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Cake day: Jul 03, 2023

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I think a good compromise would be the car only reporting you if you cross the speed limit. But then, you’d have to take the manufacturer’s word for it.


This might be an unpopular opinion, but I think cars and heavy vehicles should report overspeeding and other reckless behaviour to the traffic police.



You have three options:-

  1. Use a tool like Universal Android Debloater to disable (but not completely remove) them.

  2. See if you can get Nokia or Motorola phones. These have mostly vanilla Android.

  3. Get a Xiaomi or OnePlus phone with a custom ROM pre-installed.



All you need is to exploit the phone and wait for them to open or use signal.

Physical access is root access. But just because you can’t make something NSA-proof dosen’t mean you can’t make it bloody difficult to break into.


  • Excellent UI (WhatsApp keeps copying them, but they’re still ahead)

  • Open-source client

  • Good support for bots (very useful for group mods)



the ability to load and save data to the local file system

That sounds like a huge security risk. I’m surprised any browser allows it.


  • Intellectual property rights are granted by the state, and can be revoked as per law.

  • User data is not IP.

  • The legal owner of data about an user is (usually) the user.


You don’t even need to go there. You can just claim to be a resident and most companies won’t actually bother to check. This is why when the EU passed GDPR, most companies just gave all users GDPR rights.


The way laws usually work is (gross oversimplification):-

Different state, same country - they have to follow this rule when dealing with customers from California.

Different country - they can break the law, but then California / US can sanction them (i.e. no US-based company can directly do business with them)

There are workarounds to both but 99% of companies will just comply, at least on paper.


It isn’t perfect, but I think there is a difference between a company that currently gives user data to advertisers and authoritarian governments, and one that hasn’t done any of that so far. There sure is a ‘trust me bro’ element, but they have had to relocate from Russia to Dubai because they refused to hand over opposition politicians’ chats. That’s a pretty big commitment to privacy.


Somewhere between WhatsApp and Signal. It has FOSS clients, hands over user data only under extraordinary circumstances (terrorism and child abuse, afaik), and runs on pretty much any hardware. The last two points make it very popular in eastern Europe and most of Asia. The main problem with Telegram is that normal chats are not end to end encrypted, and instead use a weaker encryption algorithm. Secure chats are e2e encrypted, but are not on by default.

Overall, it is used by opposition parties in countries like Russia, Belarus and Iran for day to day stuff, so it is fairly secure. Of course, if you are a reporter or activist who has a lot of enemies, you could get something even more secure.