At least the listings I have seen explicitly listed the origin country. Mine is Japanese, and it cost less than an American counterpart, for example.

Here they aren’t officially available yet there are still plenty of resellers - I guess you can find some in your area. I was really scared that the bootloader wouldn’t unlock due to the origin country’s carrier shenanigans, but it went through just fine (still checked every bit of info I could before buying).

I am still very salty about it. But I considered that using a dongle is a fair enough sacrifice for actually trusting your phone.

I am using ESDF because my “A” key stopped being as responsive, didn’t expect someone to do this on purpose!

Maybe the preferred Linux distro doesn’t work with them. I had to use another distro for a while because Debian didn’t immediately support the card, but there are apparently cases where the internal card just permanently wouldn’t work (like in fully free software distros). I would rather replace the card inside the laptop than use a dongle, but idk if this can always be the answer.

My first thought was hacking.

I guess it’s a) unfamiliarity, b) inconvenience for what they don’t see as much of an upside and c) crypto as a whole being frustratingly seen as a scam, largely because of projects like the one in the post.

Is Monero hard to buy there? Are you doing so on Haveno?

Yeah, there is a whole “separate OS”, but, to my knowledge, there hasn’t been evidence of it casually being able to collect arbitrary data from the actual phone’s OS.

My issue with that is that Pixels are expensive, and in some places are not sold officially (meaning they can only be bought from smaller resellers with usually much less generous return policies). The newest models are outright unaffordable new. The only ones below $150 are either secondhand or out of support, so that’s what poor people are left with? Plus, no headphone jack.

I use Graphene myself, but I dislike absolutism. I don’t in the slightest regret buying my Pixel even though $300 is a painful sum to spend on a phone (and it was on the cheaper end if we’re talking about up-to-date models!), but I know that my mother would never spend this much on a phone - so I look into Divest or Lineage on more common and affordable phones.

Why does an RSS feed need a “new type” tho? Normal RSS can be hosted by anyone and can be read on so many different readers…

On Tor or I2P

You managed to break multiple phones in less than two years? That’s impressive.

Also yeah, 1.5 years is imo too little time to judge whether something is durable.

I’d bet this is pirateable tho

Funny how involved I was on Twitter and especially Reddit prior to summer 2023, yet barely noticed when I deleted my accounts.

I am less interested in ranking them based on what they do (because we can assume they just vacuum up everything anyway), and more in a ranking based on how easy the surveillance is to remove. Apparently for some cars the telematics module can be easily unplugged at least, losing you some non-critical functionality, but on others it may be integrated tighter.

No. If I had money to spend on media, “affordable legal streaming services” would NOT stop me from pirating. Broad availability of DRMless media purchases would.

We have several major social media banned here, and they’re still popular. All a ban would do would be teaching people what VPNs are… As well as exposing a lot of them to malware, because most people would not be doing research and instead of legitimate, charity-run free censorship evasion tools, they’d be using shady apps from the top of Play Store search results.

If the ban comes from “up top”, people’s desire to use it will not suddenly disappear. If the people decide to leave en masse on their own - now that’d make an impact.

Yes, absolutely! But that wasn’t the point - rather that the spyware ones are popular for some reason, and thus can serve as a sad example of “low-hanging fruit to make an example of”.

(TBH I don’t get the need for a separate app in general, seems gimmicky, I just use a normal calendar)

The only solution to that is permanent airplane mode (on an OS you can trust to do so) and just not having the lhone on you most of the time.