Is it a Manifest v3 thing?

People keep recommending Chromium based browsers, as if Google can’t cut them off from further security updates at will, just like they are screwing with AOSP releases …

I’m really sad to hear that you had this experience. I started using Tuta back in April or May and it’s been full featured for me. I also use it for my BitWarden since both can host in EU, and Tuta has been rock solid for me across the last half year.

I hope that you get to resolution sooner than later, with their support.

Bruh. Read the room. You have been taking swings at everyone in these threads and basically telling anyone that can’t beg, borrow or steal a Pixel to fuck off.

Nobody should take you seriously when you talk about discouragement. I asked how you and I could encourage our community today and you told me not to worry about folks in the developing world that can’t “work a few extra hours” for a mythical premium handset.

This was your smartest reply today.

“There are dozens of us! DOZENS!”

Thanks for spelling out all of this. I was you to know the I read every word of it.

The guy we both were responding to managed to waste an hour of my own day with back-and-forth so I figured it was worth seeing how others had torn apart the nonsense, and while I knew the issues in a theory level you explaining Brazil’s ecosystem was an excellent illustration I learn from.

Good luck out there. May we someday both learn to evade feeding the trolls.

Yeah, no, don’t take it personally. He’s just been attacking anyone in the threads that doesn’t buy into his prescribed “solution” while trying to also be some kind of victim-martyr.

Thanks for being here. Community needs vice and we will have to find a way, together, to back the creators that can actually code the paths forward.

Ironically, with an iPhone you could at least buy into Test Flight privately-signed-apps.

Anyhow, it took me a couple days to realize the guy that you and I have both been replying to is just a troll. Thanks for explaining your thoughts through this discussion, and try not to be too demoralized by the guy.

I’ve responded, repeatedly, and at length to you. I’ve treated you like you want to be a responsible member of community. I’ve tried to treat you with benefit of the doubt.

You have generally replied with pithy, two-liner insults and red herrings. I feel comfortable now just disregarding you.

I hope someday you find your way to kindness.

I live in a country where the government is now weaponizing the mobile data on our phones to track us, and assault us. They have begun kidnapping citizens without due process and incarcerating people with legal status, without even filling charges.

These state agencies are buying tech that let’s them follow people around by their phones, and the leading mobile platform companies are openly complicit with governments that assault their people.

When you ask if I’m living in the developing world, I travel international a lot but my home country is experiencing rapid decline, and they have banned several categories of phone manufacturers, most famously Huawei consumer products. Ironically, because that company is suspected of doing the same things that Google is doing (granting access to back-end services and data to government entities).

So it’s really not about any one device.

The people affected by this state violence (a ) deserve privacy just like anyone else, and (b ) depend on their mobile devices for every part of their daily life just like everybody else.

How are you going to help them, when you can’t even help yourself?

Nobody can “help themselves” with a technology platform. It taken cooperation with others, to make systemic changes.

Again, I personally will be fine. I can buy a Chinaphone. Or I can fund a Linux project phone for myself. Or, gods help me, I could buy an iPhone.

But what about the people on the other end of the line? What good is one secure walkie talkie?

ROMs rarely work as one-size-fits-all-devices, yeah?

I only know of four smartphone categories of phones that are really available in the markets around the world today, en masse.

1. The big tentpole phones available from Samsung, Google, Moto, and maybe two other players.

2. Boutique devices from vendors like Nothing and Fairphone with limited reach to global markets (like, being Euro only, or being only distributed in markets that can buy into they ideology, etc). Nearly all of them prices or is MOST humans’ reach.

3. Chinaphones. A mix of fly-by-night brands with ghost shifts in factories that make many varieties of phones with other people’s designs, but have extremely limited first party support and probably zero ROM support from the global community … And then the handful of tech markings like Xiami, HTC, Huawei, and anyone else that bends the knee to the CCP. Virtually no NA market penetration in this decade, and tremendous barrier for entry, for most of the Western world. Also, security issues galore.

4. iPhones.

All that to say, I don’t think a more featured OS existed it’s the way forward, with people all jockeying to make new ROM’s for everyone to NOT be able to run on their phones.

I’m hopeful folks smarter than I will be able to come in about the potential for sandboxes in it phones with their own capacity for running unsigned apps, like a virtualization platform.

“Job” is a precious commodity for many of us.

You understand that people who live in the developing world, and have hostile governments that will weaponize Meta/Google’s data and telemetry against them, ALSO deserve privacy and liberty with their devices too, right?

This is why I’m saying that being prescriptive about what hardware we use is not the end game.

It’s going to have to come from the software platform.

I carry an S22 (with no Google services allowed on it) and an S25. I could buy any flagship phone in cash and not blink. Most folks around you and me don’t have this kind of privilege.

I’m fine.

I’m saying that we can’t ask or expect everyone to have the means to do so, AND that tellibg all of them to buy Pixels to fund the very company that is fucking everyone over, in hopes they leave the bootloader for those phones unlocked indefinitely, is basically just complying in advance.

While you’re busy insulting me and others, I seriously think we need a campaign to empower devs because the solutions are going to have to come from software, and that takes real people’s labor, talent and time. That is solely what I’m advocating for.

This is your community. It rises or falls with how we treat each other. How can you and I encourage each other, today?

1. It’s not a “solution” if it doesn’t solve for most of us. Likely you and I both need to federate with others for results because I’m honestly not a qualified software developer but …

2. Modern flagship phones have more than enough resources to run non-gaming app’s within some other container or even with full virtualization or, worst case scenario, emulation. We desperately need folks to figure out porting Dockerlike platform tools and making them accessible for normies like me.

If we can run an entire Windows environment and, separately, if we can run Hades II on a yesteryear Samsung, we should be able to get a sufficiently sandboxed environment together that’s qualified to run the weather apps and calculator apps I run on FDroid.

Because I’ll be god-damned if I’m going to entrust Google’s calculator app with my contacts and phone status permissions.

Not to say I’m entitled to any of their labor but I would join a crowdfunding program in a heartbeat.

I’m even willing to use the web apps or webpages for banking, if the browsers can make the handshakes. I’ll forfeit using the bank first party apps, if their websites are full featured.

And the bootloader is now locked down across Samsung’s ecosystem, as of this year. Sucks.

If you move to using an unsecured “chinaphone” as an alternative to the big three handset vendors, then it’s unlikely they are target devices for the myriad of uncertified ROM’s.

I think we are going to need software solutions that can run on major Androdis distributions across the variety of hardware.

I think we’re going to need something like UTM or Docker (virtualization or containerization) for running our unsigned Android apps and services, and I don’t know how feasible it will be.

I literally named two different phone models, and I think dismissing that people are often bound to what handsets are available to them is … Well, honestly just cruel.

Most of us don’t have the cash to throw down for phones all the time and we need scalability to protect ALL of us, not just those of us cash flush.

My fingers are still crossed folks figure out some containerization or virtualization solution between now and the Goo-lag.

This isn’t a scalable solution. There aren’t enough affordable, used Pixels for everyone in the ecosystem to adopt between now and the Goo-lag.

Samsung s22 and s25, checking in. Graphene won’t be viable for the vast, overwhelming majority of Android users today or in the coming seasons.

I hope people figure out some kind of virtualization/docker-containerization solution to the coming Goo-lag.

Cooool. Anyone know how to deaden this behavior?

That’s going to be $0.80 for each of us

Yep, back to scoring the open web or being SEO’d into hellish sites that have six “DOWNLOAD” links, five of which are probable for syphilis.

If trying bulk mail – explore USPS “EDDM” services for canvassing local ZIP codes for sub-letter pricing.

Yeah, but I saw it this time. And thus, got to learn.

That’s the next step. They want to label Trans existence as basically pornographic and targeting the children.

I had no idea there was enforcement. I thought the popes just kept playing musical chairs with the offending priests to cover for the church.

Doubtful. Even one of me is pretty lazy. They’ll want someone more apt for their clone army.

Full-fat VPS and roll-your-own proxy solutions are wonderful! Can you recommend a vps service that gives you the global access and a workspace for you to build your tools for your toolkit?

Most I’ve priced were either more than $6usd /month or were very, very over-provisioned, but I’m interested in learning!

Something strange happened in the last decade, wherever one has 300 emotional support tabs and browsers had to create really elaborate tab groups and memory management for juggling stacks upon stacks of tabs.

I don’t think anyone actually uses bookmarks anymore, except you, me, about any 3000 misc nerds.

Can I ask what has you subscribing toVPN’s year round? I have three use cases for my subscription

1. Torrenting
2. Bypassing weird region locks like South Korea’s age verification requirements for Google searches and naughty things.
3. Throwing all of my internet traffic back to the same country as my employer with a reliable kill switch for any VPN drops and DNS leaking.

I end up subscribed to Mullvad for maybe 5 months a year. I still end up paying less than a NordVPN subscription, I feel good about supporting Mullvad’s mission (like the ongoing development of their own browser).

I also love that I can share my subscription with other users if I needed to, just by giving them current account ID number. In this way, it would be practical to give up to five people access while still protecting all of my devices since I throw the VPN on my travel router.

I will schill for a very short list of companies, all day long, and Mullvad would be on that list twice simply because they don’t trick me into an endless subscription of any sort while all the others get committed income out of me annually.

Exception when gargling orange.

I didn’t even know that they claim Chrome extensions will work, I simply use the Firefox extensions in Waterfox.

My browsing style is antiquated, my ADHD will only afford me about eight tabs per browser window and I usually have about four of those going at a time.

I aggressively kill tabs to save my own mental memory more than the machine’s memory.

It’s like $6.50USD /month, 2x the cost of mainstream vpn’s.

It’s valuable for me so I’m happy to pay and support them, but I’m mostly only need them while traveling.

For want of $100 /year Apple developer subscription , the libewolf team can’t sign binaries for Silicon M series Macs.

I spent an hour and a half trying to get librewolf to work, and just gave up for Waterfox instead.

On my laptop I run Firefox for some things, Watefox for others, and fall back to Chrome only as absolutely necessary when Gecko can’t get me there.

I’m sorry, first of all, for the egregious typos in my last remark. I won’t be fixing them or future typos, lol.

Second, vaccines work by every person in a network being a less-weak node with less attack surface than if the whole network is without. Every person that armors up is protecting the whole system, just a little bit, until the network is complete with less attack surface.

Privacy restrictions, antivirus, healthy infosec, follow similar principals as masks and shots in arms, and you have to start studying how the threats respond to shifting attack surface.

At the point the effort to execute on the securing behavior is lowered, adoption improves, but at the point it conflicts with competing values you have to start marketing to people to do the right thing. Selling them on collective interest and on self interest. It’s ironic.

How you do ANY of this, well, I can only speculate. I come from a backwards country where 1/3 of our population successfully installed a national health director that admits to not believing in germ theory, and I half expect civilian encryption to be outlawed in the next 18 months.

You’d better believe marketing execs and specialists in branding will divide and conquer market segments of apathetic typical people.

Addicts in recover programs can call the general population of non-addicts ‘normies’; people that have been marginalized for neurodivergent thinking often call the mainstream population of neurotypicals ‘normies’ etc.

Gatekeeping by commonly accepted language across diverse circles only serves for your own purity testing instead of focusing on the core issue of how to sell people on exercising their own basic self-interest.

Sounds like something normies would say. 🤣

Hard disagree.

You’re basically studying viral pathology and immunology at that point. Remember how restaurant little can be for making and for vaccinations in American culture?

On top of it taking the slightest effort … We basically have to settle the solutions and then invite or incentivize them into it, which is hard when you’re against disinformation networks with better fundling.

Not to say it’s hopeless. Just that the incentives in a highly individualized society captured under surveillance capitalism are misaligned.