If it was all of Europe, I’d agree. That explanation seems improbable for just two countries.

How long before people abuse the text feature?

SMS works perfectly well for sending https://signal.org/install

This list seems to be based entirely on aesthetics, not necessarily recommendations for apps with good features or functionality.

Every screenshot there is eye-searing with nearly the entire screen filled with 100% white.

What do you expect a low-volume phone with an alternative e-paper display to cost?

I never said anything to that effect. The ancestor comment discussed running Signal for Android inside an Android emulator for account creation, after which it could be linked to Signal desktop.

Someone could presumably fork Signal desktop to allow the scenario you’re describing, but I’m not aware of any such efforts.

I imagine search of server backups would be pretty hard to do securely. Better management of locally stored media would be nice, but you can sort by size, export, and delete media from inside the settings.

If anyone is actually going to get that right in a mainstream product, it will probably be Signal.

A phone number that can receive SMS is required, but it doesn’t have to be associated with the device that’s running Signal last I checked.

It would be nice if the backups were split into time-indexed files so I could move the old parts to cheap external hard drives and only keep recent backups on my expensive phone storage.

I never set auto expiry and often search messages. Sometimes it’s because I want to find a specific fact or datum from two years ago; other times it’s just for a reminder of a memory. On occasion, if the history wasn’t there, people might remember something important differently.

This exploit involved Meta and Yandex apps running servers on your phone which Javascript embedded in trackers would communicate with. You’d have to both allow their trackers and have their apps installed to be affected.

There seem to be two main arguments put forth here:

1. F-Droid does not thoroughly audit the apps it distributes, so they might include bad behavior that is not initially obvious.
2. It is theoretically possible to provide a package to F-Droid that does not match the source code it claims to be based on.

To which I respond:

1. No app store thoroughly audits the apps they distribute. You must ultimately decide if you trust the developer enough to run their app, or audit the code and build it yourself.
2. This creates a theoretical opportunity for a developer or maintainer to upload a package that doesn’t match its purported source code, but it’s possible to check for this manually, and to automate that process. It’s likely anyone exploiting this would be caught and their reputation tarnished. It comes back to the first point: do you trust the developer or maintainer enough to run their app?

If you have average security needs, you probably don’t need to worry about this. If you have reason to believe someone well-resourced and dangerous wants to compromise your phone, you should probably be extremely selective about what apps you install and where you get them.

It is increasingly unrealistic to entirely prevent children from having unsupervised access to internet-connected devices from a young age, but attempts to make it impossible for anyone under 18 to access porn are equally unrealistic, and often far worse than the problem they purport to solve.

With good parenting, the possibility of accessing porn won’t harm most kids. It’s not just about keeping them away from it, but about teaching healthy and realistic attitudes toward sex.

I agree, and I think my solution in combination with some filter lists addresses that problem pretty well. Very few eight year olds will have the ability or desire to bypass restrictions like that to look at porn.

Kids can’t use computers, and that’s not good for the world. If teenagers figure out enough about how the computer works to get around the parental controls and watch porn, I consider that a net win.

I don’t actually care if teenagers sophisticated enough to do that see porn.

In a January blog post, it said age verification should take place on users’ devices, such as through their operating system, rather than on individual, age-restricted sites.

The details of this are potentially problematic, as they could preclude the use of open source browsers and operating systems.

It would be great to standardize an HTTP header that says the user is underage, which could be sent by any OS/browser combination that has suitable parental controls.

A big Bluetooth upgrade will soon boost your privacy and battery life

Not if I keep this Pixel 4a going for another five years it won’t.

When I read “privacy nightmare”, I think of a system collecting or revealing information without the user’s knowledge. As I understand BeReal, the user understands exactly what information they’re sharing, and with whom. That said, I’m puzzled by why anyone would want to participate on either side.

Here are some things I might be doing in any random time window in which such an app might prompt me to share a selfie:

• Eating food, usually not interesting food foodie friends would like to see
• Walking, usually somewhere pretty boring
• Sitting on the toilet
• Writing code at my computer (often code someone is paying me to write and wouldn’t like included in a social media post)
• Picking dandelions to feed to the goslings at the park

I don’t want to share any of those activities with my friends. If we’re catching up on life in person, I’m not going to talk about any of that. If any of my friends do want to see those moments, I’d find it weird and voyeuristic.

The interesting moment I do want to share, and people might actually want to see is the close encounter with the wild gosling taking the dandelion leaf from me.