Well yeah, as much as I dislike apple, the majority of Google’s income comes from advertising - and to be the best at it, they need to have more personal data than everyone else, which = lots of tracking.
How do we open source hardware and make it competitive? If we figure that out, maybe we can break free of yet another 2 party system we’re creating lol
Not necessarily. There’s always the option to port something like LineageOS yourself, which is in fact where most of the ROMs for a much larger selection of devices comes from than what is officially supported by LineageOS. This is of course not for the average user, but it is possible. Except for some devices like the newest Samsung flagships that are based on Snapdragon. With the Exynos variants, porting AOSP and operating systems based on it is possible.
I don’t understand. There’s a large list of officially supported devices and users can create support for even more devices. Doesn’t that mean that there is a wide range of phones that support custom ROMs, even if not all phones are supported?
There’s one thing I’m still missing when looking at custom roms, and that is being able to properly hook into the camera API to use all the cameras that come with modern devices.
Unfortunately, no matter how open the hardware and software may be, for the vast number of people it will never be possible to verify that one specific peice of hardware is running a specific peice of software.
And even if the tools existed to enable normal persons to do this, they would need to trust that the hardware/software in the tool has not been tampered with and that the tool is running it.
I don’t think that that’s going to be a problem. We have a long history of dealing with such verification. What is important is that people trust science and scientific institutions, and sooner rather than later, in-depth analysis of devices conducted by experts will be able to provide security and credibility for the layman to rely on without the need to run tests themselves. This is basically how the privacy and cryptography branches of hardware and software engineering have operated for decades now.
Yeah I’m laughing at the top comment which equates Apple and Google on this. Please give me a break. Apple sells ads within its App Store and some people would have you believe this makes them an ad company. Meanwhile Google collects data from your browsing, email, phone, and tried damn hard to hook us on its social media products, and they run ads on all of those as well as third party sites and apps. I mean FFS come on.
Well yeah, as much as I dislike apple, the majority of Google’s income comes from advertising - and to be the best at it, they need to have more personal data than everyone else, which = lots of tracking.
How do we open source hardware and make it competitive? If we figure that out, maybe we can break free of yet another 2 party system we’re creating lol
You give them the freest phone with the most open operating system you can find and people will install the spyware themselves.
Give a person a privacy phone and they’ll install spyware on it.
Give a person a want for privacy and they’ll get a privacy phone and never install closed source apps on it.
You can lead a troglodyte to knowledge but you can’t make them think.
As opposed to Apple where advertising is a growing revenue stream that they’re definitely not gonna maximize because they have other revenue streams.
Agree on the hardware point. That said you can buy a Fairphone or a Pixel today and install usable Google-free software on it, today.
There are plenty of phones one can install notgoogled OS’es on, but it requires the buyer to look up the list of phones that are supported.
Not necessarily. There’s always the option to port something like LineageOS yourself, which is in fact where most of the ROMs for a much larger selection of devices comes from than what is officially supported by LineageOS. This is of course not for the average user, but it is possible. Except for some devices like the newest Samsung flagships that are based on Snapdragon. With the Exynos variants, porting AOSP and operating systems based on it is possible.
I don’t understand. There’s a large list of officially supported devices and users can create support for even more devices. Doesn’t that mean that there is a wide range of phones that support custom ROMs, even if not all phones are supported?
There’s one thing I’m still missing when looking at custom roms, and that is being able to properly hook into the camera API to use all the cameras that come with modern devices.
I’m a little iffy on just how Google-free any Pixel after 5 is even if you run Lineage or something.
I hope eventually risc-v become the norm. It’s the closests to the open source hardware idea.
Unfortunately, no matter how open the hardware and software may be, for the vast number of people it will never be possible to verify that one specific peice of hardware is running a specific peice of software.
And even if the tools existed to enable normal persons to do this, they would need to trust that the hardware/software in the tool has not been tampered with and that the tool is running it.
I don’t think trusting the security software would be any harder to trust than the OS or anti-viruses, both systems designed to keep the users safe.
More of an issue would be how to find out who is trustable, and that will take both time and trust from the getgo.
I don’t think that that’s going to be a problem. We have a long history of dealing with such verification. What is important is that people trust science and scientific institutions, and sooner rather than later, in-depth analysis of devices conducted by experts will be able to provide security and credibility for the layman to rely on without the need to run tests themselves. This is basically how the privacy and cryptography branches of hardware and software engineering have operated for decades now.
Yeah I’m laughing at the top comment which equates Apple and Google on this. Please give me a break. Apple sells ads within its App Store and some people would have you believe this makes them an ad company. Meanwhile Google collects data from your browsing, email, phone, and tried damn hard to hook us on its social media products, and they run ads on all of those as well as third party sites and apps. I mean FFS come on.