No. At least not in the way most people expect.

It does block some tracking and ads that Chrome alone allows or explicitly adds. But it simply shifts that tracking to Brave. The idea was that you’d still get the benefits of that tracking by giving all of your data to Brave instead. I honestly never was convinced by this considering your data is still being sold, just by a different company so it doesn’t sound much better to me. Supposedly, according to them, Brave is more trustworthy and gives you more control over what they track and sell, but I don’t trust that business model. There’s no real incentive for them to do what they said they would.

Right, but not all have fixed that. I still see lots of cases where I have to turn off several options individually. Though these could be sites outside of the EU jurisdiction, so they just don’t care, or sites that make enough money off of the tracking data, that the fines would be insignificant even if the EU were to get around to fining them.

And again the comment stands that it’s not the law, but the implementations that are bad. The law requires it to be simple, but that’s not what was implemented.

Problem is not the law, but that the companies implemented it in as annoying of a way as possible to get people pissed off about the law and force it to be dropped, or for what actually happened which is that it’s too much work to not opt-in to the cookies which essentially makes it opt-out not in.

And the idea to remove the requirements for “simple statistics” or whatever terminology they use will just get abused by using other illicit tracking tech to link the cookies to uniquely identify a person anyway. So it will effectively make the popups unnecessary in any circumstances and still allow tracking for marketing and surveillance.

Depends on what exactly it’s tracking. Is it tracking downloads from the Play Store. Installs based on a tracker embedded in the app once installed, or logins through the app. You’ll likely have to ask the friend to check the terms of the sponsorship to determine that.

It’s become a pretty standard practice on Apple, Samsung, and Google devices as well as many other Android manufacturers to enable data sharing by default in the US. Especially the last few administrations want as much data as possible about the people, and in the US pretty much all of the companies share this kind of data pretty freely without requiring any judicial oversight since the supreme court has been corrupted. And the current administration HSS basically cut all investigation into any corporations that are friendly to them, so there’s no essentially no risk in collecting, leaking, or selling this data, so why bother making it opt-in. And recently, it’s explicitly risky to not collect and share as much data as possible with the government.

This is what I use. I mostly just have the DNS filter turned on to allow for blocking similar to what my pihole does at home, bit allows me to have it when I’m outside of the house, too. But it has lots of other capabilities like a firewall, proxying through Wiegaurd or Tor, anti-censorship features, etc. It does use your device’s VPN connection but it creates a local VPN just to force routing all apps through it and then if you want an additional external VPN you use the proxying, but that’s optional.

But the DNS-only option doesn’t drain the battery like a full filter/firewall may, so that’s one reason I only use it for that. And I use GrapheneOS, so apps are easier to control at the OS level than standard Android, do it’s not as necessary for me anyway.

Yeah, forgejo will give you many of the features of GitHub. Not the proprietary ones like the Actions Marketplace of course, but a lot of equivalent features. It’s lightweight enough though that even if you never use it for anything beyond git, creating pull requests, and some basic CI, it’s not going to require much power to run it.

Do you need the public to have access to it? That would be the only reason for federation that I could think of. That’s not available quite yet.

I self-host forgejo, it’s one of the easiest systems I self-host.

But which features other than a plain git repo are you looking for? That will mostly determine your options. There are tons of git repos, and even just a plain git repo on a server with an ssh tunnel is enough if you don’t need anything beyond that.

I’m just talking pure cost to manufacture for each. The cost of the hardware is higher: faster CPU, faster GPU, additional RAM, additional storage, higher end cameras, etc. That is where the cost of the phone comes from, so you can’t compare cost of a Fair Phone to this one any more than you can compare the cost of a Pixel 9 to the Pixel 9a. Both have basically the same software, warranty, parts availability, etc., but the 9a was about half the price of the 9 because the “a” series is a lower-end phone overall.

But the specs aren’t comparable. The Murena phone is a higher-end device than the Fairphone. And the Fairphone does get incentives/subsidies for the Android version which is one of a few reasons the Android version is cheaper than the version sold with /e/OS.

The cost of the device is not being subsidized by all of the bloatware installation income, selling of personal info, etc. I think a lot of people don’t realize that inflation really shot through the roof on the last decade and it’s only because products are subsidized by the sale of your data and other unethical practices that product prices didn’t go up. Food uses shrink-flation to hide inflation, tech uses selling your personal info.

Right. Instead say “here you can use this as you like, and if you improve on it, share that with everyone in the same way so we can all benefit from it.” Is why GPL is better.

I use forgejo on a raspberry pi.

But not good long term. A lithium ion battery being constantly drained and charged to 100% will keep the temperature high and wear it out more quickly and the more worn a lithium ion battery is, the more likely it will catch fire or explode.

The only thing you gain from VPN is that the target server does not know your IP.

Not necessarily true. A VPN also prevents the ISP from collecting data on all of your connections. Currently ISPs (in the US at least) collect and sell what sites you visit even if they can’t see the data due to HTTPS. Additionally, some have implemented, but then removed due to backlash but may implement again some day, MitM attacks on HTTPS connections in order to insert ads. Using a trusted DNS server that they don’t also intercept can help avoid this, though. With a VPN the ISP won’t see any of this, only the connection to the VPN server and have no way to insert themselves as long as they don’t intercept the VPN connection itself before it’s established.

It’s not that kind of breaking change. It’s a change that won’t affect most people. Only those who chose to use a custom location for their media location and chose to set that to a relative path instead of an absolute one which caused the application to have trouble resolving the paths. The change eliminates a bug by preventing people from doing something that was not intended to be supported. So it’s not a “breaking” change necessarily in the sense that they are changing documented functionality. They are eliminating a way that people can misconfigure the application which may in some cases cause the application to break if someone successfully configured the application in this unintended way.

Problem is that Apple has always been even more about lock-in and user tracking than Google, though Google has been catching up on that front quite a bit. But at least Android has some open source components to allow knowing what’s tracking you. Problem is the manufacturers then add another layer of tracking and lock-in if you use phones from manufacturers like Samsung. So you may or may not be reducing the number of companies tracking you by moving from Samsung to Apple, but you’re increasing the amount of data that can be captured and linked to you and preventing yourself from using privacy apps that might be able to block some of that since iOS has much more strict control over what the user can do with their device at the OS level and forces developers to use their tracking systems in a lot of cases for things like error handling. So overall, moving to Apple is increasing your exposure to tracking, even if reducing the number of companies who have the info for free, of course they all sell all that info, so that’s not really an advantage.

A year ago I would have suggested getting a Pixel phone and installing GrapheneOS, but it looks like Google is moving to kill off alternative OSes on Pixels, so not sure what’s the best bet at this point.

But Apple has always been of the mindset of controlling user experience and security over configurability and privacy which many prefer since they want it to “just work”.

Remember, security, privacy, and usability always have to be balanced. For example, if you want a chat app that is both secure and private, then the app servers have no information to make things more usable, like how do you share your hardware address for communication to go to if there are no user IDs for privacy. You have to do that outside the app, thus less usable. So if you see an app that is very secure and usable, it likely is not very private. Signal is a good example on the chat application side since it uses a phone number which is then linked to lots of personal info, but it has very secure messages and is very easy to find your friends on it (usable).

Apple generally prioritizes user usability and user security with the detriment of user privacy and developer usability and privacy.

Yeah iOS is weird about background processes and some versions are bad about killing parts of apps but not informing the app it was killed when restoring the state of the main process. One reason I personally don’t develop my stuff for iOS. It requires a lot of extra code to deal with the disparate ways in various versions that coming back from being in the background requires. Since just restarting everything can be frustrating to users.

It’s a full release, not a point/patch release, the title just doesn’t show the second .0. They use semantic versioning so it’s major.minor.patch.

It’s also a very minor change and only affects a single configuration property and only people who used relative paths in that property.

I had a lot of trouble with keeping the connections stable and having to reatart services with both KDEConnect and Warpinator, but LocalSend has been perfect every time. I’m using a Fedora laptop with a Pixel 7 Pro running GrapheneOS.