A thing that popped up in corporate space is IgelOS. It’s an immutable image meant for linking to a VM workstation on a company network. Seems worth checking out.

I don’t disagree with owning your hardware. I’m saying that a regulatory body can pose rules on where critical software can run. Part of this is data exposure: A banking app running in a tampered environment makes some malwares possible, which is the side you want an “I know what I’m doing”-button for. But it also creates risk for the bank. In letting you look into network-traffic and memory-dumps, you may discover ways to manipulate an unrooted instance or the backend server. This is security through obscurity and I’d much rather have everything open-source, but it’s what we’re dealing with.

On the other hand, the bank promises to cover damages, whenever they do mess up. You could give them an easy excuse by taking on that responsibility. But regulations don’t allow that, much like they don’t allow you to do your own high-voltage, high-current electricity. And frown upon you breaking load-bearing walls in a housing complex to have a more open kitchen. There is a line where “let me do what I want” becomes anarchy.

Now bringing DRM into this, misses the point. There is telemetry in these apps. But there is no piracy or copyright infringement to be had. The bank doesn’t fear you giving yourself a million dollars by changing your balance in memory. It’s all about responsibility in case something goes south. They would love to shift it all onto you, but they’re not allowed to do that. Attestation was never about protecting you, it’s about protecting them from being blamed.

There is a bunch of parties making guarantees and complying with rulesets. Domino-ing all of them would make you extremely vulnerable. Which is why I opted for “tamper-proof containers running in a unproven host”, rather than signing an unlimited waiver.

Well the idea of having attestation isn’t the problem. The problem is that apps requiring attestation (banks, insurance providers, ID-systems) use the most convenient solution. Slapping on Googles prebuild attestation. Graphene for example, provides alternative attestation for their OS and offers docs for anyone to implement a more fitting set of checks.

There are two approaches here: If you’re upset that your hacked-to-bits, rooted, unlocked and/or unencrypted device is failing checks: I’d say, tough luck. Until we can create provably untampered app-containers, that level of access genuinely breaks TOS on apps and regulations on handling personal data. Breaking those checks is then breaking those compliances in an unsafe way.

If you believe your setup is actually secure and compliant, just not in a way the allmighty Google intended: Try and get an attestation module for your setup. Fight for these apps to accept non-Google attestation and fight for devices that don’t artificially limit what can pass as secure.

I feel there are plenty of local activist/independent servers all over the EU. As long as you mind the encryption/anonymization, you can even round-robin them. Having a central EU authority is better than Google/Cloudflare and should be safe, if the implementation is sound. But there is a lot of room to meddle.

By LeOS? Any GSI-Treble enabled Android phone. So most any phone with an unlockable bootloader. You can use the treble info app to check or search online.

https://gitlab.com/TrebleInfo/TrebleInfo/

LeOS isn’t very popular, because it’s a passion-project by one guy, with little marketing. Said guy is a somewhat opinionated Woodstock-era hippie, hence the colorful icons (they can be easily swapped via an icon-pack of your choice.) Though he is a friendly person.

To my knowledge it’s the only Treble-option with a hard stance on de-googling. Specifically made as an answer to some policies in eOS. There is an interview with him floating about, if you want the backstory. https://nixfaq.org/2021/01/exclusive-interview-with-guntram-lead-developer-of-a-popular-custom-degoogled-android-rom-called-leos.html

Hey there, for starters A-GPS, stun, secure DNS, and several other preconfigured servers default to Google. Some of these can be changed with ADB. Check out a guide on de-googleing LineageOS for a more complete list. It’s not AOSP, but close enough. There are also Google servers configured in the sources. How valuable those connections are, depends on your threat-model. If you’d like a paranoid GSI, check out LeOS. It’s probably the most complete treble-compatible option. AOSP by default, isn’t very private.

And have a script to secure erase the key material. Much faster and will prevent forced/coerced unlocks.

Good to hear. Having a raspberry and kodi focused base with an open Linux backend sounds good. Will try that later.

There is sendtokodi, which uses yt-dlp. I’m a bit surprised that there are no newpipe-extractor clients for Kodi, since there should be hooks for everything you’d need. Then again, I don’t know how well it works outside of Android.

Depends on how far you want to go. From what I’ve been able to tell, they pedel a lot of flashy metrics and still had a bunch of google calls. Some of which you can manually remove, same as LOS. I would avoid buying into their cloud and keeping an eye on things yourself, if you want to install it. I saw them rebrand a bunch of OSS tooling as their own products back then. Don’t know if things changed since then, but I don’t trust the marketing.

I’m on Tuxedo now, really nice so far. Thanks.

I’m currently on Tuta, because I can’t imagine Mail without a free tier. It’s run out of Germany(EU). Its 3€ a month for the normal tier, free takes away most features. Like Proton, you need to use their (OSS)-Client, for encryption reasons. It’s currently growing and I hope they don’t go crazy anytime soon.

I was looking at Posteo, but I don’t want my entire internet identity to be gone, if I ever can’t pay for it.

I’d be a good start, if content platforms had to apply the same guidelines to ads, as they do to content. It’s kinda telling that people on the platform need to not swear, while the ad below goes “You can’t last 5 seconds in this NFT gambling waifu gatcha collector aimed at teens.” or just offer money freud scams directly.

Honestly, I was avoiding Debian for the staleness, but it might be what I go for. I use ungoogled chromium, and all but the flatpak version seem to lag behind. I don’t like the packaged dependencies for each app, since there tend to be a lot of redundancies and bigger deltas. Though if you fully commit to flatpak, with Debian as a stable base, that might be good. The more I try to customize Mint, the more it fights me.

An advantage of Tuta and Proton is, that there is a basic free tier. Your Mail is a center-point of your online activity. Hoping it to never happen, if you ever can’t afford the (cheap) price, you won’t lose access to your mail. Which would suck, for all accounts linked to it.

From what I’ve seen, the argon does passive-cool alright too. With Flirc I’d need to keep the mini-HDMI-dongle and buy a separate IR dongle, that takes up a usb-slot and doesn’t have a low-power MCU. My Pi is currently in a no-name passive-case already. Unless I misunderstood you, I don’t see the advantage.

Yes, that’s what I meant by “widevine tax”, the certification is done by Google for a fee.

Yeah, it’s kinda telling, if you look at my prime subscription for example. I can either:

• Hook into the web-service with Kodi, breaking TOS and theoretically risking the account. While Google, missing their widevine tax, limits the quality.

• Pirate the same content without an account, at full 4K.

It’s truly a service problem.

I do have a Jellyfin server, this is mainly about being able to use the subscriptions I happen to already pay for. Decoding on the pi is actually quite decent with hvec and x264.