nlm @ nlm @beehaw.org

NorthernLightMountain

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Joined

2 yr. ago

That too yeah! :D

It's hard to draw an exact line somewhere too. You have to compromise or you'd end up worse than Stallman and Snowden combined. All technology ends up off limits then but still. Avoiding obvious and actually avoidable pitfalls is a good practice I think.

Defining and finding those pitfalls on the other hand...

It really would make a great game. Pretty much Sim Ant on steroids.. and with bees of course :D

Ed Sheeran in Game of Thrones felt a bit odd.

That's basically where I'm at as well.

Ignorance is/was bliss.. I used to not care as much about security concerns but these days I'm a bit more paranoid when it comes to IT security overall.

True, these days I wouldn't really flash a phone that's till supported.. but when they hit end of life it's another story. Using an unpatched android phone isn't exactly optimal.

That is a pretty good point to be honest.

It might be a bit safer.. but you still have to trust the source?

But yeah, I flashed an official Lineage OS nighly that I got from their own site.. It still bugs me though and I kind of wish it didnt. :P

It is a fair point to be honest.

Closed source could be a bit safer due to liability I suppose?

If they were to do something really nefarious and would get caught they'd get sued to pieces and probably lose most of the reputation?

Sure, a shady rom would lose it's reputation as well but that's about it. There'd be new ones out pretty quickly.

And for what it's worth.. I don't think they're doing anything shady.. but still.

I mean, I use Linux on my main machine at home. That's open source. I do trust that though..

This all struck me after flashing an old phone I had laying around (My main phone is supported for 2+ more years) and then feeling like.. do I want to use this now? I got a slightly dirty vibe from in. :P

Being security conscious is annoying at times..

Yeah but how?

I mean, who's going to verify the code? And then there are new nightlies every day. Sure they don't contain that many changes, but you'd need to monitor them, for every rom on every phone. Well, maybe just for the one rom and the one phone model that interests you but that's still not feasible if it's not a paid full time job. If someone were to do that on their spare time they wouldn't have much of that left :P

Exacly my concerns.. and I don't have the time or energy (hell or even the motivation) to go through all of their source code to find shady stuff.

I probably wouldn't even find it if any was in there and hidden by someone who knows what they're doing. :P

They do yeah, but they could technically include some shady stuff as well.

I don't know. I do like custom roms since they revive old phones. But I've recently started feeling a bit iffy about it to the point that I'd rather get a new phone that'll be supported for like 4 new years or something.

Hmm I think they've started it on their A-series as well:

https://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-android-updates-1148888/

There's a huge difference between brands when it comes to android. Samsung now provides four os upgrades and then security patches for a bit after that so that's 4+ years of support.

Fairphone has an even longer support time. I think it's 5 years? Maybe more, not quite sure.

Never thought of it that way tbh but yeah, it totally was!

See, now we just need a graphics guru and probably a sound person and we can have something going!

Maybe a biologist as well?

Don't really remember the music, I'll have to look it up.

It was so satisfying to manage to get the family to move out of their house because of all the ants too!

I think I still might have the box and the book laying around somewhere!

I'll second Security Now!

Listened to it for years but kind of lost track when I stopped having to commute. Kind of miss it really but I don't find as much time for podcasts these days sadly.