It’s complicated. These things are very uneven between countries, and the Netherlands so far do seem like the ones most enjoying their US dependence. This is the most egregious case, but there have been plenty of others recently where the establishment is strongly resisting digital autonomy (and let’s not even talk about Mark Rutte going from “Teflon” to “daddy’s boy”).

Other countries are doing better. It’s interesting that the most “digital” in the continental EU, is also the one most deeply in bed with big tech (whereas German fax machines are already 100% sovereign)

Open Office? 2008 called, they want their office suite back.

From what I understood this is the old chat control, not the 2.0 kind.

And that one had been with us for what? 5 years? Before it finally expired in March.

And while I am certainly not a fan, the two are not to be confused.

Chat Control 1.0 means Facebook, which normally is forbidden by law from scanning your private messages, is allowed at least to look there for CSAM.

Do you believe that Facebook respects the privacy of your messages? I didn’t think so. This one was even voluntary (for the platform, not the user).

So that one might come back. This time maybe with age verification.

Chat Control 2.0 is the one they’ve been trying to pass for years and failed. That one at some point threatened to backdoor encryption, which would have, even massively worse consequences. Then they tried to plant the idea that they would save encryption, but scan the photos on your phone before sending using an image classification model. Which is better than backdoored encryption, but still a mindbogglingly bad idea, much worse than server side scanning of unencrypted Facebook messages.

That’s outrageous!

Can I ask you which countries? I can see mandating an active job search, but picking which website you have to use seems like the kind of stuff that could be taken to court.

And LinkedIn is just about the worst possible pick…

Imagine the management of Fiat not going around in a Panda…

But I mean why? Used in this way, AI systems are just another static analysis tool.

Sure, a computationally inefficient one, but if you can get the signal/noise region high enough, anything that helps you find bugs seems fair game to me.

One has to review their work, and take any fix offered by the slopmachine with a lot of care, of course.

And Anthropic is a bad company, but we are talking about detecting security vulnerabilities in Firefox by wasting Anthropic money. That seems like win-win.

The only downside (and I admit it’s big) is that Anthropic gets some publicity out of this.

They are talking about specific hardware features. Which would of course be great, but you can imagine how they are not exactly at the toppiest toppy top of Fairphone’s priorities, when they are still struggling to be taken seriously by your mainstream Android buyer.

Consider that every hardware features is extra hard for Fairphone, on account of their very specific commitments to materials sourcing, labor practices, and longer term support.

They are a company with a lot of very complicated demands, for a still very low volume of sold devices. They need to pick their battles, and clearly being blessed by the church of Graphene can’t be that high a priority.

My Thinkpad from 2017 keep getting firmware updates through lvfs for like 7 or 8 years. I was pretty impressed actually.

Wilbur, IIRC is the name of the mascot.

You can do NFC payments on degoogled Roms using an app called Curve.

/e/OS on Fairphone allows locking the bootloader.

I even installed it two years after purchase on my own phone, and relocked the bootloader, of course with the same caveat.

NFC payments are possible with Curve.

I use Arch, BTW.

So, I use a FP4 with /e/OS and I like it.

First things first: some things will break. Not many, and not often, but it happens. Mostly Google stuff, but on Android a lot of stuff is Google stuff.

Recently GMaps wasn’t working for a little longer than a week. I was still able to use HERE WeGo (my current favorite) and others even with Android Auto, so it was no problem for me, but still.

Banking apps and such almost always work, but there is a non-zero chance that one of those will break, even for a short while. I have three banking apps and they work flawlessly, plus itsme (Belgian gov app) and a German health insurance (this one refuses to login with fingerprint, but pass works).

Android Auto works, but I don’t think I ever managed to get Chromecast to do anything.

You do get something in exchange. The privacy improvements are there, and the OS-level adblocking as well.

But you have to accept that occasionally there will be a nonzero level of discomfort.

You could keep the old phone around for the apps that don’t behave, or you could use the old phone to test /e/OS before ordering.

The Google Maps issue is fixed. I always kept a judicious distance from Google Home and Pixel Watch, so I can’t comment on that.

Assuming the technical implementation is sound (I’m techy but that’s still way over my head), there is something missing from the explanations I’ve been seeing so far.

The state is of course the one who should be proving my identity, and the website has (usually) no business knowing who I am or holding a copy of my documents. The state however has no business knowing what I’m browsing, and a pinky promise is not enough.

I can’t understand whether this is something that the proposed system offers, or whether it’s a property of zero-proof systems in general.

Obviously something like this must necessarily be Free and Open Source if any trust at all must be put into it.

Well, kinda. You can have access tiers. For instance no access for age<13, limited access for 13<age<18, full access for age>18.

Needless to say, I think this is (in most circumstances) the wrong approach.

We are talking about products that are often deliberately harmful and hostile to all users, and then we expect to have a child-safe version of these. Shouldn’t we try to get an adult safe version too? It would be way easier to protect children then.

As a physicist, my favorite referee comment ever was [That my claim was wrong] “should be obvious to anyone who has ever sat through an elementary electromagnetism course.” He was wrong BTW, and the paper was finally published in a different journal.

I am from a decidedly different field, so I don’t know if I can vouch for you in any meaningful way.

This! If you have good hardware that works, it’s good to keep it if possible.

My smartwatch/activity tracker is indeed a Garmin Instinct 2s with Gadgetbridge. It really does most of what the proprietary app does, and gives you near absolute control over your data.

Can’t really anyone read? Poster above said Portugal or Poland cost 1/10th of the budget above.

And plainly no. In Poland you might get away with spending half.