I think what you’re finding in Amazon are offers from third party sellers. FP6 is 550 on the official site. Still, if the FP4 is 200€ new it is certainly a contender.

I love my FP4, but my manager just bought himself a FP6 and… I’m envious! It seems ti scratch almost every itch I have with FP4

(screen draws too much power and isn’t bright enough in summer, phone is a bit too large, etc.)

Pity my FP4 won’t stop working anytime soon.

(Actually joking, at almost 4 years, no phone has ever survived this long in my dangerous hands, and I’m so happy about that).

I’d give FP6 serious thought. On the other hand, maybe you can get some great bargain on a used FP4 (FP4 isn’t sold new anymore).

Not by a long stretch. There is one single toolbox that I use which requires MATLAB to run. The toolbox itself is under GPL, and it’s fantastic work, but the authors don’t have the time and resources to port it to pythonz and it’s the only reason why I (begrudgingly) use MATLAB at all.

Bifteki!

First a technical thing which is not obvious to me.

I understand that the general, non-proprietary Android system service would uses a privacy preserving service like BeaconDB. From what I understand, Google offers an alternative, proprietary, location API in its Play Services. Is that one also prevented from giving your location to Google of you’re using Sandboxed Google Play?

It’s an honest question. I assumed that the provider option I had in MicroG was exactly for that purpose, but I could be wrong.

Next, a small rant.

Bloody hell, I really do appreciate your politeness, but how is it that every damn article about privacy starts with threat modeling, but every discussion about privacy ends with “yeah but if your threat model does not require QubesOS you’re doing it wrong”?

(I use Arch BTW)

I use Arch, BTW.

GrapheneOS requires I think a few other things, like the possibility to completely disable the data lines in the USB port, and a bunch of others.

The problem with Fairphone is that they have rather high demands (e.g. long term support for hardware, better production practices) but they are a rather small outfit, so the default answer from parts manufacturers is “talk to the hand”.

As they grow they’ll become more interesting

I would argue that Fairphone with /e/OS is a combination of a committed/sustainable manufacturer with a trustworthy OS. It does not actively spy or screw with you, and it tries to prevent snooping in many places.

Of course it’s not nearly as security hardened as GrapheneOS, so that may be an unacceptable compromise to some.

I wouldn’t say that it’s pretty similar.

They have rather different goals and feature sets.

Sent from my FP4 with /e/OS.

If you want to convince GOS users to occasionally drop their sense of superiority, it looks like you have your work cut out for you.

My wife’s previous phone was a Moto One Hyper. Pretty well made device, especially for the price.

Thank you for reading that, and for supporting the idea that these topics are worth discussing about, and different people can reach different conclusions.

Also notice a couple more useful posts in the responses to my post, courtesy of a users who decided to verbally disagree instead of just downvoting.

Being open source is not the only benefit of MicroG. It massages some (many) of the queries, removing as many bits of identifying information as possible. It lets you replace Google Location services with BeaconDB. And some other stuff.

These are all privacy wins. Practical ways to maintain as much of the functionality as possible, as much of the convenience, while minimizing the amount of information that is sent to Google (among others).

They come with a compromise in security. So this comes down to threat modeling. To use the naming from privacyguides.org, is your model includes “surveillance capitalism” but not “targeted attacks” then MicroG might even be better.

e/OS, while far from perfect, also adds a feature that blocks requests from tracking services using a blocklist. You can get that in 50 other ways, but this one does not drain my battery at 3x the speed, so I like it.

I do not claim that /e/OS is “better” than GrapheneOS, just that other ROMs can be a very good choice, depending of the user.

There is a reason why GrapheneOS is the golden standard, and if I were a journalist or activist in many parts of the world I would definitely stick to that and only that.

But that is why threat modeling exists. My threat model allows me a little more latitude, so I am not restricted to buying Pixels in an era when Google seems to be slowly undermining GrapheneOS, and I can choose a different manufacturer with better ethics. Among other things.

If it’s only about degoogling, they can very well use /e/OS and remove the network permission from microG. Yes, it’s possible.

It is best from many points of view but, as far as I understand, this community is about providing knowledge and tools, and leaving it up to the individual users to asses their threat modeling and determine the extent of the acceptable compromise?

Edit: in every use of connected technologies there are privacy trade-offs, and privacy may not be the only concern on a user’s plate.

The Fairphone mentioned in the opening has the more ethical production and spare parts support, that can be a concern for many users. Ultimately it’s for them to decide. Maybe we bore them and they just get a third hand iPhone, which is still largely a privacy improvement over stock Android.

Yeah, /e/OS too, and so I assume also LineageOS and the rest.

It is also largely questionable.

/e/OS has MicroG, and that runs as a system service. You can disable most of it, and if you’re not using any App that needs Google services, I doubt it really does much.

It is possible to use Graphene without using any Google at all. However… Doing so will break almost every app out there. Anything that needs push notifications, AndroidAuto, a thousands more things. So you end up using Graphene with Sandboxed Google services.

And we get into the debate. Is it better to take the official Google Play Services, which we all consider malicious, and run it in a sandbox, or take an open source private, and trusted implementation (MicroG) and run it as a system service?

It is at the very least largely debatable.

LanguageTool is kinda like Grammarly but it has a free plan, that includes at the very least spell and grammar checking.

The core part offering those free services is even open source, and can be installed on your PC (though the company has a reputation for decent privacy).

There are languagetool plugins for all mainstream browsers (edge/Chrome/Firefox/Safari and derivatives) email clients (Thunderbird and Outlook) and Office Suites (MSOffice, LibreOffice, OnlyOffice, Apple).

Yes there is a paid version with more stuff, but the free version goes a long way.

There are many reasons. My biggest problem with it is that it enables the productions of a incredible deluge of cheap shitty content (aka slop), sufficient to drown out a lot of more interesting decent work.

This is coumpunded by big tech having decided that slop is preferable to real content. This leads to the general feeling that I’m drowning in an ocean of shit, and thus I dislike AI.

this would have cost him vacation time

After all these years my poor European brain is still struggling to understand this.

while sick …

ill-advised

I see what you did there.