There should be a law that any time someone uses the word slam in a news context it should be about someone literally being slammed.

The FOSS equivalent of “find my device” is called… Find My Device. https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.nulide.findmydevice/

As I understand it the sandboxed google apps are entirely optional. You can go completely free with GrapheneOS just like with LineageOS.

They’re working with an (unrevealed) major OEM to bring a compatible device to market sometime next year.

https://old.reddit.com/r/GrapheneOS/comments/1o32gpg/blackberry_phones/nivsx0k/

Here’s hoping its a device with an SD card slot and optionally a 3.5 jack. The Pixel’s lack of those is the one reason I haven’t made the switch.

Source availability is necessary but not sufficient for 2 of the 4 freedoms.

Thankfully Immich is protected against rugpulls (i.e. becoming proprietary) by virtue of it not requiring a Contributor License Agreement (CLA), so FUTO doesn’t even own the copyrights to the code. Therefore, if anyone is suspicious of FUTO’s influence over the project, they can simply fork it (and I imagine someone will)

But if you have something doing face detection I would hope it’s stored locally and not sent to a “cloud” no matter who runs it.

“good” is subjective but FUTO’s software is non-free. Their attempts to openwash their proprietary license is enough of a red flag.

No, he was just a talking head that they hired a while ago. According to some in this thread he’s no longer with them today, but I don’t have a source for that.

In fairness, this is an issue with YouTube itself. It seems to take any opportunity it can to push you down a right-wing pipeline.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/01/29/276000/a-study-of-youtube-comments-shows-how-its-turning-people-onto-the-alt-right/

“FULU” is a consumer rights organization iirc. The name sounds like a spinoff or sister organization to FUTO, but I don’t think there’s an official relationship.

FUTO has always been sus, but privacy redditors gave them a pass because of Rossmann’s involvement.

Blocking internet access doesn’t magically turn proprietary software into free software.

I’ve always been an outspoken skeptic of FUTO (check post history) and their bizarre campaign against free software, but I didn’t know they were this bad. Yikes

This is proprietary (and running in a web browser does not make it less so)

LineageOS user here, so nothing will change for me. Perhaps in the long-term Google might kill off AOSP for good, in which case I’ll seriously consider a so-called real Linux device. Cautiously optimistic about the FSF’s Librephone project, which right now is attempting to reverse engineer blobs in Android devices.

I already have a Pinephone sitting around so maybe I’ll re-flash Mobian on it and play around with it. In the long term my ideal distro would be Guix or some Guix derivative.

Waydroid isn’t an “emulator” or a fully independent thing like Wine. It runs a full Android system in a container. It’s no more or less dependent on Google than AOSP itself is.

Just because it’s a libre phone, doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a linux phone.

Likewise, a so-called “Linux phone” isn’t necessarily a libre phone, either. But, I don’t care about Linux, I care about freedom, so a LibrePhone is important regardless of what Linux fans think of it, and if it is truly worthy of the word libre, it will be able to run your so-called “real Linux.”

Recently Google announced they were going to restrict certified Android devices to only allowing apps approved by Google. An F-Droid member found references to “blocked developers” in the new verification code. It’s not unreasonable to assume that this developer blocklist could be region-dependent and Google could use this ability to block Signal from being installed in EU.

As the top comment on the Hacker News thread notes,

Cloudflare clearly wants to move us to a future where only approved browsers are allowed to access the web… an independent open source web browser is obviously against that ethos.

I’m suspicious on that basis alone.

The problem is the works they didn’t pay for. “Copyright infringement” is quite the anodyne term for “theft.”

Other way around. Copyright infringement is the alleged crime. “Theft” is the entertainment industry’s spin term for it. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Theft It is best to call things what they are and not buy into this silly narrative.