And it’s only necessary because Nix doesn’t include it. Which is the only way anything is allowed to run on an SELinux system. SELinux doesn’t require Nix mutation, it requires Nix to be complete.

There are workarounds to fix Nix’s incomplete definitions, but most end users opt for the easy post-install solution that ends up mutating thier store rather than including the fix as a unique derivation for every package to add the missing SElinux labels and policy.

It’s not. SELinux predates Fedora. Fedora went all-in on SELinux pretty early on though (a few other older distros too, but Fedora is one of the few remaining with significant mind-share), and many other distros decided not to do security at all for many years.

AppArmor is “sufficient” if you only want to deal with known-in-advance high risk applications being locked down, which was the approach most other distros took since it’s extremely complex to have a policy for absolutely everything (like SELinix requires).

In the latest distros using AppArmor, it’s been expanding so much that it is arguably easier to just implement SELinux and derive from Fedora’s Standard Policy. Ubuntu 24.04 for example was been broken by thier various AppArmor bugs for almost 1.5 years after release, all because they slapped system-wide AppArmor policy restrictions on the default system and didn’t coordinate any of it.

SELinux also doesn’t mutate the store unless the package in the store failed to set an SELinix file label. Providing the labels in most cases is trivial, so trivial in most cases that a global SELinux Nix policy package exists in a number of distros that can set normal defaults that work for most things.

It completely depends on where you look it up. I can’t find much of anything successfully in northern Indiana or southern Michigan, middling results in northern Ohio and central Tennessee, and good results in urban Colorado areas and southern California. Weirdly Mapcarta is giving excellent results in all of those areas, but no other app is.

Quad9 is OK, but they follow thru on Spain’s DNS takedown demands when even Google refused. No shame on them, but it made me want to try something else.

You might look at OpenNIC

I stumbled on the opensupermaps site before, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen any explanation. This explanation wasn’t great, but I eventually figured it out.

Option 1: Download file from opensupermaps.com to data folder for OSMAND and it will auto load.

Great, there are dozens of folders in the /Android/data/net.osmandplus/ folder, and files with the same file extension all over. Maybe I should have dropped them in the app’s root data folder and hoped they didn’t overwrite anything important? I ended up just opening thr files and then pickimg OSMAnd to be sure.

Deactivate the default map file(s) to ensure search pulls results from this file.

It took me 20 minutes of digging and trying things to figure out that this means to go into the Maps & Resources, then to the Local tab, then click thru each section and on each item in each section choose the three dots an dpick Deactivate for it. Except the map names you just loaded, which don’t always match the file names.

After all this, it turns out the address data is no better than what OSMAnd already has. The only difference is display order (which is very nice to have fixed), but doesn’t change the fact that probably 60% of the US has no address data at all. I know it’s a clusterf*ck with address data in the US, and many blocks of address data are proprietary or require licensing, but apparently MapCarta was able to get it. But not OSMAnd, Map.ME, MagicEarth, CoMaps, OrganicMaps, or even OpenSuperMaps.

SELinux is used on all the Fedora Immutable distros, and the OpenSUSE Immutable distro. It’s actually much easier to do SELinux in Immutable distros in a lot of ways than non-immutable. Especially the bootc-style ones where even more of the system is defined and prebuilt before deployment.

AppArmor is OK, but the whole issue is that you have to know what to throw into it. That’s also its benefit, you can focus in the high risk things and ignore the low risk things. It keeps expanding profiles more and more though, and ironically the ultimate destination is everything being under MAC.

Well damn, they actually have working US address look up. There’s literally no other version of OpenStreetMap that has that except AppleMaps.

I wonder if they could add navigation so it’s the first and only public Google Maps alternative.

EDIT: Especially ironic: they recommend OrganicMaps, which just pulled so much shady shit it’s been forked to CoMaps. And also is missing virtually all address data for the US.

Most of the chips in a smartphone are made by Qualcomm, both processors and peripheral chips like 5G modem, LTE modem, WiFi, and Bluetooth. Qualcomm chips require proprietary binary blobs to function, and usually only have a support lifetime of about 2 years. They also only supply those blobs to the manufacturer of the device.

So what benefit does Pangolin actually provide then if you already have to provide the VPS? Routing back to your network from a VPS is trivially easy, it’s getting the affordable VPS (given bandwidth prices) that’s actually the sticking point of any solution.

I had TorGuard for years, but the service just got more and more questionable over time. I stopped using it a handful of years back. I’ve more recently looked at them again, and their VPN-router product is just a whitelabeled device you can buy elsewhere that they did the trivial install of their VPN software on. Their actual VPN speeds are fine, certainly better than I’ve heard AirVPNs are, but you either get thrown in the pool of exit points that are all very well identified as malicious VPN exit points (so everyone blocks you), or you pay to upgrade to an individual “residential IP” exit point. That gives you a completely unique exit point so the minimal VPN “blend into the exit point crowd” simply won’t exist anymore, and it’s questionable what reputation those “residential IPs” might have (I’ve gotten blacklisted IPs from my direct ISP before, IP reputation is everything).
The service claims it has no/minimal logs, but they also have a privacy policy that seems to allow a good bit of data collection now (if I remember correctly).

If you’re trying to use it for geo-unblocking, a residential IP option might work for you. If you’re trying to use it to keep your privacy from your ISP, you might very well be trading one bad actor for another. If you’re trying to use it for hiding P2P activities it will probably function well, but I can’t speak about how well they’ll actually protect your privacy from DMCA requests (if that might be relevant to you).