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So I fell for the classic blunder and ended up with a pixel that's not OEM unlocked despite being advertised as such. After a few hours of searching it looks like the only way I'm getting an OEM unlocked pixel is full price from Google itself. I don't have $400 for a new phone, I bought the one I have for $150 in 2019.

Are there any cheaper ways to get control of my phone?

Russian authorities have begun restricting access to Telegram, one of the country’s most popular social media apps, as the government continues to push everyday Russians toward its own tightly controlled alternatives to foreign tech platforms.

On Tuesday, the government said it was restricting access to Telegram for the “protection of Russian citizens,” accusing the app of refusing to block content authorities consider “criminal and terrorist.”

Russia’s telecommunications regulator Roskomnadzor said in a statement that it would continue to restrict the operation of the Telegram messenger “until violations of Russian law are eliminated.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/63572900

I've recently been working on scraping the app api for instagram for a project, and I'm surprised at the amount of data it sends that it shouldn't need. I knew it did a lot of tracking already, but after looking at what it sends, I am never installing that app outside of an emulator.

When you login it sends:

• How many sim cards you have installed
• Whether you have whatsapp installed
• whether you gave permission for: call logs, contacts, answer phone calls
• Timestamps for when you opened the app and when you clicked any component.

On most requests, it sends:

• Your connection type (WIFI/mobile data)
• Your connection speed
• Whether google play attestation is working
• If your phone is foldable or not
• Whether you have dark or light theme enabled
• What device you are running instagram on
• The components you clicked on to navigate to whatever page you are on, as well as timestamps for when you clicked them.

When loading your timeline, they payload contains:

• Whether instagram has permission for your camera
• Your battery level
• Whether your phone is charging
• The time you opened the app at.
• Whether you used pull to refresh to load your feed.
• Your volume level
• Your timezone offset.

For every useful request it sends about 2 to /logging_client_events, which has a binary, encoded as base64 payload.

On a Linux, you can securely erase data or hide erasure after the fact by overwriting the affected location on disk with new data. This new data could for instance be all 0s or randomly generated numbers. There are several programs that can do this on Linux.

I always wondered how to do this on my Android phone without accidentally f*cking up my data because of how Android partitioning works. I mean... Have you seen an Android block device list? (This is NOT critique! Android's partitioning methodology is one of the reasons for it being so secure an OS, apart from process isolation/containerization. I think they call it "siloing"? Android devs/enthusiasts, please correct me!)

Then I discovered Extirpater. Check it out and let me know what you think! It was archived not too long ago. https://gitlab.com/divested-mobile/extirpater

Australia's Privacy Commissioner Carly Kind determined in 2024 that Bunnings breached privacy laws by scanning hundreds of thousands of customers' faces without their proper consent.

A review of that decision by the Administrative Review Tribunal of Australia has now found the opposite

The retailer did not break the law by scanning customers' identities, but should improve its privacy policy and notify customers of the use of AI-based facial recognition technology, the ruling said

Petty typical stuff by this point. The privacy-invading company wins, pissweak government makes a few privacy "recommendations" but stops short of enforcing anything

I will be upfront with this, and say that I've never been a huge fan. But I did reinstall a Matrix server, and some clients to see if it'd gotten better in the year or so since I've last used it.

This just... Kind of feels like a more centralized XMPP with group chat folders that sort of function? The spaces feature is neat, but I've tried 4-5 clients, and every single one of those throws all of them into the same screen as the DMs by default, and I can't find a way to change that.

Am I missing something here? Like. I want to at least see what people like here, I just can't.

I have never had a LinkedIn account, both out of general anti-data-vacuuming-social-media, and specifically anti-whatever-the-fucking-corphead-psychos-are-doing-on-LinkedIn tendencies, and managed to find a decent job out of uni just fine (software field). I'm now looking for a job again and the number one piece of advice I'm being given by concerned parties is "get on LinkedIn".

I'm curious how many people into the whole "privacy" thing have had to make this choice, and which way you went with it.

Do the advantages (which it seems mainly boil down to "networking") outweigh the icky feeling I'd get making an account? Of course only I can actually answer that question, but it sums up my conundrum.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/55042223

Getting pixel 9, graphene?

Hey y'all! So we are changing phone providers and they are forcing us into getting a new phone. I have an s23 which I hate anyway, and can get a pixel 9 or 10 now. I want the 9 since it seems better for me.

My question is, should I install graphene on it right away? I don't wanna have to reset it again down the road. And I don't care about warranties, if it dies I can afford another one.

Graphene seems to support the 9 and 10 from what I'm seeing

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/55057321

Hey yall

Had to get an all new furnace and heat pump installed. I opted for the Honewell thermostat. I don't want this thing on my wifi. I don't need to have it connected right?

“They” are saying it has to be on wifi so it can see the outdoor temp to talk to the heat pump. Bullshit i say.

Curious what everyone here uses for their weather app or website of choice ?

Good afternoon, y'all!

I have decided to take the plunge and switch over to Graphene OS. Is there anything I need to know before I use the web installer? I'm a bit bummed about having to set up all my apps again, but I'm exporting all my settings, thanks FOSS apps! to help with the transition. Most of my data is fully backed up through Nextcloud, so I'll be able to just jump straight in with my photos and data.

So yeah, any tips or advice would be greatly appreciated before I go through with it tonight. Thanks, y'all and again, I love being a part of the Lemmy community.

Every morning, I do a multiple DNS Leak test just as a precaution. Today, I did the leak test and all my IPs were different. They were the same IP block, just different. This made me suspicious and I set about trying to track the problem down. Turns out, there was a misconfiguration in the VPS. Worked yesterday, different today. I guess it was ghosts or gremlins in the machinery.

I got to thinking, for you guys who download a lot of Linux ISOs, might be a good idea to check daily. Even though you are setting behind a VPN, it's still worth the minute it takes to fire off multiple DNS Leak checks just for a sanity check.

I've been happily running my own mailserver for ten years, but recently, the overlords (garbageMail and MicroShit) have been blocking my messages. I think I knew the day would come when they successfully push me out of SMTP, and it's today. I have 100% compliance: SPF, DKIM, TLS, DANE, DMARC, etc. yet everything I send goes to spam. Emails I reply to (with reply headers) go into spam. How can they even justify it?

I don't want a full inbox (pop/imap). I'm just looking for a privacy-friendly SMTP service for sending mail with reputation. I'm not mass-marketing so pretty much whoever is cheapest per month and respects my privacy.

Looking at like, mailgun, simplelogin, proton? This is so sad.

So far so good. Not sure how it is in everyone else's phone, but if the instance doesn't work, I just swipe back, hit settings, and select another instance.

It's got Webveiw and seems nice. I can save boomarks to the bookmark app integrated with my OS but can't figure out how to access it on Searchist.

So have you tried it and what do you think? My only hangup is the bookmarks, and this was released just a few days ago, so I bet they'll fix it.

Do you use Signal for chatting securely with friends and loved ones? Us too! We endorse it wholeheartedly, and rely on it for nearly all our communication.

But the vibes are deteriorating here in the US, and we should have a communications contingency plan for if Signal goes down.

Here's a year-long programme to get yourself off Big Tech products, step-by-step.

Many here will already have done this, but please share with your friends and family who are still yet to take that journey.

Let's stop feeding the (data) beast! This movement requires huge numbers of people to do it, to be really effective, so all upvoting is appreciated 😀

I miss the olden days when staying logged out of your account meant your recommendations weren't cluttered up by every post you read, video you watched or search you did across every device.

Any way to curb this?

So I just discovered that SmartTube had malware in it (yay) and so I reset my Chromecast I had it set up on.

What is weird though is that when I reset it now it disconnects from the WiFi all the time like seriously every 10 mins or so AND the Mullvad app was showing up back on it but the thing is I didn't reinstall it.

Is it possible this malware wasn't wiped from the factory reset? Or am I just paranoid?