I have a setup which is not ideal, but I believe improves privacy while preserving convenience: I never connected my TV to the internet, and instead use a MiBox TV S 4K for all my streaming with custom DNS blocking trackers and ads.
I guess there might be other Android TV boxes that allow you to change the DNS server. It might be worth checking a bit around if you decide to go down this route.
In my case, I found this Reddit post and was able to change the DNS server on the MiBox to NextDNS, where I could later activate relevant blocklists (SmartTV, Xiaomi, Google). I also perform monitoring of the domains the MiBox connects to and have blocked a couple manually.
This way I have an AndroidTV experience with the streaming services that I want, and with the domains I don’t want blocked.
There are several degoogled OS options for the Fairphone models, with different levels of degoogling and privacy: LineageOS, CalyxOS, DivestOS, iodéOS and /e/OS.
Most of these are based on LineageOS (I understand that CalyxOS isn’t, but I might be wrong). I personally use iodéOS and I like the helpful developers, the ability to remove / replace any of the apps preinstalled with the system, and the iodé blocker which blocks trackers, adds and any connection you want to at a system level.
Don’t forget iodéOS!
Hey there, I’m sorry about this craziness. My comment was not really directed at you, but I was just quoting part of the original post that mentioned you.
I was trying to suggest that OP is confusing criticism of the GrapheneOS community with criticism of the OS. You make a good point and, as I pointed out, you were not criticising the OS, but the community. Not the same thing.
Even @TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml gives it backlash despite being a moderator of Lemmy’s biggest privacy community. A quote here: “grapheneOS trolls are downvoting every single post and comment of mine, and committing vote manipulation on Lemmy. They are using 5-6 accounts.” That was in response to downvotes on a comment posted in the c/WorldNews community, which is entirely unrelated to technology.
It seems to me that you might be confusing things: You say that people hate the OS but share a comment complaining about the community of users/fans, not about the OS.
I have never used GrapheneOS and cannot comment on the OS, but I have seen some users in different communities commenting that GrapheneOS is the only valid alternative OS and discrediting any other OS. It becomes tiring pretty fast.
There is already a paste button, although not directly shown. I can access it in 3 different ways (but I have made some changes to the default settings, so it might not be exactly the same for you):
- on the toolbar on top of the keyboard (you need to extend it by tapping the > button on the top left). You can customise the buttons that show up here in “Settings/Preferences/Additional keys/Select toolbar keys”
- by long pressing the comma key (my favourite way), a pop up shows with several keys, among them the paste key.
- by long pressing the enter key
I followed the recommendation of the developer and installed the file from GApps packages (“swypelibs”). They provide a link in Heliboard’s README, scroll down to the FAQ section and look for “How to enable glide typing”
Not necessarily: you can choose to have several languages separated as different input methods (you can switch between them very quickly by sliding vertically from the space bar) OR you can go to “Settings / Languages” and select one of your active languages and inside its submenu add languages for multilingual typing. This way when you select that original language as input method it will use and recognise all the languages you added at once. I must say this can be tricky with glide typing, but still works pretty well.
I have Heliboard set to English (UK) and it suggests British spellings (highlighting the American ones as typos), so I think you should be good. However, I’m not sure if the spellings come from my phone’s system or from the keyboard…
I would nevertheless recommend trying it: it has some very nice improvements over OpenBoard and is under active development, so you could request new features or report bugs and expect them to be taken care of.
Heliboard can do multilingual typing, and I believe there is some kind of haptic feedback… I don’t use that function, but it was mentioned in the latest release notes
If you have some kind of Android TV device you can probably install SmartTube to have no ads and sponsorblock: https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext
I just installed Anytype to give it a try, and on first launch it tried to connect to:
Their android app seems to be full of trackers, not very privacy friendly.
THIS! OsmAnd and Organic Maps are not worse apps because you cannot find some addresses. The data comes from OpenStreetMap, and if it’s missing there it won’t be available in these apps. That’s not a bug, that’s a feature. How? OpenStreetMap data is open and free for everyone to use and edit, it’s like the Wikipedia of maps. No, you don’t have Google mapping everything for you, you should probably chip in and help add addresses if you want a map that doesn’t depend on a huge corporation, a map where you can correct mistakes, and a map that’s free for anyone to use in their apps or websites. Otherwise we depend on what Google wants to map, how they want to map it, and the app that they offer us to access that data.
Yes, I feel like F-Droid has been getting some shit lately for no reason. I think it’s good that Obtainium exists and that we have more options of easily getting apps outside the Play Store, and even better: FOSS apps.
However, I see a trend towards “F-Droid is bad and Obtainium has arrived to save us from it” and get the feeling that many times people don’t even understand how both things work. Obtainium is basically doing what some people were doing for long time using RSS, it’s not a revolution. When I tried it, it failed to properly detect the latest versions and updates of several apps, so I was personally not impressed.
Thanks, I know about reproducible builds, but I still don’t see how the GitHub release is more secure than the F-Droid build. In both cases you need to trust whoever built the apk.
It is known that F-Droid uses the published source code, reviews it for anti-features, and they build hundreds of apps used by thousands of people. If they did any tampering or had a security hole we would learn about it pretty fast (we just need one user of one of their built apps to report).
On the other hand using a GitHub release we need to trust the developer of the app: trust that the source code has no malicious code in it (or review the code ourselves, does anybody do that?), there’s no third party reviewing it, and trust that the apk they release uses exactly the published code. The user base of an individual app’s GitHub release is way smaller than that of all apps built by F-Droid, so by chance it would take way longer for users to detect any security problem.
So, as I see it, it boils down to either trusting a big community with a long story of building and providing FOSS apps, a good reputation, and offering reproducible builds on all apps that managed to achieve them; or trusting dozens of different developers, most of whom we know nothing of.
You’re both right: most people don’t know what any of this means, but also people who know often don’t care. In my group of friends there are 2 programmers, they perfectly understand this yet they still share links full of trackers in the group chat.
My strategy is to friendly scold them (a programmer should know better) and in the same message share the same link without tracking rubbish. This way my non-technical friends can also see how short the same link can become.
Area is pretty outdated in OSM
Well, we can all actively contribute to OSM to improve the maps. I personally enjoy doing it and knowing that the map data doesn’t belong to a private company like Google.
No bus/train schedule
I am used to check those on an external app from the service provider. I understand how that is an issue for you, but in my case I don’t miss it.
(no) car accident alerts on place
this could be useful, indeed, but it is hard to implement while keeping user’s privacy. It can also be unreliable if users don’t report them properly.
(no) places reviews from users.
I personally prefer it like this: it means less clutter on my maps, and unfortunately online reviews have become quite useless in the last years: businesses push to remove negative review and buy fake positive reviews. I no longer trust them.
It is available through the IzzyOnDroid repository if you want to download and update the app using an F-Droid client.
To be fair both are small repositories, yes, but I managed to find them both when looking for a way to install Signal via F-Droid. And no, I’m not running CalyxOS, but a different degoogled ROM :)
I might be wrong, but TwinHelix’s Signal-FOSS seems to still be active, the latest update I found on their F-Droid repository and their GitHub is from yesterday: https://github.com/tw-hx/Signal-Android/releases/tag/v6.32.5.0-FOSS
But anyway, I just wanted to share these 2 sources since I saw the Signal / F-Droid discussion happening. It could be useful to someone. I don’t know enough to judge what option is better.
Signal-FOSS is on the TwinHelix F-Droid repository https://fdroid.twinhelix.com/fdroid/repo/?fingerprint=7B03B0232209B21B10A30A63897D3C6BCA4F58FE29BC3477E8E3D8CF8E304028
Signal is on the CalyxOS F-Droid repository https://github.com/CalyxOS/calyx-fdroid-repo
Yes, it’s the fork of Bromite that uazo is maintaining.
It’s not absurd at all. They know the IPs, they know those devices use the same network, and they also know where they are located pretty accurately: the Google Street View cars also scan for WiFi networks and map them to their location.
2 devices consistently connected to the same router, to the same network, in the same place… must belong to the same person or to 2 people sharing a home. If cookies set by other websites and seen by Google show similar browsing habits, it’s probably the same person.