Yes ditching a secure OS for one that can easily be pwned by police / ICE / DHS with ease (especially in a time in the US when they’re doing this more and more) when AOSP can just be hard forked users. Thanks for the input, government agent.
Yes, indeed AOSP is trivial to hard fork and maintain independently of Google, which is why so many maintained hard forks of AOSP exists... right, right? Thank for the input, world's most brilliant coder.
This is partially pointing out that every time these discussions invariably come up, nobody addresses the cognitive dissonance of ideologues claiming that the benefit of open source like Linux and Firefox is that “the community can hard fork it and maintain a free version”
Yet somehow this same logic somehow becomes invalid when any open source software made by Google is brought up.
If Linux was targeted for mobile devices, there would inevitably be wasted effort reinventing the wheel just to match the feature set of Android when there’s already a suitable base to start community work from.
Seriously. The average person in real life has no idea what MV2 or MV3 is. And despite what people here would have you believe uBlock Origin Lite works nearly as good as uBO and is generally indistinguishable from its MV2 counterpart. A casual user wold not be able to tell the difference, nor do they care.
Indistinguishable because ad blocking still works at the visible end of the spectrum.
Under the hood, what the MV2 uBlock can do and Lite can't is at the least stripping tracking parameters from links and block 3rd party trackers that are cloaked in a subdomain of the originating site.
If small phones were a widely popular thing then there would be a company making them successfully or it would’ve been greater than 5% of iPhone sales. An individual company with zero brand power or presence wouldn’t have any decent sales. This is not even considering that the value proposition would be way worse than just buying a slightly bigger and significantly better phone with more R&D put behind it.
The reality is 90% or more of people don’t care about that or even think about it, this sentiment only exists in online tech enthusiast spaces. If you’re in HN you’re as non-representative of the average consumer as one can get.
Unless there is a real market advantage to it, they won't. Consumers prove over and over again they are willing to trade security to save a few dollars. Furthermore, why commit to providing hardware and software support for a device to last 5+ years, when ~25% of Americans report damaging their device each year[0]. Most of a device's population will have been replaced in 3 years.
Yeah unfortunately this is the case. Privacy and security in general are things most average consumers don’t necessarily care for, and especially don’t care for when it provides inconveniences. Even in more tech enthusiast crowds you see this reflected most obviously in people wanting to use Firefox over any Chromium variant of a browser.
Not to mention to reach GOS’ requirements the cost of the phone would have to significantly increase which I imagine only hurts Android phones even more for no real gain since GOS users are minuscule overall.
And the long term support is definitely not the norm yeah. It’s pretty much just Apple and Google doing it for their own devices. Motorola will be a newcomer to this concept with GOS. But we can only wait and see if they actually stick to it, given their track record prior to the collaboration.
Google probably got away with it cause they made the chips and security chips themselves. I read something like Tensor costing $70 vs. a Qualcomm chip with MTE costing $250.
But even with of all this, it wouldn’t make sense for GOS to spend it’s limited resources developing for a less secure platform when appropriate target devices exist (they mentioned something to this effect a few days ago on reddit too): https://www.reddit.com/r/GrapheneOS/comments/1wifsiq/comment...
Thinking about it, besides library access, the internet is already behind ISPs and requires funds to access. Having I2SP's does not solve the underline problem.
The TOR network is probably the closest thing to what OP is describing but that is filled with illicit material and has no safeguards. We all pretend we don't like internet laws but those rules keep criminals below the surface and normal users from accidently stumbling on it.
Anonymous KYC is the way forward. Legislation on preventing bots presenting as legitimate users should be implemented. Similarly to how the world has mostly made robo calling illegal.
Seriously KDE is so extremely ugly and dated looking compared to macOS, GNOME and even modern Windows. I don’t care about the 30 million configurable options if it looks like a total eyesore. You’d think they’d put some effort into a consistent style / UI framework.
People hate on GNOME for its rigidity but it’s the one desktop actually trying somewhat to provide Linux with an environment that the average person (not an HN user) won’t immediately turn their nose up in disgust at.
reply