Fairphone and Huawei: Ky's big phone book

Tech
9

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 :tada: . 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
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      • 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!”
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      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.
      • :musical_note: 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!
      • Dads are great people :) r/wholesomememes

      • “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
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[…]”

deGoogl/e/

"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

  • 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.”
    • :arrow_right_hook: 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.”

  • 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.”
  • 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

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~ Rise Of Artificial - Norul (Official Single) :musical_note:

[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 floorp_jBvFVdEqA4 that takes you to…

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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 :tm: 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.

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.

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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
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  • 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. :tada:
  • Spot : “An open-source metasearch engine forked from SearXNG”.
  • 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…
  • 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.

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."

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