De-Googling my phone • Hacker News Board

Re: De-Googling my phone

#111

Post by kuschku » Fri, May 04, 2018, 10:30 AM UTC

tecleandor wrote: post #109

cyphar wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't package upstream Firefox, but you can get GNU IceCat Mobile (which is the GNU fork of it). And they also package Firefox Klar (which is the European edition of the "always incognito" version of Firefox they released last year, with all the telemetry disabled).

It's Firefox Klar in German speaking countries, and Focus on the rest, not to collude with Focus Magazine brand :)

Klar also has a slightly different codebase, with less tracking, due to different laws in these regions.

Re: De-Googling my phone

#112

Post by kuschku » Fri, May 04, 2018, 10:33 AM UTC

maccard wrote: post #83

lern_too_spel wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's your problem. iOS Webkit has buggy scrolling behavior if you use fixed position elements or iframes. Unfortunately, Apple won't allow non-buggy browsers on their platform, so there's nothing you can do about it.

It’s our problem that developers feel the need to override the default scrolling behaviour which works perfectly across all devices on all platforms?

The developer hasn’t override any of the scrolling behaviour, the browser just handles position:fixed incorrectly.

Re: De-Googling my phone

#113

Post by SSLy » Fri, May 04, 2018, 10:33 AM UTC

tecleandor wrote: post #109

cyphar wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't package upstream Firefox, but you can get GNU IceCat Mobile (which is the GNU fork of it). And they also package Firefox Klar (which is the European edition of the "always incognito" version of Firefox they released last year, with all the telemetry disabled).

It's Firefox Klar in German speaking countries, and Focus on the rest, not to collude with Focus Magazine brand :)

what's interesting is that the polish edition of the magazine doesn't seem to care

Re: De-Googling my phone

#114

Post by JepZ » Fri, May 04, 2018, 10:36 AM UTC

That blog post is mostly just about the apps. Sadly we still have a lot Google services in use afterwards, like e.g. the optional location service which speeds up the GPS positioning, but those parts are much harder to replace :-/

Some time ago MicroG[1] was set to solve that problem, but I don't know how far they have come.

[1]: https://microg.org

Re: De-Googling my phone

#115

Post by pmontra » Fri, May 04, 2018, 10:36 AM UTC

greenhouse_gas wrote: post #79

gcb0 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

drivers. really. we are back to being limited to one OS because of drivers. this is also the reason lineageOS and other android roms can't just keep updating older phones to new releases. they need the oem to upgrade so they can extract drivers from the binaries.

They can and do. For example, you can get Marshmallow on the Samsung s2, which didn't officially didn't get even Lollipop.

I had a S2. It died on October 2016 after 5 years of good work. It still has some good points against more modern phones but I won't recommend to buy a refurbished one now. I won't trust the hardware to last much longer.

Re: De-Googling my phone

#116

Post by SSLy » Fri, May 04, 2018, 10:37 AM UTC

em3rgent0rdr wrote: post #101

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #14

Great list! NewPipe is really good, far better than the proprietary YouTube app. K9 is also a superb app and holds up very well against the proprietary options. I have to recommend andOTP over FreeOTP, though, it's more featureful and does some important things like backups.

NewPipe lets me play audio of YouTube videos in the background, allowing me to turn off my display. While Google's official YouTube app stops the video entirely when turn off the display, and pesters me to upgrade to "YouTube Red" so that I can pay money to do what NewPipe already does for free.

>and pesters me to upgrade to "YouTube Red" so that I can pay money to do what NewPipe already does for free.

It's even worse if you're supposed to have YT Red as a Google Play Music subscriber, but they don't enable that functionality in almost any country.

Re: De-Googling my phone

#117

Post by SSLy » Fri, May 04, 2018, 10:39 AM UTC

letsgetphysITal wrote: post #88

lern_too_spel wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's your problem. iOS Webkit has buggy scrolling behavior if you use fixed position elements or iframes. Unfortunately, Apple won't allow non-buggy browsers on their platform, so there's nothing you can do about it.

No it's not my problem. I just won't visit your site. It's most definitely your problem.

that sounds like ie6 all again.

Re: De-Googling my phone

#118

Post by JepZ » Fri, May 04, 2018, 10:56 AM UTC

EvilMonkeyMat wrote: post #15

Very interesting. I've been looking for something like Syncthing for a while now, without luck. I ran into TLS/https issues (can't remember what exactly) while configuring OwnCloud/NextCkound, and realized it had some security flaws I wasn't ready to live with. I decided to stick with Google Drive. I'll give a try to Syncthing this summer. Thanks!

I use Nextcloud since a few years and I am very happy with it (especially with the desktop integrations, e.g. KDE/Dolphin). I even use the Nextcloud WebDav server as a backend to store and sync data for my own Progressive Web App :D

The only security flaw I see is that it is written in PHP, which makes it harder for the devs to write secure code, but not impossible.

Re: De-Googling my phone

#119

Post by jwilk » Fri, May 04, 2018, 11:14 AM UTC

Double_a_92 wrote: post #67

Am I the only one that is weirded out by out-of-context images of people especially faces?

It's a photo of the author next to their name. It's not "out-of-context".

Re: De-Googling my phone

#120

Post by ethelward » Fri, May 04, 2018, 11:19 AM UTC

ggm wrote: post #52

jancsika wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your increased trust in these stores is motivated by .... what governance and audit structure? One gains knowledge , not trust, from studying governance and audit structures. > From here, this looks no better than "trust google" and in some dimensions looks significantly worse. In what concrete way(s)?

Do they do the same kind(s) of scans the google store does on apps? Sure, reproducible builds, but reproducible with holes isn't an upside. How does a bad app get removed? Who decides? When?

Givent the recent track records of many fishy apps on the PlayStore, I'll take my risk with the OSS of FDroid.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/phony-android-security-apps-in... https://blog.malwarebytes.com/cybercrime/2017/11/new-trojan-... https://thehackernews.com/2017/12/google-playstore-malware.h... https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2018/04/20/google-play-crypt...