A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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@Pantherina any idea why I can’t access the Piped link? It just spins forever.
Interesting. Just use Libredirect I guess
Aurora in anonymous mode is working again. They didn’t have enough accounts to spread the load with, and hit rate-limits. They’ve now added way more accounts.
https://gitlab.com/AuroraOSS/AuroraStore/-/issues/912#note_1406935721
Had to install uber yesterday and it worked fine!
sounds like great news!
I’m not familiar with Piped. I don’t know if your link won’t load because it uses some kind of non-free javascript that I have disabled on my machine, or if the services is just slow or what. I assume the video you reference is the same as this one accessed through invidious Aurora Users: Proceed with Caution!
Pipes is an Invidious instance. For some reason the only one supported for link sharing on Libretube
hmmm…so it’s some kind of fork from Invidious, and not just another instance.
Feel free to report in Libretube to change the default instance
I’m not familiar with Piped. I don’t know if your link won’t load because it uses some kind of non-free javascript that I have disabled on my machine, or if the services is just slow or what. I assume the video you reference is the same as this one accessed through invidious Aurora Users: Proceed with Caution! video
FYI, the “anonymous” login stopped working since mid last week. There’s an “insecure annonymous” login I haven’t tried. So it seems Google doesn’t like Aurora anymore, :) I use APKGrabber with APKMirror, and though a bit less convenient, it works…
But Aurora is much safer, as the apk comes directly from the official store.
@Pantherina :)) and I also shut down my google account completely. Together with this, replacing all google apps with more reputable alternatives. Let’s hope that a good alternative for GPlay Store is not far away.
This will require all the stupid providers to acually care. And I dont see that yet. But yes, annoy your train companies, banks and more!
I think the earlier recommendation of just using the web browser, preferably a Free Software privacy focused one like the Tor Browser, is a better solution anyway.
?? So you download apps through Tor, using an account linked to your mail and phone number. And you have no update notes
This is a bummer. I actually used Aurora to download my paid apps. I would buy on the website and login on my degoogled phone. Now degoogled users will have to just pirate apps they want. So much for supporting small developers.
@arthur @Pantherina what’s wrong with just using F-Droid?
You need other apps.
@Pantherina no, no you don’t. I will say I have been flaburgassted by the number of people on our free and federated network that advertise their love for the freedom denying survailance capitalist “service” of spotify. #FunkWhale4ever
No you dont but you have no social life in that case. People sharing playlists with you, looking up music quickly… personally I dont need it, but its a bubble poorly
You can still freely access the playlists on https://open.spotify.com/ without an account. And Newpipe has a share function for local playlists. You won’t be missing on a lot, just don’t fall for the consumerist trap and break the social boundaries.
Edit: You can also access banking services from their respective website. Don’t give them power over you by downloading their apps.
Here in Brazil, banking services force you into installing spyware in your computer in order to use them, making it a worse option compared to proprietary android apps.
Didnt know that! Thats cool.
Banking TAN apps are nessecary if you somehow want to use your phone and not a weird card reader. The app itself is just comfortable
@Tatar_Nobility @Pantherina or you could help your neighbor by contribuiting and partcipating in a federerated FLOSS servcie like #FunkWhale instead.
@Pantherina I’ve honestly never even heard of sharing playlists through freedom denying proprietary surveillance capitalist software like that. I understand the necessity when sharing personal files, like on #Funkwhale, but I certainly wouldn’t call that a social interaction, let alone a significant portion of one’s social life. Mind explaining it to this old guy?
I dont listen to much music. I dont have Gigabytes of music. No real idea how to discover new music of various genres.
So if people share playlists atleast I need to download the songs. I almost never use that app, but anyways.
@Pantherina yeah no need to download to listen to Funkwhale, “the cloud” it plays from is just the various servers on the Fediverse
@Pantherina really? 🎵What’s the matter with kids today 🎵
F-Droid is where I get 90% of the applications I need however banking and public transit apps are almost never open source. Once in a while I will buy a game or app that is developed does something that I can’t get from the community.
Always annoy your local infrastructure IT devs! It cant be that all these apps dont even have an FDroid repo. They can ship any binary they want its just if they actually want it!
expired
I think having seperate repos sucks but its okay. Droid-ify has preconfigured repos you just have to enable.
for those who consider the app unusable at this point: although it is true that you can not search for any app using the anonymous profiles you can still look at their play store websites using your favourite search engine. When you try to enter them using your phone it shows you the option to open it using the Aurora Store, that way you can still find the apps without losing privacy
Well, if you’re going to use your browser, no need to search on the Google app store, you can search on apkmirror or apkpure (I prefer apkmirror), you can allow your browser to install apps, and then use apkgrabber to keep the apps up to date… At any rate, there are options…
For some reason the GPlay website didnt work like that anymore for me.
Also the accounts will be completely banned, not only rate limited.
I heard that accounts with genuine activity—that is, not created for the sole reason of using Aurora—aren’t targeted. However, I wouldn’t risk it XD
Google’s also rate limiting anonymous logins. It’s looking very bad.
Like, what you would not want to do. Isolating is key.
What do you mean? I’m not following you.
Thanks very much for the heads up on this. I try to get most of my apps from F-Droid, but there are a few I still need to get from Google. In a worst case scenario, like if Aurora can’t fix this or there isn’t something else like Yalp (wait…Yalp?) how will I be able to download gplay store apps? I don’t even have a Google account. If I had used Mrs. Swann’s G account and it got deleted, I’d probably have to spend the rest of the morning picking up all my teeth off the floor…
There are certified third party stores that offer APKs.
Can you recommend some?
https://apkpure.com/
https://www.apkmirror.com/
Are these considered safe? Do you have to check for updates yourself?
Yes they are clean APKs, i.e. not modified and the original signature is preserved. So they’re as safe as the Google Play Store.
Regarding updates, I recommend checking out https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/de.apkgrabber
Thanks! Will do
I do use apkgrabber, but I’ve always got it from:
https://github.com/hemker/apkgrabber/releases
And it supposed to allow “notification updates” when new versions come out, though it’s been on 1.7.0 for quite some time.
Does izzysoft makes sure not to include apks which are already included in the official f-droid repo? It includes many apks already… And I’d rather grab the ones on official f-droid, with some exceptions, like the newpipe repo, but it doesn’t include anything else but newpipe…
Izzy removes packages that are mutual with F-droid after a week or so. See here.
And apkgrabber not getting updates isn’t crucial if it the app works fine as it is intended.
oh okay