A judge can’t make laws. Higher courts can set precedents about how existing laws are interpreted,but that isn’t happening here. The judgment will be specific to Meta.

Yeah, now every “desktop app” is a shitty website that bundles its own copy of chromium. Progress!

“It’s a piece of shit, it’s unusable” like the guy in the video says.

He doesn’t say anything like that. He points out the notice it shows on first use saying it’s unfinished and soliciting bug reports, then ends by acknowledging they’re working for free and it’s a work in progress. Despite the comedic tone, that’s an accurate assessment; PostmarketOS is currently suitable for hobbyists and developers only.

In the middle he tries several times to make a phone call and never succeeds. If anybody is treating this as a serious review to decide whether they should use the same setup around the time the video was published, “unusable” might indeed be a reasonable conclusion, assuming they want to make phone calls on their phone.

People shouldn’t joke about Linux phones because somebody might not get the joke?

On the other hand, there’s a truth underlying the joke: Linux phones are only really ready for a narrow set of users. I say that as a partial member of that set: I have PostmarketOS installed on a phone. It’s fun to play with, but I wouldn’t like to use it an my main phone yet. I hope it gets there some day.

The intention is to mock everything in tech. He mostly mocks big tech, but nothing is immune.

The channel description says

SAMTIME is probably the only channel on the internet not smelling the farts of the big tech companies! From Apple to Samsung, Huawei to OnePlus, we make fun of everyone and tell it like it is (aaand maybe exaggerate just a little if it’s funny).

and that seems about right from the handful of videos I’ve watched. He spends a lot more time mocking big tech firms than poking fun at Linux.

Android was out for at least five years before Safetynet was a thing. I’m surprised people weren’t louder in their objections to that then.

He’s a comedian. His videos aren’t meant to be taken seriously.

adb sideload is for installing an OS or OS update. The command to install an app is adb install.

Who do you want privacy from and why?

That’s not a rhetorical question. It matters. If you want privacy from corporations and governments doing mass surveillance because you’re against mass surveillance in principle, Signal is great! As long as you don’t give janky apps permission to read your notifications, or you limit what Signal shows in its notifications, your device won’t leak to those kinds of threat actors. You can’t be sure everyone you talk to is as fastidious though.

If the cops, gangsters, or similar are likely to target you and the people you’re talking to directly, there’s a good chance just using Signal without a security plan won’t keep them from getting the contents of the conversation as in this recent incident where the FBI extracted deleted messages from notification logs. To defend against that specific attack, everyone needs to configure Signal to keep message content and contact details out of the notification. Dedicated devices for secure communication set up by someone who knows what they’re doing are ideal in this situation. Signal is still a good choice here, but Signal alone won’t guarantee privacy.

If you’re being targeted by an intelligence agency from a rich country that has allocated a significant budget to surveil you in particular, you’re probably screwed. There’s plenty of public information about how US government officials and contractors are required to work with classified information to get a sense of how you might try to mount a defense. It’s guaranteed to be inconvenient.

Based on a quick web search, staff can only remove people temporarily for rule violations; it takes a court order to get a long-term ban from the NYC subway.

They won’t affect Android builds that aren’t Google-certified directly.

They’ll affect F-Droid in that most people won’t be able to install most apps from F-Droid without an obnoxious process and a waiting period. That will affect what people spend their time building and will likely result in fewer open source apps being created and maintained.

Sounds like a decentralized encrypted messaging platform is needed.

Decentralized probably isn’t desirable for this use case; self-hosted is. When designing something for that purpose based on a decentralized protocol like Matrix, it’s probably desirable to mandate that the most sensitive conversations take place using a server with decentralization disabled and a client restricted to using only that server.

Do you need a recommendation for an adblocker?

An app that could be a website and wants a huge intrusive set of permissions? So just like every corporate social media thing ever.

Anyone who was publishing to FDroid already is not going to be annoyed about the 24 hour scare screen for users.

Bullshit.

It’s hard enough to get people to step outside the Play Store ecosystem. Any additional friction will greatly reduce the number who do, and the combination of a reboot and a long waiting period is a lot of friction for the average person.

And the reason it’s less the default in the US isn’t because people are so forward-thinking to use signal, but iOS being so uniquitous that people use iMessage.

I don’t think that’s quite it. iOS wasn’t as popular in the USA when WhatsApp use really started to take off elsewhere.

Instead, I think it was a combination of unlimited SMS plans being the norm, and most Americans having few international contacts.

How much of the data Meta can siphon is an open question as I understand it. WhatsApp definitely uses encryption, but there are a bunch of ways the client could send them the cleartext, especially if one allows their chatbot into a conversation.

It’s hard to say which is worse. I have a fair number of contacts on Signal now, and I find that’s a good balance of easy and trustworthy.

If I put someone’s number into the contacts on my phone, I will see what messaging apps are connected to that phone number in most cases. If they have Signal, I’ll try that first. I’ll try WhatsApp before SMS because it’s a better user experience and probably encrypted.

It’s definitely unfortunate that it’s a proprietary closed system owned by big tech. On the other hand, SMS/MMS is a pretty bad user experience by comparison, and it’s unencrypted.