Thank you for your comment. Your response had me thinking for a while, and yes I think you uncovered it: I had a theoretical idea without actually considering the practical outcome.

I do not have a 3-letter agency targeting me to my knowledge. I quickly realised that sending signals over VOIP is a bad idea, I won’t be doing that.

You are again correct: I run Debian as my daily driver, and it would be foolish to not consider my computer to have been compromised already. I have removed the built-in camera and microphone but I haven’t attempted to clean out Intel ME from my system.

All of this makes my question look pointless since there’s already so many attack vectors. In which case, I’d be interested in your opinion in physically cutting off attack vectors from an Android phone as an academic question.

Thank you for the wonderful comment.

I don’t think you said anything unusual. I’m going to try and get to this stage myself. It’s pretty normal for people interested in digital privacy

The issue is cost. Purchasing a pixel just to keep it lying around for one app is a bit too expensive. I’ll just use my of phone instead

I’m not putting it in a Faraday cage, just preventing it from listening and seeing anything. I’ll place it closer to my WAP if it needs it

It’s still the same problem no? If I can’t DeGoogle a phone then I don’t know what and how much data is being captured. Honestly I really liked the idea to just keep the desktop app running on a separate PC with headphones plugged in. I’m wondering if USB landline converters exist so I can have it ring when a call comes but then I can speak like when I’m wearing headphones.

Thank you for the suggestion though

Yes I realised that after I posted, sorry. Do you have any other ideas I could look at? I just want to keep my phone locked up and away from me when I’m in the house but still be able to talk to family over the chat apps they use (they are not very technically literate so Simplex is out of the question; it took a lot of convincing to get some of them in Signal)

Hmm, do you think there’s a way to have the ringing happen on the speakers but the conversation on the headphones? TBH if this is possible then I don’t need to use such complicated measures

What are you talking about mate? The VPS will be a wireguard server, your device will connect to it and use the VPS’ IP address to connect to your game

Just so you know; American tech is the exact same with different overlords, and Europe is actively banning encryption.

Where do you want to go?

I’d wrap it in a towel inside the box. Have you considered making a DIY Faraday cage? I’ve been thinking about it but my physics isn’t very good

Let’s see: TAILS, Fedora/Debian, Windows and OpenBSD?

Why not both

2FA won’t work as well for banking. Unfortunately, family is still on WhatsApp

Thank you. This was exactly the response I was looking for.

1. Is it possible to set a password for sudo on Android? I’ve never seen anyone talk about it.

2. Sucks that I can’t control sensors with root. Sensors are my biggest fear on all phones.

3. Ah yeah, ARM TrustZone. I had forgotten about that.

4. afaik the modem often relies on a linux based system

   Well, shit.

Are you able to run banking and chat apps?

None of them usable

This is setting Google up to eventually say “Aw shucks, might as well make it proprietary, we’re doing it in-house anyway”.

Edit: I can’t believe this comment got downvoted. I wish I could see who the Google SIMPs are in this community

Haveno reto

Ah, I missed that crucial part, apologies. I’m not very well versed with cellular standards: I would assume that Qualcomm is not very OpenSource friendly. Is there any other manufacturer they could use?

Can this be made into an android app to hook into android’s APIs for their modem? I think that would make it a lot more portable

Hardened Gentoo?

Find me a car produced in 2024 or later which does this

Scalpers made it expensive though

Yeah unfortunately ROCM is shit last I heard

Deepseek 1.5B doesn’t exist. I don’t know why the Deepseek team named the models on Huggingface like this, but what is labelled as “Deepseek 1.5B” is actually not the OG Deepseek 70B model distilled to 1.5B, it’s a different model either trained or finetuned by the Deepseek team. My theory is some sort of intentional manipulation on their part so people stay confused on whether they are actually running the Deepseek model or not. There is a lot of commentary on this online, sorry I don’t have the links from the top of my head.

Obligatory: you’re not running deepseek 1.5B. You’re running some other distilled model which was finetuned by the deepseek folks

Spend $500, buy a beefy used GPU and run Whisper + Mistral small. It’ll be a bit slow but now you can maintain your privacy on your own hardware! Best of both worlds.

It sucks that other ROMs are not as up to par in terms of security. That and the US doesn’t have any other options either. Europe has Xiaomi and Fairphone at least, if anybody wants variety

Good plan. I’m balking at having to pay 500 for a mobile device which I know won’t last me for more than 4 years at maximum (unless I spend more and buy iFixit repair kits which isn’t my forté). If the FairPhone was available in the US I’d consider it but I guess running Graphene is probably a better idea given the price you got the device at. Thanks

Is there a reason why you bought the 8A when the 9A just came out? I think they are both $499

Yeah it’s just the Pixels are becoming quite expensive. I liked it when the A series was under $400

I’m on an old Motorola with Lineage. I don’t want to pay $500 for a phone so I was thinking of getting the Nothing CMF and installing eOS

I largely agree. Qubes may not be as user friendly as others, but honestly I think it is the only OS which can get close to Android’s level of security (of course, by taking a hammer to most privilege escalation problems).

I have heard about Accrescent but I’ll wait till it gets more popular before I jump.

Google being broken up might mean the beginning of a demise of both Chromium and Firefox. So we better get on a new engine quick or things are about to get a lot worse.

Unfortunately, I have not found a better way to install the few playstore apps that I need without Aurora store. I guess using it in a different namespace (is that what Shelter does?) is an option.

Great note

Flashing Graphene on Pixel or eOS on supported Nothing devices is quite easy TBH. I might even do that

Using Apple to DeGoogle is a tough one to swallow

I’ve used them and had a lot of trouble getting their cards to be accepted by online merchants

That matters? Why does developer behavior influence your judgement over whether you will use certain pieces of software? Just curious