K-9 mail is literally Thunderbird. It’s been rebranded and taken over by Mozilla. They’re keeping the k-9 branding as its own (otherwise identical) app as a nostalgia token for the people that have used it for a long time.

Firefox automatically updates to install new privacy-abusing features like this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40974112. So getting all the settings right once isn’t enough—you need to be constantly vigilant.

Like you said, a fork is a much better option, since they take care of stripping out the user-hostile nonsense for you. I like Librewolf.

I’m switching to Librewolf. I don’t want ads in my browser.

I’m not sure of the specific case numbers but searching brings up many sources, e.g. https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/fbi-taps-cell-phone-mic-as-eavesdropping-tool/ (2006)

Matrix and XMPP don’t hide metadata (who you’re talking to, when, and how often). This is OK if your users are all on the same private server that you self-host/trust. But in practice most users will be on the Matrix equivalent of Gmail, and you’ll be sending this metadata to the largest server in plaintext for every conversation involving one of those users.

I also have trouble where iOS “instant” notifications in SimpleX aren’t delivered–hopefully this gets fixed.

Even if your phone is OFF, it can still track you from the towers and transmit your audio (this is documented in court cases bringing down the mob). It’s built into the chips themselves, at a lower level than the operating system. Do not bring your phones to protests.

If you’re adding another repo, it’s not vetted by fdroid.

The point of this is that it’s a redirect. The link isn’t taking you to xyz.com, it’s going to abc.com which redirects to xyz.com. The abc.com server redirects to the second link – there’s no way to know where it’ll take you unless you follow it.

It could only know that by navigating to the link in the background. That would have side effects, like them being able to track you even when you don’t click on links.

I’ve used uBlock Origin for years and never knew about this. Just enabled it. Thanks!

Car companies are directly sending this data to the brokers in exchange for “low millions of dollars.” Imagine destroying all consumer trust in a multi-billion dollar brand for so little. I would never even consider buying a GM or any brand involved in this.

Crazy how American gov claims the EU is unfairly targeting American companies… if the American gov did its job to break up these monopolies, the EU wouldn’t need to in the first place!

Codeberg only allows open source licensed code. If you’re working on non-free software you could self host Codeberg’s underlying software, or SourceHut is a different but other good option too.

Mac even had special rules so firewalls (including Little Snitch) couldn’t block access to Apple’s own data collection servers.