” (Siemens).

Nokia 2630 (2007)

Nokia phones were always special, even in the brick days they had a 3D game, or a flashlight. We had a Motorola flip phone with a camera in the house, but the 2630 felt like the next generation. We got 3 of them, with loyalty points from the contracts. Impossibly thin, it maintained the “weapon” tradition by having the back panel be a razor blade. My first phone that felt “smart” with Bluetooth, sending and receiving games and MP3s, themes you could preview by just pointing at the file, and MMS. After years of WhatsApp and the issues we’re having with the transition to RCS, MMS might as well be magic. Not that we had much internet on those things, the “Web” button did nothing but cause panic at the thought of the phone bill back then.

LG KP260 (2009)

That big front speaker on the chin needed to be replaced. It had a proprietary 20 pin headphone port on the side, and a quirky NextNextInstallFinish way of installing .jar files, it couldn’t run them from storage. It bravely carried me through years of 50MB of internet a month (that technically was unlimited on the weekend, but after a couple megs of download it stopped unless you used a few paid megs too). So J2ME games were the most efficient hours/MB of entertainment available, outside of Wikipedia. It had Sudoku and Candy Cru Bejeweled out of the box. Waptrick and Luigykent on OperaMini/ UCBrowser days.

It had a gamer black&red interface that I had learned by heart to the point of switching to korean out of boredom. That served me well in the final months of this phone, the display wasn’t doing the displaying no more.

Samsung SGH-U600 (sidequest 2010)

Mom’s silky smooth slide phone. I couldn’t get a custom browser or much games on it, since most java games start by asking whether you’d like sound, and those capacitive option buttons didn’t register. Still, it was built like a jewel, with a beautiful hi-rez screen and animated wallpapers. It did include game demos, I remember a good-looking Asphalt racer and a Prince of Persia game based on the 2007 reboot, with buildings you could enter and a playable Elika that could fly. Note that auto-focus on the camera, as the next device on this list didn’t have that.

Samsung Wave Y (autumn 2011)

~I can’t believe it’s mine.

~That notification on the store icon never goes away btw.

“being comfortably close to Samsung feature phones may actually work in its favor.” And I still think dedicated Call&Hang-up buttons are a good idea on a phone. It was my first real smartphone, with no noticeable data cap and performant enough to watch youtube on. It was focused on easing the transition to the smart era, running their own in-house operating system named BadaOS, meaning water, and it lived up to that; this first iteration of TouchWiz was incredibly fluid next to the bloated launchers of the Android 2.2s of the day. Voice dictation, not-Swiftkey/Swype, handwriting, T9 Trace along the QWERTYs gave the writing flow, as the Twitter app was poking fun at how much it sucks typing your password on a phone. The voice assistant was as useless as ever, but at least it didn’t talk back. Real multi-tasking and a J2ME Java emulator completes the experience, even adding on-screen D-Pads for non-touch games.

~ Gotta love that skeuomorphic design

"A Menu key is the first thing experienced Android users are likely to miss. One thing directly resulting from this absence is the fact that all application-specific settings are packed together in the general settings. In the absence of Menu and Back buttons, the previous Bada edition relied heavily on on-screen soft keys. We like it how the new version pretty much gets rid of them. The swipe gestures in the phonebook and inbox are nothing new but they did well to keep them. " ~ Samsung Wave Y review: Young blood: User interface: Bada OS 2.0

Internet Device

Dolphin browser was always a slow mess, thankfully the “Samsung Apps” store included Opera Mini Touch.

"This is a continuation of the Jet browser, based on webkit, only its version is now 2.0 (the name of the browser is Dolfin). The differences from the same NetFront are striking: while maintaining the experience of working with that browser, they have added a number of unique features. For example, for the first time, it is possible to adjust the brightness of the screen backlight in the browser itself; you don’t need to go anywhere. This is a surprisingly nice thing for working outdoors. Flash support allows you to view all resources without any restrictions (at the moment the question is being decided whether Flash will remain or not, since it is precisely this that causes unstable operation of the browser). One of the first browsers to support a built-in ban on displaying banners. We tested this function on a number of resources, it works.
The browser supports an RSS client, you can download feeds. The history of viewed pages is supported in the form of thumbnails, the same for bookmarks. Zoom up to x10 with one finger. Formatting site content into one column. Filter by pictures, search for words on the page. Javascript, Flash support. A full-fledged browser that is as close as possible in convenience to that of the Apple iPhone. Fast and high quality. The device benefits from this." ~ Mobile-review.com Предварительный обзор Bada 2.0 (there’s even a video to see it in action there)

“Pixel Viewer can be briefly described as an application that opens files in MS Office format (for example, MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint), Adobe Acrobat (PDF), graphic and video formats on the phone. The beauty of the technology is its speed: opening a 20 MB PDF file takes about a few seconds, then you can quickly scroll through the pages, scale them, rotate them as you please. No file editing - only viewing, but this is often enough, especially considering there is no need for additional file conversion for a mobile device.”

I watched lots of youtube on this bad boy, for the first year I kept to PC VideoTutorials and linux-y things and I recall The Wall Street Journal having an app that would let me watch live streams too. Cool guy stuff.

“HD video playback is supported, but is it really necessary?”

Social Hub

"All your accounts for mail, social services, IM are collected in one place. You don’t have to go to different apps to get an overview of all your activity. Everything is available from this menu and once you have selected the application, you open it. The idea is sound, but what pleases me much more is that even this menu is not particularly needed. In the phone book, all information is displayed instantly, and incoming messages become pop-up, and you can immediately respond to them on the screen, much the same as for SMS messages.

It’s probably worth focusing separately on applications for working with social networks, for example, Facebook. An excellent client that can do almost everything, there are no complaints about it, on par with the best examples on other platforms.

Twitter is so disappointing, the main complaint is that the friends’ feed is updated with 5-8 entries, which is extremely small. Saving traffic in this way is a crime against ergonomics. You have to constantly press the “refresh” button. There is also no option in the settings to specify how many tweets to show you. In your feed, you can click on a person’s name and view their profile or reply to them. Names in tweets do not appear as links, which is a shame. In general, the functionality of this client can be assessed as average, sometimes insufficient.

The IM client is quite good, it has Google Talk, AIM, and a couple of other solutions will be added (but not Skype or ICQ, at least not in the near future). In the phone book, an IM icon is indicated opposite the subscriber and you can start a conversation with him, if he is available. It’s exactly the same idea that you don’t need to go into the application. Although, if you want to see all your contacts in one place the old-fashioned way, you can open it." ~Mobile-review.com Предварительный обзор Bada 2.0

I remember classmates asking to log into Yahoo! Messenger with it. A time when the people around me didn’t treat technology as the enemy, even my dad was sending pictures. The design must have been better back then, now he gets angry at basic calling…
At the time, it was really cool how it integrated online services into the basic functions, accounts in the settings, even an early Shazam into the music player. The reviewers were lamenting how the development of the OS itself was slowing down, BadaOS being relegated to a cheapo budget Android leveraging webapps for more and more functions. Eventually the code was recycled for the follow-up to MeeGo, Tizen - Wikipedia , and in 2021 the mobile-cetric parts of the OS were stripped and moved to Google’s WearOS, leaving Tizen as a minimal WebApp renderer for smart TVs.

ChromeCast AllShare

“Allshare . A utility built on the uPnP standard, when you can download files from other devices via Wi-Fi (streaming). For example, having installed a server program on my laptop, I streamed music, podcasts, and videos to my phone. Everything works well; this function is new for phones of the S8500 class, although it is well known from a number of Nokia products on the S60 platform.”

Free full games from Samsung Apps

Caligo Chaser 1º Episódio MISSÕES INICIAIS! [Walkthrough] #1 /ANDROID/

NOSTALGIA GAME JAVA Gangstar Rio City of Saints #1

Turbofly HD - Gameplay Nvidia Shield Tablet Android 1080p (Android Games HD)

Though looking into it, Turbofly looks like a bootleg from this:

RaggedEdge Extended - Trailer 1 - Samsung Wave (Bada 2.0)

By the end I was hitting it on tables to get the gyro to rotate. Looking back, this is what I imagine a “dumb phone” to be, physical media keys, dedicated call & hang-up buttons, a screen small enough that people don’t expect you to do work on it.

…?

A gap of no new phones here. I did miss out on the custom ROMs CyanogenMod craze. I got a digital point&shoot camera around this time, a laptop and home internet in 2014. It’s sweet how back then “taking photos” was a hangout activity, just get together and make silly faces, maybe put them on a book of faces while at it too.

Huawei P8 lite (2015)

Nothing but praise for this one. I still keep it around the house for playing youtube. De-google’d/disabled in settings out of necessity, if I try to update all the Play store stuff today it slows down to a crawl.
Razor thin, metal edge, glass inserts, cheap enough that 3 of my clasmates had them. Got one for me and one for my mom too. It has 3.5 mm jack and 2 microSD card slots .
I love what they did with the interface, they added quality of life features like an “Ultra power saver” mode that let you pick a handful of apps that could still receive notifications, like WhatsApp, and disable every other process, even make the screen black&white. Distraction-free dumbphones, who’s that?
More creature comforts included:

• quick screen recording
• double-tap volume for instant photos
• Kirin CPU designed in-house
• simple access to the file system, it acted just like an USB drive when connected to a PC, no funny HiSuite needed.

It has Android 5.0.2 (Lollipop), upgradable to 6.0 (Marshmallow), EMUI 3.1. One downside was the laughable security, you could bypass any password unlock using that quick photo feature, and files were accessible to everyone in LAN if the phone was running a hotspot. Whoops. Coming out of depression feels like getting out of prison, so someone was teaching me how to use Instagram.
Playing around with it today, old-Android’s lack of permissions system hurts, Instagram was listening in and delivering targeted ads. Poetic justice for me, as I was at both ends of stalking. Take your privacy seriously, people.

Huawei Y6 (2018)

Just as thin as the other one, but with a camera bump and plastic all-around. I don’t like this one. Still, it played Youtube and Discord in split-screen and that’s all I really want from a phone.

P8 lite	Y6 2017
Metal and glass chassis	Golden plastic
Kirin 620	Snapdragon 425
720p screen	1080p screen
Android 5 EMUI 3	Android 8.0, EMUI 8
2GB RAM	2GB RAM

So they had a weaker CPU handle a bigger screen and more android stuff on the same amount of RAM. The settings were trimmed down, can’t even change the ringtone anymore. After an update, the files weren’t accessible from basic Windows file manager anymore, it required installing their HiSuite back-up tool to get files off the device. It’s not badly made or anything, it’s fast and easy to use, but I’m not sure for how much longer I can rely on the Huawei website to host the files for the older version needed for these older devices.

Mine always had a book-like protective case, so it still looks just-like new. I had it for the 2 years of contract, then it went to my mom and now to my dad. He was happily using a Nokia Asha 302 but, you know, mandatory banking apps my beloved.

Huawei nova 5T (late 2019)

After 2 years with Captain Slow and the couple of times my university expected me to write a CV on it, I went looking for the most bang-for-the-buck CPU out there. Octa-core Kirin 980 (7 nm). Maybe even get into that “mobile gaming” those whippersnappers keep talking about.
I found this phone under a different name and I was willing to install a lot of sketchy stuff to get Google Mobile Services on this baby, but the nice folks at Orange let me know that the Nova exists, with GMS, for $40 extra.
So here it is, the last Huawei phone ever released with Google services. It also included Huawei Mobile services, it had ads in the app store and it tried installing some games the second I opened it, so that was enough for me to never open it again.
Soon enough, I was reminded that Google services aren’t much more joyful, with ads in the Play Store, failures in syncing contacts and the slow & steady return of the pop-ups, I mean toasts, but they’re bringing proper pop-ups too.

So, about that CPU full of beans.

With great power comes great heat. So if I wanted to play graphics intensive- games, I had to lay on my back, holding the thing above me so it could dissipate the heat. Or I could… Sit on the computer chair, that was next to that bed. Could even use a controller.
Joke’s on me, soon after I got the phone the pandemic started, so no more CV’s on phones, and a lot more sitting on the computer chair.

Too many cameras, not enough ports

Wide, Ultrawide, 3D Depth, and Macro. The macro one is useless lol, it’s so myopic it can only shoot at under 4 cm distance in glorious 2 MP. The rest are good, I still grab it sometimes for quick landscape pics, or night time pics. Huawei does wonders with its software, and the camera interface and post-processing is really good, I think their latest release was holding up against the Pixels on DxOMark. It’s a proper modern phone, no SD card, no unlocking of the bootloader, no 3.5mm jack. The sd card bit stings, because now there’s no way to go around using HiSuite to get files from inside the device storage, besides sending via bluetooth I guess.

What was it about the software?

EMUI is clean and does black magic when it comes to battery life, all day long of Discord and YouTube on split-screen and I arrive home in the evening with 70% left. I like the split-screen features, the straight-up floating window manager, a customizable side panel with specific functions from apps, some “Super Device” integration and…well… most of the quality of life changes ended-up in mainline Android, so there’s not much point in mentioning here besides “Look, they had the smart island thingy before Apple woo”. It was used to display info about the current call, some posture warnings in China, and an optional plug-in to display battery level in a colored circle around the camera, making the pinhole even more obvious.

As good as it’s ever going to get.

After the sanctions, the software started to get worse, and the engineers left the company. With the updates, various elements of the OS got more pushy about Huawei online services, including cloud storage, music and video streaming, and facial recognition in the Photo gallery. The “Cloud” is the worst offender, the way it required permissions to location at all times was very suspicious. It didn’t get any better in the years since, only forcing more access to stay enabled. In hindsight, it’s probably how android handles third party “X Mobile services”, like how if you cut out network access to MicroG then nothing that relies on it has access anymore. I’ve seen the theory that it’s about cloud back-ups, since it has access to call logs but no microphone, but then it’s even more sus why are the toggles forced-on. The last security update introduced the Covid19 contact-tracing features, which thankfully we never had to use here.

I created a ChatGPT account with a @hotmail address, as a joke, my own little “I see what you all are doing”. No issues logging in on a PC. When I tried to log in on the phone I got an angry email on my google address. Did I mention that it ships with Microsoft SwiftKey ?

It was getting on my nerves, and Samsung these days has Mobile service suites from Google, Samsung, Microsoft, and whatever other sponsor they got that week (not unusual to see Facebook and Tiktok with no way to uninstall, just “disable”). I don’t want to use any of those, I live out of my little third party f-droid apps, so I started looking for something that could run a clean, de-googled ROM. Maybe there are less invasive ways to remove stuff, like ADB. I would have removed e v e r y t h i n g, I’m already using third party apps for everything, I wanted to go full de-googled. It was just easier to start with a clean slate and install things I knew I wanted. And I really really want the microSD.

Truth be told, locking the bootloader doesn’t add much security, there’s always paid gray-market services that generate unlock codes, even for Find My iPhones. Huawei flip-flopped, sometimes providing free codes, sometimes not, sometimes only for old devices, it killed interest in developing custom ROMs. There were OpenKirin initiatives, but they gave up due to all the flip-flopping. Huawei has custom-made Kirin CPU’s, you can’t just reuse code from lineageOS or whatever, they need new drivers written from scratch. As of right now, the “About” section includes a warning:

"Any modifications made to this device that are not expressly approved by Huawei Device Co. Ltd. as compliant may result in the withdrawal of the user’s authorization to operate the equipment."

~ “Well put together, Operator, now get out there and - cut down the - and make the Lotus proud.”

After all the updates, it identifies itself as a “HONOR 20” these days. Whatever the name, it’s my nicest phone so far, now serving in the facebook trenches for my mom.

~ A visitor to the launch of Huawei’s Honor 20 range of smartphones photographs the product at an event in London, Britain, May 21, 2019. REUTERS/Peter Nicholls

Fairphone 4 (autumn 2023)

TLDR: it’s a $300 phone with a $650 price tag. I got mine like-new second hand for $174, I’ve seen the 6GB model go for as low as $87.

It’s a brick solid enough to rival Nokia lol. I’ve seen that they made the 5 slimmer, but the 4 is a proper blunt weapon. I never cared about the race for thinness, but this is a bit much, I dropped it a lot.
It didn’t break yet, so i won’t say I “repaired it”, but it’s a cool party trick to take it apart with nothing but a pointy fingernail. People compare it to a desktop PC when they see me pulling out the microSD from inside its guts. (No hot-swapping, it sits behind the battery)
You can take out everything they list as parts on their website, usb ports, camera lens… The 5 is better in this regard, the 4 has a big black box module near the top because the early 5G modules were big and surrounded the camera entirely.
Performance is pffine, it’s a bit slower than my previous Huawei Nova 5t. The only thing I noticed being slower is Instagram videos sometimes play the first second twice. Gotta have the microSD slot, dearly missed on the nova, and the unlocked bootloader. I completely missed out on the cyanogenMod/Jailbreak trend, and wanted to play around with custom roms (and have an easier time installing pirated games. It’s a bit awkward because google is taking a half-measures to limit access to the appdata. Like, you can’t copy to /obb/ or whatever it’s called, but you can create the folder inside of it and copy there.).
People were clowning on the FP 4 for having a pretty bad camera, Fairphone overcompensated and got a Sony camera for the 5. Then people found out that the magic was in the Pixel’s and Samsung’s custom camera app post-processing. Recently, FP4 received a major update to its camera app. It’s pfffine, but if there’s a night photo or a cool landscape, I grab my old Huawei Nova 5t. The FOV seems too big, a dog so close I could step on him looks like it’s on the far end of the street, really making me wish for a zoom lens like on those flagships.

More on the lack of 3.5 jack (expand)

I’ve looked at the schematics. (FP provides schematics!) So, the analog audio out pin is somewhere near the cameras. They’d have to route the wire all the way to the bottom, between like, 7 antennae and that causes interference. Also, the modular design has those contact pads where all the connections come together to pass through to the next module, more interference and if the contacts get the smallest bit of corrosion you can’t clean them because they’re so tiny. This doesn’t justify the lack of a 3.5mm port, it just explains why it used to be on the top side of the devices.
I have the shortest possible dongle, it’s like a solid dice, so it doesn’t have a cable to twist and break in the pocket. Since the jack stays close to the phone, it sometimes buzzes from interference if I’m streaming on the phone. Good thing it has an SD card to keep the files local, but yeah, those annoying twisty dongles have a point in being so long.
I used to have the nova 5t with no jack, but it had USB-C headset in the box. When I wanted the jack, I got the cheapest $1 “just touch the pins” dumb adapter and it worked, because the Huawei had a secondary custom DAC chip near the bottom, to serve their own headphones.
By comparison, FP4 uses off-the-shelf chips, so their reasons apply to all the other normal phones that use normal chips, with the pin near the camera. That also means that FP and many of the normal phones are actually rather pretentious when it comes to what dongles they would accept, it has to have a dedicated DAC chip in the dongle, because the USB audio standard is an absolute mess. I recommend the “ddHifi TC35B” dongle. I ordered this thing from China, it was available here in RO, but so overpriced that I got a nice pair of headphones for the difference

Initially I wanted to run stock for a bit, to compare with roms, but I saw that google search accessed “precise location” the second I turned it on, so I nope’d out the battery.

Setup

There’s even proper “desktop linux” distros getting ported to FP, if you hate yourself enough. I run Murena’s /e/OS since it’s a noob friendly set of open source tools from f-droid and nextcloud sync stuff. Installing it was pretty easy, no trial and error. Well, there was one, they offer an easy NextNextInstallFinish installer, that one didn’t work for me, the “hard” method is installing Git for Windows and copy-pasting one line of “download script and auto-run it” in that terminal. One thing to note, unlocking the bootloader still involves going to Fairphone’s website and introducing the IMEI code, to get an unlock code in return.

[kyller3030]

Right to repair is getting murky.

The first fairphone was a bog standard budget thing, but they were working with the factories to get them to use fairtrade metals that actually pay and keep safe the miners.

Later, user repairable parts and long lasting products became FP’s “shtick”. The problem is, at one point they tried to release in-ear bluetooth headphones. Again, standard things, the idea was to establish factories and supply chains in Europe. No lithium mines in europe, so factories would be supplied by recycling plants, since FairPhone got very involved in recycling lately.

The fanbase got very angry at FP releasing regular disposable wireless ear buds at the same time as removing the 3.5mm jack. So the “Fairbuds” got discontinued. FP then released Fairbuds XL, all lego and repairable, even the internal connections used USB-C ports. And nobody cared anymore because… the internet is like that sometimes; there are other, modular, repairable, over-ear Bluetooth headphones; Fairbuds XL have cheap rubber that sweats and don’t sound that good anyway; they cost $300; pick your favourite reason. I can’t help but lament how the fanbase missed the point and affected the establishing of “strategic assets” like battery recycling and manufacturing in Europe. Still, the company isn’t entitled to their money, they made a product that nobody wanted and that’s that. Since then, they released Fairbuds No_Subtitle which are properly modular in-ears. (Gotta love reboots with the same name as the original). Eventually a “battery recovery and recycling center” started construction in North Macedonia, paired with a huge car battery plant planned in Romania. Great success!

Of course, this only applies to small companies staffed by people that can be bullied. The bigger fish are feeling a lot less confliction about OEM repair, from draconian data-harvesting terms for their technicians, confiscating third-party parts out of customer devices… The repair business started because OEM repair services suck and are overpriced, and technicians get rewarded with short monopolies when they figure out how to fix the new shiny thing. Skill issue, as it were.
Right to repair started in retaliation to the companies doing all they could to prevent tampering with the hardware. Relying on central servers, parts pairing, Apple AND ESPECIALLY SAMSUNG working to get customs to ban the import of spare parts on their behalf. It wasn’t a skill issue anymore, the few spare parts that were manufactured were practically banned from entering the US. (assemblies instead of parts that cost more than a new device, claims of risk of s.assault in the parking lot because of compromised security, lobbying etc etc this is a rabbit hole, the long and short of it is that honest customers get the brunt of the DRM and criminals can just call into apple servers to get stolen devices unlocked remotely. )

EU is mandating removable batteries now. As much as I like to see them bully Apple, I have seen replies along the line of “If the EU wants to get into the engineering of electronics, why aren’t they making their own?” and… I kinda agree. They already consolidated engineering&manufacturing with Airbus, and tried to do that for online services with Qwant (it’s french and no one uses it).

Maybe you would buy an Airbus phone, with the latest and greatest tech of the 1980s, but uhhh * inhales*

Of Apple, Signal and EU commission's Chat Control attempts to make encryption illegal. Again.

https://linustechtips.com/topic/1574421-the-eu’s-bad-idea-more-x-elite-reviews-perplexity-ai-plagiarism-more-techlinked-june-21-2024/

• European Commission rep comes out and says Apple isn’t compliant with the DMA
  Apple has 'very serious' issues under sweeping EU digital rules, competition chief says
  EU says Apple has very serious issues for not complying with DMA
• Apple announces it’s withholding Apple Intelligence from EU users rather than compromise security
  https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/apple-won-t-roll-out-ai-tech-in-eu-market-over-regulatory-concerns-1.2088123
• BUT EU lambasted for trying to sneak encryption weakening legislation through
  Signal, MEPs urge EU Council to drop encryption-eroding law • The Register
• Proposed scanning all your messages Chat Control: The EU’s CSEM scanner proposal – Patrick Breyer
• EXCEPT of course the messages of EU officials? lol https://www.eureporter.co/business/data/mass-surveillance-data/2024/04/15/leak-eu-interior-ministers-want-to-exempt-themselves-from-chat-control-bulk-scanning-of-private-messages/
• President of Signal is, unsurprisingly, against it Stop playing games with online security, Signal president warns EU lawmakers | TechCrunch
  https://signal.org/blog/pdfs/upload-moderation.pdf
• Vote on measure postponed again
  EU Council has withdrawn the vote on Chat Control
• Is Chat Control Really Dead?

  • “As per usual with Chat Control, the articles only popped up AFTER countries had already voted for it and could have easily been passed stealthily without a single beep from any outlet, if it weren’t for Swedish parties that “accidentally” voted for it and triggered the media to report on THAT.” A couple of weeks after the EU parliament elections, naturally

And while companies infringing on personal liberties and taking over customs deserves the bonk stick, I’ve seen mandates to manufacture in a certain way be argued as part of “right to repair”. Bullying Apple is funny, but it’s not protecting personal right to learn to fix stuff or buy spare parts and second hand devices. Apple was part of the frigging design board that invented USB-C in the first place! The mandate for USB-C has quirky results, like how the chargers with USB-A to C is the standard, when usbC-PowerDelivery could push up to 150W.
A while ago, I tried to buy a type C cable from a store. I kept staring at it, it was “charging only” with only 2 real pins and the rest were plastic. “What? You need a data cable or something?” and eventually they gave me a proper cable … that’s 20cm short. The first iPods used F-35’s FireWire because usb didn’t push enough electricity, now it’s weird to use usb for something other than charging.

The weird truth about the EU commission is that Europe has had a long standing tradition of sending the biggest idiots to the EU parliament to get rid of them from the national politics. That’s balanced out by everyone mostly ignoring them. After all these years, Europe finds herself in a world after the “Bruxelles effect”. People outside EU have to follow EU laws, while europeans ignore them lmao. As Ross found out the hard way, when push comes to shove the EU commission just points back to the laws of the individual nations, even for the €Euro currency itself.

Dead Game News: Response from the European Commission

Issues with increasingly fatter cats

~more dots

• Simple and obvious issues, like
  • parts pairing and server-side DRM on core farming equipment. Louis Rossmann did succeed in passing laws to stop that. We Won. after ten years, John Deere FINALLY lost
  • relying on leaked schematics on random romanian FTP servers
• Complex:
  • A simple magnetic sleep sensor requiring reverse-engineered calibration boards in the name of “security”. Solved! " We beat Apple at their own game - let the unauthorized calibrations begin"
  • OEM repair programs that exist just as lipservice to the issue, to take legislative pressure off their backs “No need to take action, we solved it ourselves”.
  • Parts being available in limited quantities, or as overpriced “assembly bundles” that cost as much as a new device.
  • The fundamental lack of incentive for factories to produce a surplus of spare parts, in-between the fast upgrade cycle of smartphones and difficulties with distribution. The more they’d build the more they’d lose.
  • The recycling standards and internal conflicting incentives lead to employees stabbing TVs and Macbooks because sending them to be “recycled” is less effort and paperwork than the complex refurbishing process. Complex as in, the drives are soldered, and wiping is only permitted with one specific enterprise wiping tool, then another one to check the wipe…

Modern Recycling Is a Scam: How R2 Standards Encourage E-Waste

• Impossible:
  • Investments going into China used to go through the loicence-loving system of Hong Kong, and while getting parts directly from the factories was never easy, there were middlemen ensuring no funny business. HK was kinda sorta invaded in 2018, with the mainland companies handling the public relations themselves. Finding quality parts is as pleasant as finding good answers on Google Search.
  • entanglements with core national infrastructure providers and customs

Panthers?

• Black cats: I don’t want to play armchair psychologist here, I’d say go watch Louis’s channel directly for the repair stuff, but he’s moving on. Got a job at FUTO, with a focus on open source hardware and changing the culture; to get more funding into the Open source ecosystem (post-open?) and generally help user-respecting software get over that “80% completed” hump into daily-driver status.

Edit: Louis just released a video covering ALL the repair stuff. Convenient.

What was that about the fighter jet?

~ Cool Japan Fund.
I kept pushing back writing this because of “the hard part”. It seems like business philosophy and ethics is the only thing I write about in here, and truth be told, my only real-world experience is with shutting down businesses. Back in middle school, part of mandatory reading is “Diary of a Short-Sighted Adolescent”; a book about a student writing a sincere journal about high-school experience, something the world has never seen before, with the big twist at the end being that his writings were bog-standard with plenty of already published books covering his ideas point for point. While this has caused an existential crisis for a romanian author 100 years ago, I only feel joy that someone else did the hardest part of my script, covering a subject that had 100 years of experience doing it by the time the People’s Republic was being founded.

Today’s big reveal is that Huawei was founded by the Chinese ministry of Defense. All the nuance derived from state policy working with private enterprises to turn a starved grass-roots art-form into a global re-humanizing phenomenon was covered beautifully by Moony. Gotta love how the bastion of capitalism in Asia was… a state-planned economy. History is fun! (for nerds)

Kawaii: Anime, Propaganda, and Soft Power Politics.

Watch anime without becoming and otaku, play games without becoming a gamer, for gamers could never boycott a good game. It’s a nice conclusion, but it gets more complicated in tech, as core infrastructure providers get involved.
Big tech companies used to let the state foot the bill for research and then keep the profits from increased efficiency in manufacturing. That flavour of never-has-been free market feels downright nostalgic compared to today’s use of public funds to build cloud infrastructure and charge for rent, it’s less good ol’ capitalism and more Cloud feudalism, but the sins of the platform holders are a video about a book for another day. I mean, it does get into Chinese megacorps and the planned aspects of cold war capitalism too…
I want to point to military electric bikes, they are what technology felt like in the 2000s, no-compromise upgrade on all aspects. Faster, quieter, lighter, and they do have small quick-release batteries, so refueling is even faster than an internal combustion engine. They simplify the supply chain too. But today I’m writing about old phones, not army planes, because they also get the brunt of right2repair issues and Microsoft Copilot.

Most helpful MS Copilot response

~This was supposed to be an auto-playing GIF but I’m having issues with the embeds so be kind and click it, I can’t pick a thumbnail yet.

Now, here’s what I learned about a good phone.

---

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet

• Qtek 1010
• HTC Wallaby
• O2 “X” convergence of voice and data

AKA the XDA of XDA Developers

Diary of yadda yadda, here’s people that were at the forefront of mobile computing doing a retrospective and interviews on things I could only read about.

CyanogenMod and the Death of the Android ROM

Some power users would look down on users chasing convenience, but even back then, the mods were primarily improving performance on slow devices and adding functionality. Do not insult the audience. That’s rule number one. In a few more words, “we won’t win if we bicker among each other about “the correct brand” for cheap dopamine hits. Profit-chasing user-hostile design will come to your favorite brand too,” it’s simply not economically viable to serve only the enthusiasts, the company might even be liable to shareholders if they knowingly leave profits on the table.

• Why Enthusiast Brands will Betray You ~ TechAltar

Why Enthusiast Brands will Betray You

Back then, even Samsung was working directly with the modders to bring features to the market. Carl Pei spearheaded the release of the first device running a CyanogenOS out of the box, Oppo N1 (it also introduced a flipping rotating main camera). This led to Cyanogen Inc. becoming a gathering of everyone with a vested interest in making Google have less control over Android and avoiding the mistakes of Windows Mobile.
That venture capital strategy of “get as many users as possible now, we’ll figure out the monetization later (they never do)” is a recurring theme in the story of CyanogenMod too. But that’s not what killed it. Quite a few companies made their fame by shipping powerful specs and lightweight ROMs.

• Bonus rants about the OnePlus “story” manufactured for the public.
  • “The OnePlus hype needs to die” ~ TechAltar
  • What OnePlus doesn’t want you to think about
  • Even Carl Pei himself used official company communications to lament OnePlus’s increasing spending on marketing. A Few Words on OnePlus Marketing | OnePlus Blog He eventually left and started NOTHING, and I like that they still have unlocked bootloaders to this day.

Xiaomi also got their fame with a custom ROM and unlocked devices and sure enough, they still ship unlocked. As does Oppo and Vivo. I wonder what do these have in common.

There is no BBK in Ba Sing Se

The man behind the world's largest phone empire (the story of BBK)

• quite an uplifting video actually, it’s nice seeing anyone treating employees well for a change.

Da’ Șaomi când mai testezi?

40 cool and ridiculous facts:

What you didn't know about Xiaomi.

The video points out how popular they are in Eastern Europe. Dan Cadar of Zona IT got so many requests to test Xiaomi, the phrase " Da’ Xiaomi când mai testezi?" (“when’s the next Xiaomi testing?”) became a catch phrase to start off the videos. “When’s the next one? Well, right now!”

Xiaomi still keeps their community focus. I’ve never had one, but my friends treat them like Windows laptops, “good specs for the money, re-install/debloat when you get home”. I do have one of their fitness bands. Mi Smart Band 6 NFC - Xiaomi Global Official

I enjoy how they advertise the SpO₂ oxygen in blood tracking, since Apple isn’t allowed to do that anymore due to a breach of patents. As for de-bloating a bracelet, they took their time and looked at how people actually use their smartwatches, and they made a bare-minimum device with 25MB of RAM that relies on being paired with a phone for most functions besides the fitness tracking. Currently going on the second-hand market for under $10. That also means it’s too dumb to do anything without user consent, and everything goes through the phone App. So, I want to showcase Gatgetbridge, a lightweight FOSS privacy-respecting way to use Bluetooth gadgets like True-wireless headphones and wearables. It even allows me to hide buttons for functions I don’t use from the band’s interface.

Home

Shout-out to Rob, The Quantified Scientist for doing long term testing of the biological data readings. (it’s a playlist because I couldn’t decide between the older videos that show the pro medical equipment and explain the basics of what he tests, and the newer videos that are overall better videos)

---

I never got the point of a “powerful” smartwatch with a SIM card that can do everything, if people are still keeping them paired to their phones. Mental Outlaw brought up the point of leaving the phone behind, that they’re good for children, since the watches provide all of the useful (maps, messaging, phone calls, location services, payments) without any of the interesting (pick your favorite combination of issues with the modern internet, the mobile ecosystem and sys-admining the security of a point-of-sale system).

I tried using an Apple Watch as a phone

• TheMysteriousMrEnter did a similar no-web challenge, for a month, focused on local files rather than grass-touching. Here’s an off-brand Liminal-Musing about it Chronically Online - Mr.Enter
  • I like the bit about YouTube providing all the tools to know how doomed you are without any guidance on what to do about it or at least how to cope with it. I’ve always been pretty good at balancing my online consumption to avoid actual traumatic imagery. Do people struggle with this doom-scrolling stuff? Still, I relate to that “chasing random buzzes for days on end, that definitely won’t matter in a week from now”, I do that a lot. I didn’t include a section on the sins of Facebook or anything, but seems like a good moment to shout-out his documentary, Technocracy (All Parts Together) - YouTube

I’m not an Apple hater, although perhaps I should be. I’ve never owned anything from them, my only experience with an iPhone is that one time my uncle got a dash cam. The Camera’s App only allows looking at the recordings while tethered to the camera, so he wanted me to download the files to his phone. The file downloaded, but didn’t show up anywhere, not in the Photo gallery nor anywhere else. iOS file manager my beloved.
Here’s the user manual, if you want to take a look at LuckyCam or the “professional player installed firstly”

UM-4367572.pdf

“Do not use the thrill chemical substance. Please protect the environment, don’t discard this machine
randomly; do not throw this machine into fire, otherwise will have an explosion.”

"After the installation is completed, if you want “LuckyCam” access to cell phone photos, please click “OK” (Note: you must select “OK”, otherwise you can not preview the pictures download by APP )"

waitwhat. I didn’t see that note back then. I guess the guy refused the prompt before I got to it. oof

I’ve always found the iPhone itself to be their most exhausting Apple product to talk about. Whatever, not for me, move on. Now everyone and their cat has a hot take related to the USB-C mandate, as if the MacBooks and iPads didn’t have them for years now. And the least said about the eSIM situation the better, “we just couldn’t possibly fit one in, there was no space” as the international models continued to have them, where the US variants had a piece of wood.

Besides that, I like the iPods, the way iTunes went DRM-free, the iPad is the only tablet worth mentioning (besides the full-fat x86 computers), and I have to assume their dedicated enterprise Xservers were better than trying to shoehorn iPhones and iCloud everywhere. They were pretty at least.

• I Bought the Last One Apple Ever Made… - Apple XServe 3,1 Server ~ Linus Tech Tips
  • In today’s episode, Linus finds out the hard way that Apple intentionally makes their old hardware impossible to use
  • iChat used to federate with regular XMPP chat servers?!
  • Everything related to Podcast Composer and Producer looks awesome, auto-publishing and offloading video encoding to other Xgrid servers
  • Gaming on the Apple SERVER? - XServe 3,1 ~ LTT

Back in the day, they used their mega-corpo powers for good, sometimes, like their Graphical User Interface research addressed at normal non-computer savvy people (even for the server software); I can’t even imagine how that process goes. Or their fights on the side of user privacy.

Two iPhones or the privacy of billions: Why Apple vs. the FBI matters

The M1 Macs seem cool, and I’ve seen quite a few x86 translation layers so it won’t break compatibility. MS is just now starting to ship developer kits for their ARM efforts. Gaming! (by the time I posted this, the Vivobook S15 got released. It’s still terrible for gaming)

• x86 is a lightweight architecture with few instruction sets. Let’s add just one more set.

• x86 is a bloated mess, let’s try ARM with its lightweight cores. Let’s add just one more dedicated core…

• Now there’s RISC V laptops coming to the market, and the Asahi efforts helped Linux get a head start on that front:

  • TUXEDO on ARM is coming with that Snapdragon Elite X “Copilot Plus Ready” chip
  • Canonical Announce First RISC-V Laptop Running Ubuntu pre-orders went live on June 18
  • Framework Laptop 13 is Getting a Drop-In RISC-V Mainboard Option from the same DeepComputing, the company behind the Ubuntu laptop. It’s an under-powered dev kit with no upgrade-able storage

Mac Address laments how the VisionPro is limited by its iPadOs, while I’m still waiting for someone to explain to me iOS the way fpt. explained the Vision Pro.

Apple AirPort routers brought Wi-Fi to the masses, and brought a convenient solution for schools that didn’t have the budget to start drilling holes in walls to route cables everywhere. I still think a well-integrated all-in-one router and Time Capsule for back-ups is a good idea. Anything to avoid opening ports and router troubleshooting.

Apple cancelled this, now what?

[kyller3030]

All this talk of network infrastructure, I can’t ignore the elephant in the room any longer.

internet.
~Source: Lucian Prună https://www.instagram.com/p/C8pBDyCNCoE/

One point of pride for romanians is the wired internet, taking the 5th place in the world behind city-states like Monaco or Hong Kong. What they won’t tell you is that world-class speed was available in a few top-tier cities, with the rest of the country enjoying a non-statistics affecting speed of N/A. Even back in 2014, the best I had at home was 300kbps down/75kbps up through the pictured Huawei router, via Romtelecom. State-owned until '98, monopoly by law until 2003. Greece’s OTE (Hellenic Telecommunications Organisation) took over Bulgaria, Albania, Romania and Macedonia (FYROM at the time)'s national telcos and kept bleeding money and delivering less-than-bare minimum until 2009 when Deutsche Telekom put them out of their misery.

• Undeva-n Balkani Nokia opened its factory in Romania in 2008. The factory opening in Romania was met with protests from workers in the Nokia factory in Bochum, Germany, who had seen their work cut due to the relocation. Nokia closes down Romanian factory by end-2011 in restructuring move. 1 2 3 4

Secret Nokia contract

Latest on Nokia's Jucu factory closure: Contract still secret / Nokia chief dismisses rumors on Moldova plant / Economic effects - HotNews.ro

The stake of the Nokia business in Jucu revolves around assistance provided by the Romanian state to the Finnish company, as a HotNews.ro investigative report in 2007 revealed. Statements by the officials who backed the investment at the time – Cluj County Council head Marius Nicoara and then-PM Calin Popescu Tariceanu – showed that:

• total investments amounted to over 30 million euro
• Nokia promised investments of over 60 million euro
• Nokia received from the Romanian state the right of free use of 160 ha of land in Jucu (90 hectares for Nokia, the rest for parts providers)
• Nokia might buy the land if interested once 15% of the investment is done
• The Romanian part covers infrastructure costs

Since then, the secrecy over the contract has determined the European Commission to launch an investigation on possible state assistance to Nokia. The investigation gave no result.

• “But there are companies which want to come to Romania: Huawei, Dell, ZTE. Those I have met, all want to expand their business to Romania, to open development centers,” Vreme went on.

As for WiFi, the ISPs were stating out loud that the wireless function is a “bonus” that came for free with the routers, and people should bring their own wireless gear. This, on top of our bunker-tier communist walls meant that WiFi was only available near the teacher’s lounge at school.
I still have hang-ups when it comes to networking settings, due to the years of “oh yeah that’s an easy fix, just change that in your router./ I cannot change anything in the router settings”.

• In 2017 I got fiber at home, along with a router Optical Network Terminal from Compal, which incidentally manufactures Motorola phones and the Apple Watch Series 4. Small world.

So, pretty much everyone that was covered, picked the correct world-class provider, RCS-RDS, now simply Digi. In 2021, with everyone sitting at home complaining that their WiFi doesn’t cover the bathroom, Digi had a big campaign to bring WiFi 6 to the nation.

So, for $6.50/month you get an OG Xbox-looking TP-Link Archer AX1500, Gigabit down/ 450Mbps up speeds, a Huawei OptiXstar ONT and a free Mesh signal extender, with as many more as you want for an additional $0.64/mo a pop, to cover all your Ceaușist-era concrete walls. And previous subscribers had their previous ZTE devices replaced for free too. As for the meshes, the options are three names I’m sure you heard enough times in the news by now:

• Huawei K562E
• ZTE H3601
• SR1041E - Wuhan FiberHome International Technologies Co., Ltd.

I didn’t mention ZTE in the smartphone section because all I really knew about them was a vague memory about a ZTE Blade ad on TV, the thinnest phone in the world at the time, before the bendy iPhone. Looking back, their success with the 4G equipment put them on the map, covering 70 percent of the countries that have invested in LTE, and had their eyes on the wifi and smartphone sectors in Romania since 2012. Looking into it, ZTE became the scapegoat for everything the americans didn’t like, I’m amazed they didn’t get banned sooner: ZTE Controversies - Wikipedia

Well, there is one thing ZTE got banned years ago…

• CyanogenMod and the Death of the Android ROM - YouTube Timestamp

Transcript:

" And there’s even this crazy thing that Stephanie says that not a lot of people know about that ended up probably being the death blow for the company.
Stephanie aka Cyanogen: You know, we were working on a project with a couple, with a large U.S. carrier partner and a large manufacturer in China. And it was going to be the “mod phone”, right? We hired industrial designers. The manufacturer built the first versions of it. It had this really cool industrial design, and we were bringing all these features to it. It was going to ship on a major carrier. We had all this stuff in place, and the worst thing happened. The manufacturer got hit with a trade embargo from the FTC, and that basically killed the whole project.
Can you imagine what would have happened if a Cyanogen branded phone got launched on a major US carrier? That would have been a very different path for the history of Android. Yeah. Wow. Very different, right? Yeah. And you can kind of speculate on who that major OEM might have been that got hit from this uh fine from the FTC, we think, we kind of deduced that was probably ZTE because at the time they got hit with this major major fine, something to do with giving a ton of money to Iran, okay, lots of u.s geopolitics going on in here um but it sucks right, Cyanogen Inc is just trying to make their phone… Yeah. So if you remember ZTE had launched this phone called the ZTE Axon M that was an AT&T exclusive, it was the one of the first like dual screen phones. It had a screen on each side and it would open up but it was just two separate screens it wasn’t like a foldable screen so like the Surface but it didn’t close in on itself, the outsides were screens and it would open like this and it was just flat on the back… So it’s an even worse surface. Anyway AT&T at the time was more open to launching more experimental devices like this. What, real quick, year-wise, what time period are we talking about now? This was early 2016 through mid-2016. So, yeah, they got hit with this trade embargo. They couldn’t do it.
And Stephanie has this quote that was… But that was ultimately the downfall. That’s what broke my soul, after we put so much effort into it you know, we had marketing, we had the device, it was built right, like it exists.
Which is rough because they’ve been going out trying to do their original thing of like selling the OS to everybody and that wasn’t working out, and Stephanie had been wanting to build her own hardware for so long, finally they’re like “we have to make money somehow, okay let’s build the phone” they go, they build the phone, they have everything ready, it’s ready to go and then ZTE messes everything up. Allegedly ZTE allegedly just in case allegedly ZTE. So things start getting really bad, they’re not making any money, investors are getting upset, they have a big first round of layoffs in july, then Kirk McMaster steps down as CEO…
Sorry, how many people were working for them at that point? I don’t have an exact answer but but at this point in time, they had raised almost $100 million in total. And they had two offices, one in Seattle and one in Palo Alto. And they were like, it was a flush organization. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So, so Kirk McMaster steps down as CEO and he sends this email announcing the first pivot of the company to a “modular OS”. Like they were going to try to license off little bits of the OS to people that needed it. Okay. Which seems strange I think he thought that like yeah like “if someone wants the cyanogen camera then we can sort of give them that” selling it for parts, always a great death rattle. So they tried to make that work but, no. The next month the Seattle office closes, next month Stephanie officially leaves after she gets removed from the board because she’s having fights with Kurt, she’s having fights with the rest of the board, it’s not great; and later that month in December the final build of Cyanogen OS is released. And then on December 24th, a blog post comes out called “A Fork in the Road”. This blog post was basically announcing the end and saying goodbye, saying that Cyanogen Mod as well could not go on because the brand was too destroyed at that point and also because other people now owned the Cyanogen brand. They couldn’t even do anything with it, which is so depressing. But the blog post said, “CyanogenMod has served the community well over its eight long years. It’s been our home, bringing together friends from all over the world to celebrate our joy of building and giving. It’s apt then that on this eve of a holiday, we pay our respects, we take pride in our Lineage, and we move forward and continue to build on its legacy”. So Cyanogen was dead. And with it, the ROMing community. Was the ramen ROMming community dead? This beautiful combination of people who are all bashing together and making something beautiful. Was this the fall of the Android ROM? It’s okay. I have the answer. Maybe. Maybe. And we’ll find out after the break.

The Self-Healing Smartphones!

• The ZTE Axon M in action! He questions the company’s marketing blurb; who would watch two videos at the same time, or play a game on half the screen?
• I do remember seeing the Yota’s on TV all the time back in the day
  • Yotaphone: Russia’s Failed Smartphone - NFKRZ YouTube
• Zenfone: Name and shame, the latest of them released with an unlocked bootloader, and then they locked it back with an update.
• LG G Flex: I remember seeing a lot of ads for this. Like, huge banners in the streets, it was this, GTA 5 and one for The Division 1, that’s still up to this day

Make the Lotus proud.

Most Chinese phone brands lament how americans don’t buy phones, they just get them with their contracts. Huawei didn’t seem to have any issues with that over here, all of mine were on contract (what is it, 5, 6 by now? christ…). They entered the market by targeting the counter-culture, the old BlackBerry and HTC users. This was back when YouTube was sending codes via snail mail to enable monetization, 10 or so years ago. The phones had either a good battery or a good camera. “That brand I can’t pronounce” had impossibly long battery life and a pretty good camera, as long as you ignore the odd skin tones. A few TV hosts complained about losing all the contacts on their Samsungs… and the spell was done.

For a bit of perspective on the sheer scale of it all, while Xiaomi copied some designs from Apple, Huawei recreated entire european cities for their tech campus, including a train service. Roll that Top things you didn’t know!

What you didn't know about Huawei.

• The CEO and his family use iPhones, to call back to that “play games, don’t be a gamer” thing
• Samsung did that same “Moon mode” too

Storytime

Huawei P40 lite

I got to play around with a post-sanctions device. So I had some relatives over, and I had to work on a “worst case scenario” Huawei P40lite, no google mobile services, somehow they got viruses on it, it was constantly opening up new browser windows to scam websites and a wallpaper-changer-thing filled with AI girls. I’m sure no banking data leaked from that… I remember that was one of their PR talk points, they got the banking apps and the usual “you must have them” money transfer, ride-sharing, WhatsApp, tram ride apps ported to AppGalery immediately after the sanctions.
I pulled the family pictures off it, then reset it. (It wanted the “google account” password to disable Find-my-phone, even though it was a Huawei cloud account window, classy.).

The main objective was to get Youtube Kids on this thing. There’s plenty of ways around for youtube proper, but not yt Kids. It definitely wasn’t me playing with sketchy Vanced apks that brought-in the viruses. I know for a fact I disabled third party sources after that, but oh well, it is what it is…
After the reset, I placed all the default huawei bloatware in a folder and then wasted a few hours trying out old ways to play with google services, microG, WebApps, Aurora Store…

all I managed to do was get disappointed at the state of mobile browsers. (expand)

Firefox-based ones were the only ones that gave me a functional yt kids webapp, via the “display desktop version of the site” option. The Chromium ones went back to the ad for downloading the app from the play store immediately. There is a weird “Privacy browser” on f-droid, based on the existing internal Android WebView, I want to love it so much but it got it into its head that the screen was super wide and only let me see half the page, but yt kids DID work. This is the moment I remind y’all that Mozilla discontinued webapps years ago, so I couldn’t use those either due to missing APIs and the permanent address bar and browser menus. Floorp is the only way to get proper WebApps on firefox right now.

I vaguely remembered seeing bigboi YouTube on the Huawei AppGallery.
Meet your new lord and savior, GBox. Long story short, Huawei, being a big megacorpo, it was able to pay a proper company in Singapore to copy GrapheneOS GMS sandboxing. Initially, GBox has a limited list of apps recommended in its menu, but one of them is literally the Play store, so you can install everything. With an adblocker.
Let me say it again. An annoying Huawei phone from years ago has THE SELLING POINT OF GrapheneOS. Google apps work perfectly. Including youtube kids and account management. As a free over-the air update, even to older devices.
Capitalism, Ho!

I like brands and I love corporations

I’ve been doing some soul searching lately, and I can’t ignore how the “power user way” meant that something as “normal” as youtube Kids was an impossible task. Reminds me how in IT used to be very easy to calculate π pi, but impossible to determine if the picture contains a cat or a dog.

What even is YouTube kids?

It’s what it says on the tin. It has parental controls, and filters content by age groups. It recommends content in romanian (regular yt loves to push russian and vietnamese if it thinks kids are watching, for some reason). The kid in particular is very agitated and imitates everything. So, some filters were in order. I also like how it forces them to hold phones in wide screen instead of squinting at a little stamp at the top of the screen while browsing other recommends. I think children find the YouTube Kids app boring because they pester parents for their “real youtube” (they watch shorts and learn pranks to play on the relatives).

I have a bit of a soft spot for Huawei’s EMUI, and I wanted to play around with a modern one. I keep postponing doing stuff with my own phone, because everything boils down to “try out everything in sequence and see what works best”. Having an actual objective for once was nice. I still don’t know how they got viruses in the first place, but I disabled AppGallery* best I could, and told em to install stuff through GBOX’s play store. Installed Brave for a bit of adblocking, added its search widget to the home screen, lamented how normal people barely use a browser instead of apps for everything… None of this really mattered, the mom moved on to a Samsung A34, the huawei was meant to stay at home and become the kids toy, I guess.

* updates...

Normal updates to default system apps pushed packets in various languages, and after I installed all of them I kept being prompted for “screen recording and mic permissions” yeah nah I deleted most system apps that I could and blocked updates lol. But, a couple of I-agrees could get them pushed right back. The mentions of UnionPay in the settings weren’t encouraging, but Russia getting kicked out of that system after the Tucker Carlson interview was funny.

One more thing, we walked by the arcade at the mall, and the mom kept telling the kid it’s closed because “no videogames please, screens are evil and he gets enough youtube shorts at home” …? like, do videogames have that bad of a reputation out there still? I’m so disappointed Nintendo didn’t push harder with their “Labo” cardboard line, that could have really gotten through and convinced people like that.

video games with less video and more cardboard

~This was supposed to be an auto-playing GIF but I’m having issues with the embeds so be kind and click it, I can’t pick a thumbnail yet.

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Super Device

The ecosystem integration cannot be understated, it’s the only one that went above and beyond Apple. Tapping the phone on the WiFi mesh to connect, no passwords needed, just NFC magic. Same with headphone pairing, audio quality, animations of your exact model and all. Quite a few tech journalists brought sound engineers and musicians for a blind test with Freebuds Pro, live on stream. No compromises for using them on iPhones either, as Apple TV was releasing here without the TV service…

Running android apps on PC is such a messy affair, between performance issues, outdated android versions and Google DRM, even with the best of efforts people seem to lose interest. I find it’s such a good idea to just in-home stream the apps/games from the phone to the PC, taking full advantage of that latest generation chip you already own. Instant easy drag and drop file transfers, shared clipboard, selecting from all the audio I/O available on the network… This was the idea with HarmonyOS, a minimalist OS to integrate devices around the users like they’re peripherals of the same computer.

I tested the Banned Huawei Products.

~that portal animation when moving the mouse between devices
He didn’t get that GBox update. What he also didn’t get is GDPR, as the chinese internet companies must keep user data in Ireland.

The US was exempted from that after 6 months

Biden signs executive order with new framework to protect data transfers between the U.S. and EU
“ensure the efficiency and effectiveness of American and European cross-border data flows(…) The executive order provides a new legal framework for trans-Atlantic data flows that are critical to the digital economy, the White House said.”

The last of the dragons

~ The committee would prefer it if you’d use the term “loong”.
Mega-corporations don’t have it easy is China. Rock-star CEO Jack Ma was disappeared when he got too big for the party’s liking, and Alibaba was anti-trusted into 6 companies. As for Huawei, it had to sell off HONOR to a distributor, and the Huawei phone division to the local government administration of Shenzhen in 2019.

The all-cash sale will include almost all assets including brand, research & development capabilities and supply chain management.
Main Honor distributor Digital China Group Co Ltd will become a top-two shareholder of sold-off entity Honor Terminal Co Ltd. Digital China group, which also partners Huawei in businesses such as cloud computing, plans to finance the bulk of the deal with bank loans, the two people said. It will be joined by at least three investment firms backed by the government of financial and technology hub Shenzhen, with each owning 10% to 15%, they said. ~ Exclusive: Huawei to sell phone unit for $15 billion to Shenzhen government, Digital China, others - sources

I guess that explains the increased pushiness of their online services.
After 14 years in Shenzhen, here’s a recap of Huawei’s less than honorable corporate espionage activities and the modus operandi of the state-private joint ventures; a princess is involved.

Did Huawei ever invent anything?

“first time as drama, second time as farce.”

The brand being heavily promoted by the iPhone loving CCP members would be enough to turn it cringe-worthy, but they did it at the worst time possible… As the latest iPhone was breaking sales records, P60 international was overheating due to their use of the old stock Snapdragon 888 4G chip, and the P 60 for China was an ad-ridden, always-on recording meme that would overheat if it didn’t freeze up so often. As the party was going on about 5G expertise, their flagship phone was being referred to as the “IQ tax” or “patriotic tax”.

China's Huawei Phone Clown Show Gets Even More Embarrassing!

• Huawei watch can measure blood oxygen for ham sausage
  • Huawei Responds to Reports of Smart Watch Measuring a Sausage’s Heart Rate

The IQ Tax Research Center found through actual measurements that on the same sausage, the Apple Watch failed the test, while the Huawei Watch gave the result.

“Doesn’t this mean that the ham you bought is fresh?” Another netizen said: “It may be the pig that made the ham, and it can be rescued.”

Dayou from Hunan put his Huawei Watch3 Pro on a box of ibuprofen granules. The result was a heart rate of 100 and a blood oxygen level of 97%. In this regard, Da You said to Pan Ge: “The test data of this thing is simulated, right?”

Sanran from Liaoning used Huawei Watch GT3 Pro to test a roll of toilet paper and found that the heart rate of the toilet paper was 80 and the blood oxygen saturation was 99%.

---

The first thing said about businesses is to focus on solving issues, so they have to pay you even if they don’t like you. Tech in the 2000s was simple, bigger number better product. If it’s a convenient solution at the time, for an accessible price, I can’t really blame the consumer. It would feel weird bashing someone with a Huawei phone so soon after getting rid of mine.

~Look at me, talking smack about the company that keeps the lights on.

So, the nearest city is full of these solar inverters, folks get them for free from the national “Green House” program. Green as in green energy, not greenhouse effects, though the manufacturing on such large scale might contribute to that. Well, at least these solar inverters on every wall aren’t 5G equipment. Wait, 5G is supposed to have small antennas everywhere . Nah, after failing to achieve a service economy due to that CovidZero disaster, the party decided to go back to the ol’ reliable manufacturing. I guess having eyes everywhere is less useful nowadays, as nations of the world are cracking down on their clandestine police stations. Also they probably got their fill of seeing the world through balkan eyes lol:

Strand type

~This was supposed to be an auto-playing GIF too.

I needed a reminder of the “vibes” of back then, the hope and excitement of tech, and this blog-post depicts it very well:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150908121509/https://blog.oneplus.net/2015/01/future-tech-and-its-inevitability/

We aren’t quite at servers-on-a-hip yet, but fitting a full stack of wireless networking gear in a backpack is here, monitor, server, Splitgate and all. Batteries are included.

Homelab Server in a Backpack!

People of the past weren’t naïve either, for every “vibe” there was a “chill”. For a conclusion, I’ll have Mr. Enter talk about a phone game game that uses phones to make a point about the fears of my generation, before we were all pacified by convenience: (timestamp at 14:57 if the embed doesn’t work)

Top 10 Best Advertising Campaigns (Part 1)

[kyller3030]

Did you know that people who are good at recognizing patterns might struggle with tasks that require active cognitive thinking and decision making? I want to link here some fancy study (here’s one: Scientists uncover a surprising conflict between important cognitive abilities) but truth be told I saw it on Instagram, Hashem Al-Ghaili has been doing this “science news as shorts on facebook and insta” for a long time.

So Tech Altar has an older video about european phone brands making a comeback, two of them are Fairphone and Blloc:

“Fairphone and Blloc are probably the best examples of the “niche brand” strategy, and the trick here is that unlike regional champions, these companies have a very unique niche product that has no direct competitors for now. Amsterdam-based Fairphone makes a phone that is modular, easy to repair and has as little negative impact on the environment and the people in their supply chain as possible. You know, as many conflict-free materials as possible, no child labor, you get the point.”

“Berlin-based Blloc has pretty standard hardware, but develops really unique software for it. In short, they have completely customized Android to make it as distraction-free and as non-addictive as possible. I like the idea behind both of these companies, they’re unique, and for now they don’t have very direct competitors. And a niche product is a high risk, high return strategy. It’s high risk because nobody knows if sustainable devices or distraction-free Android software is something that people actually want, and even if it is, it’s unclear whether these companies can actually build the stuff that they have envisioned. BllocOS is a cool concept and the team has made some great progress, but it’s still far from the universal solution that Blloc envisions for the future. That is still years of hard work away and success isn’t exactly guaranteed. In the same way, Fairphone has had unimpressive sales results in the last few years because they just couldn’t produce phones fast enough with their complicated manufacturing processes and supply chain. So these companies are highly risky, but of course the return is also pretty high because they don’t have a lot of direct competitors right now, which means that the prices they can charge are also pretty high.”

Here is the phone in action, space-food packaging and all:

Android in Monochrome? | Blloc Zero 18 - exclusive first look

“Now, all of this software is definitely still a work in progress. Many of the integrations are pretty buggy, there just aren’t enough integrations yet, and it’s unclear if Blloc can keep up with all the changes in the future. After all, Blloc is hacking these integrations into Android and into Android apps,so if those change the way they work, these integrations might just break. And if nothing else comes out of it, this phone will at least be a fantastic UI or UX design case study.”

Following along WVFRM’s Cyanogen video, the hosts go on to explain the reasons they stopped caring about ROMs around this time. After these years of experimentation, most performance improvements and notable features were rolled back into Android Open Source Project to benefit the entire ecosystem, and at the time, Google was so focused on making android better that they released the first Pixel with their name on it. And, two months later, Cyanogen Inc. went from being a big corpo with partners in China, India and about to enter the carrier-contract driven market of the US of A, to being very busy being dead and the community was picking up the open source pieces, which are all of them.
Even though Pixels come unlocked cough ahem, there was less to “get” out of ROMing, less enhancements to miss out on, with Huawei’s magic battery life on the market. Less push to be experimental. Side-loading, third party launchers exist too. This is why I wanted to showcase Blloc, it’s a good illustration of how most of their android modifications simply became part of AOSP, the tiles are the quick settings in the notification area, the advanced notification controls themselves, the quick media controls, the black & white filters, focus time etc.

They’re still around, making one of those aforementioned third-party launchers, Ratio, and their site looks impressive, having discovered yellow accents in the meantime.

Ratio—Your new homescreen

See also: the NoPhone Air

https://youtu.be/Ijssm6Qv5nE&t=121

---

AOSP reached a high-point around Android 8 Oreo, and many odd-ball devices run android internally these days.
Oculus Meta Quest 3,

• Nintendo Switch (SurfaceFlinger, OLED)

• The SUNMI V2 Android POS System Thing…it has a printer thus it’s cool (kind of) ~ SMOOREZ yt

• Gaming on a Chinese/English Translator Pen ~ Bringus Studios yt

  • Would you look at that, it doesn’t support USB type C properly, it just has the pins of a type A in the shape of type C. Timestamp

• I Installed Android on my iPhone (For Real) ~ Bringus Studios yt

• Gaming on a Rabbit R1 ~ Bringus Studios yt

  • I love that intro lmao

• 2022 Polestar 2 Android Automotive OS; Update

"All of these things run on android open source project so if you could take something that was a better version of android, say LineageOS that had been significantly updated and had newer android features and it’s open source you could put it on your device… wouldn’t you do that instead of just using AOSP?"

Thing is, Google started to abandon many “phone” features of AOSP, perhaps because there’s so many of these things that aren’t phones out there. So here’s the situation: the only reason to buy a new phone nowadays is to get extended software/security support, and embedded devices especially want extended support. That’s the niche Lineage occupies these days, bringing into the present AOSP, with all the parts still stuck on whatever Android Oreo had in 2016, with Long Term Support, security patches, and maintaining on top of that a dialer, phone-book, messaging… hm.

I kind of want to know how many of the 1.5 million LineageOS devices are not smartphones? Are there refrigerators running lineage in people’s basements? Probably. That’s awesome.
I don’t think anyone, any companies have really come out and said “We are using LineageOS as our like, basal stuff”. Yeah, most of them you don’t need the latest Google Camera app, like Michele told us that his printer runs android. It’s running like android 8 but you don’t need like a camera and all this latest stuff."

Android’s slow creep towards being closed source continues on - open source elements deprecated

Android's slow creep towards being closed source continues on - open source elements deprecated

• This video is important.
  • Google is about to make life more difficult for custom ROM fans ~ Android Authority
  • Google further guts the Android Open Source Project by deprecating the dialer and messaging apps ~ OS news
  • Android Mobile OS Snooping By Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei and Realme Handsets ~ School of Computer Science and Statistics, Trinity College Dublin
  • Google Data Collection ~ Professor Douglas C. Schmidt, Vanderbilt University
  • GrapheneOS strikes again; my phone wasn’t compromised because I wasn’t using Google’s fk’d android
  • A Dad Took Photos of His Naked Toddler for the Doctor. Google Flagged Him as a Criminal. ~ The New York Times

"Due to the slow erosion of functionality from AOSP, as well as the transfer of functionality from AOSP to closed-source Google applications and frameworks, we’re fast approaching a point where you can’t really state that AOSP is a full open source mobile operating system anymore.

Is a mobile operating system that can’t send messages or make phone calls really complete?"

RCS... 🤕 (expand)

I trust user comments so much more than the articles themselves it’s not even funny. It’s so validating that HTC was aware of how the smartest people were never the company employees as far back as the first XDA.
Apple is bringing RCS to the iPhone in iOS 18 - The Verge

Google’s version of RCS is non-standard, why would Apple implement Google’s non-compliant version of RCS? once encryption comes to the standard Apple will implement it, as they’ve said already.

Apple could easily call up Google and implement encryption between their two clients. Wonder why they won’t do that?

We’re talking about adding encryption here, not using “Google’s version” of RCS (which I guess means Jibe?). Google uses the Signal Protocol for encryption, which is an open standard.

darrsil:

Oh boy, here we go.

Google’s RCS uses Universal Profile, which is the standard. Anyone who uses Universal Profile, like Apple, will be able to talk to Google’s RCS on day one.

The RCS spec does not have encryption built-in. You say “once encryption comes to the standard” like it’s a certainty when it’s anything but - there are members of the GSMA that explicitly do NOT want E2EE built into the standard.

This is why the spec today says that encryption is up to the individual clients to implement, which is exactly what Google did. They built on top of RCS which is how it’s intended to be done.

Like I said in my previous comment, the encryption Google uses is the Signal Protocol. It is an open standard and not proprietary. Apple could easily work with Google to implement E2EE using the Signal Protocol across their two apps.

But Apple doesn’t want to do that because they SAY they want it added to the base spec - which like I said won’t happen. So Apple can say “well we tried” but still claim iMessage is a more secure messaging platform.

MorbidGod

We will just have to wait and see what Apple does. They usually a good to their word, but not always.

I am looking at you, FaceTime being “Open Sourced” and then pulling back on that promise.

apparatchiki ☭

Google doesn’t offer RCS encryption worldwide, it’s on a country by country basis, it makes little sense to depend on an unrelated third-party for encryption, why would Apple tie themselves to that logic? Not every Android phone out there has access to Google’s services either, for example in China, the largest smartphone market in the world.

Then again, if the GSMA consortium doesn’t come around to requiring encryption at the standard level, how is that Apple’s fault exactly? blaming Apple for that makes very little sense.

I’d agree though that they failed the market when back tracking on opening up the iMessage / FaceTime protocol to allow third-parties to use it. They could be the Whatsapp of the world by now if they would have wanted to.

BTW, Google using the Signal Protocol has nothing to do with this discussion at all, that doesn’t make their implementation a standard on any level.

darrsil

My comment was specifically replying to your points that Google is using a “non-standard” and “non-compliant” (???) version of RCS.

Google’s RCS uses Universal Profile, which is the standard. Google built on top of RCS to add E2EE into their client, which is how it is written in the standard. The encryption they use is the Signal Protocol, which is an open standard. Everything they’re doing is in line with standards.

I know Google doesn’t operate in China. Apple does, but let’s be real, they aren’t concerned with privacy in China in the first place because they give all of user iCloud data over to the Chinese government there anyway. Regarding your claim that Google doesn’t offer encryption everywhere, can you source something that shows they don’t use encryption in a region they operate Messages in?

And Apple said they don’t want to work with Google on adding E2EE between their two clients but want to rather work with the GSMA to add it into the spec. So if the GSMA doesn’t add it into the spec, then Apple failed and yes it’s their fault because they could have added E2EE into most of RCS by simply working with Google on adding it between their two clients.

---

spamabyss

It has been said before. And no one. Not one person outside the US uses iMessages. It’s Telegram, WhatsApp or Signal since many many years.

NoOrdinaryQuokka

RCS could make Messages and iMessage much more viable in Europe. Now people actually might try using the default Messages app (again).

frederick

Glad you guys have to juggle multiple apps to text people. Seems like a better default messaging app on all phones is better for everyone?

henlejeremias

The ‘or’ here is to be seen geographically more than anything else. In Europe, for example, WhatsApp is the one messaging service, it is more ubiquitous than iMessage in the US even.

And while I agree on your idea that a default messaging app on all phones is tempting, it’s also true that both iMessage and WhatsApp are awful apps UI-wise, which I could imagine is due to lack of competition (because of their monopolistic statuses).

A mutually agreed, modern messaging standard with multiple user-facing services to choose from sounds like a dream. Let’s see if it manifests with RCS.

---

Jonathan Horst, host of Mac Address also claims it was China that pushed Apple to adopt RCS. Is Apple even Apple anymore? - TalkLinked

MindTheGapps

Nowadays LineageOS still has 1.5 million users, significantly updated over AOSP, with optional GMS if you need them. They aren’t the young excited media people flashing cyanogen nightlies and just talking about it a lot, but

"there are still a lot of community members that are maintaining lineage for individual devices. If you go on the lineage website most popular phones on there, and it sort of works the same way as it worked on CyanogenMod where you buy a new phone, you decide you want it to be the guy that maintains it, you go on and you maintain it and it’s kind of fun but it’s being used a lot in industry now okay which is very different.
So I’m trying to figure out okay well what really happened to the modding community, right? Like, people stopped using this. Is it just because Android got mature and things got good, right? Now, you might have heard of this kind of conspiracy theory that’s been going around for a while, that Google has been taking things from AOSP, and instead of updating AOSP, they just update them in the Google apps. Right. And this is sort of a major thing that has been happening for quite a few years now. So yes, Android is open sourced. And if you want to use Android, you can use it, but it’s like the camera app is going to be from like Android eight. And this app is going to be from Android eight. I made a video about this."

Can You Trust Google? ~Marques Brownlee

Can You Trust Google?

And they started just using their own Google Photos and Pixel apps now and the messenger client in AOSP is different from Google Messages and like everything is like Google This , Google That versus the aosp versions. So there’s kind of this conspiracy theory that google intentionally… they need to make money off of android, right? They originally made it open source because they needed to get as much of a user base as possible. But then at one point they were like, “how do we monetize this? We can’t keep giving away all the good stuff that we’re making for free.” It’s the fourth time this has been brought up. Like somebody’s like, “we gotta be, I gotta make some money off of this.[Laughter] I really wanna. I really wanna do it.”
So I asked a lot of people right, I asked Michele, I asked the lineage guys, I was trying to ask them “Do you think this is the main reason that ROMing has gotten so not popular? You know, that Google’s like taking aosp and making it a lot harder to like build stuff off of?” and they actually think that it makes a lot of sense for Google to be doing this. Because the biggest reason that they say is that our phones are now a much more major part of the way that we live our lives, right. And back in the day, you could ROM your phone, you could do whatever you wanted. And you would still go to your bank, maybe, and there would be a banking app; but the banking app was really bad, It was very new. And as our phones kind of get more mature and have become a more integral parts of our lives, there have been people at those banking companies going like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. This person is throwing an OS that we have no idea what it is, and the security features we have no idea what it is, and they’re using our banking app on “some phone”. And so, a big reason that both the lineage os people and people like Michele think that roming is getting a lot harder and people are not doing it as much is because now google has made it that, if you use a custom rom on your phone things like banking apps don’t work. Right and imagine your banking app doesn’t work like that’s a major reason not to rom your phone. You can’t use a lot of the core features that you would want to use on your device. Yeah it’s not worth it anymore, what are you gonna do you’re gonna unlock your Snapdragon processor and get “faster” performance like what does that even mean?
Yeah but I’ll have my flashlight! * chuckles *.
But early on when we’re talking about roming phones and doing it all the time and resetting it and the like, just so little of your life was on it back then, it was a device that’s an accessory. Your phone is everything about you at this point, there are so many insanely important things, and if something were to mess up on your phone, you could be really screwed for a while. It’s way scarier to also just do things to your phone now. So security is very important, there’s security patches and bug fixes all the time, it’s a rat race as soon as there gets there’s this bug that people find out about, they’ve got to patch it, and then people exploit it, and patch it, and exploit it, and this whole thing.
Random trivia question: There is a fast food app that does not work if you mod your phone, if you unlock your bootloader. […] McDonalds. It has to do with GPay(?)
Is it only McDonald’s that does the…? That was the one that Michelle pointed out in particular. Yeah, it could be other ones, too. It looks like Starbucks does a lot of the same stuff. Well, Starbucks is a bank. That’s what I was going to say. When you wrote that, and how many Starbucks gift cards… yeah, that made a lot of sense. That’s how Starbucks makes all their money, is by investing your money that you “add to your card” on the app. Insane. They’re… It’s. Insane. Yes. They’re literally a bank. That’s why it’s called Starbucks. badumtsss Hey! Sorry. Wow. Yeah. That felt horrible to say out loud.
Security is just becoming really important because our devices are this one-stop shop. They really are PDAs now. All of these apps are like, “I don’t want this unknown OS to be running my app, especially when it has things like your financial details on it.” Because if they get in trouble, they’re going to get in a lot of trouble. It’s risky. Yeah, so it’s getting more closed down. And surprisingly, people like the LineageOS team and Michele are like “Yeah that makes sense. We actually totally understand that right”. So it’s not as much of the like google is intentionally trying to make android harder to use, they really think that the reason is because of security. I’m sure they don’t want to be the ones to create something and then that winds up being the reason somebody loses a lot and then they have to think “that’s kind of our fault”. Not even legally, but just… that sucks to think like “yeah we did something that a bunch of people lost important things with it”.
Yeah, but it is a bummer because even RCS does not work in AOSP. Oh yeah. The messaging client of AOSP doesn’t have RCS support, that’s “funny”. You have to use Google Messages, which is crazy.

But, you know, the spirit of ROMing is not dead. There’s plenty of open source material that’s being published consistently. People like Stephanie are a huge open source, people, they really advocate for it. And I think that even if these ROMs like Lineage OS are not the level of CyanogenMod, like they used to be where the community was like, there were so many people and everyone was super excited about it all the time and flashing every single day. I think every community will always have enough people that want to maintain it. And just for the reason that they want to maintain it, right? They don’t have to make a company out of everything. And that’s kind of the magic of open source. Wise words. You don’t have to make a company out of this. “I Gotta make money out of this.”
I just remember, yeah, the modding days were fun.

It keeps going for a bit longer:

I had my, and I still have it, the original Motorola Droid that I had. And that phone, I can’t believe it’s still boots. That phone went through it. And that, my Galaxy Nexus, I had custom ROMs. I was overclocking those phones. I had custom kernels where you could choose like, all right, let me get up to 1100 megahertz when the screen is on, but then underclock down to 200 megahertz when the screen is off and have this refresh rate so that I can like cycle between those clock speeds quickly and end up with a faster phone with longer battery life with all these custom kernels it was insane yeah these phones were cooking in my pocket it’s unreal and I was flashing nightlies. That was quite a time, yeah.
When was the last time you tried to ROM a phone? I think right around the time that Cyanogen was done, I remember being on the nightlies, I remember doing a lot of Paranoid android and the like, because that was an ALT ROM Yeah. Right around when Cyanogen was super …(big?) Alt-rom. Yeah, it was like… Cyanogen was the big one. “It’s not a phase, mom.” [Laughter] But there was Paranoid Android on the side, which oh, it’s got these cool themes and a couple extra kernel features for my overclocking desires. But I definitely wasn’t doing it much after ~2015, 2016.
I did it once on my ERIS, that’s all I remember. Nice shout out to the ERIS. I just think it’s pretty incredible how important cyanogen mod ended up being to a lot of stuff that happened… Like OnePlus only really exists the way it does because of cyanogen mod. Yeah I mean it was a community-based thing that was also built off a different person that built something and then made it, it’s literally in the history of Android at this point and, like, Android phones in general. So that’s wild. Yeah. So while we might not do a lot of ROMing ourselves anymore, I think it’s beautiful that communities will still come together and make open source projects that are really cool. (one more trivia intermission about the name origin of Nexus. A piece of media with sleeping androids that may or may not dream of electric sheep. Also Bladerunner The model is "Nexus 6, and the Philip K Dick estate sued google over it.)
It was fun recapping on what happened from the birth of android up until now and how important the open source community was to all of that.

I mean as someone who wasn’t part of that community and did very little, knew just enough about it to know what cyanogen mod was, and then to know about it as in, like, inside of OnePlus and stuff yeah it’s fun. //Literally me fr fr
It was a crazy set of years dude.
Sounds like something I would have been into.
I was flashing cyanogen mod nightlies every single day, wiping my device every single day; I would lose all of my data, all of my photos, every single day, for no reason because I was a nerd. [Laughter]
Same, that’s you and me both, yeah simpler times simpler times but it was a good era of android. Zero points!

As per the website:

Individuality:
Customization is paramount to productivity. That’s why LineageOS promises to push for user personalization and preference. Everyone is unique and your device should be too.

Security
Your data, your rules. Along with monthly security updates to every supported device, we enhance existing privacy touchpoints around the OS and keep you informed of how the system shares your data. Trust helps you understand the state of your device’s security and warns you about possible threats. SELinux Enforcing.

Longevity
LineageOS extends the functionality and lifespan of mobile devices from more than 20 different manufacturers thanks to our open-source community of contributors from all around the world.

Power to you
Our open-source apps are here to help you get through the day. Want to do more with your device? Power users will enjoy Unix command-line utilities. Android developers will turn any device into the perfect device for apps development thanks to enhanced tools and debugging capabilities.

It feels weird how these are relegated to a “niche” and business to business solutions nowadays. My mom went through four vacuum cleaners that kept burning-out before finding one made in Poland for warehouses.

---

Cloud yelling session

So the bank’s been shutting down their previous online platform in favor of a new mobile app. That adds a “maintenance” monthly fee. The app was so bad they shut it down within a year and launched another one (to my branch’s credit, the branch’s boss was really trying to get it working, but the server was offline at the other end so there was nothing he could do). My millennial insistence on making payments on the PC looks increasingly silly, as they all need to be approved on the mobile authenticator anyway.
I want to put to pixels just how bad this digital payments thing has been lately. So I try to pay for food, and the debit card keeps getting declined, the mobile app keeps saying I forgot my PIN ( I didn’t). I walk to the closest bank branch, and there’s a crowd of people trying to get their salaries out of the ATMs. All but one are out of order. After 10 minutes I get the attention of a clerk (they were all bunched together around a laptop) and she tells me all the customer support issues should be handled through the app. The app doesn’t open, the only button I have is “Reset PIN” for which the clerk informs me that I can pay with cash…

Another day, my card was disabled because I haven’t used it in a while, so I had to go through the procedure of opening a new account. Verification codes, sent through the super-duper secure SMS, followed by a 40 page contract…PDF. That I was supposed to read on my phone, as the queue was forming up behind me. Gotta pay the App administration fee for all the months the card was disabled too. My card also gets blocked every time I go through Stripe as “unusual activity” even after approving it in the app, and I have to call human customer support. That’s probably the biggest lament here, that many branches get closed down, and the few that are left don’t carry any money. To withdraw cash, my brother had to call some of his old classmates to find one treasury that had any, as most branches kept insisting to just pay everything through the app. Because they think rural Romania is flush with POSs, I guess. In fact, it’s not unusual for all the ATMs within an hour’s drive to be out of service at the same time.
So all the enshittification of mobile software is happening in the name of security of this well oiled machine. I’ll tell you about the machine, we have these smarty “ROBOts” to handle basic tasks like paying bills and depositing money in the account. It was unresponsive. I asked for help and the clerk lady…unplugged the ROBOthing from the wall and plugged it back. And so, we were chilling for 10 minutes with the Windows 8 updater.

~ Customer survey: how was your experience with the staff?
I’m just saying, all the security buzzwords, widevine, attestations, safetynet and platform integrity checks* ring kinda hollow, when it’s all in the service of… displaying ads on the payment object. Isn’t that why we got the debit cards in the first place? To have a dedicated payment thing with security chips because integrating security into other things was too hard?
*oh yeah WebDRM is still going ahead on Android only. Summary of the whole mess.
I guess I’m supposed to log the bank account into Google Blank and forget about it, but most help pages about that start and end with “Works in USA and Germany”.
There’s a happy end, the situation on the ground isn’t that dire, at least here Revolut reached the market years before Apple and Google, so most people use that, with the bank-issued app as back-up. Revolut works fine on modifies androids, and my choice of rom fixed its attestation over a year ago, so the majority of payment systems work fine. Here’s the full list of user reports: [LIST] Banking Apps on /e/OS - Lists - /e/OS community

Here’s a few more banking adventure visuals, and the older ROBOts.

Russian Mars colonization program

~What can I say, eastern europe prefers androids

Oh, one tablet security thing I do like: voting here is done with rubberstamp on paper, and the polling stations have a couple of tablets just to check if the same bulletin (ID paper) is used at multiple stations. We had cases in the past where the papers of dead people were used to vote in their name, touring many stations. As in, happening so much it has been parodied for at least a hundred years now.

Now, buy something or get out of here, the train’s leaving!

[kyller3030]

Acquisition precondition

After not getting much usage out of the overpowered nova 5t, I gave it to my mom; she actually needed a new phone, that Y6 was spending more time frozen-up than running, often crashing while opening WhatsApp. I was looking to buy a cheaper second-hand phone to play around with ROMs for the first time, so no two year contract, just in case things don’t work out. Getting a new phone that’s slow from the factory door feels really bad, and older flagship devices wouldn’t get long term support from the carrier so… no need to pay the carrier for that privilege.

This Phone is $169 - What's the Catch?

“At this price point, I’d prefer prehistoric premium over presently pleasantly priced”

Rapidia

In the time since I got my current phone, the brand “INFINIX” from 4th world-wide best-seller TRANSSION launched in our market. The cheapest we got is the Infinix HOT 40 Pro: It has substantially bigger numbers than the Motorola above, looks nice. In the box, they give you a silicone protective case, charger, wired 3.5mm headphones and a lot of plastic for $215.

Moto G Play 2023	HOT 40 Pro
3GB RAM	8GB RAM
IPS LCD, 90Hz, 720 x 1600	IPS LCD, 120Hz 1080 x 2460
6.5 inch	6.78 inch
5000 mAh	5000 mAh
Mediatek G37 (you saw how it runs)	G99 6nm (idk how2read benchmarks for mobiles)
$169	$215

But… there’s HTC Desire 22 Pro for sale, going for less than $100 brand new, with sdcard, jack, and it has a proper 5G Qualcomm, not Mediatek. It’s a beautiful device, better than both of these, from a brand I respect. Good things stay good, they just get cheap And it’s End-of-Life. Or at least, people on the internet say HTC is bad with updates, I can’t find any info on this besides a comment on GSMArena saying he got an update back in March. Damn shame, at least Sony has the decency to allow the community to fix it. When it’s not setting things on fire[1] [2]. There’s a mysterious HTC U23 Pro out there for a good price, made by the half that didn’t leave to make the Google Pixels. In fact, as I was writing this the pre-orders for the HTC U24 went live (this comment section is already asking for an unlocked bootloader, good.). Uhh it’saprettycoolphone withallthe numbers Icouldaskfor, IP67resistant, Snapdragon 7 Gen3, 12GB RAM, 120hz screen, 256GB ofstorage, expandable with MicroSD, 3,5 jack, and even a two-color notification LED. 50MP even on the front camera, 2x opticalzoom and it showcases an AI function to create one perfect group shot from many mistimed photos, no more “I had my eyes closed!” The showcase concludes with mentions of pairing the phone with a VIVE XR headset, a “Viverse” andtheprice of the U24, €$564 eddies. Good L_ck .

• Hey Lois, this rat race is just like that time Aladár traveled to the planet that rushed so much they drove time mad, a year was 3 minutes long. My stars, the wise old-man rushed out of the room, he didn’t want to be late for his funeral! The Hungarian Family Guy - Mézga Család(1969) ~ Living Ironically in Europe

• As I was looking for a clip from the show, of the sun moving so fast it became a permanent rainbow on the sky, a storm brought the fastest moving clouds I’ve ever seen. Trust the process and all that.

---

Hardware as a service

So unlocked bootloader it is, if not for the privacy and debloat reasons, then at least for the e-Waste prevention reasons:

• Spotify bricked devices: So the Car Thing is something to make listening to Spotify in the car safer and easier than looking at the phone app, especially nowadays when cars don’t have volume knobs anymore. Car Thing discontinued - Spotify.

  • How Spotify destroyed Car Thing: ‘You Will Own Nothing’ & what to do about It ~ Louis Rossmann

    “We have made the decision to discontinue Car Thing. This means that Car Thing will no longer be operational.”
    “Apparently they have the server capacity for their application to work and for them to stream music to millions of people every day but they do not have the capacity to continue allowing this device that you paid $90 for, to work on top of your subscription.”

    “What should you do with the device? We recommend resetting your Car Thing to factory settings and safely disposing of your device following local electronic waste guidelines. Contact your state or local waste disposal department to determine how to dispose of or recycle Car Thing in accordance with applicable laws and regulations.”
    “so they’re admitting that they’re turning something you paid $90 for into e-waste. I’m sorry where’s the part of this FAQ where you say: hey since we’re not supporting this device anymore here’s the firmware and here’s the software that runs it. We’re going to open the source code for you so that you may be able to use this for something else, you may be able to repurpose a device that you paid 90 [ __ ] dollars for so that you can continue to use it with the service that you’re still paying for. This sounds like the f’n Mafia: “you’re going to buy my shit, you’re going to pay 90 bucks, you’re going to pay monthly fee to use it, we’re going to disable it so that you have to buy a new thing and you’re going to have to recycle it at an e-waste facility of your choosing” sounds like my uncle trying to be a tough guy…”

    Solutions? (expand)

    Moar quotes

    “You know what I think people should do? You know what I think would be really fun? Fuck disposing of this where your state or local city authority claims you should dispose of e-waste. You know where you dispose of this e-waste? Their corporate headquarters. And what’s great is Spotify has made it convenient to figure out exactly where that is, regardless of where you are in the world. Contact - Spotify This seems like a perfect place for every single person who bought this piece of shit to return it to. If you’re not able to go there in person, you can mail it. UPS, FedEx. I think it would be prophetic and wise to fill their corporate headquarters with this e-waste. Why is it your responsibility to recycle it? How about you give people their money back? Because it seems like you took it for something that you never had a plan of support in the first place.”

    “You know what I think would really hit them in the pocketbook? If every single person who watched this video filed a charge back on their service, not because you care about getting your money back on one month of service in exchange for losing 90 bucks, but because it hurts their ability to accept credit cards, which I think they deserve. I fundamentally believe that a company that has stolen $90 of your money deserves to have this happen to them. Think of credit card processing similar to internet services. You can spend $5,000 a month to get, you know, 50 by 50 megabit per second where it’s technically fully provisioned for you and it’s not being shared or oversold. Or you can pay, let’s say, $90 a month to have one gigabit per second internet where you’re getting the gigabit, but if everybody decides to use it at the same time, you’re no longer getting the gigabit. With credit card processing, if they get 10,000 chargebacks a second or a minute, their merchant services process is gonna knock on their door and say, “hey man, what’s up with this shit?” It’s gonna cause them a problem. And technically, you’re not lying. When you file a chargeback and say service not as described, you paid $90 for this, you need to use Spotify services in order to use it, and they took that away from you without ever telling you that when you purchased this device, that they could disable it at any given time, and they had no intentions to support it. You can reference their website, where they call this device e-waste. If you want to send a message to Spotify, I don’t simply suggest that you cancel your service. I suggest that you file chargebacks on the last month of your service, two months, three months, five months of your service, however much is necessary for you to get back the $90 that they stole from you. There’s only one way for companies like this to learn. A, massive filing of chargebacks. B, action from our government, which as you know, is never going to happen because the FTC is toothless and spineless. And C, for every single one of these devices to be disposed of, as they suggested as e-waste, at their corporate headquarters.”

    He goes on to talk about CDs and local files for a bit.

  • Spotify does their own “tangible reduction pathways” by… writing a 63 page document on how they’re saving the planet by reducing the… size of the APK executable. That document can be reduced to just two letters. There really isn’t a lot of proper eWaste disposal out there, it usually comes down to pushing garbage over the border into Serbia. That’s why it’s important to do the reduce, repair, renew, reuse before it reaches recycle. Still, I enjoy how the cloud service provider talks about reducing cloud usage and not buying devices that rely on company’s servers to work.

    Links (expand)

    • Louis loses mind @ greenwashing scam - 63 page climate report from Spotify after destroying hardware - YouTube
    • Climate Action | Life at Spotify Climate Action | Life at Spotify
    • https://www.lifeatspotify.com/reports/Spotify-Equity-Impact-Report-2023.pdf
      Easy ways to reduce cloud usage:
    • pfBlocker-NG Package | pfSense Documentation
    • AdGuard DNS — ad-blocking DNS server
    • https://ublockorigin.com/

• Samsung, Motorola, OPPO and ZTE issued a remote shutdown. This story is more involved, so here’s another video link to follow along: Samsung disables customer phones remotely, holds data hostage until Mexican government stepped in ~Youtube. Because no one wants to hear “please watch this yt video it will explain everything, just trust this one guy” I’ll add all the links at the bottom. The bulk of the reporting was done by Juan Zago:

Bloqueo de celulares importados en México: ¿Qué está pasando?

(quick google translate link)
The jist of it is that people did not purchase them “the right way”. To avoid costs from carrier contracts, ODM warranty services that don’t help anyway and the usual “dynamic pricing”, many people in Mexico may not buy a phone from the official store because a lot of people in Mexico don’t necessarily have the USA income standards. So they get these Grey market phones that are not stolen, they don’t have stolen IMEIs, they’re simply gray market phones that were supposed to be for another region but just so happened to work fine in mexico. The official argument is the GSM frequencies being different and the electrical chargers being a different voltage. None of these brands have shipped chargers in years, Samsung used to poke fun at Apple for that before doing it themselves… As for the Networking, obviously they work otherwise they wouldn’t buy them, the way it’s handled is, the moment you place the SIM in the phone, you receive an SMS with the settings, this is how it worked in the featurephone days too. If there was a network issue, they could just switch to airplane mode. If there was a danger, Samsung would do a recall with safety boxes like in the Note 7 days, or at least force them to shut down. But it was necessary for them to be on, to display that scary warning about the government.

“Your device will be disabled in 10 days for not complying with Government Regulations in Mexico.”

These companies not only decided to disable these phones from being able to make phone calls, they also disabled customers from being able to access their data on the phone, effectively holding their data hostage until they purchased a new one at their retail store and utilized their own special proprietary software to get the data off of it.
Not only was the government not asking these companies to do this, they actually punished the companies that did this. On October 19th, Profeco and the IFT issued a suspension against all manufacturers who disabled those mobile devices because they unilaterally violated consumer rights by blocking imported phones.
Xiaomi, the legends, simply sent a notification stating that “Your device may not be the official version for the region”, and that “this may affect functions of your device, such as connection to the phone network contracted by [the user]”, where the only recommendation given is to contact the distributor for further assistance on this matter.

• • All the links. (expand) Give a click to the original article k thx.

    Bloqueo de celulares importados en México: ¿Qué está pasando?

    ZTE bloqueará celulares de “importación irregular” en México, esto es lo que sabemos
    ZTE bloqueará celulares en México: Estos serán los modelos afectados – El Financiero
    unocero - ZTE bloqueará miles de smartphones en México: Te decimos por qué
    ZTE Mexico to disable illegally imported phones - Telecompaper
    ZTE responde sobre bloqueo de celulares en México: los smartphones que se hayan importado legalmente no serán suspendidos
    Los dispositivos Motorola, deben cumplir con las normativas mexicanas ya que cada país tiene diferentes regulaciones. Verifica siempre la política de garantía y disfruta de tu Motorola. ~ Facebook
    ¿Por qué recibiste una Alerta de Uso en tu dispositivo Motorola? ~Motorola México
    Motorola México | Tienda oficial - deshabilitacion-dispositivo-MX345
    ¿Por qué recibiste una Alerta de Uso en tu dispositivo Motorola? ~ Motorola México | Tienda oficial - Tienda en línea
    Exclusiva: OPPO bloqueará celulares de mercado gris en México
    Información relevante sobre el Mercado Gris – Samsung Newsroom México
    Información relevante sobre el Mercado Gris – Samsung Newsroom México ~ webarchive
    Comunicado de PrensaLLAMAN PROFECO E IFT A SUSPENDER DE MANERA INMEDIATA BLOQUEO DE TELÉFONOS CELULARES comunicadodeprensaiftprofeco.pdf ~ El Instituto Federal de Telecomunicaciones IFT
    Conoce qué es el #MercadoGris y evita ser vulnerable de engaños. ~ Procuraduría Federal del Consumidor- Facebook
    ¿Adquiriste un celular fabricado en el extranjero, pero no sabes si está autorizado para operar en México? Aquíte decimos cómo puedes identificarsi un equipo móvil es irregular en el país: Http://catalogomoviles.ift.org.mx/ ~ Instituto Federal de Telecomunicaciones México - Facebook
    comunicadodeprensaiftprofeco.pdf
    Postura oficial sobre Mercado Gris – Samsung Newsroom México
    Motorola detiene los bloqueos de celulares mercado gris en México luego de la postura de IFT y PROFECO
    Motorola volverá a activar todos los celulares bloqueados por mercado gris en México

• And one more for the road: Today I learned F1 cars can have their engines disabled wirelessly via IP connection | PC Gamer

---

Buying second hand has never been more convenient, since Olx started handling the shipping themselves you don’t even need to talk to the seller, just add to cart. I’ve seen proper stores and refurbishing shops list on the site too. So a year ago, my final choice ended up between a Pixel 6a and the Fairphone 4. The quality control issues scared me away from the Pixel:

• Promises to fix a green screen flicker with a software update? eventually they gave him a replacement but sheesh
• some petty squabble with all the chip manufacturers led to them making their own Tensor G modem, and that caused Overheating and connectivity issues: Why I’m (reluctantly) ditching my Pixel 6 Pro - Android Authority ; The Pixel 6 Pro has the most connectivity issues of any phone I’ve used
• Uh oh, some Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro owners are reporting spontaneous screen cracks No comment.
• Pixel’s Hidden Risk: Google’s Arbitration Clause & Defective Phone Sales; Class action lawsuits are about holding big companies accountable, extended warranties & getting refunds for faulty products, not one dollar checks on a refrigerator.

Additionally, wouldn’t it be weird to get away from google software via… google hardware? Couldn’t I just get a de-googled Fairphone from the company? No. No no no.
Manufacturers are contractually obligated to never ever ship any android fork.

“In particular, Google has prevented manufacturers wishing to pre-install Google apps from selling even a single smart mobile device running on alternative versions of Android that were not approved by Google (so-called “Android forks”).”
Antitrust: Commission fines Google €4.34 billion for abuse of dominance regarding Android devices ~ Press corner | European Commission

• Fairphone used to link and shout-out Murena on their online store. Now, FP have for sale a de-googled phone available with Murena’s /e/OS, and it is “Android™ app compatible” wink wink nudge nudge. Huawei had the right idea calling HarmonyOS a new, compatible OS.
• Murena is the only official way to get a fairphone 4 in the US with the 5 year (!) warranty. FP5 coming soon™. I can’t in good heart recommend paying over $600 dollars for one lmao, I see them second hand going for $100. Hell, the FP5 is going for 350$. I never got much use from company warranties anyway. Murena also sells Pixels, Teracube and used to have Galaxy S9s [1].
  • They also launched a couple of limited-run phones under their own name, Murena One and Two. They have switches on the side, one to physically disconnect the camera and microphone, the other to enable Airplane mode and Do Not Disturb (customizable).

Nokia N9 | The Timeless Revolutionary Smartphone

Mr. Nokia’s design expertise pushed me to pick the fairphone, he highlights the honesty in a poly-carbonate back with the paint mixed into the material. No need for a bulky protective case, wear the green proudly! (well, the gray one was cheaper, so mine is grey, but still). The metal edge around it is better at dissipating heat too, which was a low point for the nova. I agree that there’s no point in picking a thin, beautiful device if it will spend its life in a cheapo rubber cover. That golden plastic Y6 always attracted attention when taken out of its black case.
He calls out the silly company mojo text some brands place near the camera, FP’s “yours to open, yours to keep” and “Change is in your hands” catchphrases are printed on the battery, so only visible if you’re showing off the removable modules or picking the transparent back option on purpose. A design attentive to every detail, built to last, and environmentally friendly. If you keep digging, there’s even a map of the DR Congo on the heatspreader.

[kyller3030]

Living with the damn thing

It’s chonk. I’m a big guy, I shouldn’t have any issues with big screens, but this is just thicc and 225 grams heavy, I dropped it a dozen times in the first month. The aluminium frame braved the pebbles outside with only one tiniest scratch. It technically has stereo speakers, but the bottom firing one is, well, bottom firing and sounds bad. I’d keep it only for ringing and alarms if I could.
I took the scenic route through the history of LineageOS because /e/OS is based on that.

• This bringus fella puts in a lot of work to make computers work like computers. Say, in this video he attempts to play computer games on a Lenovo Google Meet Video-conferencing “Room Kit” computer, and goes through all the classics: proprietary power cables, evading enterprise enrollment, having to short a security chip, DIYing a cursed loopback SuzyQable, finding arcane Discord-exclusive knowledge: Installing SteamOS on a Google Meet Video Conference Computer - Bringus Studios YouTube. The FAT Gaming GPU Sequel.

What if I didn’t do that?

Murena’s /e/OS

Android without Google is now 100% usable

My attempt at pushing back the shifting baseline ( Online Privacy and Overfishing - Schneier on Security)
Lineage even at its best sorta expects you to install MindTheGapps, or at least bring your own apps for Email, updates, Gallery (they fixed the gallery like, yesterday. In fact, they’re ahead of schedule). /e/OS is a privacy-focused effort to have a smooth experience out of the box, with an iOS-inspired launcher, ad and tracker blocking browser, customization up to the fonts, interface icons and navigation gestures, and polished-up apps with a common theme for gallery, files, maps and Cloud productivity tasks. I started on 1.13-stable, and now I’m on 2.1, so there will be some comparisons.
I like their unified “App Lounge” client, it allows installing apps from f-droid, Aurora Store and PWAs in the same place, with priority on f-droid and giving apps an Out-of-ten privacy rating. It’s nice to see at a glance that 0/10 whenever I get recommendations for mobile games

My brother asked about battery life first. The battery is pffine, “the standard smartphone experience, charge it every evening when you get home.” Well, every morning, since it has fast charge and likes to go from 100% to 85% idling over night. Measuring battery charge is kind of a complicated science, but the short of it is to keep enabled that Charging control, not going over 85% limit. I noticed that even-numbered update versions make the battery last longer than the odd ones. That charge setting was added in 2.0, so it should be nice and even for a while. Does it look like the screen is using too much power? I think it doesn’t have variable refresh rate, it’s just a standard Samsung IPS 60hz. Blocking ads and playing yt with the screen off help reduce the power drain.

The operational end of~the device.

The device has been modified~ified. Du du du I remember not being able to create an account on the /e/OS forums at the time, so I had to go to the Telegram channel to ask questions, I had gotten cold feet when the Easy installer didn’t work (the phone was fine, the download was getting stuck). The people were nice and patient. One thing I asked was whether you could re-lock the loader, as a safety measure. Yes, but… all it does is it prevents attackers with physical access from erasing the internal storage. I think your files are full-disk encrypted even when unlocked, it decrypts at the first log-in/screen unlock, it shows as an empty USB drive in My computer before that. If that’s not a threat, leaving it unlocked is preferable because it makes recovery easier in case the OS fails to boot. It should never happen on the stable branch but you never know. That warning about being vulnerable to attackers is in case you sell the phone, to inform the next person. Signing-up for the forum works fine now.

Interface

Linus Tech Shaved mentioned the lack of an option to have the “Back” button on the right side. Did… the stock ROM remove that option? it is present on /e/OS.

2-button navigation is no-compromise navigation. The permanent back button is handy, and it can still have functions added to double-tap and hold. Tapping the pill takes you home. I have it set up like a joystick, swiping left&right acts like Alt+Tab and Shift+Alt+tab, and it always sticks to the charger side, it doesn’t rotate around with the content. Pulling down on it rolls down the notification area. The important part: Pulling up goes immediately to the “Recent Apps drawer”, full screen animation and all, it’s so fluid and it’s faster than the pull up then hold gesture. By default holding it shows current tab’s history. It is very intuitive, see it in action Timestamp:

The Best Android Feature You Can't Have! [Gesture vs Button]

Google dropped it, “when you’re in an app, sliding up to view Recents doesn’t work properly; you see the sliding animation, but as soon as you lift your finger, you end up returning back to the app you were originally in.” Lineage patched it back in and it is now buggy. On my device, after the 2.1 update it was hanging when trying to open the multitasker/recent apps, and some zoomed-out apps were stuck on screen. I tried to switch to 3 buttons and back, to maybe clear appdata and reset it, and it does work, it only mildly stutters, but the setting now spells out “2 swipes up needed to see all apps”. Spamming two swipes is still faster than holding, but apparently /e/OS will drop it too.

I would rollback for it but, you know, anti-rollback for your security: They updated the documentation, rolling back is fine and the security checks get ignored. Good to know. 3 button nav can also have hold and double-tap functions, but it’s stiff and the double-tap mean added lag as Android is doing nothing but waiting for you to will-he won’t-he press the button.

So gesture based navigation: I do see the appeal, seeing the windows move around, rearranging themselves with full screen animations is nice. The navigation hint (pie?) can be disabled for even more vertical space, but the problem is that it moves around, it always overlaps/ Z-order conflicts with the progress bars. You can still swipe sideways to Alt+tab, but that always causes glitches when in widescreen. The gigantic 15cm back button on the side feels good. I wish I could disable it on the left side, that’s where most apps hide their main menu, behind a swipe from the left but this is as low as it would go. You can put two fingers to always get the menu but…

And so, two "work"flows emerge:

• buttons on the bottom, SwiftKey*, menus on the left, widescreen video
• gesture navigation, tap kb/ voice input, menus as grand tabs that you move between with horizontal swipes (Zune?), vertical video

*FUTO Keyboard recently released, with offline voice input and swipe typing.
Swipe KB disables the back function from the sides of the screen. One of the big shorts platform, Instagram, does not. The “back” function refreshes the feed. Insta also has a lot of functions on small buttons near the edges, and it is just so cruel to place the “Save” button under the biggest “Refresh” key in the history of computing. Also, what’s up with apps showing a small toast, with a yes or no prompt, and as I go to answer, another one pops-up in front of it. Firefox usually adds a 3 seconds cooldown when that happens, but on mobile… idk what I clicked tapped. All these touch screen controls are complicated, how about some physical buttons:

It ain’t Motorola’s famous Chop Torch, but it’s good enough to use daily. And so, I finally got a smartphone with media keys. I like how most podcast apps remap “Skip track” to Skip/Seek back 30 seconds". Happy days. There’s somewhere in the settings an option to double tap to get the camera, like Huawei used to do. Huawei also had a one-handed mode, activated by pulling the home button to the sides. It reduced the screen to 70% size, and was kinda useless as it would exit if you tapped out of bounds, and apps like to use swipes on the edges. /e/'s one hand mode makes the screen square, it brings the notification area to the middle of the screen and blacks-out the top half. One last bug that was fixed before, but returned after 2.0 is how the fingerprint sensor keeps trying to scan after failing a check, the phone vibrates a few times fast and then it asks for the PIN.

PC GUI mini Weblog

• The GUI should be better. A lot better. ~ Accursed Farms Cool Thumbnail
  • 100 Years of Fictional UI - Were They ALL Wrong? ~ Juxtopposed
• The Desktop Metaphor Sucks; Menus, windows, launchers & system trays: can we do better? (Probably not) ~ The Linux Experiment
  • Joplin does that “start from a blank file that adapts as you add different media formats” thing, minus the web functions.
    • Simple, Non-Commercial, Open Source Notes ~ By Default

    • “I love how he goes from “I need a simple editor” to “I love emacs” to “Productivity is a waste of time” to “I spent months making this video” in a single flow.”

• In Loving Memory of Square Checkbox @ tonsky.me
  • Web Developers Ruin Everything They Touch ~ Brodie Robertson

Camera.

It’s telling that the most popular thread on the Murena forums is people trying to figure out a better camera app, as /e/OS ships a customized OpenCamera that used to detect a phantom third eye lens. They do add work on top of it, like with all the apps they ship, recently it got a QR scanner. It has a clunky interface, clunky in general, it’s slow to focus, it loses focus as it’s taking the pic, tapping on the subject always makes the sky overexposed. It must be a software issue, FP4 has a dedicated Time-of-Flight (ToF) Sensor; it’s like a tv remote, you can see the red light if you record in the mirror/with another phone, so it’s trying to use it, but…

OpenCam’s RAW capture isn’t fixing this. The “manual” focus was useful for a “show&tell” with my ophthalmologist, so that’s nice. People tried to extract that fancy new camera apk […]

• RELAUNCHING: The Fairphone 4 | All new camera experience | Our most sustainable upgrade yet - YouTube
• A day with the new Fairphone 4 camera | SO. MUCH. BETTER. | Fairphone - YouTube

[…] apk, but it might rely on google libraries that ship as part of GMS, so it just crashes. DRM-free apks for ProShot also crash for me, and I would buy the legit version, but it’s only available on the play store. Aurora allows you to download paid apps if you log in with an account that has it, but Play store won’t let me buy apps if I don’t have Play store installed on a compatible phone. I can’t be assed to re-flash twice just to test this…

Breaking news: the official Fairphone 4 camera has been merged for eOS 2.2: FP4: Import FPCamera (!53) · Merge requests · e / devices / android_device_fairphone_FP4 · GitLab

The only App that never worked for me was Monster Hunter NOW!, since it uses complex anti-tamper to prevent people from spoofing their physical location. And, you know, /e/OS has that big privacy widget with the options to fake location or hide IP via… Tor. No kill like overkill. Special mentions go to Temple Run (the most trackers/minute I’ve ever seen) and Twitch, with its branch(dot)io topping the Wall of Shame. I’d expect a live streaming platform to make a lot of connections, but here’s the thing: I procrastinated. I never logged in. I never opened it.

I needed to clear the App Lounge’s appdata like once, changing the grid of apps from 4 x 6 to 4 x 5 caused some apps to be hidden, one clear app storage for the BlissLauncher fixed that. Besides that, I didn’t have to navigate many bugs.

By default /e/OS ships with Magic Earth, it looks like 2000s GPS, I like it, but I don’t have a car so I’ll shout-out that MapLibre SDK, it makes every app that wants to display a map run so much faster, that flightradar view would lag even on my PC with regular google maps.

/e/OS 2.0 release event

Would you believe this thread started-off as a “/e/OS added Android Auto support today. Do y’all use android auto?” My dad’s Dacia Sandero isn’t smart, but this does highlight how much work work goes into maintaining microG compatibility with apps, even Google’s own Maps and Speech Recognition & Synthesis, if you need them. Magic Earth was a bit controversial since it’s “privacy respecting closed source” so Murena announced they employed people to work on an Open source, open standards Maps app.

Why 5G Sucks⚠️ - Mrwhosetheboss The internet doesn’t seem too happy with 5G, citing expensive dedicated plans, expensive phones and problematic roll-outs with firmware that displays in the signal icon because the company invented some new term for 4G “plus”. I just got it for free via 2.0 update on a random Thursday lol. It’s only available in and around the municipality/ capital of county (not country) and has some funny ideas about coverage, but I was so excited to run a speedtest when I saw that icon. Yeah, 5G is real.

Other things I noticed is, 2.0 improved WiFi coverage. I said I keep that P8lite* for youtube around the house because it has great reception. Like, from across the street it’s crazy. Well, now FP4 earned second place, with full-yard & kitchen coverage.
*Mine did anyway.
Let’s talk repair. We had 2 P8lites, one for me, one for me mum. Her phone had reception issues, and was sent to warranty service twice. The reception improved a bit, but most days she would get that “missed calls” SMS the second she went outside. Commie-era walls and all that, but mine never had issues. So we went to an independent to fix it. Years later, again, to replace the battery too before giving it away. The LG slide phone needed a big sperker speaker replaced. The company didn’t help, ofc.
In 2014 a store was running a campaign, giving out a backpack, mouse and a stick of 4GB RAM with Lenovo laptops. I got one that did boot in the store, FreeDOS… but had issues installing a real operating system. (remember when people staged an international protest against Microsoft for the right to buy computers without Windows '98? Good times [1] [2]). Lenovo’s contact numbers didn’t pick up, it was the importer/shipping company that put us in contact with Lenovo’s warranty service, I guess they work with them a lot. They sent a courier to pick-up the laptop, and in 3 days it returned. It was sent to Poland, took apart and every part was inspected and tagged with stickers. That bonus stick of RAM was defective all along. I still keep it as a prop to give to people, it’s small and light enough that it makes technology look less scary and blackbox-y. A while later, I needed to send in the laptop for repairs again, and in the meantime Lenovo opened up service centers here in Romania too. It spent two weeks there and they didn’t fix anything. So uh, yeah, independent repairs FTW. Around that time there were many people repairing CRT TVs, and roughly all of them were complaining about all the parts being soldered on the board, many of them refusing the modern TVs that were just one integrated circuit and the tube. I have lots of respect for the people doing board level repair, my solder skill ends at super-gluing batteries to speaker-wire to make the most annoying noise in the world. There is someone out there with something to say about hardware design and repair:

Corpus advisory: Brand unsafe content

Consumer advocacy like I haven’t seen since TotalBiscuit, anti-sponsor spots included. Supply chain advocacy, anti e-waste advocacy, silenced Apple-authorized service providers and independent repair providers advocacy.

Uncovering Every Lie in MKBHD’s Softball Interview; a scathing critique of ‘brand safe’ influencers

Uncovering Every Lie in MKBHD's Softball Interview; a scathing critique of 'brand safe' influencers

• Apple Reacts to Repair “Propaganda” Claims

---

Did I mention that Fairphone publishes schematics willingly? I had to go far back to find another phone like that:

[EposVox]

I love this. That is all.

[kyller3030]

Thanks!
I have some more brand unfriendly umm… weblog? There’s gonna be a couple more phone reviews on the far side of this.

---

“Mediocrity sold at a premium to consumers who want a product to perform the activism for them?”

For what it’s worth, they were doing the activism before there was a company. TechAltar looked into the finances and how green is the grass, this video covers so much ground:

Is Fairphone really fair?

• It’s doing my script for me, blending a phone review with wider lens business philosophy and independent studies. Well, I’m not gonna get my hands on a FP5 anytime soon so… The FP5 is thin and (optionally) transparent!

It’s not about selling more product than X or Y brand, it’s about showing that it is possible. The FP2 pushed over seven years of updates, and the mad-lads cracked the CPU microcode to go beyond what Qualcomm offered. Using already existing hardware is the most effective way to be green. And now, we see more and more brands from Nokia to Google and Apple bidding with years of support and putting their weight into large scale material reclamation and recycling initiatives, which benefits everyone.
Teaching a rock to do math takes a lot of energy (Short):

How To Make A CPU

I still feel a sense of wonder towards the math rock that allows me to see the people of the internet, escapism and all that… We didn’t have many consoles here, so if it has a CPU, it plays games.

• GameTales #11: NES The console that beat communism, The best console ever made: The Terminator (Ending Man)

It’s so chilling to see how much of the energy usage goes into making the CPU, something usually overlooked because a CPU isn’t a wear part, once it’s made it’s made for good. And then the CPUs were tied to the disposable batteries… I remember that time a supercomputer was built by ordering a lot of PlayStation 3 chips and just sticking them together. I was hoping to see that for phones, a few old single cores turned into a new cheapo device. The wild thing is how this breaks the cycle of life, this isn’t “we’re all playing with the same blocks so obsolescence is how we all get to have a turn” this is eating into our inheritance. A barrel of oil has the energy potential of 12 years of hard labor, and it was kinda cool when we used it to go from the first flight to the moon in 60 years. It’s less cool to manufacture bin-food e-waste loading-screen-simulator tablets, Craig!
I love seeing those Chinese motherboards that salvage old chipsets to use old server CPUs in cheap PCs:

• Mystery Motherboard from China: Salvage Chipset & BIOS Hacks ~ Gamers Nexus

  • “We accidentally discovered a Russian enthusiast overclocking scene”

  • LTT showing the active development of custom BIOSes in the forums in a more recent video and explaining the economics.
    • This is the stuff I pay my internet bill for.
• Would you pay $100 for a Chinese Salvage Motherboard?? I did… ~ LTT
• Why Is AMD Selling Broken PlayStation Chips? ~ LTT
• wait, latest gen. of Intel rusts?

Apple’s Biggest Threat: Qualcomm ~ LMG Clips The comments are worth reading too:

Linus:[…] windows for ARM is it finally coming true after 12 long years or whenever the surface rt launched.
Luke: Are you gonna be super sad? You think they’re gonna be replaceable chips…
-Am I gonna be sad? Oh they’re not gonna be, they already weren’t in laptops.
-But they’re gonna come to desktop
-A lot of aios already use these laptop chips…
-My whole point is about desktops because now you’re gonna get chips soldered to boards, then RAM’s coming next.
-Oh man I’m about to get myself canceled again. I am probably less opposed to CPUs being soldered to boards than I was in the past
-because the whole dream of upgrading the processor and keeping the whole motherboard never happens is that why? * chuckles *
-I think my experience with Threadripper kinda killed it.
-Everyone I know when they’re specking out a computer enjoys being like “This is a new motherboard generation so it’s gonna last like three more so I can upgrade the CPU” and then the next time I talk to them which is the next (uhh this sometimes does actually happen) but then the next time i talk to them when they’re building a new computer: they’re replacing the motherboard anyways.
-Yes. Now with that said the secondary market is something that we can’t lose track of here. It’s really important to be able to pull the CPUs out of Lenovo ThinkStations and repurpose them for cheap gaming boxes in China or whatever. We have a really cool video coming on a gaming PC we bought for $300 on Taobao that is kind of awesome. That won’t be possible anymore. And that is terrible.
-Also, motherboard failure rates are, I hazard to say high because honestly, they’re not. It’s just relative to a lot of other components in a computer.
-Especially CPUs.
-They’re really high… I wouldn’t say honestly failure rate of anything in a PC these days is actually high, I’m not trying to dog on motherboards in general just… CPUs basically never die and motherboards die fairly often. You can get cpus from like 15 years ago that are rock solid still and usually you just have to keep swapping out the motherboard every so often.

commenter @Metalrasputian

Higher end server ARM chips run on separate, slotable packages. I don’t see that changing for high end desktops. I do think lower end desktop chips will likely end up being AIO style boards. Hell on those cheaper ones, I’d bet we’d see the whole SoC (proc, ram, storage) as a single package.

It gets complicated with storage, like, even if it isn’t soldered, it can rely on TPM cryptographic chips. Also, talk on long term support for older CPUs: . Tbh I lost the plot on everything UEFI and firmware around 2012, maybe I’l make a thread asking questions about that.

Why Doesn't Windows 11 Allow Older Hardware?

Fairphone is already pestering Qualcomm to work on socket-able consumer ARM chips. For now, they managed to get industrial long-term supported chips for the FP5. It turns out, the wider industry tries to keep their gear going as long as possible by default, it’s just phones that are weirdly hasted in that area. The “stopkillinggames” standard of “allow the company to do business whichever way they want, but when they drop support they have to provide unlock codes” would be nice.
I’ve seen someone move from Android to iPhone because they got “viruses” and blamed android allowing random apk installs. So maybe there’s use cases for super-duper locked-down devices out there, but when that use case ends it doesn’t need to create e-waste (and mandating third-party stores doesn’t really fix privacy&security issues anyway). So bootloader unlock please. Re-flashing is enough of a pain to prevent random people from getting “social engineered” into installing viruses.

• Recently Google announced that ChromeOS will get rebased on Android, and it doesn’t involve the Android-x86 project, so best of luck to all those ChromeBooks out there: Google might abandon ChromeOS Flex. Here’s why - and what you can do about it | ZDNET

---

It’s been over 10 years since the initial awareness campaign, and people are growing weary of declining quality of products being marketed as the “green” option. The concept of a social enterprise struggles to fit into regular economic systems.

Living with the damn thing 2

This Fairphone 5 Review is Going to Make Me Very Unpopular

• Linus reviewed (roasted) our phone | Fairphone reacts - YouTube

  • “FairPhone did a much better job at convincing me to NOT get a FairPhone 5 than Linus… because I’ll still be using my FairPhone 3 4 for years.”

• Android 14 is here. Here’s what’s changed. - Fairphone

FP got some backlash due to the lack of 3.5 jack and dongle issues; Linus got backlash for seemingly not being up-to-date with how worse the repair-ability of flagships has gotten in recent years*, and equating glue, alcohol, pull tabs and suction plates with the fingernail-removable back cover. They both mention sth about pre-production prototypes and fixes coming via updates, and I can’t help but wonder at what point does 8 years of support turn into 4 years of “Early Access”?

*LTT did have a video a couple of months earlier showcasing Dan fixing water damage and the joy of data recovery from a Galaxy Fold a few months earlier: Fixing my Water Damaged Phone - Samsung Fold Repair - LTT Video starts by calling out how buying a second phone was faster and ~about the same price as spare parts.

Commenter @ymi_yugy3133:
9 months ago

“I think Fairphones mediocre sales success illustrate something we’ve known all along. People are unwilling to trade quality for sustainability. Selling sustainability only works if it’s coupled with quality, e.g. people are willing to pay more for organic food, but only if they believe it to taste better or be more healthy. If you walk through a grocery store you can tell that basically all organic products are marketed as premium offerings. The only way to reliably increase the sustainability of consumption is via regulation, be it setting standards, taxing unsustainable practices or at the very least make sustainability price competitive with subsidies.”

• PS3 is “for consumers to think to themselves ‘I will work more hours to buy one’. We want people to feel that they want it, irrespective of anything else.”
  • “It requires a huge financial investment” $599 US Dollars
  • Thanks for All The Memes, PS3!

I mean, as far as I’m concerned the pricing issue is solved by just getting it second hand, perhaps that feels bad enough that it cancels the goodfeels from going green for some people? But yes, I agree that they cut too many corners on the software side, if they have issues absent from custom ROMs like Lineage or Murena /e/. There’s quite a lot to say on keeping the lights on while doing the impossible.

Let’s hear some stories!

NGL these two blend together in my head, two artist-engineer “vision officers” with background in open-source
that had to hire CEOs because selling dreams is easy, scaling up an international electronics brand is hard.

Causeartist Classic Episode: Bas Van Abel 2019 // Founder of Fairphone

Disruptors for GOOD | Social Entrepreneurs and Social Enterprises | Bas Van...

Here’s some bits I found interesting

• 04:59 “A phone is not a banana and by now I figured out a lot of the differences between the two.”
• 08:15

  “How do we make people a part of what’s happening behind the scenes? “What do I have to do with it?” How do you connect again to the fact that the beauty of our economic system is being able to work together on these complex products. In open source, you’re both a user and a contributor. Bringing that feeling of working together to products and addressing the issues of the economic system.”

• 12:19 Let’s ask around! Is a fair cobalt mine out there? It all started with fake business cards and a 250$ bribe to the ministry of communications. Why are companies hiding the things they deal with instead of addressing them?
  • [RANT] The lower rungs on the economic ladder are gone ~ Louis Rossmann yt

    “I have all the expensive equipment now. How does somebody getting into this field get all that equipment if they started where I did with nothing but $200 in the bank and no credit? They don’t.”

• 14:45 Step by step, first of all tracking conflict-free minerals. That’s how Fairtrade Gold started in the 70s. Yeah there’s poor conditions, but it’s a start to finding ways to improve. Simply outlawing it would just make the companies leave, and the people would lose their livelihoods, might as well join the rebels. By creating a market and telling the story, we were able to create a safe space for any company to put fairtrade transparency on the agenda.
• 20:12 Consumer demand for ethical products, driven by education and awareness, holds significant power in shaping supply chains. Efforts are better directed at finding the spots where you can actually make a difference instead of, you know, trying to create world peace in the supply chain of electronics because that’s just too big with the current life cycle of a cell phone.
• 28:00 Life is above creating and destroying at the same. It’s a philosophical dilemma and it’s about being in, you know, this world, that you have a footprint. It’s just how it is, people can (n.r.)//self-reduce footprint, but then you also contribute less to the ecosystem you actually part. How to do hardware as a service in a way that goes beyond manufacturing and promotes using the devices for longer. Sweden lowered VAT for repair services.
  • Back then they had issues working with corporate clients, something to do with root certificates I think? idk what those are, but iirc that was solved in android as a whole. In the meantime they actually launched a service, check below.
• 36:04 Pre-sales and equity crowdfunding with the community.
• 40:46 more product categories?
  • The new Fairbuds are getting excellent reviews - The Products - Fairphone Community Forum
• 42:10 phones are just a means to an end, to have impact, in 10 years we might not even be using phones anymore
  
  
  • 1989 vs 1998. Internet inside! Source: 100 Adelaide St E - 2 - April 4, 1998 | Patrick Cummins | Flickr
  • Toronto through the lens of Patrick Cummins
• 44:46 integrating fairtrade supply chains together. Picking the providers that needed help to stop child labour over the convenient ones.
  • Tackling child labour in artisanal mines in Uganda
  • Striving for impact in tackling child labour and creating a fair gold supply chain in Ugandan mines - Solidaridad Network This report is legit.
• 51:02 “a manic ride” looking into economic systems, they looked back.

  “And it’s that I also wanted to be able to move away from my position as CEO because I knew that scaling a company takes so much different skills and mindset and expertise than starting something. I’m really good at selling stuff that’s not there yet. And there are people who are really good at selling stuff that’s not there yet and there are people who are really good at selling stuff that’s there so um I made the decision last year to hand over the CEO position to Eva who has been scaling companies before and Eva is now the the CEO of Fairphone and I’m still in the board and I’m still involved. I’m really happy to have a position where I can have a bit more distance and also see all these beautiful things that you forget when you’re into the operations too much.”

Smartphones - and companies - designed for the future: Fairphone’s Bas van...

I can’t link timestamps on a podcast website. Transcript. ~designing new business models 2023

• 03:38

  "That paradox of something as complex and personal as a phone, being able to make that through the economic system, and not knowing anything about it, really intrigued me. How are we going tell that story of the origin and also the problems that are connected to the origin. Setting up a campaign, we didn’t have a bad guy, nor a solution. "we’re going to look at the world through the eyes of a phone and step by step we’re going to look at what we see and what we can do about it. "

  • Oddly enough, for my BAC exam I also wrote a character analysis from the perspective of the ground itself, because I didn’t read the book and didn’t care much for the conflict of the people arguing over land ownership. Scored 85%!
  • Welcome to the Present of Gaming: Age of Nuance | Cold Take - YT Perhaps pointing at a video and saying “this is what I would have made” is a sign that I’m easily influenced. Oh well, it’s a good video.
  • Screw Nuance, Give Me A Memorable Villain | Semi-Ramblomatic - YT
• 13:10 “you want people to actually want to use that phone longer. We can make phones that last longer, but then if people see a new shiny model that they want… So that’s why we focus also on caring for your products. And we believe if you really show people the inside of products, show the connections with where it’s coming from, these kind of things go hand in hand and people start caring more for their products.”

Hardware as a Service 2: Electronic Boogaloo

• 14:09 Camera upgrade modules, re-manufacturing and the beautiful dilemmas of social enterprises. The construct of a company doesn’t take into account what humans are really capable of, on a philosophical level.

  "We measure success the more phones we sell, the better. Because we want to show that there is a market for ethical products. But we also want people to use the phone as long as possible. And this is a bomb in the head of a salesperson because a salesperson has to go, ‘Oh shit, I have to sell as many phones as possible. But I can’t sell them to people that already have a phone. How am I going to do that?’ And then you have a dilemma and you have to think creatively as a human being. […]
  So with Easy we use a subscription model. So you don’t buy the phone, you rent the phone. And the great thing about that is that as a company we’re now intrinsically motivated to have you keep that phone as long as possible. Because normally I don’t want you to come back with complaints about your phone because it costs me money. Once I sold you the phone, I want you to come back as soon as possible to buy your next phone because that’s basically making me money. That’s purely from the business side. So one of the main challenges there is also to make sure that we run the businesses in a way that we don’t shoot ourselves in the foot every time with also having a sustainable model. You can go into remanufacturing for example. If the phones are designed in such way that parts of the phone that do get old are, you’re able to replace them, the manufacturing process is still going on, the materials stay in the supply chain, and you make new products out of that.

  That’s the biggest challenge which needs to happen. I don’t think there will be any phone producer that will say on stage to their shareholders, ‘Guys, listen, we’re going to produce only the half amount of phones that we produced last year because it’s better for the world.’

  It works, if you say, ‘We’re going to produce only half the amount of phones we produced last year, and we’re going to make double the profit.’ And that’s really where we have to find the solution."

  • "And it worked… For a bit. We’re stopping Fairphone Easy… for now." A company might welcome the predictable costs and simplified return procedures, but normal humans would rather own the thing in the end, thanks. Bit of an oversight there huh. Comments mentioned something about lowering the rent in the final years, since there would be no costs with recycling if they’d just let people keep them, but no one trusted the company would change the contract terms for the users benefit soo The article ends with mentions other third-party ways to lease devices (in Germany and France, naturally) and the current discounts for FP4. Still, I appreciate they actually tried, and now that it’s done we have the receipts, instead of rants and theories.
  • Closing the loop: The little mainboard that could! - Fairphone blog article showcasing the impact of returned devices and parts for their repair service.

---

• 21:51/22:09 when FP messed-up and the company taking a PR hit for a two month delay was preferable to placing overtime pressure on the manufacturers to hire people without an employment contract to do temporary work. In the end, the feedback was positive and only 3 people cancelled their orders.
• 31:05 separating money from power. Shares without voting rights allowed them to be valued based on real revenue value, not speculative valuation
• 33:52

  “We’re going to pay back everybody the money. We made our statement, now let the big brands do it. The campaign was a success.” ‘You pussy. You are going to set up that company and you will never get this chance again.’

  • The advice for the younger self is just go for it, because if he knew how much work it would take to become that goddamn professional he would have pussied out.
• 35:38 background as an artist, and in open source.

  “We got help from Dutch operators. We asked for help because in the eyes of the industry, we were stupid. I think that really helped also for other players to really know that we were not, to be in their way. We’re really in it to find a way forward for the whole industry.” And creating a platform for other companies to do things that they would normally never do.

• 37:59 A book recommendation: The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt. She’s a political philosopher […] politics basically is the arena of where you try to find the connection between the commons and the private. And then to do that is storytelling.

[kyller3030]

Undine Almani:

• How to use the Internet like a Minimalist - YT Gotta include at least one “put the phone down” bit. Heroin rats, cat pics and
  • I have learned a new word: “User content”, as opposed to the “authoritative voices” LTT was talking about. I don’t have to point fingers at a format and then apologize and enumerate good examples of that format anymore . Thoughts on redundancy, “relaxing” and intent. Remember cord-cutting, when TV got too trashy? 5:51
  • Saving up for the human experiences. 10:43
    • Rat Park drug experiment comic – Stuart McMillen comics
      
      

    • JoshuaNeeley:
      “Ive personally tried to push for my phone being nothing more than a tool. Frequently i find myself in situation where ill be out to dinner and will see so many people sitting around on their phone while with other people and it bugs me.
      The dopamine drip from short form content is real. I quickly began seeing myself falling prey to it and had to uninstall apps like tiktok. Its scary how it can lock down your life and kick people into an echo chamber.”

      UndineAlmani: “Agree. I see that too and it’s so sad. Especially on the bus or bus stop etc. People used to read or if not talk to at least look at each other… we are more antisocial than ever now thanks to “social media”. I use a technique from meditation called “noting”. You register when you have an emotion or a thought. And instead of hovering over it and giving into feeling or thinking, you just note “A feeling.” or “A thought.” and kinda put it into a box. That is used in addiction therapy as well. Aka if you feel like “Now I want to look at my phone.” you just take notice but don’t do it. Some people also like to put a dash on a piece of paper and register how often they think of the substance / thing they want but isn’t healthy for them. I do that with my phone, games, other distracting behavior etc.”

    • I had a couple of drafts for weblogs, but it felt too much like user-content. These phones that litter my room feel like a better anchor.
  • “Create more than you consume” or at least buy/watch it later. 17:16
    • I picked up journaling recently, if I take a break to scroll for a bit the “fire” goes away immediately. I thought I was keeping my Instagram feed clean enough, but it is what it is. I scroll a lot when I’m sleep deprived.
• Lost the weight and kept it off. - yt
  • These two videos call back to the same experiment, Rat Park. It’s pretty cute, the premise is that previous testing had the cobai in alone in cages, with nothing but the heroin button, and since they’re social creatures… So in 1977 scientists built Rat Park, a large open social space with toys and activities. And sure enough, it’s residents consistently chose to avoid addiction. Even the ones that were depended before, decreased their drug use on “choice days”, pushing through withdrawal symptoms. 06:23
  • “just got lucky” with the change of surrounding environment 8:30
    I had a similar experience with things falling into place by accident. I was just watching youtube, “doing nothing” outside and I got a notification from Huawei Health:
    “Congrats on your daily goal of 10 000 steps!”
    
    I talk a big game about privacy and tracking, but it was the push I needed to get professional help, riding that one compliment for months. The video goes on to talk about how you can design your circumstances, order your life in such a way that it’s easier to follow the correct path, you don’t have to keep spending willpower to make the correct decisions. By now I walked 600 KMs, listening to podcasts to stave off boredom, and paying it forward by boring y’alls with whatever I listened to. Sorry.
    • This is my phone! There are many like it but this one is mine! Debloat my device and it debloats me! Without me, my phone is useless. Without my phone, I am useless! Hoorah!
    • 

    • “I used to think the world was full of stupid people. I may have been right the first time, but that’s no way to live. A more charitable opinion I hold now is that people don’t bring their mental A-game to every situation. It’s physically impossible. The brain would burn out trying to calculate the most cost-efficient, nutritious, morally righteous breakfast when you could just eat cold leftover pizza and get on with the day. Papa John’s Better Ingredients. can be found elsewhere. So on occasion, fighting for consumer rights means fighting the consumers themselves. Notoriously, the JCPenney effect surmises that people’s purchases are emotion-led. People would rather pay more for a pair of pants that has a big red bargain sticker on it than that exact same pair of pants without the sticker at a lower price. Thus disincentivizing honest business and incentivizing predatory practices against themselves. Sometimes greedy, hungry, hungry corpos are taking us for a ride And sometimes, maybe you just have bad taste in men.”
      ~ The Line Between Pricey and Predatory | Cold Take

• 5 Years Fairphone: Everyday-Use Review + Camera Demo :^) - Yt
  • Why fair, disappointment with other brands, vanity metrics. I felt that bit about dedicated camera and headphones; people ask me for “gaming headphones with a good microphone” like, just get a microphone?
  • “Answering comments so Fairphone doesn’t have to. - yt” It doesn’t break like lego. It’s rain resistant, if you drop it in water you pull out the battery like in the 2000s.
  • “We need to talk about Fairphone / criticism towards fair products. [Rant]” - yt . An angrier rant than her usual videos, but Fairphone replied, so I include it here:

    • @Fairphone: in one video, you just said everything we always wanted to, but can’t much appreciated :).

She did the write-up herself, do I just include the whole description here? (fold)

"Yo, here’s my disorganized rant on why I don’t get the issue people have with Fairphone or fair hardware in general, as in:

1. It is expensive. People can afford it.
2. For the same price you get a better Samsung / xyz phone, bla bla bla
3. If I can afford such a pricey phone, I can afford something “better”.
   ⁣

1. Uhm, yes, cause it’s fair-made - like that’s the whole point? Of course it is more expensive than your average child-labor hard-labor phone, no shit sherlock!

2. Do you though? Like how is “that other phone” better exactly. It’s not more ethical, and the camera specs, which is like the one point where people get all railed up about as if the Fairphone had some horrible bad camera… but uhm, in that aspect it’s not like the difference is relevant to the average user. The camera is actually very good in the latest fair phones, and more than sufficient! So all that remains is a weird “who has the better hardware” challenge, but done by usually total noobs that don’t even have any application for that hardware that would allow them to distinguish between what “good” and “bad” actually means. So, just no.

3. No you can’t. Because (a) an ethical buy is always better. And (b) if you just want to spend money on a good phone specs-wise, you can buy a refurbished one as “the right thing to do” minimum. Like if you have the means but you still prefer an ethically questionable product, that makes you ethically questionable. And that is nothing to be proud of. I believe that EVERYONE who can afford a fair option SHOULD get that fair option.

How is that even a debate? If you can afford something that is better for the planet or the people or both, you gotta buy it and not the shittier option. It really is that simple.

And don’t you “but most people aren’t educated on fair products” me. How are they not? They’re educated on sports, on hobbies, on where to buy junk food. They are educated on everything they want to be educated on. Either you care about the planet we live on and the people we share it with or you don’t, which then efficiently makes you a dork. And if you care, you do your own research. You can’t wiggle yourself out of it by using comfort arguments like “I don’t have time”. There are people with 4 kids and a full-time job that still find the time to educate themselves on things they care about, are they some sort of anomaly then? You can get your ass of your couch, switch of that TV and start caring. Because if we all do, we will make a change.

Rather than picking on great, yet of course not perfect initiatives like Fairphone and other fair companies / products, we should work together, making the whole tech industry more responsible. And that can only happen with less bickering and more demand for ethically well-made products. And yes, that one specification has to come before the other ones.

FURTHER READING

Why I hate Apple – Undine Almani’s Blog"

“Can we please step away from that narrative that one thing that fits our pocket has to be a supercomputer and do it all? It’s okay to use a laptop; it’s more than okay, it should be the standard for your editing[…]”

• A bit too aggro imo, but I get the sentiment. I got shouted at for taking my time to make sure the A/C unit we were ordering was not manufactured garbage. People out here aren’t aware of how bad ordering online has gotten, between the bootlegs, name brands going bad, fake reviews and every online store trying to copy Amazon by being a “digital marketplace” with no inventory and no accountability.
  • China’s Fakes Are Getting Better - Fake iPhone Almost Looks Real! ~ China Fact Chasers
  • Linus hates “fans” ~ LMG Clips This video is such a ride, it starts with “I’m tired of Apple’s hypocrisy” to “absolute clowns saved AMD. I love Clown World!” to the murders in the food industry that ruined nations.
  • Amazon’s allows FRAUDULENT product page after MANUAL REVIEW! Deep dive on Amazon’s support of scams - YT

deGoogl/e/

• This New Smartphone Puts You in Control of Your Privacy ~ LifeWire
  • “It’s just like eating organic food: there is no immediate benefit, but you know it’s good for you in the long run,” said Duval.

"The goal of “deGoogling”/ UnGoogling in /e/OS is

• To remove or disable any feature or code that is sending data to Google servers, or at least to anonymize those accesses
• To offer non-Google default online services, including for search.
• the Google default search engine is removed and replaced by other services (see below in default apps and services)
• Google Services are replaced by microG and alternative services (see below for more details)
• All Google apps are removed and replaced by equivalent Open Source applications. The one exception is the Maps Application
• No use of Google servers to check connectivity
• NTP servers are not Google NTP servers anymore
• DNS default servers are not Google anymore, and their settings can be enforced by the user to a specific server
• Geolocation is using Mozilla Location Services in addition to GPS
• CalDAV/CardDAV management and synchronization application (DAVDroid) is fully integrated with the user account and calendar/contact application"
  ~ /e/OS product description - a pro-privacy mobile operating system and cloud services

Restart Podcast Ep. 56: A smartphone OS that respects user data privacy, with Gaël Duval - The Restart Project

Restart Podcast Ep. 56: How e Foundation are prioritising user privacy and...

• 02:02 Why Operating Systems? Falling in love with Unix and the internet. He made Mandrake Linux, one of the first distros with a graphical interface by default. It was guided by usability.
• 06:57 “/e/OS was originally named eelo, after the Moray eels, or Murenidæ, which is a fish that is hiding from others in the sea. So the operating system is like the eel in there is within the sea of the internet and mobile connection, but it is invisible. You can’t see it.” A way to fight Invisible passive data collection.
  • a Deus Ex Invisible War isn’t very interesting to watch, no?
• 11:30 Cambridge Analytica, “that was also connected not just with the US, but also with events in the UK, including Brexit. Although, of course, some people feel differently about these things than others, and some people believe things more than others, partly because of the fact that all of our data is being collected. We’re all seeing very different versions of the world, which makes it harder to have collective reference points.”
  • I’m getting really sick and tired of AB testing. It seems like every consumer software talk starts and ends with “works on my machine”. I have 2 phones in front of me, one is happily playing music with no ads via the official “Spotify lite” client, and the other claims “Lite is no longer supported” then closes. The only difference I can see is the “not supported” one is logged in with an account that used to have premium years ago.
• 16:35 Nextcloud
• 12:56 and 17:07

  “I can see why you favor the word de-Googled rather than un-Googled because as you say, Google is there. You can’t really avoid Google being there at the start in some way with an Android. So you have to de-Google. You never are in a state of un-Google. And I guess it also ties in with concepts that people are much more familiar with these days, like decolonization or defunding. So it makes a lot of sense to de-Google things rather than un-Google things to me.”

  • Also, third party trackers, even on iOS, even without having anything from facebook installed. How Facebook Intercepts Your Web Traffic: Onavo and “tbh” ~Mental Outlaw YT. Lizard in the middle “approach”.
• 17:50 “Firefox OS or Ubuntu Touch remained a niche because of app incompatibility. Gotta have WhatsApp! I knew that from my past Linux experience on desktop about all these virtual places that you kind of have to be a part of if you want to interact with the modern world. And all of those applications are barriers to those past operating systems.”
  • Who Remembers The OFFICIAL Ubuntu Linux Phone, from Canonical? ~ Brodie Robertson
• 20:50 Privacy by default, GDPR is not enough, if you don’t give consent you just get to remain at the door.
• 21:40

  “I’d like to add that if you really think about it, especially about operating system and maybe even app stores, I think that those should be considered as some commons, like roads or electric grids, etc. Nobody would accept that, you know, the roads would be owned by car makers. Like on Internet, if you do some HTML, this is not owned by a single company. This is open standards and you can do your own implementation. And I support the idea that everyone should be able to do this own implementation of a mobile application store that could run both on Android and Apple App Store. And today (n.r. september 2020), this is not the case. Everyone is in a closed proprietary model. And I think this is one of the cause of the problem. I’m quite optimistic with progressive web apps, which is a new way to design and build mobile applications. This is supported by all the standards of the web. This is compatible both with iOS and Android. And we are trying to introduce those technologies in EOS because we think that this could help to disrupt the current model in the future and help us to retrieve some freedom on mobile apps.”

Murena’s Nextcloud

~ Rise Of Artificial - Norul (Official Single)

[regarding Floatplane] “Every 3 years, it’s easier to make stuff on the internet”.
You might have noticed from the screenshots that I’m not logged into the /e/clould on my phone. The two times I tried to show off the online portal to a friend, it was “offline for maintenance”. I… may be stupid. So, if you search “Murena Cloud” it takes you to a page with a big button that takes you to…

If I just go to Murena.io it works fine. so now I actually have to review nextcloud instead of using it for a quick transition
I never really understood cloud apps, they have little to no security because they expect the cloud to be trusted. And, yeah, sure, for cloud storage you can just have a .zip with a password and boom, you can upload that anywhere and it’s safe. (Mega has server-side encrypted storage, but by default it just uses the link to the file as a password, so if you don’t add a password, they just… click the link lol. They have deleted some users’s game ROMs accessed like this). Cloud apps just store their stuff on the clouds as is, in plain text. Joplin for years pointed back to “just encrypt the whole cloud lol” when asked to add in-app encryption for the notes. Recently they added that. [1], [2], [3].

“Nextcloud is an open-source cloud solution. You can either host it yourself on a virtual private server or at home on any small NUC or Raspberry Pi or you can find a provider online that will give you an account. It’s a replacement for the cloud services Apple can give you or for most of Google’s services and it’s obviously private, secure and you can extend it with a lot of apps that let you manage your tasks, calendars, contacts, emails, chat. You can use it for your photo albums, to get a Kanban board, an integrated office suite, taking notes, manage your RSS feed, track your phone’s position, listen to podcasts, basically anything you want. It’s also fantastic for managing a team with strong collaboration features for instant messaging, audio and video calls, and more. And all that data can also be accessed through mobile apps for iOS and Android, synced through CardDAV and CalDAV, and there’s a desktop app to auto-sync files as well.”
~ 5 NEXTCLOUD UPDATES that will make you ditch Google & Apple - The Linux Experiment Yt

The nextcloud project overall is built for self hosting (or at least running inside a Linode nanode Virtual Private Server) and for the admin to add apps from a Steam Workshop-looking thing. The website showcases some instances hosted by third parties, if you want to skip the setup headaches and start using it immediately. I didn’t have much luck with those, they’re severely stripped back and most don’t even include the first-party apps made by Nextcloud themselves. I was very confused why something as basic as the “News” RSS reader was missing, along with the buttons to install apps that everyone was mentioning.

16 of the BEST NextCloud apps to replace Google and Apple services

The video showcases, along with the server-side apps, mobile and alternate clients to interact with them.

And so, we get to Murena and their app selection.

Most of these were covered by Nick, but for the sake of completion:

• Notes works more cleanly than Joplin and its custom DBs, it uses plain Markdown files like QOwnNotes. I still like Joplin better, it has lots of plug-ins and, you know, it is purple.
• they picked OnlyOffice over Collabora (LibreOffice Online) because it has better support for Microsoft .docx ; I’m not confident to make claims about excel, I know some organizations use it as a programming language, so compatibility is a verrry touchy topic.
• News RSS; for an RSS reader the design of the client is very important, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. It’s cool that it allows for third-party clients like Gnome NewsFlash.
  • Note for past me, Nextcloud News does support more feeds than feedly, it does include a RSS Generator to recognise feeds in pages that don’t maintain one themselves, but it doesn’t have a bespoke “Builder” tool that allows you to click changing elements to follow, like RSS.app Visual Selector. Neither of these can pick out Youtube Community Posts though, that page relies so heavily on javascript that it only renders the search bar in the selector. (if you find some convenient way to get all the community posts let me know pls)
  • STOP using social media for News, RSS is much better! ~ Linux Experiment Yt
• Mail: I actually really like their email. This is the point where I get tomatoes on my face because I don’t practice what I preach: So I went back to sign-up for “business administration” at my University, right. I have a real.name(at)murena.io address specifically for situations like these, to avoid having to spell out my cool_gamer_id in real life. I didn’t use it. I gave them the gamertag gmail address. I don’t know why, I got cold feet, in the moment I was thinking back to how the uni interns were complaining that their official emails sent from their @whateverUniversity.gov addresses were getting blocked as spam by Google. I feel silly now, messages between @uni and @murena wouldn’t go through Google at all. And so, I had to go through the usual 2-factor security theater in the uni hallways, and it kept kicking me out because there were too many people accessing Gmail from around that area in the same day.
  • I couldn’t get a “normal name” address on Gmail because all the name combinations are taken and it keeps pestering me to send them my gov’ment ID and phone number to create a new email address. Ew. Also didn’t want numbers, imagine writing “I am Me, the second” on a CV lol.
  • “There is no private email/ But I’m reviewing Skiff and Proton Mail” ~ By Default yt
    • I’ve seen a few youtubers move from Nextcloud to Proton. There might have been a couple times Proton collaborated with authorities where Skiff didn’t[source?], but Skiff got banned from one too many countries and had to shut down.
• Spot : “An open-source metasearch engine forked from SearXNG”.
  • 
    • advanced settings. It shows those red warnings because it has a SafeSearch option in basic settings, currently set to “Moderate”.
  • Spot? If you don’t like Google, just go build your own! Yeah!
    • No! Websites are breaking the robots.txt standard and de-listing from search engine indexing to cover up poor business-ing.
      You have one company restricting right-to-repair, the next day you have Samsung and Apple doing it. You have one company removing the headphone jack, next day you have fairphone removing it. And now there’s reddit removing itself from search indexing and charging for access “to protect users”. Further thoughts on search engines (both google and the alternative services), the yesterweb and how centralizing all the forums on the net into reddit causes it to drown in bot-scrapping traffic:
    • Reddit’s CEO helps Google ruin the internet - F spez ~ Louis Rossmann YouTube
      • Google expands partnership with Reddit ~ The Keyword Google blog.
    • What Happened To Google Search? why you can’t find anything ~ Enrico Tartarotti yt
    • Breaking News: Google loses massive antitrust lawsuit over its search dominance | CNN Business. Officially a monopolist!
      
      
• Bookmarks: I haven’t used bookmarks in years, it’s all open tabs, sideberry and OneTab folders for me.

  “This app allows you to manage links to your favorite places on the web. Sort your bookmarks into folders, label them with tags and share them with others! The app will regularly check all your links for availability and display unavailable links. If you add a link to a file on the web, the file will be automatically downloaded to your Nextcloud Files. You can also import bookmarks exported from other services or directly sync bookmarks from all your browsers with this app.”

  • Ah I knew I forgot something. Nextcloud has some panels and settings in the main menu, most of these are above my pay-grade, things like “Flows”, advanced [When] file_upload [if] larger_than [request user_agent]. By default the only active flow is for the Bookmarks app, “Takes a link and adds it to your collection of bookmarks.”
    Email aliases, personal data editing, social media integrations, accessibility features like themes, dyslexia fonts, keyboard shortcuts. Optional Beta apps: Cookbook, Forms, User migration.
• Carnet: Notes again, but more french. Enough modern_subtext to make anyone wish first impressions mattered less.
  • 
• Photos: It’s pffine, it’s nice that it has facial recognition and can auto-sort things into albums (they’re more playlists than folders). It’s slow to access from mobile. How slow? Louis convinced FUTO to give ~$3 Million dollars to get Immich completed and easy to use within the next three years…
  • The Immich core team goes full-time | Immich is pretty cool, has that “smart search” I was promised by Rover | Windows XP Wiki
    • How to Install Immich with Docker: A Comprehensive Guide
    • Immich Joins FUTO! [Stream Highlights] - YT
• Contacts and Calendar and Tasks and Deck and backing-up Files: All I can say is that I should use more organizer tools like these. Regular open-standard CalDAV and CardDAV. Shout-out to https://syncthing.net/
  • Timestamp to Nick@The Linux Experiment talking about the “Files”'s sharing features and how they integrate with the youtuber workflow 13:48
• Passwords: It has in-app encryption (options for server-side, client-side and End-to-End), just in case the cloud security gets breached like LastPass.

Encryption?

I keep mentioning encryption, because it isn’t much of a priority for a self-hosted Nextcloud, you’re gonna see your files either way. Nextcloud kind of has encryption, but it’s buggy, and that’s an issue for Murena, the cloud storage provider. So they leave it off to prevent losing files to encrypto-bitrot. They take some measures to reduce access to files, generally they only have access to config files for maintenance and resetting passwords, but they can’t promise Zero access, end to end encryption.

• "Like in most cloud services, a reduced number of administrators can see your files and all the information in the database as they need to make backups, perform upgrades, reset passwords, etc. Learn more about this topic here:"
  • “Can the Murena Cloud admin access my data?”
  • “To protect your data, we have implemented server-side-encryption on our servers which hides by default the content of your files and notes even to these administrators”
• Which to be fair is a massive ask, there’s only a handful of services like that out there, whispers in the corners of PrivacyGuides.
  • The Best Private and Secure Cloud Storage Providers - Privacy Guides
  • File Sharing and Sync - Privacy Guides
  • 
• Nextcloud themself even states... (expand)

  Nextcloud themself even states how server side encryption isn’t very useful: Encryption configuration — Nextcloud latest Administration Manual latest documentation

  “The encryption app does not protect your data if your Nextcloud server is compromised, and it does not prevent Nextcloud administrators from reading user’s files. This would require client-side encryption, which this app does not provide.
  Note also that SSL terminates at or before Apache on the Nextcloud server, and all files will exist in an unencrypted state between the SSL connection termination and the Nextcloud code that encrypts and decrypts files. This is also potentially exploitable by anyone with administrator access to your server.”

• This seems like a good moment to mention that /e/OS allows you to connect to any Nextcloud instance, just type in the IP of your instance in the settings.

Murena didn’t lose user files, they just… misplaced them.

[…]"these conflicts led to some users connecting to our services (379 users in total) to being wrongly authenticated and potentially seeing some other users’ files belonging to 26 impacted users, restricted to files that have been uploaded by affected users during this time window."

[kyller3030]

Everything wrong with /e/OS

/e/OS is more private and secure than stock. Their focus on usability means that it’s not 100% free of google blobs, and testing the releases for the stable branch means they’re a bit behind on security patches. These aren’t secrets, they’re part of the official documentation. This goes a bit beyond “google is le bad lol”, I think it showcases how deformed the internet has gotten now that projects purpose-built to de-google are shaped by them to this extent.

• deGoogling – Scope and Definition within the context of /e/OS
• Anonymous calls to Google servers ~ /e/OS documentation
• Most of the issues have been fixed within the past couple of years. The obvious issues left are the Maps app which they’re working on a replacement for, and the security updates being behind. Rabbithole starts here:
  • Analysis of “App Lounge” the /e/OS app installer, part 2 | nervuri. “This article has been discussed on the /e/ Foundation forum.”
  • more details on the App Lounge and possible issues with Aurora’s “gray area” [1], [2]

    • “It also allows for anonymous browsing if you’re willing to abstain from paid apps. But access to paid commercial apps via the App Lounge requires signing in with a Google account and having access to Google Play on a separate Android device in order to make the purchase using the Google account before you can download it on the Murena device… If you select the Google Account option, Murena’s OS pops up with a recommendation to use a “dedicated” Google account to mitigate tracking (i.e. by avoiding linking any existing Google account you may have to your activity on the device) — but also to “limit impact in case this account is restricted by Google”, which suggests ToS issues could be a risk.” [3]

    • "When we asked Murena about this concern it denied there are T&Cs issues with its hybrid store, claiming: “We have ensured that App Lounge T&Cs are compatible with Google’s T&Cs so that users can use the service with confidence.” It also suggested the warning /e/OS serves to users who sign in with a Google Account is just a cautionary step, saying: “Google has hardened its usage policy with Google accounts this year and we have been aware that some people had some restrictions with many different usages or lack of usage. So it’s our role to warn users about this. This is not specific to App Lounge usage, as so far we have not been reported any usage restriction related to the use of App Lounge.”

• and then there’s the things not said out loud: Should you de-Google your Fairphone? - #16 by SkewedZeppelin - The Industry - Fairphone Community Forum SkewedZeppelin:

  • “Reminder that /e/OS is still shipping a highly insecure version of Chromium Browser & System WebView from December of 2022 with 296 known security issues: April of 2024* with 132 known security issues (downstream Cromite): https://divestos.org/misc/ch-dates.txt
    Has numerous other issues, such as phoning home directly to Google out of the box: https://web.archive.org/web/20231127163548/https://divestos.org/misc/e.txt
    And generally doesn’t even stack up against the rest: Grand Comparison of Android ROMs
    Also of note: their cloud services do not use end-to-end encryption and already leaked user data to other users once: Service Announcement : 26 May - #27 by arnauvp - Forum - /e/OS community
    They even had this removed from their Wikipedia page”

    • // * n.r. it was almost a year out of date at the time they made the original comment, it’s three months out-of-date today
    • now I feel like I should have started with that Grand ROMs Comparison huh.

  • “Every app talking to microG does so using the proprietary Google Play Services library.
    I also guarantee you have proprietary Google blobs such as Google Widevine DRM and Google EUICC, as the FP4 did.
    I’d love to point you to the code that includes those, but /e/OS hasn’t even published source code for FP5, which is actually a potential GPL violation as I don’t even see the kernel repo.
    [1], [2], [3]” ~ Source.

    • I’ve seen proposals suggesting a quick toggle or consent option during the initial setup, allowing users to customize the amount blobs to their liking.

/e/OS Browser information:

"It is a fork of Cromite, and adds settings such as:

• Async DNS disabled by default
• Do-not-track-enabled by default //lol?
• Launcher search engine integration
• User agent spoofed by default //customizable
• Unified autoplay enabled by default
• Adaptive launcher and recent icons"

It has a custom settings panel that… why is Instagram registered as a payment method? "Always use HTTPS " is disabled, didn’t I just see a merge request to enable it by default? Ok here’s a good one, “open custom tab intents as tabs, similar to webview”. Good. I always wondered why android insists on using bone-stock webview when so much effort goes into the browsers. It comes with Adblock Plus, and I see some settings about “anti-circumvention and snippets” suggestive, but no, “they’re JavaScript injections to combat advanced ads that circumvent ordinary blocking.” That’s cool, but the issue is that the block lists get updated along with the system, with that large once-a-month system update.
What else… legacy Bromite adblocker settings, “apply Dark theme to sites, when possible” because system default is dark (Lineage just started supporting light theming), built-in support for Greasemonkey scripts, nice, advanced per-site permissions… Accessibility: “Override a website’s request to prevent zooming in”, “get notified when an article can be shown in simplified view”, “live captions”…

alright, maybe it’s not all bad.

Your 2024 journey with /e/OS and Murena (and a V2!) - Gaël Duval (blog,...

It’s a good overview of that works and what needs more work, I am happy to see them implement more advancements from the open source space like Voice Input, an additionnal(sic) push notification system for developers who want to avoid going through the (Google)Firebase Cloud Messaging, Parental Control, system-wide single sign-on and back-ups. Purity-focused linux distros are all nice and good, but /e/OS targets app compatibility and SafetyNet passes and licensing servers and all that. It’s not just a de-googled ROM, they’re building apps and the cloud ecosystem too, smartphones are “internet devices”.

“I learned something [from] my first venture with Mandrake Linux: you can do the best OS possible, [but] the mainstream adoption will be very limited if it’s not compatible with applications users actually use,” said Duval. “So, I wanted /e/OS and [the] Murena smartphone to be fully compatible with all mobile applications.”
… we want to keep you safe from digital surveillance and help you regain control over your data."

I love seeing the ROMs-conversation move past “banking apps”, that’s easy solved. Can we please talk about something else, like apps and user-experience? NO. "Play Integrity API is based on lies." GrapheneOS states that it has “irrefutable proof that the majority of certified Android devices do not comply with Google’s Compatibility Test Suite”. Should Google not permit GrapheneOS into its Play Integrity API, GrapheneOS will be taking legal action against them and their partners. “We’ve started the process of talking to regulators and they’re interested.”
Oh yeah, 2.2 is out, one sec let me enable that “Fairphone Camera beta” real quick aand:

• 
  • one day… Recording video crashes it, photos work fine. No side-by-sides yet, though I want to show this glitch, photos from Faircam have extra crispy thumbnails in the file manager (looks fine in the gallery).
    
    
• The update also enhanced the integration of the Microphone and Camera disable toggles. Now, when you receive an incoming call, you’ll see a prompt to unblock the mic right next to the ‘Pick-up Call’ button.
• I had a small whinge about touch sounds and interface noises, they added toggles for everything except screenshots, those are always at ringer volume. I should count my blessings, “Camera Shutter” used to do that too, now it’s always quiet. I shouldn’t attract attention to this, in S. Korea the law mandates that all phones make a loud noise when taking a pic for… dishonorable reasons.
• AOSP keyboard is… AOSP keyboard.

“Is there a market for Android devices which — out of the box — don’t expose users quite so utterly to Google’s trackers yet do still require a compromising workaround requiring use of Google services to access paid apps?”

Demanding Something Better with Gael Duval | Emily Omier

Win. Your data is your data. ~march 2023

Highlights (expand)

Gael introduces himself and outlines why he started Murena (0:51)
Murena’s relationships with hardware (3:43)
Gael reflects on Murena being a rare B2C co, as opposed to most open source B2B companies (6:04)
The value of being open source for Murena was building on existing technologies (9:16)
Gael shares advice for his younger self (11:58)
Gael recalls his most significant challenges at Murena (14:36)
How views on privacy differ between Europe and the US (15:43)
Gael shares advice for starting a B2C open source company (17:06)

A rare consumer-facing open source business. Between OpenAI and Mozilla, it seems like it’s the hot new trend to have a smaller company inside a non-profit. I’m glad that Murena is finding new ways to fund open source projects besides their Nextcloud, including selling hardware with /e/OS and even offering voice plans in the USA. Best of luck, Google is pulling the ladder up behind them. Between that debacle with root certificates getting sorted out and Nextcloud introducing more enterprise (and public office) features “we see more and more organizations purchasing Murena smartphones with /e/OS, and they have been asking for pro features on both the smartphone and our digital workspace at murena.io” they picked a good moment to start their Business 2 Business branch.

07:28 a wider trend of consumers asking for something better, working with fairphone.

“There’s quite some common ground in the values of our two organizations: we both strive to bring more ethics to this industry and whether that is about privacy or about longevity and sustainability,” observed Eva Gouwens, Fairphone CEO, during the launch event.

09:35 auditable privacy
11:52 “the spirit of newcomers to open source has changed”
13:00 mistakes and life advice

• "Google has realized you can’t just own the operating system and the company will continue to make hardware purchases."
• Helping open source companies grow revenue | Emily Omier Consulting blog
• Big News: The price of the Murena Fairphone 4 drops!
• /e/OS devices: Smartphone Selector and List of devices supported by the Easy Installer
• /e/OS Review: This Operating System Is Better Than Android. You Should Try It | WIRED
• Why Murena, the Next-Gen Privacy Tech Maker, is “Crowd-Fundraising” - Gaël Duval
• Nextcloud for DIE ZEIT: Microsoft’s anti-competitive behavior, PR stunts and salami slicing - And the antitrust initiative lead by Nextcloud
• Thoughts on ‘The Open Source Definition’ ~ Eron Wolf
• More: DivestOS, iodéOS, Calyx Institute, Free your wrist - AsteroidOS, GrapheneOS “reasonably private”, postmarketOS // real Linux distribution for phones

~source: https://youtu.be/nCXNc6iei0Q

So much of the talk around Nextcloud is either install guides or new feature announcements, no “long term living” with it (besides the Immich thing). Not that I mean to talk ill of Nextcloud, they’re doing great work catching clouds in boxes. Last time we trapped fire in a stove, poor Prometheus had to feed the birds. Murena is great too, offering an all-in-one, plug&play solution for the coolest alpha-nerd toys: Orbot, F-droid, GPS signal spoofing, system-wide tracker blocking, even a customizable SearXNG instance, Spot. And they make 'em look like iOS.

I think there is value in being allowed to jump straight in. At least you know if it’s the right tool for the job. Driving a car is a different skill than building one and all that. Reminds me of stumbling upon “Ultimate Edition Linux” as a kid. It was an Ubuntu-based riced-to hell bloated mess, with multiple desktop environments and triplicate clients for everything, but it helped me get a good overview look of the apps programs people were using and the differences between them. All in one DVD I could take back home to my offline laptop (a demo disc for the entire Linux ecosystem, as it were). The thing even included PlayOnLinux, GTA Vice City was back on the menu for the first time in 4 years. Modified portable executable, no wine install errors! At the time it reminded me of the customized “Windows 7 Black Edition” ISOs with all the power-user tools pre-installed. No errors about Windows Media Player missing codecs here.
For me, if it’s an older game that has a more complex setup, I get to the point that the game boots up and I am satisfied with getting it working. I don’t even get to playing the thing until months later, it’s like setting up a game is a different kick of dopamine than actually playing the thing. I don’t think I would have written down all this if I had to go through this here copy of “Creating WebPages for Dummies 2000” first.

There might be an argument about how tearing down barriers to entry makes it easier to make bad decisions but uuhh… Millennials like to talk about life before social media, so here’s mine: Hobbies were treated with contempt. Discussing any field started and ended with academia and diplomas. Even a cake, if it was “too good” it lighted-up heated banter about how a specialized “cake-making school” was involved. Unless you had a friend-of-a-friend in that field, all you had to go off on were whatever stilted presentations by university interns were shown on TV. 50 years of the “multi-laterally developed society” where the engineers were TV stars does that. I’m glad to see FUTO push for that “middle ground” culture change, to take pride in ownership and completing projects beyond “eh, it basically works, I got my dopamine out of it, no need to fix the interface or plugins on top of that” without needing a 4 year degree to be allowed to work on the thing.
Right…?
This doesn’t feel right for a conclusion, I’m ignoring the obvious point that the cloud is someone else’s computer and you’re intrinsically limited on what you can do with it, be it technical reasons that would be solved in time or legalese stuff. btw:

• 
• Would You Like to Sign My Petition?
• https://eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/?lg=en
  • Initiative detail | European Citizens' Initiative

This forum is about nostalgia and video production, and all I want to do is go on tangents about whatever I watched last night. Can’t even delete my own posts without mod approval. “FUTO endeavors to create infrastructure for creators to have their content hosted by someone else but the creator retains full ownership.” ~ The Internet and Social Media.

The harsh part about “being yourself” is that you can’t fake it, if you want to be better you have to put in the hard work to become that goddamned professional. Now that multi-streaming is allowed, I’ve seen some streamers say that youtube is weird for keeping the old streams, they wouldn’t want that cringe out there. For how much I whine about ytbers deleting their channels, I think I get it, if you did do change over the years, looking back is straight to Uncanny Valley. I’ll leave in one short tangent for now, back to the regular program:
Not to defend the russian pilot that let his kids fly and crashed but jumping straight in kinda is how new copilots first officers get their training, the captain lets them fly for short segments, land if it’s a sunny day. That’s why Croatia straight-up refused the single-seat F-35, it’s part of doctrine to have instructors with the students (the price of a F35 simulator rivaling fully equipped birds didn’t help either).

Mom, he’s talking about that plane again!

~ Prey - Semi Sacred Geometry ; Source: Mark and Taj @point_mugu_skies
NextCloud in a box? How about a server in the sky! It kinda fulfills that piratebay dream of invisible flying hosting lol. Ok here’s some things it has in common with my smartphones:

• unusually-shaped computer built to be operated by people that don’t “do” computers
• internet-first devices
• covered in something that looks like broken glass
• over-powered gadget that needed an update years later to do the thing: GBox, 5G or MA DataLink (actually connecting the internet-plane to the internet, with Open Standards [1], [2], [3], [4] ).
• 

These threads start as a big weblog, then I see a cool picture like this and things click together in my head, IDK what to make of it.

• Rafale, Ouragan, Typhoon, Tempest, Torando, Hurricane, Lightning, Thunder, Lightning 2… Risk of Rain-ahh names.

---

[kyller3030]

Nothing (1)

• How to Build a Phone Brand Out of Nothing ~ TechAltar YT Storytelling and a good price.
• How to actually make a phone - YT A look behind the scenes at the R&D, design and manufacturing plants for the Nothing phones. Some key people from Blloc ended up on the user experience team. Small world. The assembly line is so optimized, that when BYD opened a new location in India, they had to replicate the temperature and humidity conditions from back in China inside the factory.
• This Modular Phone Is A Gimmick - Nothing CMF - Tear-down and Repair Assessment ~ Hugh Jeffreys YT A bit of a missed opportunity, a phone advertised for its removable back panel and expansion modules does not have a user replaceable battery. Still, Nothing continues to deliver devices at accessible prices, no complaints there.
  • CMF: Colour. Material. Finish. Ce Mai Faci?

---

(2)

The shorter yt video:

How Companies Profit off Unfixable Devices (ft. Louis Rossmann)

The full interview: Coldfusion/Louis Rossmann 1 hour special

• 17:07

  “I would imagine it has to do with economies of scale, efficiency and by getting rid of the Overflow they make things cheaper for themselves and their own manufacturers (again S&P to 200 to 500 thing). But that also means that I have nothing to grab now myself out of the… I think of it like a Chinese restaurant in New York City where you see all the cats going out to the dumpster like there was one right across the street from where I lived. If everybody were to finish all of their food and clean their plate then there’d be nothing for the cat to eat in the dumpster; that’s the simplest analogy that I probably should have started with.”

• 18:07 schoolyard rebellion
• “I’d like to see other people’s names associated with the Right to repair movement, these people do way more work than me but due to some youtube glitch I’m the one mentioned a lot”
  • To my shame, I never looked up those people he shouts-out often, so here’s the links: Nathan Proctor [2], Jessa Jones @ iPad Rehab, Kevin O’Reilly, Kevin Kenney [2].
• 24:17 he mentions a 90s looking “but it’s beautiful” Sony website that offers service manuals and allows ordering parts for cameras directly from a warehouse. I wanted to just link it here, but reality is louder than anything I could have written. The world was a nicer place 6 months ago.
  • Sony ServicesPLUS site for Bulletins, Parts, Repairs, Service Agreements, Software, Training. ~ Wayback Machine
    • and because that archive link currently gives me 503 errors, here’s Louis showing off the responsiveness of a 640x480 website, a 30 years old (functional at the time) page to drive home the point of how long it’s been since repair-ability was a part of culture: https://youtu.be/7IUWOOyY6o8
  • 
  • 
• 27:05 car talk. Subscriptions and safety systems
  • Automakers Are Sharing Consumers’ Driving Behavior With Insurance Companies - The New York Times; passively increasing the cost of car insurance by 21 percent.
  • How General Motors Tricked Millions of Drivers Into Being Spied On (Including Me) - The New York Times
• 33:12 Legislation? How to put into law the first rule of teamwork? the answer that nobody wants is to try and get the next generation excited about the field of electronics. When they get to work in a big company they’d remember watching people fix stuff and the issues getting in the way of that, changing culture. You have a lot more power than you think you do.
  • more shout-outs, youtube channels: Jesse Cruz, TCRS Circuit, NorthridgeFix, Hugh Jeffreys, Dave Jones @ EEVblog, Salem Techsperts, Phone Repair Guru
  • 
  • I’m an engineering degree dropout so this is rich coming from me. Oh well, I did my fair share of tech support.
• 39:44 it’s going… At least the community is much better now.
• 47:32 Fairphone and Framework, “the firefox trap”.

  “the ironic thing is, what makes a device really fixable in many ways it’s not just the schematics and all the parts and being available, it’s the popularity of it. So if let’s say framework did not make parts available right, let’s say that they went the Apple route; I would never be able to fix their products. I would be more able to fix Apple products than framework (if framework decided to be assholes and not make things available) by nature of the fact that there’s so many available. Because there are so many Apple products available, there is so much demand for some guy to go through a dumpster and find every single thing that goes into it. There was so much demand for somebody like me to stay up until 4 in the morning, for 3 years in a row before I started doing border repair videos just to try and figure it out and show other people. So when you have a product that’s niched that has that 1 to 3% market share…
  Even if let’s say you have a schematic and a boardview right: how many repair shops are going to have a donor “framework board” to take parts off of, you know what I’m saying. How many of them are going to have the chips in their stockpile for it; like at my store I can’t get access to chips that I need so I dumpster dive for donor boards and sometimes those donor boards have broken chips on it you know. Very often the reason that a board was thrown away is because the charging Integrated circuit that I need didn’t work on that board. But if I have a stack of 78 of them that I bought then one of them will have the thing on that I need and it’s worth it for me to buy 78 of them because I know I’m going to see that product 30 times a day. If it’s a product that has a one or 3% market share where I’m not going to see that product more than once a year… is it really worth it to me to stock up on parts for it? And if I can stock up on parts for it then that means that I have to order things one at a time; if I have to order things one at a time because that is a very very niche product then that means that my customer has to wait every time I want to order a party you got to wait 3 days “oh never mind that wasn’t what’s wrong with it, I think it’s this thing” okay “oh never mind that wasn’t that I have to wait another three days”. Who wants to deal with that type of repair experience?
  So I love what framework’s doing and I love the fact that they’re trying and they have their heart in the right place, they’re good people I’ve spoken to people at that company. I don’t say this lightly I haven’t had a single sponsor in 13 years: they are very very good people. At the same time I feel like they are really fighting this ridiculously uphill battle which is a very tough thing to do because I’m just thinking about this myself. I have access to the schematics and the board views; if somebody brought me a framework they’d probably have a slower repair than they’d get with a Macbook because I don’t have every chip for it in my store; and why would I buy every single chip for it when I see this product once or one or two times a year.”

  • when I was looking for a screen protector for my Fairphone 4, the clerk called it a “foreign phone”. Eventually she noticed it’s just a normal Samsung screen and gave me a protector for a Smasnug A40.
• 57:17 if you want to get people involved, don’t tell them that they’re bad. He tries to get them to care, both through entertainment and sharing that little dopamine kick of fixing stuff and saving people’s money. Getting them personally invested by sharing the joy.
  • why bad activists suck - YouTube
    • a really good video explaining the works of a deep fear of mine, to see people going from “neutral” to “hates this” because I talked about a topic. Mathematically.

A story with no ending is a setting at best. It’s weird, it’s not like I don’t believe Fairphone’s story, it’s that no villains make for a cool writing exercise but it’s a hard sell.
So third party battery manufacturers do much more to save the turtles than a niche european design-statement-device, and even they themselves say that for the longest time their biggest expense was replacing cracked screens. As samsung tries to ban the import of screens… good luck with third party parts:

• This will kill combustion engines, and the hobby ~ Dankpods/Garbage Time
• Driving into the Absurd: Imagining a Smartphone-esque Auto Industry - Gaël Duval
• Samsung Display fires killshot on ENTIRE repair industry with… a patent on pixel patterns?

Samsung Display fires killshot on ENTIRE repair industry with.... a patent on pixel patterns? 🤦‍♂️

Mobile Apps

Keep it simple, stupid. I like how most of them follow the Unix way of doing one thing well. I don’t like it when they’re webpages with the bare-minimum IP to enable them to go after people for tampering with the app.

Starting from the humble Photo Gallery sorting out the messy file structures, some apps do things I couldn’t even imagine, like Waze relying on nearby people having it too, or Clubhouse enabling live audio communication… on… a… phone… that became a much-valued format for every other social media besides them lol. I’m sure plenty of smart people fantasize of “just let me in, I’ll fix that bug/add that feature in a day”, it’s cool to see it happen in real time.

Shout-out to f-droid for being the gold standard in checking the code, and izzyondroid for doing heavy lifting for discovering new open source apps, and doing all the possible checks if a privacy-respecting app can’t provide a replicable build for whatever reason.

• KDE Connect
• SoundWire Audio Communication System ~ GeorgieLabs
• Driving Directions & Traffic Reports by Waze
• Notally, Joplin and Linwood Butterfly
• Gadgetbridge and Habo, open-source habit tracker. Created in a flutter.
• AntennaPod, Podbean [2]
• Moonlight Game Streaming
• HeliBoard
• Fennec Browser
  • Browsers Comparison ~ DivestOS Mobile
  • Brave’s adblocking shields work on mobile too
• people seem to really enjoy Google Gallery Go so I’ll give it a mention, but I’ll stick to Simple Fossify Gallery until Immich gets better.

[kyller3030]

FUTO?

“I will pay for any software, as long as it’s free” ~Richard Stallman

• What is FUTO? that’s just a list of cool apps and projects
• about/What is FUTO?

Disclaimer: All I know about FUTO comes from futo employees. Even worse, they’re employees with youtube channels.

“seeing as this is my video, I am the most right. When you go watch their video then they’re right. That’s how the internet works.”
~ Is One of the Most Played Steam Games A Scam? | Cold Take - TheOtherFrost YT

I saw a comment along the lines of “Louis has a way of being a bit too convoluted (or maybe repetitive?) + presenting things without any room for self doubt or self reflection. It does not create a climate that encourages discussion, only agreement.” Public speaking demands confidence. It’s usually that the interviews, questions and doubts go into their dedicated video. It kinda breaks flow to go back and forth on “the Apple phone is good actually, here have a link:” like I do here, no?

So these people spent a lot of time thinking about incentive structures and the failures of acqui-hires, Silicon Valley types treating the users badly and generally the culture issue where people would pay for worse software because they don’t have the option to not pay, while open source software has this attitude of “everything belongs to the commons, donation-ware built in the spare time” as if top-level engineers have that much free time. They’re taking the Cyanogen Inc. model of full time hires “everything we develop is open source, so if the project goes under, the development can continue” a step further, it’s all under a 501.3 non-profit and the developers remain project leads, FUTO isn’t supposed to interfere with where it’s going. So from the outside it looks perfect, have devs work of software that doesn’t suck, and do enough presentation to convince people to pay for apps that respect them. The linchpin of all this is s/w that goes beyond the FOSS standard of “80% completed, kind of a pain to set-up” and is usable by regular people, and to get there:

“FUTO sponsors multiple generous grant programs to provide funding to great projects and people. See our home page for organizations we’ve funded.” https://futo.org/grants/

So now I wear my FUTO pajamas to sleep in my FUTO bed?
Out of their apps I only used Grayjay and the Keyboard.
Grayjay: It’s built to be easy to create plug-ins for all streaming platforms people want, Odysee, Spotify, PeerTube, to have them all in one place because asking people to go to a different app to watch your stuff… means they won’t watch your stuff. Better to smooth out the transition, no need to give up your regular yt channels (unless yt bans or takes down the videos, then the users keep getting them in the same feed, from the altertative hosts).
If Google tries to cease&desist, all that can be hit is the plug-in itself, which is easy to replicate. Learning from Vanced, and Re-Vanced, no single point of failure and no over-complicated fragile micro architecture-dependent injectors. It’s open source, and that kinda forces them to implement things people want to avoid protest-forks (looking at you, Tubular. No hate, I like it). Some people don’t like SponsorBlock, it infringes on Mr. Clinton’s freedom of meow, so it’s disabled by default. One oddity is that playlists don’t show up on search results, you have to go to the dedicated “Playlists” section, there’s a bespoke “Playlist Search”.
It shows creator’s merch below the currently playing video, I have no opinion on that, it’s unintrusive enough that I don’t mind. (I’d rather print their designs on one of my own shirts and just donate, to avoid shipping fees, burning fuel and I know for sure the shirt is my size.)

• I still prefer NewPipe, when it works, there’s no beating a simple, fast client; fast-forward during silence my beloved. It’s also more of a hobbyist project, so when youtube decides to break something, it takes them a day or two to fix it, and I have to download the apk myself because f-droid wants to test the packages more thoroughly. (did you know that android doesn’t allow sending&receiving of APK files via Bluetooth?).

Keyboard: open source swipe, finally! It’s not as good at predicting as Microsoft Swiftkey, but at this point I’m just happy that something exists. I like how it suggests emoji, like if you type the word “turkey” a appears in the err… word suggestion bar. The killer feature is the offline Voice input, by the developer of Live Captions | Flathub. Gotta download the whattheyrecalled, training data model weights language packs separately.

• New Privacy Keyboard By Rossmann - ThePrimeTime yt
  4:18 about comments asking for technical content on yt.

Grayjay and the keyboard are like KDE apps, standardized base platforms with many plugins running inside, full of features and the occasional weird glitch because some applets crashed while others are still running.
Immich and Circles: I like how these are two separate, host-your-own-cloud projects. Immich is ultra-fast and has a local AI model to understand what is in the picture to help you search for stuff; looking to add federation in the future. Circles is like a fully encrypted “close friends and family” Instagram. Limitations on what you can do with an encrypted cloud and all that, no need to slow down Immich to bolt-on features it wasn’t built to handle.

“You like the software. Great. Pay for it. That’s it. No DRM.” ~Eron Wolf.
“We offer a way to pay for the app once. The app will function identically without paying.”
They’re calling it a purchase. You’re not donating, it’s not charity, you’re getting quality software made by full-time employees. It’s Eron Wolf that burns money on charity because he wants to see this happen, giving people the agency to vote with their wallet for something that’s “worth it”.

Murena’s claim to fame is that they handle both the phone warranties, ROM/OS, the apps and the de-googled server software. Murena has to thank their lucky stars that a previous project lead for GrapheneOS has beef with Louis, because Graphene ROM with FUTO Apps, Nextcloud/Proton servers and more devices supported would have been THE combo, with their social media presence. (Want to write an OS? Start a TikTok et al. That’s how we all learned out about TempleOS). Maybe I’ll get a Pixel 6 to play around with Graphene when it drops under $100. As it stands, FUTO got closer to Calyx and now focuses on apps and user experience, throwing some shade at Nextcloud for being a slow lumbering provider of public office infrastructure gunning for Microsoft’s place. Futo’s looking to start their own hosting offers, if you don’t want to handle the server side of things.

The Five Pillars of FUTOey Software

1. Source First /Open Source If people are to have control over the computers in their lives, they must have the capability to inspect and modify the software running on them.

2. Self Manageable Servers (if applicable) Servers should be Source First too. It should be relatively easy for a user to run their own server for whatever service their client software needs.

3. Sovereign Identity (if applicable) Servers must allow the user to authenticate with a private/public key pair. Email and phone number authentication is sensible for normies, but it must always be possible for a user to transition to using a sovereign mechanism.

4. Open Databases (if applicable) Crowdsourced content should never be kept hidden in a silo by the crowdsourcer. The creator of the content most likely intended for their work to be distributed as widely as possible. The crowdsourcer must provide reasonable mechanisms for the content to be distributed by others.

5. End-to-end Encryption (if possible) Servers should never be able to leverage their man in the middle status to discern the content of communications between their users.

   0. Don’t Suck. This applies to all software, FUTOey or not. We have accomplished nothing if our software is sluggish, unreliable, or lacks key features. Our clients need to be delightful. Our servers need to help our clients be delightful.

If you tolerated my “include e v e r y t h i n g” writing so far, here’s the full interview/stream where they answer all the questions about structures, goals, to ground-floor programming and triggering the events on the downpress, not the off-press.

Immich Q&A ft. Eron Wolf & Louis Rossmann from Futo

Timestamps and my extra comments

• 12 minute preamble on Louis’s channel
  00:00 issues with the Android ecosystem
  02:55 Nextcloud and Immich, a cloud not connected to the internet.
  04:36 Video proxies
  07:06 Let’s give them millions of dollars. What could possibly go wrong?

  “Now typically when an open source project has an infusion of capital by a billionaire 99% of the time you are right to think that something bad is about to happen. So we wanted to have an hour and a half long talk with the community where we answer your questions both the easy ones and the very difficult ones to give you an idea of how this works.”

  08:37 4 years later, what did the non-profit achieve?
  09:30 “Don’t trust me. You should not have to trust me.”
  11:06 Vote with your wallet doesn’t work, there are no good alternatives. “Will people pay for it if we build it?” Changing the culture, making people the customer again.

0:00 Introduction
9:30 How does FUTO intend to fund Immich? Will there be monetization? And if so, in what form?
13:56 What sort of return on investment is FUTO looking for when funding the Immich team?
“I want this to become sustainable, that would be a huge success. Chasing 10x ROIs is vulgar, you only get that by abusing customers.”
18:05 How does FUTO make money? Where does the money come from? I learned that nothing is free, you always pay somehow.
This has an interesting answer:

“You’re asking people to pay for FOSS? How do you make money?” Where does the money come from? You. Do you think this is good? We’re asking people to pay for it, we’re not calling it a donation and we’re not calling it “free” software because we want people to pay for it. Do you have the ability to use it for free? Yes. But we’re hoping that if we honestly put out our product and we say “yeah the trial period is indefinite and you can read the source code if you want” that that will develop enough good will that people will say “you know what yeah I’ll pay five bucks for this” so when somebody asked “If I self-host my own instance why should I pay?” um because they coded it. I can’t code this[…] It’s so much faster than nextcloud that I want to say thanks."

22:15 What would happen to Immich if FUTO went under in the future?
26:00 Will FUTO have any access whatsoever to my content as someone self-hosting Immich? Analytics or AI or any kind built into the platform that they can access?
30:50 Will Immich undergo an independent security audit after FUTO takes over?
32:40 Will anyone still be able to volunteer on Immich development on Github?
34:03 Side note: FUTO, an engineering-driven company
35:28 Side note: Very little will change
36:53 The immich logo/brand and name will belong to FUTO, how could a potential fork legally be like with it still being recognized as “immich”?
40:26 If we don’t like the direction FUTO takes Immich, will a pre-FUTO version of Immich be available that we don’t have to update and can remain stable locally?
43:30 I am working on ImmichStat, a self-hosted companion website that shows in-depth statistics of my Immich instance. Will I be able to still use the name Immich?
45:04 FUTO seems heavily involved and invested in blockchain. Is Immich going to be changed in this way? What if we don’t want to be associated with crypto, blockchain, etc?
47:02 Eron, what can you tell the people who believe this is probably going to ruin this amazing project on the long run? Would you put out an official statement about no ads, dataminers or paid features?
49:25 Will immich stay on GitHub or be moving to the FUTO Gitlab?
Zulip, the only chat app that runs fast on a Raspberry Pi.
52:21 Do you have an exit strategy if things don’t work out with them? Transferring all rights mean you would not work anymore on it if there’s a dispute? Would you just fork it?
52:32 Is FUTO/Immich looking for more developers to join full or part time? Are pay ranges disclosed?
54:55 How will very long term project maintenance work now that funding is suspended outside FUTO, and now that IP has been transferred?
55:42 What conditions did FUTO set? Will you still be able to accept donations from other people? Will they own the source code?
1:00:32 FUTO has given a grant to Zulip. On Immich’s Discord someone recently was pushing Zulip. Is FUTO going to force the community to migrate to Zulip?
Telegram responsiveness on the downpress, Engineering tangents, The FUBS bare-metal programming environment that cold-boots to the program in 400ms on a PineBook.
1:07:01 Side note: What will actually change?
1:09:18 How did FUTO pay attention to you?
1:11:05 As a company, can I still offer infrastructure and support for running Immich for my users? So not selling Immich, but selling the online service to people interested in FOSS without IT skills or hw.
1:12:47 Chat comment: Is encryption on your mind? There are less good software app offering encryption.
1:14:40 Will merch be available?
1:15:18 Was there anything that came close to preventing immich from joining FUTO? Like a major disagreement?
1:15:39 Are there any plans to integrate Immich with any of the other FUTO projects (e.g. FUTO) in the future?
1:17:36 Are y’all ever gonna have a stable release that just gets bugfixes and security updates? If so, when?
1:18:28 Can you share some future features? Looking forward to something like a baked-in duplicate photo-finder, auto-add face to albums, fine-tuning on machine learning, features, and maybe highlight videos?
1:21:10 Chat comment: It seems like you throw away money with no plan for profitability. - Talking about the general mindset that people associate OSS with not being able to make money/not being allowed to take money. Good software costs money!

“I could use audio plugins in video editing software from 2002 but not in Kdenlive in 2024. We want open source software to be something where it’s not considered by default "Wait, what do you mean you’re spending money on development? Of course you’re not going to make money.” that’s a fundamental problem with the culture and it’s why we’re to the point where you literally don’t have a choice for certain verticals to get something that doesn’t suck unless you want to just be spied on, tracked, or be stuck in Apple’s ecosystem. One of the things that drives us not to that… There are projects where even if it is open source and free the simple act of saying “would you pay for it?” there are certain people that frown upon that in this kind of communistic way like you’re literally not even allowed to ask for money; how dare you ask for money to feed your family or pay your rent while you’re producing software that millions of people use. And I think that I find it detestable and I think Eron does too."

“Are you talking about kind of the fact that big Tech has abused people for so long that they just don’t trust any kind of free market solution is that…
-The attitude in open source that if you even ask for somebody to pay for the software, there are people out there that will actually get mad at you for that.
-Yeah and I do think the people who get triggered by people asking to get paid have been abused by big Tech monopolies for so long they may not even remember a time when the free market was working properly, that they just have an instinctive distrust of any time people mention free market. I want the free market to work, that’s what we’re going for. If you disagree, if you think all software should be owned by The Commons, it’s okay for you to try to do that but don’t bother us, is what I would say. That’s not what we’re going for here.”

• I think I’m sensitive to this stuff since I worked a few years in a grocery store, dealing with old Warsaw-pact era comunists that genuinely expected to take bread from the store and not pay for it for weeks on end, and would make a scene about it. What can I say, capitalism is still new and novel for us, think of Marcus from Borderlands. Even after the revolution, the only people that knew a thing or two about capitalism were criminals smuggling goods over the border, that subsequently became oligarchs and paralyzed the economy for the next 20 years.

The discussion continues about pride in ownership, and completing consumer-facing software too, not just that proverbial back-bone maintained by one dude in Nebraska. And how to prevent big companies from taking over open standards, ruining them, and people accepting that because the interface is polished.
1:27:07 Coming back to features.
1:28:12 Will Louis Rossmann promote Immich as a Google Photos/iCloud alternative on his YouTube channel?
1:29:35 What are the plans to make Immich a stable piece of software? For example, the iOS app is still a bit buggy.

“We went to the Matrix at FOSDEM and they did not once acknowledge that Discord existed or Microsoft teams existed, they didn’t even think that they needed to be better than those. We’re aware that yeah sure Apple does suck but they’re also good and we have to be better than them.”

1:32:00 Final words. Thank you all!

The Thirty-Million-Line Problem (2015)

The presentation itself ~Molly Rocket YT

“Casey Muratori is awesome. My boss is trying to solve the 30 million line problem with an approach I can best describe as Terry Davis meets Howard Hughes. If you think this would be a cool thing to work on and get paid to contribute to, and are qualified to work on it, FUBS · Wiki · Eron / Public · GitLab email me - louis@rossmanngroup.com
This is totally unrelated to the topic of the video but pinning just incase there are some other programming geniuses out there watching this video. You never know, I’ve found 3 already just from comments section…”

The FUBS bare-metal programming environment that cold-boots to the program in 400ms on a PineBook.

Mobility Independence Foundation: FUTO’s latest grant recipient ~ Abilities Expo Houston yt.
Tech freedom beyond computers: Right to repair and open-source hardware for wheelchairs ; “We are creating a competing supply chain”.

https://futo.org/transparency/

Our Response to Legal Requests

---

Source: @pixelianska

“WhatsApp is not going to go faster if you have 16 processors instead of 8”

How KaiOS is catching up with Android.

~don’t let the thumbnail fool you, this is for Bork Spec Flip phones. ENMBOR!
Hey look it’s named after me. There were quite a few attempts to bring lightweight Web App-based smartphones, which stripped-back the useful parts of android, while keeping the interesting parts of modern web. KaiOS is such a cool idea, fitting modern webapps into cheap devices that do indeed have internet, technically. Running WhatsApp and Maps is enough to get you by in most of europe. I find these Java feature-phone demakes of bloated modern Webapps charming and nostalgic. I would have loved to see them fit Discord into 240 pixels, but uhhh…

• Is KaiOS dead ? (maybe not, or maybe) : r/KaiOS

• “The web browser is another disappointment, even when compared to the likes of Opera Mini, as it lacks tabbed browsing, the ability to save pages for offline reading, and an ad blocker. KaiOS lacks a good web browser, copy/paste functionality, and an easy way to side-load apps. ~I spent a week with a $17 KaiOS phone - here’s what I learned”

wait wait hold the phone, their latest blog post was 2 days ago and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS#Jailbreak
See it in action!

• Finally! a usable Discord App for KaiOS devices! r/KaiOS
  
  
  
  ~image credit: diamondburned/Kaicord