If govts actually start making stuff like grapheneos illegal, maybe I'll just stop using smartphones. If they're gonna be that blatant about wanting to be a surveillance state, then I see little reason to help them.
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has anyone questioned who is behind all this age verification all over the place, including forcing the credit card bans of the games, on one reddit post, someone said russel vought is behind all of this, but i cant find anymore info other than the post.
The credit card game bans are all coming from one Australian Religious group.
Similar Astroturf groups are being used to create fake grassroots community groups to PrOtEcT tHe ChIlDrEn.
I think it's not so true. MasterCard wanted an excuse to do this anyways. You can tell because the bigger backlash does not sway them at all.
I think there is an ounce of truth in that, but Corporations don’t “want” things. Investors want dividends and ROI. Executives want golden handshakes. Employees want a pay cheque.
Someone is financing the Astroturf campaigns. Someone is directing who they lobby.
It's a cooperation between:
- religious fundamentalist christian groups, many of which done some rebranding to appeal at least somewhat secular (Collective Shout, NCOSE - formerly Morality In Media, or even the European CitizenGo), while others are still primarily religious fundamentalists (Exodus Cry, Seven Mountain Dominion),
- big tech companies like Google, who want to tie their users' data to real identities, want to lock down their ecosystems even more, and don't really care about potential bans under a far-right christian theocracy as long as they benefit from it economically and finacially.
It just happens that those people pushing for it happen to be extremely religious. Nothing to see here, if we ever got our rights back and not everything will go to crap, we don't have to set up provisions so that a small religious extremist minority cannot get hold on our governments. In fact, those christian extremists weren't "real christians", they just pretended to be one, because my interpretation of the bible only include the good parts and I ignore the bad parts.
I wonder how home-grown European companies like Fairphone will be affected by this.
Mixed. They sell phones with "standard" Android and /e/OS. "standard" Android could potencially have strong Google Play Integrity API support, while /e/OS which uses open source MicroG can only get basic Google Play Integrity API support.
But since API check can be required by app developer for any reason, it can easily be abused or mandated by law like age verification or chat control.
I wonder what future there is for non google phones like fairphone, or even apple. Do apple phones use google things?
Yes. I'm unsure of where I heard it so take with a grain of salt but I've heard they make about the same number of calls to Google servers as a stock android phone.
As far as I know it's only the case with Safari using Google Safe Browsing service and Google being the default search.
Although I would prefer to roll-my own but Ubuntu Touch, postmarketOS and SailfishOS all run on the FairPhone.
YMMV for software support, but the non-Android Linux-based phone OSs will suit most people’s needs, as long as Angry Birds isn’t a killer feature of their phone.
nope, the google chrome is just reskinned apples own browser.
This is like saying that Safari is just a reskinned version of KDE Konqueror. It is patently wrong and oversimplifies the development processes.
While Apple did use Konqueror as a base for WebKit, and some of that code was pumped back into Konqueror, they are not the same. Chromium was also based on WebKit but has had so much code replaced that it is also essentially different code.
I recommend Ken Kocienda’s book “Creative Selection” about the development of the iPhone and WebKit.
I think in this case they’re referring to Chrome on iOS. Apple doesn’t allow any browser engine except WebKit on iOS so to many people that means Chrome and any other browser on iOS is really just Safari with a different interface. Pretty sure I saw something recently about the EU considering forcing Apple to allow other engines on iOS.
Once again, the EU ^^ is overstepping their mandate. There is no benefit to endusers if Google, Opera and Firefox are forced to use WebKit for rendering on iOS only. There are disadvantages for Opera, (who are Nowegian), but no other European companies.
There are huge benefits to endusers if their phones batteries last more than 15 minutes because Google and Opera are trying to backdoor their privacy.
^^ the EU’s regulatory bodies.
Yeah, I totally agree. Lots of people don't seem to understand centralized authoritarian control is the big evil, even if it reinforces your personal politics (for now).
It’s still amused by the whole USB-C push to “Reduce eWaste”.
By legislating that everyone should use USB-C, they generated a lot of eWaste in the form of legacy USB-A, B, micro, lightning, etc, as well as requiring more cables in the form of USB-C to USB-A, B, micro, lightning, etc. cables in the transition phase.
The various different types of USB-C cables (power only, data only, Thunderbolt 4, etc) as well as the glut of different incompatible USB-C interfaces has made things much worse.
It reminds me of the XKCD comic about introducing new standards to reduce the number of standards.
So far as I can see, this is just speculation (and propaganda!). Regarding European Digital Identity Wallet which the article says is under development, this would be an app you don't neccessarily have to install on your phone (and it might not be possible to install if it requires some google-pay api).
If they depend exclusively on the Google safety net attestation service this is true. GrapheneOS supports even stronger attestation though, they just have to choose to implement it properly: https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-guide
European Digital Identity Wallet is the reference implementation under which each member state can model their own to access all governmental services. It will effectively be mandatory for citizens to do anything. It's also planned to be part of the EU age verification implementation.
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