No apologies needed, I thought you were quite civil. People have different opinions and I’m circumspect enough to see that my own views and values are just the mysterious product of my culture and conditioning, there’s not much absolute in right and wrong. Nice talking.

The military penal code however, does indeed have life imprisonment

Interesting. It figures. And Breivik will never be truly free, I get that. But in a sense his punishment is a lifetime of ostracism, which is pretty terrible for a human being. What’s more interesting to me is that almost nobody was clamoring for capital punishment in Norway as they surely would have been pretty much anywhere else.

On Hitler, yes of course I know I have an unconventional take. But I really think most people are not thinking straight. If you have a principle, you stick to it, you don’t drop it because “wow that one was so bad”. My principle is that it is not right to tie down a captive human being and forcibly snuff out their life. The abstract fact of what they did or didn’t do is completely immaterial. For me, capital punishment is a moral abomination of the first order. End of story.

Did you know that the Norwegian shooter (who killed a very large number of unarmed young people with an automatic weapon in 2011) is already 2/3 of the way thru his sentence?

This was my point. Americans didn’t understand this and still don’t. Cultures have different conceptions of what purpose is served by punishment.

Not at all. Of course, I’m not American so my starting point is not that people are locked up for years for the tiniest offense

Other than (a) having to use a browser and (b) no update mechanism, yes.

Yep and that’s exactly what we doing with Signal to avoid the Play Store. It’s a bit of a PITA and it’s the same on desktop. It’s because they don’t want third parties maintaining their packages.

My crazy utopian idea is for some kind of protocol (or equivalent) that would allow native package managers (mobile or desktop) to “plug in” to the website repos of authors, directly.

So it does! OK so this is pretty close to a decent solution after all (the ideal one being IMO exactly the same thing but native to the OS). Thanks for the correction.

Yes true! Forgot about Obtainium. Personally I’m not much tempted because all it does is swap out F-Droid for Github (i.e. Microsoft) as the middleman. But I agree that it’s definitely a win for convenience.

PS: Turns out Obtainium is source-agnostic. Good news.

I have a tangential question. Would it not make sense for an OS, in this case Android, to have some proper mechanism for installing apps (in this case APKs) directly from a website (as lots of people have been doing fastidiously from signal.org by necessity)?

After all, this is all about trust. With software, assuming that you trust the developer, the goal is to be sure that nobody interfered with the developer’s compiled software - and who better to guarantee that than the developer themself, at their own domain? DNS resolution is already based on the “web of trust” principle, which is why you can trust your bank’s website. Arguably F-Droid performs a valuable role as a curator and selector of good software, but is there any good technical need for it to actually distribute the software?

As you and others have said, privacy is just much harder on mobile than on desktop. Mobile hardware and software is generally closed-source and locked down. On a tiny screen web apps are also at a genuine UX disadvantage to native apps, which offer much weaker privacy protection.

The pragmatic not-quite solution is to do roughly what you’re doing already. NB: maps are actually pretty easy - many people find that OsmAnd and Organic Maps are superior to the corporate options.

But the optimal solution is to move some of your computing back to desktop, i.e. probably to a laptop. This way you get more control over the hardware and software. And it’s already some kind of privacy win just because the thing is not in your pocket all day. It’s really not that hard and you might even find you appreciate the change! I did.

IMO the big sticking points are the messengers and transport tools - these are where you get genuine convenience from corporate spyware in your pocket. For all the rest, I’m not convinced, personally. For mapping and fitness etc, there are F-Droid apps which work great offline. For everything else including banking, just do it in your web browser while seated comfortably at home. As far as I know, no bank except Revolut insists that you use its app. If you want to do NFC payments, that may require a locked-down OS but not an app and it can be done in airplane mode (I do it regularly).

There are ways to get better privacy on mobile but nothing approaches the benefits of just using your mobile less and your laptop more.

Yup, messaging was the original killer app for mobile computing and nothing has changed. Just being able to arrange a rendezvous while out and about, hard to deny that this one was progress. Added to that are a couple of newer use cases like ride-hailing and payments (tho this latter doesn’t actually require a connection). But most applications are not better on a tiny screen on a street corner IMO, and the fact that several billion people seem to disagree is more explained by social media and addiction than anything else!

I’m not a luddite, I do actually have the thing in my pocket and use it too. But as you say, the point is balance and moderation.

Yes of course. But it requires a Pixel. A bit of a pact with the devil if you ask me.

GrapheneOS and LineageOS (I once used CyanogenMod) and Replicant and so on are great. But even better, I argue, is to migrate one’s computing back to the desktop. I know this is not a not a winning argument, I’m used to getting eyerolled when I suggest it, but my personal experience is that it’s not just feasible but better. So I’m sticking to my guns! But everyone should find their own path to privacy.

Well done! Make sure to tell some of that to people you meet in person too. Everyone here is a convert already.

So, my story begins with a Suse Linux CD back in 2004. I’d been on crappy Windows XP just like everyone else, a cracked version that was not updated, and it naturally got infected with a trojan. Took me 2 weeks to clear the thing out. But the worst thing about that experience was something deeper: it made me feel violated and helpless. My computer had been broken into because I didn’t understand how it worked and I didn’t really control it. Something had to change, I wanted to take back control. I’d heard about Linux so I ordered the CD from the Suse website and received it in the mail! And I never looked back. Now I use Ubuntu but that hardly matters. Back then it was blood and tears for me to get Linux working properly, but these days it’s easy peasy, anyone can do it.

That same year, I installed the cool new browser Firefox. Even before its 1.0 release it was the best option on Linux. And there too I never looked back. Except for a 6-month flirtation with Chrome when it was first released. Sorry.

Around a decade ago I tried Ubuntu Touch on a phone. Unfortunately it was unusable and even today it’s not much better. So Android it remains for now, alas. My approach to mobile is just to use it as little as possible, i.e. camera and music and podcasts and that’s about it. The thing stays mostly in airplane mode and has nothing installed except a few F-Droid apps. Everything else I do from my laptop, either using web apps or in standalone apps. Including communication. This is where I am most radical. It means there’s lots of stuff I don’t have access to on the go. Most people will not even consider this to be an option, but just remember that this is the way everybody lived until basically yesterday. If you want to, you really can decide not to be glued 24-7 to a little screen. Personally I consider it a quality-of-life improvement.

Using the desktop is IMO the single best route to better privacy. A corporate OS on a mobile device with lots of sensors which follows you around everywhere - this is always going to be a privacy minefield. A desktop web browser is the app platform where you have the most control.

20 years maybe, then a permanent community-service mandate

It’s a theme with the US justice system. Doesn’t happen in Europe, even for genuinely bad crimes.

The court has no evidence

Not beyond reasonable doubt, no. But there was a preponderance of evidence, according to the court. I’m sure you already know this.

In criminal law you need overwhelming proof. So I agree with you, it’s absolutely correct that he was not found guilty of this.

This pardon seems justified to me. Nobody deserves “double life imprisonment plus 40 years, without the possibility of parole”, as far as I’m concerned. Yes, literally nobody. And here it’s even worse than that: the sentence was explicitly designed to be exemplary, i.e., to frighten others. That is just retribution, vengeance, posing as justice. America should be better than that.

I’m aware that this guy probably ordered two murders. The probably is important.

The EU required that WA not connect its DB with FB for EU users.

Rookie numbers! 4 here.

perhaps take a look at the comment votes once in a while and do some self-reflection on your communication style, if not the correctness of your statements and either say: sorry, i’m clearly miscommunicating, or sorry you’re right

So, it turns out there are people here who believe that comment votes somehow track truth, or at least something other than the prejudices and confirmation bias of those doing the voting.

The naivety is sad enough (internet forums have existed for 30 years - have we learned nothing?). But it’s worse than that, because it suggests that you would put aside your reasoned views, your values even, in order to fit in with whatever the mob around you thinks. No democracy can work if everyone does this. Let’s hope you’re an exception.

Apologies for the condescension but there was no alternative here.