If there’s one thing GrapheneOS is good at, it is calling people out.

Having a program causes issues. Connecting it to the internet causes issues. Having a computer causes issues. Better turn your laptop off and throw it on the garbage.

Oh well

The fact that it exists might, even if uncommon. It was already in question for many developers due to the bad press and minimal effect on sales.

That being said, as someone who works in IT, please don’t use a hypervisor to run pirated software if you have absolutely anything important or of note on your computer. You shouldn’t even run your an admin account as your daily driver on Windows. MAYBE if you have a separate computer just for gaming and disconnect it from the internet. Maybe. There are other things to play or pirate though.

I’m not Muslim, though I do have some general knowledge of their teachings. I don’t think that this is a topic that can be answered only with scripture, since it was not directly addressed. You pretty much covered the two schools of thought in the topic.

But consider this: Jesus (considered by most Muslims to be a prophet) says in Matthew 23:23 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others.”

You see, based on the above, my perspective is that if you are using (any) scripture to justify an action, you’re probably doing religion wrong. Personally, I agree with the Muslim idea that knowledge should not be hidden, I think it’s an important addendum to simply “not lying”. I don’t believe in intellectual property as a concept. But…someone or many someones did work for many hours on the end product.

Is paywalling, say, GTA V “hiding knowledge”? I believe in game preservation and all that, but ultimately, no, that’s a little silly to say. It’s a luxury. An extra thing we do for entertainment, not to better oneself. Is it WRONG to pirate? I don’t personally think so (I’m subscribed to the piracy sub) but it’s certainly suspect, and at the end of the day we shouldn’t be spending too much time on luxuries anyway.

Has the government banned an educational book, or perhaps it simply isn’t sold in your region? I would have a hard time condemning that from any perspective, and I think the author of the book in most cases would encourage you to pirate, because they want you to have the knowledge within.

There was a book I was reading about personal internet privacy, and within, he mentioned that many people pirated earlier versions of the book. The author said basically “I can’t stop you from pirating the book. Maybe you can’t afford it. Maybe you don’t trust the value without seeing it first. Just know that I am considering not updating a new edition because I am getting less and less sales. If it ever becomes not worth it, then resources like this will not exist.”

At the end of the day, that’s what it’s about. If you respect the work being done and want more of it, you should pay for it, if possible. If you want more things like that thing, you should pay for it. If you want to prevent further degeneration of art into lowest common denominator slop, you should pay for it.

There are times where pirating (or similar things like adblockers) may be more moral than not doing it. YouTube has a lot of important knowledge that should not be gate kept, but Google is a very immoral company, and so are companies that advertise heavily. Ad blocking is the moral thing, as well as the best from a privacy and security perspective, even the FBI recommends using them. So at the end of the day, it’s a complicated topic, but you should consider “what would Allah do in my situation?” If good people create something with their hard work, he would reward them. If it is avoiding association with bad people by pirating, or finding a way to bring knowledge and wisdom to the masses, maybe he’d pirate.

I dont think piracy is that bad, and I don’t have qualms about not giving money to mega corporations, especially for content that rarely makes them or the actual creators money years after release. But if you’re really worried about morality, the question should not be “is it THAT bad?”, it should be “what is the moral line of action in this situation?”

Do you want push notifications from your browser? If so, then probably. Unified Push is a trusted, commonly used alternative to Play Services push notifications.

The problem with universal clients like that is that it inherently breaks encryption, shares it with a third party, and then MAYBE re-encrypts it correctly. And it does not prevent the third parties like Discord or whatnot from having access to your messages just because you run it through Beeper. It still goes through them. It’s not even particularly more convenient. You still have to create an account with the other provider, and often times this can only be done by downloading the app.

So there are a lot of downsides, and the only upside is not having as many apps installed, and I doubt you’re hurting THAT bad for storage.

It’s cool because online based chats have more features but are more susceptible to enshittification. A federated, online based, encrypted open standard like Matrix is the future.

Congrats! I know too many foreigners to get rid of WhatsApp. I try to count my blessings that it’s not WeChat or Facebook Messenger that inexplicably became popular worldwide.

It’s sort of a loaded question. Depends on threat model and what you’re trying to accomplish. Apple is frequently the “good enough… I guess” privacy and security choice, believe it or not, but heavily skewed towards security. And at the end of the day, iPhone privacy comes with an asterisk that Apple may keep others from spying at a mildly acceptable level, but Apple themselves will know a LOT about you. iMessage is E2EE (from iPhone to iPhone) but do you trust the trillion dollar company to not have a backdoor? I don’t, they’ve proven they scan content in messages.

You can mitigate privacy AND security concerns with GrapheneOS on Android. I do this and use JMP instead of Google Messages/RCS. This is the move on GrapheneOS, because Google Messages/RCS is not fully implemented, and hotfixes often break due to Google’s changes. You could also try a Linux phone, but usability has mixed reviews. These are the best options.

If that’s not an option, it’s almost better to just stick with iPhone, since other custom ROMs often have security tradeoffs in the name of privacy, and stock Android has HUGE privacy tradeoffs in the name of security.

So, assuming you are sticking with iPhone. iMessage is more secure than SMS, no doubt there. And since SMS security is not there, the privacy of the content of the messages are in question if it is intercepted. Although, these days, intercepting SMS usually require a targeted attack, and targeted attacks are almost always through social engineering. Note that iMessage will also use SMS if texting a non iPhone. But it is more common to go iPhone to iPhone vs using an app with XMPP to another app using XMPP, so in practice iMessage is more secure. Features are slightly better on iMessage. Sometimes I miss being able to edit my texts, not having them be split up into multiple messages, and group chat is slightly simpler (assuming everyone is on iMessage, if not it goes right back to the same functionality)

Are you worried about approximate location data from your mobile provider? If so, JMP is a great choice for that, since you can sign up for some carriers anonymously, and you won’t be using the phone number they provide to you. You can even get a data only Sim card. JMP almost entirely prevents SIM swaps. It’s harder for governments to pull your cellular location data and tie it to you, though they can get it from Apple depending on the situation and if they know to look specifically for you. Some websites scan your device info, which can include your SIM phone number. Even JMP itself, when I went to sign up, offered me numbers to choose from that were the same area code as my SIM card number. Only…I specifically picked an area code for a state I’ve never been to. So if you use that SIM number, many sites that will be able to tie it to your real name from public records or people search sites. Lastly, JMP can give you multiple numbers for half the price of the first, which can be pretty useful for dating new people you don’t trust yet, spam, restaurant wait lists, calling a company anonymously, selling stuff locally, etc.

Money wise it is about the same. JMP costs extra money on top of your separate SIM bill, but since you don’t care about your SIM number, you can constantly get new customer deals that usually last up to a year, and further obscures your cellular location history.

All of this assumes you have a factory unlocked phone. If it is locked to a big name carrier, it becomes harder to sign up anonymously. If you have a carrier locked phone, may as well stick with iMessage.

Tl;Dr: JMP is a fairly significant privacy boost at a slight security decrease and slight feature loss, but there’s a lot more to it.

I wouldn’t say it is irrelevant when there is a worldwide push towards authoritarianism and countless examples of unreasonable search and seizure.

Plus, everyone has their own threat model. It’s almost a meme in the privacy community, but there’s a reason threat modeling and prioritization is step #1. It may not be a big concern to you (in your opinion), but imagine if it didn’t exist for someone who needs it.

Depends on what features you need. For some people the whole idea is that you can take and make calls on your watch, as well as messaging. Sometimes the health tracking stuff requires a proprietary app instead of Gadget Bridge.

The most private watches are glorified notification machines. I got my wife a Garmin Venu and she uses their app. It’s not perfect but they’re fairly private as far as smart watches go. She needs all the bells and whistles so that’s the best I was able to find that is high end.

That sounds wildly unnecessary and resource intensive tbh. You’re already trusting their software, but you don’t trust…what? Their server security? Their signing process? Their honesty about the open source code being what you’re downloading? I’m really struggling to understand your thought process here.

But then I wouldn’t have been able to make this meme.

I get you, I wasn’t being sarcastic. Going through something difficult has a way of bringing people together, especially if you still love it after the effort.

Hm yeah that blows.

It’s not that they have a deal with Google, it’s that Google’s hardware security is best bar none except maybe iPhone. And Graphene is the best way to degoogle, as counter intuitive as it may seem. They are working with other manufacturers to get these security requirements for new phones so Graphene can be put on them.

Yes. It is hardened a lot though, easily the most secure and private. Ubuntu Touch is maybe more private because Linux but it’s barely functional. iOS in lockdown mode is decent, better than stock Android.

I wish Ubuntu Touch wasn’t the main player because I dont want to give Canonical money 😭 Better than Google or Microsoft though.