Fr*nch.

Barry we’re not on 2we4u

As far as I understand, border officers can kinda send you back because they don’t like your vibes.

You can totally do it with the GPL as well, as long as you own 100% od the copyright. Of you accept a patch, and don’t get copyright attribution… You’re stuck with the GPL forever.

And they have truly gone a long way.

There’s virtually no choice for building competitive phones in Europe.

Or anywhere else for that matter. Know of any good phone made in Canada?

So FairPhone is really as European as it gets.

Indeed, and that was not an irrelevant consideration when buying one. As is often the conclusion when discussing FairPhone… “Yeah, that’s far from perfect but it’s truly the best they could do given the circumstances”.

Well, Proton tries as best as they can, but they are not above the law.

They retain as little information as possible, but in the end when the authority come knocking best they can do is appeal, but in the end they can’t refuse to hand that over.

Privacy does not exist in absolute, but only in relation to a threat model. If your threat model includes state actors coming after you, you should avoid leaving them your billing information, so pay with bitcoin or cash by mail.

If, like most of us here, your threat model includes mainly surveillance capitalism, then using a credit card is fine.

To quote James Hetfield…

Sad but true.

There is a way of knowing that. You can choose from a variety of open source apps that just don’t contain tracking code.

No stealing your address book, no logging your GPS position, no snooping on your list of installed apps, no profiling your scrolling speed and which post you spend more seconds reading.

For the server part, the upstream code io open source and has no ad-trackers of that kind. Since you get to pick your instance you have a chance of hopefully going with one you trust not to have added them in afterwards.

Your data isn’t limited to your toots though.

Mastodon isn’t profiling your clicks, how long you spend reading each post, your DMs, your geolocation, your IP, stealing the addressbook from your phone, forcing you to use the app to steal more data, checking what other apps you have installed, track you around all the internet, and all the other toxic profiling bullshit that big tech social media does to beef up your advertisement profile.

electoral politics is over and done for

to disregard the movement Bernie started and continues to lead is disingenuous

If elections don’t matter, what’s left is surrender to the dictatorship or take arms. If elections don’t matter, I don’t see why any decision maker would care about any movement started by Bernie or whoever else

I think you are either replying to the wrong comment, or completely misunderstanding the issue.

The majority of Android is open source, though its development is still led by Google.

That is how you have so many deGoogled versions like LineageOS, GrapheneOS, /e/OS, CalyxOS, etc. They all start from the OS version, called AOSP, and then add things from there.

The Android you have on your phone contains a few proprietary bits by Google (the Play services) which are absolutely essential to using Android the way most people do. These can be replaced with open source versions that are mostly fine (mostly).

If Google makes android closed source, we stop getting updates, but we keep all we have, and can move forward from there.

Having a good mobile operating system without Google if need be is totally doable.

But if you want to use a mobile operating system, you first need a mobile phone to run it.

And while we can totally already have a mobile OS without the USA, right now we really can’t have a mobile phone without China. And neither can the US. And that’s going to take a long time to sort out.

Yes, but something like that will take a long time.

There is all the manufacturing know how and the need to make the manufacturing process economically viable. That is certainly not something that can be done overnight, but also certainly something that can be done.

But the materials are a way bigger mess. The literal materials you need in order to make that phone are not available here.

You need to start with a reliable supply of rare earths, and good luck doing that in Europe (the extraction is, with current industry practices, really quite polluting).

China developed the deposits they have in some regions and we were all too happy ti never have to do that crap again domestically. Then they put rare earths under export control, so that if you want rare earths in your products (and you do, you really do) you have to manufacture in China.

So yes, we really need to have an alternative, but your next phone is definitely going to be made in China just like the one you have now. And probably the one after that too.

• wallet: my current solution is Garmin Pay. For that you need a compatible Garmin watch. Once the card is added to the watch, all the payment is done without even passing by the phone, just communication between watch and payment terminal. Garmin watches work really very well with Gadgetbridge. Cards have to be added via the Garmin App, and possibly via a phone running a stock OS (mine didn’t work from the aftermarket ROM, but may be bank dependent)

• Family Link: For other options you may need to do a factory reset and install a device manager app, that then needs to be enabled via ADB. Or use a custom ROM. No pleasant options out there.

And you think Fairphones are made in Europe? They are made in China, just like all the iPhones and Google Pixels.

Fairphone is indeed Dutch, and they even make a point on their website of paying a decent living wage to all Chinese workers making their phones.

Typed from my Fairphone 4 running /e/OS

More like a derivative, they consistently port stuff over from Lineage, which is just a distribution of Android, which is in turn based on a gazillion other OS project starting from Linux.

In the end either it’s good enough to have the “headquarters” of this specific project in Europe, no version of Android can be considered European enough, as it all depends way too heavily on Google.

There is also a decent chance of Google making Android closed source in the medium term anyway, but the last several releases of Android have not exactly added mindblowing features, and I don’t have a tremendous amount of interest in whatever kind of enshittified cloud dependent AI infested mess they have planned next.

What is the stupid “freedom fries” thing and how does it compare to the current situation?

What I know of “freedom fries” seemed to me an inconsequential little bit of cosmetic chauvinism, while the current status of things is that the US have decided to strongly oppose Europe in both economic and geopolitical terms.

More correctly, it’s obsolete.

It just can’t keep up with a reality that is this absurd.

Thanks for your extremely thoughtful and interesting reply to my rather silly comment.

I regret I have only one upvote to give.

But I don‘t think most of the staff would care enough to even talk to you.

Getting German staff to talk to you? It’s hard enough getting the attention of waiters.

The other 40 had to disagree with the majority out of a knee jerk reflex.