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Apple Confirms Governments Using Push Notifications to Surveil Users
(www.macrumors.com)
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this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2023
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Lol you're dreaming if you think even 0.1% of people will be interested in setting up their own server.
They're also dreaming if they think doing these things doesn't just make them stand out, and provides them any real protection from state actors.
The number one rule of tradecraft is to blend in. I promise that you haven't thought of some way of using an always connected smartphone that the NSA hasn't considered. They are probably the ones making your degoogled ROMs.
This is hubris, plain and simple. If your goal is to hide from state actors then the best way of doing that is to be uninteresting statistical noise.
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Most "standard" messaging apps (that includes signal, telegram) use the "OS provided" push service. On Android, they use firebase cloud messaging, a component of google play services.
Degoogled Android means not having any notifications, unless the app supports UnifiedPush, runs in the background 24/7 (which drains battery), or runs in the background occasionally (which delays notifications).
If the app runs in the background occasionaly, you can "burden" the people on the other side by being slow to respond.
Eh, I use a few apps that have true foss forks and thus don't use gcm but the keep-alive method, and I didn't notice a difference in battery when I made the switch.
Also lol #3 isn't exactly a "burden", take the hint and go away people. Let me live in blissful solitude.
Pretty much my experience with pull-based notifications. I've even tested the same client on the same setup against both NTFY and client-pull without seeing a noticable difference in battery usage.
It also means you will be on a very short list of people who use Unified Push.
Well I'd say those going the degoogle route learn about things like Unified, NLP, etc, along the way. But it is something the end user has to handle themselves, rather than it just being there in the OS.
That's why I bothered to set up a nixOS config to deploy a docker cluster... I'm planning to give my friends and family a USB that connects to a private shared VPN, so all I have to do is walk them through booting from it
We all get a way to back up stuff with redundancy, and I'll throw up a Jellyfish server, maybe set up some llm assistants to scrape the web for interesting news and put it in a Lemmy instance or something. These are all things I want for myself, and I am willing to configure it exactly once... At that point, might a well let people I trust join the cluster.
Even my technical family used to scoff and ask why bother... This last week when my sister called and asked what I was up to, instead of explaining that it's more than just targeted ads, I asked if they noticed that everything sucks way more lately.
They never used to listen before... I think that's changing. I think it's time to build out alternatives
It's not so difficult actually. If you already use Conversations from F-Droid you can use your XMPP address to receive push notifications for example.
Let me just tell my dad next time he can find the Skype icon on his taskbar so I can call him.
One interesting point is that some aspects of Linux are actually really good for people who struggle to learn new things as a lot of things on Linux are very consistent, and don't feel the need to reinvent the wheel every few years like Microsoft.
Because anyone with older relatives or tech illiterate friends knows the fear of a looming new Windows release on having those people suddenly be asking us how to do basic things like change the WiFi network due to Microsoft changing it again.
And for some strange reason young people somehow getting a sense of superiority due to the fact they were able to find the new menu before their parents that was perfectly good before Microsoft changed it again.
Yeah, I was a believer of Linux on the desktop back in 2003-2005, but there's no way I could have converted my dad.
Which is why I don't update machines till they die. If it works, don't mess with it.
I'm so tired of MS moving stuff around.
Lol.