She lusted after lovers with genitals as large as a donkey’s and emissions like those of a horse. 21 And so, Oholibah, you relived your former days as a young girl in Egypt, when you first allowed your breasts to be fondled. Ezekiel 23:20
Setting aside the context of this quoted verse and how NSFW stuff is judged in religious texts, this doesn't address the more important point that OP raised: the visuals of this verse and more extreme ones can be easily found on Reddit and similar allowed apps. So OP's points stands.
Those points don't connect though. Reddit is a social media platform. The Bible is book. It's a static piece of media.
In Biblical times, yeah? There was no such thing as birth control. If you get pregnant and are unmarried, your life might as well get over.
The act of abortion has existed since 1000 BCE with the earliest being 1550 BCE. Around the estimated time of the mythical Moses. Obviously not as effective, but the practice existed. Not to mention sex isn't one specific act. There are many ways to have sex, even by biblical standards, that do not involve the possibility of getting pregnant.
GrapheneOS works only with Pixel devices, which doesn't make it much useful for the vast majority of Android users.
Indeed. Sadly the reality is that most other Android devices are simply not secure enough. Many Android phones do not have a separate secure enclave (outside Pixel and IISC Samsung flagship and A5x range), so they are vulnerable to breaking PIN-based unlocking, side channel attacks, etc. Besides that they often only provide old vendor kernel trees, old firmware blobs, etc. So, you have to wonder whether you want such…
> Sadly the reality is that most other Android devices are simply not secure enough.
This seems like a bad reason for not supporting a device. If the device doesn't have a hardware feature then the OS it came with can't be doing it either, and then all you're doing is leaving the user with all of the other security problems in the OEM OS that otherwise could have been improved by replacing it.
Were any of the current directors or new nominees involved in the incident where F-Droid marked Bible and Quran apps as NSFW, hid them from search by default, and expressed the intent to remove them completely ( https://gitlab.com/fdroid/admin/-/issues/252#note_2578531026 )? (Discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45638096 ) If I’m charitable, I could assume they intended to make a controversial move t…
My reading is they were simply trying to comply with regulations. It wasn't about what ideas they believed the religious texts were trying to convey, but whether their content met a certain definition set by law. The law could be poorly written, or it could be poorly and over-cautiously interpreted by F-Droid maintainers. But I didn't get the feeling they were acting on any kind of moral judgement or own belief about…
> The law could be poorly written, or it could be poorly and over-cautiously interpreted by F-Droid maintainers. But I didn't get the feeling they were acting on any kind of moral judgement or own belief about what's appropriate for children.
If F-Droid were being overcautious, they would have blocked social media apps too. Social media is explicitly the single biggest target of these “think of the children” app store laws after outright porn sites. F-Droid left Reddit and Mastodon clients unmarked. Am I supposed to believe that F-Droid honestly thought the law applied to apps containing only ancient religious texts, and not to social media? Has any other app store interpreted the regulations the same way? And if they truly believed that was a legal requirement, why did they reverse the policy after only a couple days of user complaints?
Were any of the current directors or new nominees involved in the incident where F-Droid marked Bible and Quran apps as NSFW, hid them from search by default, and expressed the intent to remove them completely ( https://gitlab.com/fdroid/admin/-/issues/252#note_2578531026 )? (Discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45638096 ) If I’m charitable, I could assume they intended to make a controversial move t…
Ironic as Governments use religion to oppress. In facts it's one of religions primary roles.
Setting aside the context of this quoted verse and how NSFW stuff is judged in religious texts, this doesn't address the more important point that OP raised: the visuals of this verse and more extreme ones can be easily found on Reddit and similar allowed apps. So OP's points stands.
The other apps are clients. The apps themselves don't actually contain any content, they're just code. An app that itself contains an offline copy of a book with NSFW text is not the same thing. Meanwhile Reddit is a doubly poor example because even though the service contains NSFW content, it marks it as such, and then the client not only doesn't itself contain it but gives the user a separate opportunity to select…
Bible apps often don’t contain the text directly, but allow the user to download a preferred translation on initial startup. That didn’t prevent them from being marked NSFW.
And clearly that wasn’t the standard anyway. Before the introduction of the policy restricting religious texts, the only apps F-Droid had marked NSFW were frontends to porn sites, even though the apps presumably contained no sexual content directly.
Reduced security has always annoyed me a bit as an argument. Sort of in the same way as signal deprecating SMS because it's insecure. I get all or nothing when your threat model is state actors. However, for most people, the benefit is just freedom from corporate agendas. Not everyone needs kernel hardening, or always E2EE (as with signal). Personally I just like the features it provides (e.g. scoped storage, disabli…
Reduced security has always annoyed me a bit as an argument. Security is one of one of the main selling points of GrapheneOS, I can fully understand that they don't want to weaken that by supporting fundamentally insecure devices. I think a nice side-effect is that they only focus on a small number of devices (Pixels) and support those really well. I have followed the /e/OS forums for a while and many devices have co…
> I can fully understand that they don't want to weaken that by supporting fundamentally insecure devices.
Except that there is nothing fundamentally insecure about them, they just don't support a specific convenience feature. You can straightforwardly support PIN-based unlocking by encrypting the PIN in ordinary persistent storage using a longer passphrase that only has to be entered during boot.
This is arguably even more secure because it allows the PIN to be dumped from active memory and require the longer passphrase again after a timeout, a limited number of bad attempts or in response to a panic button on the lock screen. Then the device doesn't contain the long passphrase whatsoever, instead of having it permanently stored inside of an opaque enclave that itself could (and often does!) have its own vulnerabilities.
Indeed. Apple is financially successful, but they're ultimately a minority player in pretty much every market they engage with - including desktop/laptop computers and even mobile devices globally. And for me they are just as inaccessible as GraphineOS. But for Apple that is not necessarily a bad thing. They're a company. Their goal is to make money and they are highly successful at it. GraphineOS is not a company. T…
that value is undercut by its inaccessibility You are saying this like GrapheneOS only runs on some unobtanium hardware. I can literally hop on my bike and pick up a phone that runs GrapheneOS in 5 minutes, every day of the week. Also, it's available in pretty much all price classes except maybe a 100-200 Euro phone that runs on a Unisoc CPU. Pixel 9a regularly goes for 350 Euro here and you can go all the way up to…
The Pixel hardware does not have the capabilities I consider to be essential for my personal phone.
Will F-droid continue when Google bring in their changes, soon?
Even with Google's changes, F-Droid will continue to work with Android phones that do not use Google GMS. If you care about your actually owning your device, install something else than stock OS. I would recommend GrapheneOS, since the security of some/most other alternatives is pretty bad.
AFAIK every popular Android phone uses a qualcomm modem chip with a separate OS that has complete access to ram. NSA most certainly has a backdoor there and such complete access to any Android phone. This was common knowledge after the Snowden stuff. I don't think this has changed at all since. Only few niche phones (pinephone) separate these systems or have a hardware switch to disable the cellular system.
Were any of the current directors or new nominees involved in the incident where F-Droid marked Bible and Quran apps as NSFW, hid them from search by default, and expressed the intent to remove them completely ( https://gitlab.com/fdroid/admin/-/issues/252#note_2578531026 )? (Discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45638096 ) If I’m charitable, I could assume they intended to make a controversial move t…
> a sincere belief that these apps contained content unsafe for minors Hey I believe that too. If people are entitled to believe whatever is written in those books, surely people are also entitled to believe it's nonsense and actively harmful.
You’re free to believe that. But the topic here is F-Droid and its board of directors, along with the context that governments are attempting to censor operating systems and app stores. The question is, if you controlled an app store, would you prevent users from making religious choices for themselves? F-Droid is, probably, the biggest and most mainstream free software app store for mobile operating systems, and is trying to drum up community support (“Keep Android Open,” etc.) in response to the new laws. But F-Droid initiated a sudden change in policy—censoring religious apps—wilfully censoring content that’s never been illegal by any reasonable interpretation of the law. Such decisions obviously negatively impact parts of the free software community, and bring up questions about how effective F-Droid and F-Droid’s leaders can be in this fight.