It’s too late either way. The fact that it even got this far through implementation says the vendor is not on my side. Not only that once capability is revealed it can be required by governments and manipulated under warrant. Particularly in some regimes, mine included, the vendor can be compelled to do something and not say anything. My comment doesn’t even cover how monumentally flawed the entire thing is either.
So I’ve been on the verge of doing this for years so this was the final push and motivation.
Yesterday I sold my iPad and Apple Watch. They are being shipped today. I’m just waiting on refunds on my AppleCare for my MacBook and iPhone now and I will sell them.
Yesterday I had a Nokia 215 arrive as a replacement phone. Also a monster pile of PC bits arrived which have been assembled into a Ubuntu running desktop. I am spending today migrating my data over carefully. When the MacBook sells I will buy a Nikon DSLR.
At the end of this I lose perhaps 20% convenience for an immeasurable privacy gain, lose a big chunk of the distractions from my life and end up with some cash left over which I will use to go on holiday.
The only thing I will miss is Apple Music but it’ll give me a chance to curate my music collection without distraction again.
How does Nokia 215 solve the problem? All messages, including any images, wi now go through the carrier's network (and the recipient's carrier) and be subject to intercept, analysis, and sale by those two entities.
I'm not sure how is that better?
Wouldn't AOSP/Lineage with Signal installed be better?
I don't know if the 215 supports tethering, but there are feature phones that do paired with a laptop or even something like a steam deck (running linux) is the way to go if you really need mobile internet
you get privacy and freedom from the smartphone-service-based-everything-forever lifesytle, it's nice
Carriers, at least in the Czech Republic, are very restricted in what they can do. Regular phone calls and SMS messages are much more private than anything else out there.
Before buying the DSLR, I'd recommend at least checking out the 1" sensor size market. These cameras still take excellent quality photos in a wide range of lighting conditions but are so much more compact than having an interchangeable lens system.
I sold my DSLR a couple of years after getting my G9x Mark II. The DSLR was always gathering dust compared to the G9x which with a small belt case could easily be taken anywhere.
That said these cameras are definitely not as flexible as a full SLR nor will you get the same performance. Its a large sensor when compared to a camera or other point and shoots but its still nothing compared to APS-C.
There are plenty of Micro 4/3 sensors that have interchangeable lenses too though, so you don't have to be locked into a compact camera with built-in lenses. You can have the best of both worlds.
I've heard good things about Panasonic's LUMIX G7, and it looks to be at a very reasonable price point. I personally use a Fuji X-T3 which is also more reasonably priced than full-frame, between that and Micro 4/3 price-wise. The main differentiators for a smaller sensor are low-light performance & dynamic range, but 99% of the time these won't matter. Megapixels shouldn't really even be considered - any of these cameras can take a photo to put on a billboard, DPI scales in relation to optimal viewing distance
Agreed, those are also an excellent middle ground from a full-sized DSLR to a compact shooter but still give most of the performance and about all the flexibility of a DSLR.
Even Apple Music has gone to shit. iTunes keeps managing to get worse and worse, and they're pushing hard to pretend you don't have your own collection to get you to buy into the subscription model.
At this point I'm going back to owning a seaparate dedicated music device that is totally divorced from the computer. There's just something intentional about walking over to a CD player or record player, picking out an album, and putting it on compared to mindlessly browing Spotify playlists.
I recently started looking into buying my music again since 90% of my Apple Music listen time goes to the same generic piano playlist. I figure I could have bought the playlist 10 times over by now...
My question is where do you buy music these days? I would like it digitally but I would like to own it (no DRM stuff). Any suggestions on a good store to buy music online? Last time I bought music I did it on itunes...
No sure if the parent (grandparent?) would find this helpful: but here’s the setup I use that provides a cool amount of options.
I use a Yamaha receiver (R-N803) that has their MusicCast software on it. And I use these various inputs:
- CD
- Phono
- USB. A little teensy usb loaded with music I’ve collected for the last 25 years - however, I’ve cleaned it up so it’s not filled with random things that makes my wife go “what is all this stuff! I just want to see MY music!”
- I have a Navidrome server running on a pi, with a hardrive connected to it. It basically contains the USB + all the other random stuff. This is played via the bluetooth input and Play:Sub app on my phone.
- Likewise I play the bandcamp app via Bluetooth through the receiver, and spotify as well (I mostly use spotify for listening to the back catalogs of established artists).
- Net Radio. Access thousands of radio stations, worldwide, that stream their service. It’s pretty cool!
There’s more. But, point is the setup is cool and diverse and it’s pretty easy to use.
Great to hear someone else is doing the same. For me the biggest issue is I have young kids and the convienence of quick photo taking is good on a smartphone. Might look into pinephone or something similar.
Pinephone is my hope, too, but do not expect anything stable soon. That will take some time, probably years. It does not happen on its own, though, they need support now to make it a real alternative and not just a tinker toy.
There's like three major options if you want to run a FOSS smartphone, and I'll sum them up.
Pinephone: Cheap. The device isn't very powerful. With people coming from an Apple device, that's a problem.
Fairphone 3: Fair. The hardware isn't very powerful either, and the device is more expensive, but the product is better for the people who assembled it and the environment.
Librem 5: Open. Even more expensive than Fairphone, but the hardware features killswitches, and there's no binary blobs. Lacks the fair advantages Fairphone has.
Each of these can run a myriad of FOSS OSes from a deGoogled Android (ASOP-based fork) such as /e/ or Ubuntu or Debian/Arch/Ubuntu mobile versions or SFOS (Sailfish) community version (without Android emulation layer!), and each hardware and software has their pros/cons. I use a Fairphone 3 with stock firmware with a Pinephone as back-up phone (and have to use a Samsung flagship device for work). Previously I used a Fairphone 2 with LineageOS + microG (kind of like predecessor of /e/ before that took off).
PS: On the gaming side, I'm getting a Steam Deck. Its a bang for the buck compared to Aya Neo/Nintendo Switch/gaming smartphones). No, it isn't open hardware, but the device runs Linux and you get root on it, plus all the reviews (including Linus Tech Tips) are positive.
It is nice the the fairphone trys to be nice and fair, but I would rather have a focus of a actual open phone under my control and they do not deliver this (not to blame them, the issue is hard). Fixing the global exploitive economy is a different issue and trying to solve everything at once is not working usually.
"Librem 5"
How useful is a microphone killswitch, if there is no killswitch for the speakers, that can be used as a microphone, too?
And it would be news to me, that it is now completely free of binary blobs and their claims always felt a little bit dishonest to me. I recently read a interview by the former CTO that confirms it
I would go with the Pinephone. For now I have a stupid samsung phone with facebook app preinstalled and unremovable, but have not yet found the time to try lineage with it.
> if there is no killswitch for the speakers, that can be used as a microphone, too?
I know that physically / electronically, a speaker is a microphone, but is there any way for someone to actually record sound through the speakers on the librem? There is a lot more to a microphone than just the diaphragm...
Not easy probably, but likely doable, when someone think it is worth the effort. When the goal is security, because you feel (rightfully or not) targeted by state level intelligence, false sense of security can be dangerous:
It was just a random link. There are plenty of other articles in that area I read about, because I do care about privacy. I do not have them at hand - but the point stands - it is possible. So if there are speakers connected - I assume someone could listen.
Maybe not at all likely (in my case) but when we talk about real security and for some people this is indeed a question of live and death, then I don't want to promote half solutions.
edit: to clarify.
, yes a microphone killswitch is probabyl useful in the way that it eliminates most common attack vectors to silently listening to people, but it is potential harmful if people would rely on it for 100% - but do get listened to and send to gulag because the local KGB did in fact took the effort to implement such spyware
Pinephone is a certainly a good bang for the buck, but the hardware is nothing special, and the killswitches are DIP (better than nothing, like Fairphone's current iterations). If you want a cheap solution, this one's the one to opt for. Especially a good option for people who live in (relatively) poorer countries/regions than US or North/West-Europe.
A lot of people in our world simply cannot afford a Fairphone. I can, and I applaud the project, so I went for it. I also applaud the other projects, and remember that perfect is the enemy of good. That a Librem 5 isn't going to be perfect in terms of security, is OK. Its their first iteration (and they had various iterations of it, which lead to considerable delays).
There's also some keyboard smartphones such as Planet Cosmo Communicator and Planet Astro Slide. And some other ones as well such as F(x)tec (which is a good successor to Nokia N900). These are also niche, specific, with their hardware keyboard (which include custom layout such as Dvorak). But they can run alternative OSes, by default. I believe that, for me, this (hardware keyboard smartphone) is going to be the ultimate usability dream, if the keys are large enough. I previously owned a Nokia E71 and Nokia N900, before touch typing became the status quo.
> [...] I recently read a interview by the former CTO that confirms it [...]
I also backed Astro Slide (and own a Cosmo Communicator), and am disappointed with their hardware downgrade from Dimensity 1000 to 800. I hate it when promises are not kept. But it happens. As mentioned I owned a Nokia N900 previously, but I wasn't fond of the keyboard, so I hope Astro Slide's going to be better. And, given its like the Cosmo Communicator (which I am used to), I am confident it will be. The big disadvantage of Planet devices is their slow updates, and being reliant on Mediatek (MTK) which means EOL soon.
With regards to hardware keyboard I read Pinephone is planning such as well, which is great news because its otherwise such an affordable smartphone. Pine64 sells a lot of other cool FOSS stuff such as Pinecil and Pine Camera.
Note that the FSF takes the position that binary blobs that are in non-writable memory and executed by secondary processors are part of the hardware and thus not relevant for judging the openness under RYF criteria. Which is how the Librem5 achieves that status, by deliberately picking components that do not use firmware upload from the host CPU but rather ship with the firmware in non-writable memory, and by adding read-only memory that is only used in the pre-boot environment. The OS is blob-free because the thing is engineered to make the blobs inaccessible to the OS. Which is a valid choice, since entirely blob-free would be impossible to make and ship, but I also see why people disagree that "blob-free" is a good description for the device.
>phone with facebook app preinstalled and unremovable
I've never used a phone like this, but are you also forced to provide FB credentials during initial setup? If not, then is the FB app just being installed a privacy threat if it is never used? Is it still accessing information on the phone without being tied directly to you?
I have had a phone that had a Facebook application preinstalled, and prevented removal of said application. Setting up the phone did not require FB credentials.
I would be worried that even without logging into Facebook or giving it my credentials, my FB-ized phone would help FB's efforts in creating and maintaining shadow profiles. As far as I'm concerned, since the FB app is tied into the OS so tightly that it cannot be removed, it poisons the phone and makes it an adversarial surveillance device.
This type of poison, of course, is not limited to Facebook.
Deactivating the app is usually possible and is equivalent to uninstalling it on Android. It still takes some room in the system partition but you cannot use it anyway. Unless you root your phone, in which case you can also remove the app entirely.
These preinstalled apps are still crap though, I'd rather have a smaller system partition and a bigger user data partition, should I own such a phone.
This phone was paid for and controlled by the company for whom I worked at the time, so I didn't want to cross the IT overlords and their policies by rooting the phone.
Good to know about deactivating apps on Android, though; thank you! I do not remember if I had that option.
" Is it still accessing information on the phone without being tied directly to you? "
I don't know. I do not have FB. But the fact, that I still have to have the app no matter what I want, illustrates my point, that I really do not own or controll this phone. But it works reliable, was affordable - AND I can remove the batterie.
And I do it regulary, because then I can be sure, it is really turned off.
Otherwise I kind of assume everything I do with it or around it, is potentially recorded.
So yes, I really, really want a phone that I can trust, even if it is turned on.
I can assure you I'm not asking as an advocate for accepting FB to be pre-installed. I'm asking to know truly how vile it really is. At this point, I assume FB knows enough about everyone to be able to ID them without confirmation via logged in FB app.
A slight correction about Sailfish OS - the official/commercial Android emulation layer is only available for officially supported Sony Xperia devices, as can be seen in the table on Jolla Shop:
I do have Xperia X & Xperia 10 II and can confirm Android emulation layern works very well.
You can run Sailfish OS on many other devices thanks to community porting work, but without support for the Jolla provide Android emulation layer. The devices will still run all the many native Sailfish OS apps + ARM compiled flatpaks just fine & the is community work in getting Anbox to run to provide Android emulation on the community ports as well. :)
If one is okay with less-open hardware, the F(x)tec Pro 1 X seems to be a good higher-end smartphone that has a decent camera sensor, slide-out keyboard, AMOLED display, and can be ordered with either Ubuntu Touch or Lineage preinstalled.
It's at the top of my if-I-ever-jump-ship-from-Apple list of phones.
Yeah, I'm going for Astro Slide instead. I have used a keyboard similar to F(x)tec in past (the Pro 1 X is just a rebrand, btw) with Nokia N900 and Nokia E71. It simply does not type comfortably on such a keyboard, the keys are too small (there's always a learning curve with regards to layout as it is never 100% standard qwerty). If the Astro wouldn't be available I'm better off with touch type with a second screen as keyboard. Though, do see the Pinephone hardware keyboard link posted elsewhere in this thread. It seems to be akin to the Astro Slide. At least in spirit.
Oh wow, that's a very interesting option - I like the way that hinge works, but I fear that a mechanical part that complex in a smartphone is likely to become worn out quickly (source: I had both a Moto RAZR and a T-Mobile Sidekick back in the day and both would barely stay closed by the time I upgraded).
> the Pro 1 X is just a rebrand
This is very interesting to me, would you mind filling me in on what it's a rebrand of?
They have other interesting products on their site. I'm also waiting to decide if getting this Pinephone or waiting for a beefier one with more battery life (1), but I can wait since I'm not into smartphones. In the meantime I supported them by purchasing their solder iron, plus tips and other add ons, which works surprisingly good for the price, and I'll probably buy one of their SBCs. So if anyone wants to support them, there are other ways to do that.
(1) To Pinephone designers: I would absolutely love a 2cm thick Pinephone if that allowed some more speed and serious battery life. I'm serious about that; my current phone is a Nokia 8110 4G (the new "banana") which is 1.5 cm thick, and although the OS is a joke and I use it only for calls and as 4G access point for my laptop, wrt usability it's the best thing I've bought in years.
Fortunately mine are teenagers now so that bit of my life is over mostly. I only get photos of them lurking, hiding and giving me the middle finger and that’s about it :)
well make sure to take plenty of pictures, you will cherish the memories of them lurking, hiding and giving you the middle finger for the rest of your life
Doesn't that really depend on how you use it? They might have a separate user account or even a whole separate OS installed like I do, encrypted, and use only online services.
Interesting observation. This might be more damaging to Apple than anything else.
Without iMessage/Facetime, a large part of the peer pressure teens get for having an iPhone is gone. Now they might start asking for a Galaxy or something like that.
The CASM scanning happens on device, right? At least so we’ve heard.
My sense is Apple is trying to keep CASM off their servers. Scanning phones before it gets there was their solution to what I assume is a government demand/ultimatum. “Do this or we repatriate your foreign entity taxes” or some other shit.
I too feel that Apple just caved and eroded trust that took decades to build up. The only way this gets sorted is the “screeching minority” continues to screech and brings other in. Notify state attorneys general, FTC, etc. will that do anything? Who know? My bet is that it’s the DOJ behind all of this.
Hopefully the plaintiff bar which are already preparing class action lawsuits will find a way to get documents in discovery that allude to government coercion. But then again I’m sure there would be a clever way those are not produced under some “national security” bullbaiting reason.
That's my theory as well. I see all those people selling their iPhones that will instead use Android, upload all their photos in Google Photos, and Google will happily share all those those same photos. Yes, yes, yes, I know, one is done on device, the other one is done in the cloud, for me that is pretty much 2 sides of the same coin.
As I understand it (and I've not spent too long on this, just picking at various articles) - there are two separate things at play here.
Firstly - CASM scanning is done via fingerprinting - the image is fingerprinted on device and when uploaded to iCloud that fingerprint is compared with the "dodgy images" fingerprints and an alert raised if a threshold of matches is reached (what's the threshold and with whom?)
Secondly - there is on-device AI image recognition - when you send an image to someone else (via iMessage or the share sheet) it is checked for nudity and if the iCloud account in question is registered to a 13-year old or younger, their parents are alerted.
In both cases the fingerprinting/scanning is on-device and is triggered by the images leaving the device.
> the image is fingerprinted on device and when uploaded to iCloud that fingerprint is compared with the "dodgy images" fingerprints and an alert raised if a threshold of matches is reached (what's the threshold and with whom?)
Nope. The comparison is done on the device and the threshold is set there as well.
I am not sure how alarmed I am yet at this whole affair but I do know that maybe 50% of posts I read about this have glaringly incorrect information which definitely dampers my alarmism.
> Nope. The comparison is done on the device and the threshold is set there as well.
As I understand it the fingerprinting and comparison is done on device, but it only happens as part of the upload-to-iCloud process. So the grandparent's phrasing isn't unreasonable.
It isn’t being circumvented. It is intended to work on photos that are uploaded to iCloud. If you don’t use that (via turning it off or via selling everything Apple and switching to Linux) then you aren’t using it.
No. The intent is not that it works on iCloud. The intent is catching pedos.
This is obviously not effective given that you can get around it that easily if you want to. Coincidentally though, it will be totally effective at surveilling the 99.999% that are normal users and won’t go out of their way to disable iCloud. The whole CP thing is such an obvious farce.
The theory would be that many people are stupid. Of course we only know about criminals who get caught and that tends to be because they made a mistake, so it looks like most criminals are stupid.
So, you trust Apple to install this spyware and only use it in the way they currently describe. Great!
But what happens the second they get an order from $GOVERNMENT that tells them to use the spyware to also look at other documents on the device?
I think it's pretty obvious what Apple will say. They'll say "OK." They have no plausible deniability to tell $GOVERNMENT to go pound sand - they have demonstrated the capability already! Telling the spyware to scan different files is a trivial change from a technical perspective.
They could have done what you describe at any time in history. This doesn't change anything in that regard. Either you trust Apple enough to use their products or you don't.
> They could have done what you describe at any time in history.
That doesn't make sense. The issue is that Apple is very publicly signaling they are changing their approach to privacy now. Companies change approaches to any number of things all the time, they're not static entities. As such you have to evaluate their nature as a consumer on an ongoing basis, not one time forever. It's true of food, it's true of consumer electronics, it's true of general product or service quality, it's true of privacy issues or censorship, and so on. Apple even knew the consequences ahead of time - per the insider notes - and don't care, they charged ahead regardless.
They could have done that any time because their code is proprietary, their hardware closed & won't boot code not signed by apple + they gate keep all third party apps from their walled garden.
It would be much harder for them to pull of if the system was open with user actually in control.
Probably, at least until someone successfully gets a court to say otherwise, by which time it'll be irrelevant because everyone will either have installed & enabled it to get the updates or (less likely given how entrenched many iDevice users have become) moved to other products.
And after the case to stop them refusing security updates for those without it installed+enabled, there will need to be another one to force them to allow it to be disabled, then a few circuits around the court of public tattle to make it really disable and not magically re-enable itself at random intervals.
Interestingly, iOS 15 is the first version of iOS in history to be optional if you want security updates. You will be able to choose if you want to go to iOS 15 and get the new features (including the CSAM prevention stuff), or you can stay on a security update only channel for iOS 14 (for a unknown period, but I'd guess until WWDC 2022? N-1 seems reasonable).
Generally, if you are shelling out the kind of money for a dslr or mirrorless, you want control over the final image. I shoot in raw and tweak the images I like by hand in darkroom. Lightroom is another option if you want to support adobe.
It takes longer but the end result looks MUCH better than anything your phone can produce. That said, sometimes I just want to take a selfie and not fiddle too much. Thats when I use my google pixel.
What might be useful for the next generation of prosumer cameras is being able to capture depth data (which is probably the main differentiator allowing computational photography to work on smartphones), with editing tools like Photoshop eventually supporting it.
lidar builtin to the mirrorless that takes a depth would be amazing. not just for computational photography but also to make focusing way more accurate!
You can post process that from RAW if you want to. I generally want people to not fuck around with my images before I get to do it though if I'm honest.
As soon as I have time it will be CalyxOS on my current Pixel 2. Once I got to update, no idea when, to a Pixel 5 I'm going to try Graphene OS. Oh, and Linux on my private laptop. I don't think you can do anything else to avoid FAANG's eyes. And MS's. Which sucks, I still remember when the only thing tp worry about was malware, not being spied upon by OEMs. Oh, and being spied upon by three letter agencies and their counterparts, but there is not much you can do about that either way.
Again why are they there in the first place? Also how many eyes are on KaiOS anymore? How sure are we of its sandboxing and all other security/privacy aspects?
So I’ve been on the verge of doing this for years so this was the final push and motivation.
Yesterday I sold my iPad and Apple Watch. They are being shipped today. I’m just waiting on refunds on my AppleCare for my MacBook and iPhone now and I will sell them.
Yesterday I had a Nokia 215 arrive as a replacement phone. Also a monster pile of PC bits arrived which have been assembled into a Ubuntu running desktop. I am spending today migrating my data over carefully. When the MacBook sells I will buy a Nikon DSLR.
At the end of this I lose perhaps 20% convenience for an immeasurable privacy gain, lose a big chunk of the distractions from my life and end up with some cash left over which I will use to go on holiday.
The only thing I will miss is Apple Music but it’ll give me a chance to curate my music collection without distraction again.