this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
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Privacy
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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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I disagree. Firefox is fine, but saying chromium is spyware because its primarily maintained by google is like saying android is spyware.
Additionally chromium browsers are arguably more secure than Firefox, and has more advanced sand boxing. So much so that graphine OS used chromium instead of Firefox for their vanadium browser.
Only thing I agree with is not using brave.. Cause well.. They fishy.
android is spyware
Those who don't know about it go and read GNU replicantOS blog and wikipedia page
Android is not a single OS (?)
It is. Custom roms modify very little of the code and they are all based on aosp(it is open source but google controlls the changes). The whole point of aosp is to create the illusion of choice but if you really want to avoid using google spyware you have to give up on most apps or go to extreme lenghts to use an alternative. The grapheneos project is really cool and usefull but it only patches the inherent (intended)problems of android and doesnt provide a real solution.
I'm unsure you have any idea what you're talking about.
And I'm sure you only use twofish because the NSA backdoored AES when they standardized it.
what does it have to do with Google's business model being mass-surveillance, and/or them being caught several times collaborating with the NSA, the US army, etc.?
I agree that the NSA backdooring stuff is a problem too... (or even a different facet of the same problem...) Yet, one doesn't invalidate the other...
I'm just saying that collaboration with or association with spooks or glowies isn't in itself a red flag.
Many privacy and freedom granting software is made by these people.
Take Tor for example, made by the navy to hide information from the public and anonymously attack networks of adversaries.. Yet now is the NSA's biggest obstacle in mass surveillance.
I beg to disagree: the global interception capacities of the NSA in 2012 (as showed in the very few 2013 documents from Ed. Snowden that were made public) clearly were enough to routinely de-anonymize tor. By owning a certain percentage of the global internet traffic, you de facto own tor (can very precisely correlate what comes in and what goes out, and do that retrospectively when needed).
and that was 10+ years aog....
Association with spooks is a red flag, for the multiple, endless ways they have been doing their shitfuckery, endangering the general public, the exceptional US citizens, and information/communication security at large... by weakening standards, by corrupting corporations to introduce (or leave open) some bugs, by infiltrating development teams, by pressuring operators to grant full access, by breaking and entering, etc..
Anyone who doesnt see that as a problem has to be considered as part of it. Simple, basic rule.
...no? AOSP is very well free of Google code, and if Android is spyware, then Linux might as well be spyware, going by this logic. And even with GMS installed phones, it is very easy to disable and neuter GMS with a computer and 15 minutes of time. At best, Android has Google DNS as default unless you set a different one in Private DNS or with your firewall, which is also true for systemd's network checks in Linux distros.
Western corporations working on collaborative FOSS products cannot be treated in the same way as closed source products. Any analysis of type of malware capabilities must be based on technical merit analysis, and not feelings, even if Western Big Tech does disgusting things.
I truly appreciate the perspective of this post. I would like to switch fully to Firefox and support the cause. Unfortunately I have a PWA addiction and that is the only thing keeping me living my shameful hybrid browser life.
Is it a weak reason? Probably. But it's an honest one. If Mozilla hopped on PWAs, I'd be totally fine bouncing from Brave and joining the Chromium rebellion.
But they’re the only ones blocking ads on YouTube for iOS 😞
You can add something like AltStore to an unjailbroken iPhone and sideload a YouTube app with adblock built in.
The only reason I still use it. I like Orion but it’s not quite there yet. Not really sure what other iOS alternatives there are to chose from.
YouTube ads are served on the same server as the video.. So they would have to filter it through one of their servers and block the elements and stream it to you.
So if you're using them for privacy.. you better trust them a lot because they would have equivalent info as google.