I am a long term GrapheneOS user and would like to talk about it. r/privacy on the redditland blocks custom OS discussions which I think is very bad for user privacy, and I hope this post will be useful to anyone who are in the hunt for better privacy.

Nowadays smartphones are a much bigger threats to our privacy and Desktop systems, and unfortunately manufacturers has designed them to be locked down devices with no user freedom. You can't just "install Linux" on most smartphones and it is horrible. And most preloaded systems spy on us like crazy. That was why I specifically bought a pixel and loaded GOS onto it.

According to https://grapheneos.org/features , they start from base AOSP's latest version, imptoves upon it's security and significantly hardens it. There's hardened_malloc to.prevent against exploitation, disabling lots of debugging features, disabling USB-c data, hardening the Linux kernel and system apps etc. They even block accessing the hardware identifiers of the phone so that apps cannot detect whqt phone you're using. That means with Tor and zero permissions given, apps are anonymous.

Compatibility with apps are best in Custom ROMs but there are still that can't work, especially if they enforce device integrity. Very few apps usually enforce that tho. Also their community isn't the friendliest but you can get help. Just don't try and engage too much or have too many debates.

Anyone else here use GrapheneOS, or any other privacy ROMs? What is your experience? Do you disagree on any point? Let's have a discussion!

I've heard multiple issues with 5G, like range and stuff, effectively sacrificing range and reliability for even more speed just so that companies can market it better. Do you think 5G is a downgrade compared to 4G?

Obviously I can understand why mysoginists are hated upon, As their belief is all women are trash or men are superior etc. But why are incels also generally hated upon? They are lacking in a way that makes them unable to gey in a relationship, but that shouldn't necessarily mean they are mysoginists, right?

What am I missing here? I haven't ever had a relationship with a woman, but I don't hate all women either. I just consider myself unlucky. Does that make me an incel?

Hi, I've recently put some posts asking what laptop should I buy. I got some quality advice, so thanks for that guys. I've finally bought (well, paid, it's not reached yet) the acer Nitro 5.

https://www.amazon.in/Acer-i7-12650H-Graphics-AN515-58-Keyboard/dp/B0C5R13NGB

I know the battery is shit, planning to check the thunderbolt port to use an external power bank. But other than that the specs seem awesome, the reviews also say the same. There's just no other deal that gives a display like this with the specs. I hope the build quality is good, I've bought an external extended warranty, so the risk is minimised (I hope).

What do you guys think? This is my first gaming laptop. Is there anything I should do first on receiving? Any ideas how to extend the provided battery's life? Is Win10/11 better for this hardware? Can I use it for like the next 4 years?

I found an acer nitro 5 with 1440p display and an RTX 3070ti for a crazy price around ~1000$. It sounds too good to be true and I suspect aggressive corner cutting. Is it an actual crazy good deal? Should I buy it? Should I leave it and keep looking for ASUS deals?

Laptop in question: https://www.amazon.in/dp/B0C5R13NGB/?psc=1

I use wire (wire. com) for daily chatting. I like it but I couldn't find any good communities in wire. In session, or simpleX, there are privacy (and other) groups in which anyone can participate.. Can we start a privacy group in wire so we folks can also hang around?

I've been using skiff. com for sometime, as they claim to be a fully privacy preserving app suite like GApps or proton. One thing I like is they provide 10GB storage even for free accounts, where proton eventhough much bigger provides only 500MB.

But that got me wondering... Are they trustworthy as proton? Is there a chanve they end up being a honeypot? Does data actually gets encrypted before sending to the servers in a trustworthy way?

Basically title. Looks like wire is now heavily being targeted towards corporates. In a corporate environment you don't need too much privacy, so I was wondering...

Is wire messenger private in 2023?

Where does it stands in the current stack among WhatsApp, signal, simplex etc..?

Exactly how much data is being collected?

We are starting to see for quite some time big tech trying to get the internet under their control. We have seen half of the internet starting to block proxies. Tor is not usable in the normal internet anymore. More and more services require a government issued id for their account.

And now Google went ahead and did the final blow by announcing WEI. If that gets integrated on all popular sites, there will be no more open web. We try to fight back as much as we can, but the bitter truth is most people are already 'good little pets' of these giants.

Most of the people, are not just okay, but want these big brothers to handle everything for them. They want to get their finances, entertainment, social medias, government services all done for them by these giants without them even knowing. They are ready to live as big brother says. Half of them already don't have individual opinions.

Although the fight still continues, It's time to think about plan B. What if most of internet is blocked for us privacy conscious people? We need alternatives. It's time to build an ecosystem that we people can use without the help of popular services. There are already a lot of softwares, but we need to fill the gaps fast. We need an open hardware, accessible and a fully open software stack including everyday apps for most of our needs and entertainments. On PC it's almost there. Mobile terribly lacks in the lowest levels, but have some apps that can help.

PC

For PC, we can still install linux on most devices, so linux. For browsing, we can use firefox or any forks of that. Proton and skiff are good alternatives for basic email, storage etc. For social media we have federated systems like lemmy, services like odysee, mewe etc. Share services that you think should be in this list

Mobile

For mobile, we miss variety in hardware section. One option might be pinephone or other linux phones. Other option might ironically be Pixel. For OS, we can use graph eneOS, cal yx OS, linux based OS etc. But setting it up is currently very hard. For browsing, firefox for android is good (I use it) which also has extensions support. Above mentioned services like proton, skiff, lemmy, odysee, mewe etc. has android apps. For IM we have briar, Session, simpleX etc. Share services that you think should be in this list

Help me document a full recommended ecosystem. Maybe we can have a recommended guide. Maybe there are better options. Discuss.

Watched Oppenheimer today. It's a fantastic film. Christopher Nolan is a fucking genius. The way the movie is structured, the quality of scenes, the general feel, everything is so refreshing. It was a revelation when most of the movies releasing are woke shit.

But still barbie gets more popular than Oppenheimer? What? I watched trailers and reviews of barbie and from what I know, it's a woke shit that tells matriarchy is better than patriarchy, with a bit of comedy admittedly. I mean yes they can have their freedom of speech, but how does a film like that shadows a fucking artwork like Oppenheimer? What am I missing?