So I’ve been in the rabbit hole of android privacy for some time, last I joined the GrapheneOS community but let’s just say that they doesn’t have a “healthy” opinion about other projects like f-droid.
So I am looking for generic communities that focus on mobile privacy that doesn’t have drama or toxicity or “extreme opinions”. Any suggestions? I prefer chat based communities like matrix or simplex instead of like reddit or lemmy.
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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I’ve learned a lot about privacy/security from xmpp chatrooms, especially the room for the conversations client and the divestos chatroom. They both are kind of support chatrooms for the chat client/ android rom but privacy is often a topic and the programmers/ rom maintainers are also present and very knowledgeable. https://search.jabber.network/rooms/1
Doesn’t tick all the boxes as it is on Lemmy, but feel free to join us at !degoogle@lemmy.ml
Be prepared to be assaulted by the Graphene OS community
My suggestion would be the Calyx OS community or even the F-droid forms.
I run graphene on several devices and recommend it. I do not participate in much discussion about it through. You can just use the best we got in android and be fine with that.
Discussion forums are the same all over I think. I don’t see much difference around graphene here on Lemmy or XDA forum.
For the love of God do not ever go to their community in any case… If you need technical help literally ask anywhere else… If you go there, you’ll end up hating GOS you’ve been warned
I’ve always got help, and the moderators are really nice.
Was this recently? It was bad under micay but thought it had improved by now.
Still not great…
Isn’t he still pretty involved in the project? I only followed the Rossmann story for a bit until I encountered random attacks on microg in the issue for Mozilla Location Services shutting down.
There’s also this random attack on alternative location services by GrapheneOS.
https://grapheneos.org/articles/positon-location-service
(Some surrounding discussion on the article can be found here (microg issue for MLS retiring))
Overall, Graphene does not seem like a friendly project in my opinion.
Two words: Fuck Graphene
(More words): and the assholes who run it.
I’ve been flashing phones since my OG Droid in 2009. Done probably 200+ flashes across numerous phones.
I’ve been in IT since the early 90’s.
Had an error with the Graphene flash on a clean Pixel. The way they talked to me would’ve gotten me a re-training session with my management, possibly fired, back when I was on a help desk.
Bunch of arrogant, condescending pricks. They need a Red Foreman boot up their ass.
Oh brother tell me about it. They talk like they are the final word on computer security lol
To be fair Graphene OS is probably a big part of there personality
That ego lol
Main guy got into a pissing match with Louis roassmann lol
Some people got no social skills
iodéOS has a Matrix server and the people there are pretty friendly, but discussion is mostly focused on bug reporting and features among beta testers and developers. Probably not what you’re after but just throwing it out there anyway.
You can just join XDA. TBH if Graphene is not your thing and Lineage OS isn’t supported on your device, you can just unlock the bootloader and install the patched kernel using KernelSU which will give you the control you want.
what about DivestOS?
The dev has ties with the Graphene OS project and has had some controversy. Not to say that it is bad but you should be aware of the person who controls it.
Device support?
It’s based on Lineage, so lots
Most of them older devices. This is not the fault of the Lineage OS devs, but companies just aren’t allowing it anymore. So if you have a new device, Lineage OS is not an option, if you’re in the US
Yeah, I want all my devices to run LineageOS and that limits me from lots of options to maybe 2 or 3 modern ones at reasonablish price points.
Thankfully I don’t live in the US, it would be even more difficult as you said.
Best supported devices: https://divestos.org/pages/devices_golden
All devices supported: https://divestos.org/pages/devices
Most of them older devices. This is not the fault of the Lineage OS devs, but companies just aren’t allowing it anymore. So if you have a new device, Lineage OS is not an option, if you’re in the US
Any good tutorial??
Read KernelSU docs
XDA has a chat?
They have a forum
‘Just trust me bro’ hardware, Google Play Integrity API, banned and GrapheneOS is still simping it.
Running away doesn’t fix this.
At least they could like not be paranoid and hostile…
the excessive and constant noise a limited number of people is making, their rage when it’s not pure hatred against whatever they don’t like or whoever they don’t agree with, is the main reason why, a Linux user worrying about privacy myself, I decided to stop wasting my time online with any such ‘tech’ communities. It has become almost impossible to have an open and calm discussion on any topic without someone jumping in and barking like some crazy dog — because reasons.
No matter what their reasons or motivations are to be angry or hateful, I have zero desire to listen to endless rabid barking. There isn’t much to learn in that, at least when you’re not a dog.
And I have no time for that either: we only have a limited amount of time to live before the game is over and there is no extra life to get, no second chance. I realized that a few years ago and decided I would not waste a second more of my time dealing with those constantly frustrated or hateful people. In tech or elsewhere.
Tech-wise, I have had much more stimulating and enriching discussions in communities that are not tech (or privacy or security or Linux)-related but communities where tech can still be discussed and debated (including by very competent tech people) just always in a broader discussion that don’t focus on tech itself.
If you’re interested, I’d be open to DMing about privacy and security. I would like to learn more about your situation and your threat model and what measures you’ve taken
Not sure to understand your question, my situation is nothing special. I’m a dude that cares about what I consider a fundamental human right, as essential as is/should be the freedom of expression: privacy. A right I certainly don’t want to see thrown away for a few already very rich people to be able to make even more crazy profit, nor in the name of convenience (including my own) not even for my own ‘security’ or well-being, for that matter.
Is there anything in what I wrote that made you believe my situation was somewhat special?
As for the ‘measures’ I have taken. I try to be careful & lucid when I use any app/services/device and I do as much as I possibly can without using them at all, aka offline and the analog or IRL way, which is not that hard for me as I often work much better using analog tools.
If you have any specific question feel free to PM me, I can’t promise you an answer but at the very least I will let you know I’ve read it and can’t answer it.
It’s sad that so many good projects is plagued by this crap. Like did we forget about the whole “respect other people’s opinions” thing?
I cant say if we have forgotten it or not, but it sure looks like we don’t want to hear about it very much.
It’s all turned binary (pun intended): you’re with us or you’re against us, either you’re good or you’re evil (and then, you deserve to be eliminated). Which is as saddening as it is is… stupid.
What does a healthy opinion of F-Droid look like though? Lol
What’s an unhealthy opinion of f-droid? Is something wrong with it? Genuine question. I’m out of the loop.
F-droid acts as a trust for all the apps you download through it, which means if F droid is hacked, hackers can push fake update to all the apps. It is an issue, but not the biggest concern of average joe. Although F-droid should take it pretty seriously.
But I think hating on them is not the solution…
They have actually made a bunch of security enhancements to there systems and processes. You can look at the blog if you are curious.
Oh. Same is true for Google Play and literally every self updating app/program on the planet lmao.
For Google Play: Google has root on play devices which is a separate issue, but the apps are actually signed by their developers and not google.
This is not true… play store now requires you to give up your signing keys to google so they can sign the app themselves after injecting whatever they feel like. F-Droid does the same because they also compile your apps for you. Another reason some don’t trust F-Droid (or Signal, Tor and a bunch of other free/open source software for that matter) is that they received funding from OTF which is funded by the US government and some people don’t like that. And yes I know computers and the internet also came from the government /shrug
I have no skin in this game, I am not intentionally trying to spread any FUD (but I realize some people will still claim so, they are free to do so), just relaying information I have seen elsewhere. Happy to provide sources if anyone likes.
https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/9842756?hl=en#zippy=%2Capp-signing-key-requirements
Thats a good point, but it looks like they still let you use your own keys if you want to, but they even say 90% of apps let google sign on their behalf. yeah, ok, full trust with google then.
Before 2021 all apps used their own keys it seems
Play App Signing is required for new apps.
Also now required is giving up your government identity document to google in order to keep publishing on the play store.
Fdroid is introducing another trusted party to your supply chain, which should be a factor in anyone’s threat molding.
https://f-droid.org/docs/Reproducible_Builds/ However, with reproducible builds now a package is built and signed by both fdroid and the original developer, so you get a net security benefit of having a third party attesting they can independently reproduce the binary from source. Problem solved right? Well, yes but mostly no. Most projects and packages don’t have reproducible builds, so if your using fdroid for most packages your still trusting droid.
I think a lot of the online hate comes from people making assumptions that their use case and threat model applies to everyone. That’s why I prefer discourse where we just talk about the attributes and not “you should”
There isn’t anything better than F-droid as far as I can tell
Do you know of an equivalent to https://reproducible-builds.org/citests/ for Android/F-Droid packages? I’d like to see some public verification of these reproducible builds, especially Signal.
Signal isn’t on F-droid. You need to use Molly for that.
Indeed… I was not trying to imply that it was.
the public verification is that the developer signed binary matches the fdroid built binary
Yes, but this is often not an option for non-developers
I feel like there’s a lot of FUD around this subject, because people bring it up as if it’s purely a negative without talking about the reasons why it’s done the way it is. The whole point of F-Droid is that it’s a repository (not a store) of free software applications. They have an inclusion policy forbidding proprietary code and dependencies, and in order to enforce this policy they have to build from publicly available source code, and in order to do so they need to sign the builds themselves. This means, yes, you are trusting F-Droid instead of the upstream developer - but given F-Droid has higher standards than upstream developers this is a tradeoff I am willing to make.
Reproducible builds solves this in a way that preserves the standards of F-Droid, however, “security peoples’” favored “alternatives” (such as Accrescent, Obtainium, and Google Play Store/Aurora Store) forego this entirely, showing they don’t either have a viable solution to offer or that they don’t really care about the problem that F-Droid is addressing to begin with.
Really well said!
I completely understand, but this only adversely affects you if f-droid getting hacked is in your threat model. And not everyone have that.
Yeah exactly. So pointing that out is sufficient, and it’s up to every user to decide if the benefit is worth the risk. And I’m sure for most people fdroid is a net positive.
Now, I want to change gears, and talk about annoying personalities also being really beneficial. Crazy principled people drive change in the world. The open BSD founder, RMS, the graphene founder, these are crazy unreasonable uncompromising people which are difficult to get along, but they drive change. Sometimes we need those uncompromising people. I think putting up with them is the cost of a vibrant ecosystem.
I disagree.
If you’re an asshole, people don’t want to work with you, and will actively avoid you.
I’m the IT guru in my family and extended circle. Of the probably 100+ people I advise, none will ever use Graphene now.
They alienate people with their hubris and condescension. Rather than help people understand their perspective, they act like it’s “the only answer”.
That’s never a solution. Discussing pros and cons of different approaches moves us forward, not the Graphene “us VS them” mentality.
I would like to not delve into infighting and would like to avoid it
As you wish. But maybe open up to some new perspectives.
As long as it doesn’t get dissolved into pure hate.
There are no non-toxic spaces these days.
Lemmy isn’t bad although there are some far left
Uggh, I even hate that word.
There are assholes everywhere, always have been, always will be.
Can y9u share some?
They said there are none
Oh shit I missed the “no”
Fuck that’s sad…