Found this really cool and minimal Android launcher the other day.

For the past few months I've been using a side (smart)phone where I only installed Whatsapp and Spotify. Just an old Android I found in the bottom of a drawer. This has worked well for me, and Olauncher is a nice touch that makes it feel even more minimal. I sometimes go out only with the side phone or leave the main phone on my bag. As a result I get much less distracted than before.

I know this doesn't qualify as a dumphone, but I thought I could share in case someone who is not ready yet to make the switch to dumbphone finds it interesting.

GOAT

Came across this paper the other day. I'm yet to read it fully, but its existence is interesting already. Dumbphones have now gathered attention from the media and the academic world too.

We're all gonna end up in one of those aren't we...

They turned around a 3-0, and won in penalties (6-5, went to sudden death)

I think more leagues should have relegation playoffs. One last chance of salvation for the upper team, one last chance of promotion for the lower team, and a thrilling game for the neutral fans.

So I joined a new gym last year and was pleasantly surprised. They gave me a smart card to get in and out, that's it, no app, no accounts, no nothing. Well, today I got to the gym and saw the announcement that they are phasing out the access with the smart card and starting to use, you guessed it, an app.

Now, I know this is not such a big deal in the grand scheme of things. But I'm just tired of this trend of replacing perfectly functioning systems with apps (public transport tickets come to mind). Just more ways to harvest people's data, I guess...

Ah and by the way, in my previous gym they not only required an app for accessing the place, they also incentivized people to track their workouts, meals and bodyweight using the gym's app (of course I never used any of these features).

Stumbled upon this article about the rising popularity of dumbphones.

Hope this community starts getting more traction :)

As for my journey, I am still on a "dumb smartphone" phase, an old phone with only Whatsapp and Spotify. I've been considering making the switch to a dumb phone or at least a candybar smartphone like the Qin F21.

Context: the creator of Linux is from Finland

The news was already posted here last week, but I found this great technical explanation of the flaw. Long story short: Apple is using bad cryptography. They got alerted by researchers back in 2019 but didn't fix it.

Recently stumbled upon the PhD thesis of a researcher at the Eindhoven University of Technology from ~2 years ago. I haven't read the whole thing, but I thought it might be of interest for someone here. It's freely available for download on the link.

Excerpts from the preface:

The sheer number of the surveillance systems that we document in subsequent chapters reflects the industrial scale of data collection in the twenty-first century. We hope that future researchers will take up the challenge of addressing each covert program as a research subject to fully and completely explore, and to freely share their findings with the wider world in the spirit of open academic discussion. This kind of basic research is crucial to anti-surveillance software and hardware development.

The machinery of mass surveillance is simply too dangerous to be allowed to exist. We must work to ensure that no one will be able to say that they did not know, or that they were not warned. We must use all of the tools in our toolbox – economic, social, cultural, political, and of course, cryptographic – to blind targeted and mass surveillance adversaries.