It’s probably more fair to call its claim of being decentralized fake or disingenuous. There doesn’t seem to be any way to participate in the ecosystem without going through the Bluesky relay, a central point of failure with strong incentives to eventually do something shitty.

propagating and caching images

This leads to the problem of abusive users trying to cause legal issues for server owners by introducing CSAM.

nobody is refusing to offer their sevices on linux because it is vulnerable

That’s not quite true, though in that case it’s about the service provider being unable to verify that the user isn’t running a operating system configured or modified to work against the interests of the service provider.

Maybe, but the archetypal non-technical user, my mother does want to run a third-party ROM. Her phone is out of its official support period, and she knows that security updates are important and would like a way to get them. Most people, at least in wealthy countries do have a technical person in their lives they can ask things like that. She doesn’t want to buy a new phone because it would be too big and lack a headphone jack, a position I share.

I had to recommend against running what I run (LineageOS, Magisk, Play Integrity Fix). Without PIF, too many apps will refuse to run on LineageOS. She doesn’t need root for much else (maybe adblocking) and doesn’t have the knowledge to make good decisions about whether to grant root permissions to an app that asks (Magisk doesn’t have an allowlist-only mode, but it should). Finally, keeping root through an update is fussy. It’s not hard, but it’s an extra step that has to be done in the right order every week or two.

Unlike Firefox in 2024, a third-party Android build that’s easy enough to install and isn’t sabotaged by Safetynet would something many non-technical users care about: an extended useful life for their devices.

Last time I used one was because I forgot my physical wallet and needed to pay for something. I don’t want to tell Google about my shopping habits, but I like to have options in case of emergency.

I’m running LineageOS (with GMS), Magisk, and Play Integrity Fix.

Can you cite examples of rooted smartphones leading to significant data breaches or financial losses? When the topic comes up, I always see hypotheticals, never examples of it actually happening.

It seems to me a good middle ground would be to make it reasonably easy (i.e. a magic button combination at boot followed by dire warnings and maybe manually typing in a couple dozen characters from a key signature) for users to add keys so that they can have a verified OS of their choice. Of course, there’s very little profit motive to do such a thing.

Google doesn’t want distributions of open source Android without Google services to be a viable option for mainstream users because that would reduce their ability to extract profits from the Android ecosystem.

While the focus is surely more on OEMs than end users at this point, I’m sure Google wants to keep the difficulty level for end users high enough that it remains niche.

I think the main reason third-party ROMs aren’t more popular is that Google and certain app developers fuck with people who use them. The article addresses the difficulties later on, but comes up short in my view on just how much of a hassle it is for someone who isn’t a tech enthusiast who wants, for example to keep an older phone up to date for security reasons.

I think the main motivation for Google is limiting user control over the experience. More user control leads to unprofitable behaviors like blocking ads and tracking, which is also the motivation for recent changes to the Chrome web browser that make content blocking extensions less effective. In all cases, companies that try to take away user control claim the motivation is security, usually for the benefit of the user.

I use Firefox almost all the time, but I’ve run into a few sites that act up, and the rate seems to be increasing. Sometimes I complain.

When Firefox had a tiny set of permitted extensions, I used Kiwi most of the time.

Extension developer information from Firefox explains why it was necessary to make some technical changes. What they’ve never explained to my satisfaction is why they took a cautious, curated approach to it reminiscent of Apple.

The typical approach of a large open source project is to put a “here there be dragons” sign on unstable features and let anyone who wishes to use them anyway do so at their own risk, and that’s the approach I prefer.

Kiwi Browser has offered an Android build of Chromium that will install and attempt to run any extension available for desktop Chrome. Most of them work.

Firefox also recently regained reasonable extension support on Android, which was a slow and frustrating process for those of us who had used it before.

They wanted full access to the user’s Google Drive. That’s a permission Google is very reluctant to hand out because some users (perhaps unwisely) store large amounts of sensitive information there, and very few apps actually need direct access.

Even if an editor app needs access to arbitrary files on Google Drive that it did not create, it can use the Android file picker. This seems like a case of an app developer failing to follow the good practice of minimizing permissions. I have complaints about Google and the Android ecosystem, but having high requirements for unrestricted access to Google Drive is not one of them.

PRNGs aren’t random at all; they produce a deterministic sequence of numbers based on a seed value and an internal counter. Two PRNGs using the same algorithm and seed will produce the same sequence of numbers. The sequence is difficult to predict without knowing the algorithm and seed, and the values are close to evenly-distributed, which is enough like random numbers for a lot of use cases.

Here’s an example in Ruby:

seed = Random.new_seed()
=> 142757148148443078663499575299582907518
prng_1 = Random.new(seed=seed)
prng_1.rand()
=> 0.6702742156250219
prng_2 = Random.new(seed=seed)
prng_2.rand()
=> 0.6702742156250219
prng_1.rand()
=> 0.9667236181962573
prng_2.rand()
=> 0.9667236181962573

If you run this yourself using 142757148148443078663499575299582907518 as the seed, your first two pseudorandom numbers will also be 0.6702742156250219 and 0.9667236181962573, assuming your version of Ruby hasn’t changed its PRNG.

typically portraits are taken with 50mm lenses

While photographers use a variety of focal lengths for portraits, the focal length that’s most associated with portrait photography is 85mm. This article from lens review site Imaging Resource illustrates the point; most of the lenses are 85mm or equivalent (e.g. 42.5mm on m43 with a crop factor of 2 making the field of view equivalent to 85mm).

There was a recent related discussion on Hacker News and the top comment discusses why this sort of solution is not likely to be the best fit for smaller organizations. In short, doing it well requires time and effort from someone technically sophisticated, who must do more than the bare minimum for good results, as you just learned.

Even then, it’s likely to be less reliable than solutions hosted by big corporations and when there’s a problem, it’s your problem. I don’t want to discourage you, but understand what you’re committing to and make sure you have adequate buy-in in your organization.

• side left: flashlight, keys
• front left: phone
• front right: knife
• side right: pepper spray, coins
• back left: wallet

The fact that it’s been out for a year and federation is still only half-implemented suggests to me the decision to add it was pretty late in the development process, even if it was early in the marketing process.

Threads is for whoever Meta can sell it to, and I think it was pretty far along in its development before they actually committed to ActivityPub support.

Since 2014, but Android had already been out for six years at that point.

We had several years of Android that mostly wasn’t. Now it’s hard work to get Android that isn’t.