Searxng uses bangs but you have to double them up (i.e. !!aur btop or !!ddg search).

Sorry to hear that. I’ll admit I don’t buy ebooks. Yoho yoho and all that. And yeah, I also never turn on wifi. Have you tried a hard reset?

Kobo is the answer. It used to require some finicking to get it so you didn’t have to sign up with Walmart, but now that’s supposedly no longer an issue (I’ve had my Kobo for a long time). Install Calibre and the Kobo extension for Calibre. You now can borrow epubs from your local library, purchase them from your favorite online ebook store, or sail the high seas if you don’t give a fuck.

You can still use lite and then use bangs. !ddgi myimagesearch will immediately redirect you to ddg images. Duckduckgo has a plethora of useful quick search shortcuts called Bangs. Even if you don’t use lite, bangs are worth looking into imho.

I trust a search engine if I can turn JS off and still get results.

I just use Duckduckgo Lite with Ublock Origin, NoScript, LocalCDN, Libredirect, and Chameleon extensions on hardened Firefox fork.

A self hosted Searxng would also be a good option though.

You can still use yt-dlp with most of the invidious instances that are still up, but not displaying the video for some reason. Just copy the URL and use it with yt-dlp from the command line. All still works, sponsor block and all.

On my android phone I use either invidious with seal(yt-dlp wrapper app) or tubular (fork of newpipe with sponsor block).

Bring back your Advocacy division. Lower the pay for your CEO. Secure funding from other entities so that you are no longer dependent on Google. Focus more on implementing better security measures on Linux and Android, specifically within the domain of sandboxing your open processes. Keep about:config and manifest v2 options available.

Great work. They haven’t commented on this matter for some time now and its good to see an updated comment on this issue.

I use Graphene OS, but do use Mull. I also use Vanadium and base Chromium. Each for different uses. Mull for general browsing (I have many extensions, but I feel a bit more secure by running NoScript).

Vanadium is for when I need more functionality, and raw Chromium for inspecting responsive design of my own sites.

The GrapheneOS community is a great asset to the Android ecosystem, and their mentality has always seemed to be security above all else (even above privacy), which is a voice that is needed in any organization.

Again, thanks for doing this investigation.

Nice writeup. One note: I don’t think the Fossify projects are abandoned. The creator has commits on the project as recent as 21 hours ago at the time of this writing. They just haven’t pushed updates to FDroid for a couple months.

Ever since bypass paywalls started getting hit and miss, I’ve been pasting this into my Ublock Origin Filter list. Works well from what I’ve seen.

Yep. I’ve tried other clients, but somehow this one just stuck for me. Simple interface, works well.

Agreed. Although The Fediverse also can’t easily be searched via your standard search engines, so finding that public information is harder than on other social media apps (for now…).

This isn’t to say there isn’t a privacy concern using any Fediverse Social media platform. It’s just that there are some inherent design implementations that make it hard for the average person to invade the privacy of a user of the platform.

This is, of course, afaik. Please let me know if I’m mistaken.

Lol. I mean maybe not if you planted and protected a fuck ton of trees in the rainforest, or cleaned out a shit load of plastic from the ocean, but yeah…

I can respect that. I’ll admit my finding new creators has slowed considerably since I stopped using Youtube directly. Now I just use word of mouth from podcasts and YT creators I already follow. For me, as of right now, that’s fine.

But if I had just joined the platform, I’ll admit there’s just no way I’d discover as much, and would probably just use the platform directly.

You can request a csv file of your subscriptioms from Google which you can import into Libretube and then cut ties with Youtube entirely, at least on mobile. There are other methods on desktop.

Futo supports the following languages:

English, Chinese, German, Spanish, Russian, French, Portuguese, Korean, Japanese, Turkish, Polish, Italian, Swedish, Dutch, Catalan, Finnish, and Indonesian.

I love Openboard as it has the closest layouts to Gboards (looks almost exactly the same imo). But I’ll admit that it’s prediction, while usually fine, can be very janky when trying to just edit a block of text. It will often delete the last space, undo the recent character edit, or jump to a different part of the text block when typing out the new edit.

All that said, the GrapheneOS default keyboard is just too basic imho, and while FlorisBoard is nice, it had worse prediction from what I observed.

The best is Gboards, and as another poster pointed out, you can just turn off Network access foe it to prevent telemetry. I just would prefer to use a competitor.

The settings do have a slower option that according to Rossman is more accurate. I have not played with it cuz I personally have no issues with the accuracy at the default speed.

Interesting. I was under the impression that Google’s SST required Network access.

Yes. Agreed and Edited.

Agreed and done.

The Chameleon extension could solve some of the fingerprinting issues as it can randomize the browser and OS info that is sent.

i wasn’t aware. Could you link the specific post? It’s not up on the feed from that community in jerboa…

EDIT: Found it. okay, yes, FUTO does have some telemetry issues. Glad I posted this as it needs this kind of scrutiny thank you!

On the flip side, I now have another Lemmy community I joined and the Exodus App that catches these sorts of trackers is pretty cool. I already had revoked FUTO’s network permissions on GrapheneOS, so hopefully that mitigates the telemetry problem.

DDG HTML is quite similar to Lite, IIRC Lite does have some JS involved as opposed to HTML version, but I could be wrong.

DDG is Microsoft Bing under the hood, so yeah, not ideal. DDG also made some controversial changes when the Russia/Ukraine war started, but at least for me, I just didn’t see any lesser evils in the room that could still get me the results I needed.

I’ve tried Brave Search and it’s impressive what they’ve done, but their monetization model via Crypto is unlikely to pan out and I don’t see them lasting long unless they can find a way to monetize without crypto and ad revenue.

As far as searx is concerned, it just pulls in a bunch of other search engine results and I’m not sure if it just ends up supporting those engines at the end of the day. If anyone else knows more about whether these search platforms are still able to monetize off of searx results, please chime in.

I haven’t heard of librex, but will take a look. Thanks for the lead!

It does. I just prefer it to regular ddg.

I’m fine with DuckDuckGoLite. If I really wanted to have granular control though, I’d spin up my own private searx instance.

Yeah. I thought it was weird, but the stock Pixel is very secure, and if you install Graphene OS, it is even more so. Additionally, Graphene OS sandboxes The Playstore Apps, and gives you much more control over what the Apps you install are allowed access to. You have to go way out of your way to make it less private than the stock OS, and you pretty much can’t make it less secure than the stock OS.

You can get almost anything that works on the stock Pixel working on Graphene OS except for Google Wallet and the Android drive app. Banking Apps work, Google Apps work (but you might as well try to use alternatives).

I had an iphone for years, but after using Graphene OS for the past 3 months, I can honestly say I’ll do everything I can to not go back.

And on Android, Clipious works with Invidious. Not as nice as Libretube, but at least it will circumvent this bs should the need be.

You also can yt-dlp with invidious, sponsorblock, and “subscribe” using rss feeds. Once downloaded, you can then load it on your phone via usb if you want to go through the trouble…

That she does. Some of the finest content on youtube I’ve ever come across…and I watch a lot.

I have GrapheneOS and recently tested Magic Earth and Organic Maps, in my rural area around town. For me, MagicEarth audio worked fine, but Organic Maps was mute…

Magic Earth found specific street addresses better than Organic Maps/OSM, but couldn’t list street names, just like OSM.

AFAIK, this is because Graphene prevents the downloading of the Google voice modules that have access to local street names. I could be wrong on this.

TLDR; You can’t. GrapheneOS prevents it because Google owns the voice modules including the specific street names and most privacy invading maps software tracks your location in order to vocalize the basic naviation and street names.