I can hear the lobbyists (both civil society and big tech, mainly the big tech ones) marching towards Brussels right now. This will be as heated as the Digital Markets Act.
Fighting is expected to flare up again next year, when the Commission wants to present an advertising-focused piece of legislation called the Digital Fairness Act. The executive has stated that the rulebook will help protect consumers online, including from manipulative design or unfair personalization.
Yeah, Zorin did this recently too. They made some good arguments on why Mozilla’s trustworthiness has nosedived these past few years, but awkwardly centered on a ToS change that didn’t really amount to much.
They didn’t make a case for why Brave is more trustworthy, though… (and I’m not sure one can)
Thank you so much for reporting back :D
It’s the good old network effect. Telekom appears to be kind of expensive but getting an eSIM in general appears to be a valid (and likely cheaper) option.
That’s very helpful, thanks!
Hm, was expecting there to be some kind of artificial hurdle preventing me from getting a foreign SIM. But looks like I can just choose any SIM I like (read: minimal top up fees) from a country without annoying KYC regulations. The shipping fees to Germany for the shop linked above are reasonable.
Will report back if I find a cheaper deal in case someone else is interested. Thanks!
Live in Germany but perhaps this will help others :)
Thanks for this, looks like a great resource.
/e/OS is a good option to regain privacy from Google, but arguably does some things worse in terms of security than stock.
You can find a good comparison here.
For the Fairphone 5, I’d recommend CalyxOS as soon as they’re back from their hiatus. In the meantime, might as well stick with stock.
I too want to domesticate a Firefox
Have a later model, the Pocketbook Verse (not the pro edition). Flashed KOReader on it which was much easier than anticipated. Have a couple extra features in the reader that way.
It does as promised. I just plug it into my devices to get epubs onto it. You don’t even need a book management software like Calibre, you can use it similarly to how you’d use a thumb drive.
Thanks for taking the time to share, this was very helpful :D
Thank you for the thoughtful reply! One more question: Can you really manage everything using the website? Just sounds too good to be true!
Checked out the support pages. It does get a bit complex trying to figure out if they charge for adding money via bank transfers. But I got to it! For other people wondering (only valid for EU folks):
Turns out they take the customary 1.75% on using the card to get cash from ATMs (and even take 0.50€ on top after the second time). That makes them slightly worse than established banks for this purpose.
However they offer pretty low fees on transactions with the card. While established banks still take 1.75% on every transaction, Wise currently takes 0.46% on exchanges from EUR to JPY. They don’t seem to skew the exchange rate like PayPal does either. The only drawback is they’re free to change their fee any time, while most normal banks haven’t deviated from 1,75% in forever.
To my great relief adding EUR to your Wise balance is free with a standard SEPA (EU zone) bank transfer. And they automatically convert money to other currencies as needed. Though I wonder whether you can convert in advance to make use of favorable exchange rates.
This makes it seem like Wise is a solid option. Only one data breach so far, too ;)
Planning a trip to Japan soon and would like a credit card to pay for accommodation (I don’t have a credit card yet). Wise seems to be what I want but I’m not sure:
From now on whenever I talk about Android with Google Play Services I’ll refer to it as the “shit sandwich OS”
Finally a good, nuanced article on this topic, thanks for sharing. Only drawback is that the author doesn’t seem to be aware that degoogling your phone is a viable alternative, especially with manufactures like Fairphone offering this out of the box.
Lots of people (including myself, previously) fall for the narrative that Apple can financially justify not spying on their users because their hardware is expensive. Versus Google, who have always been about ads and data mining.
This logic unfortunately fails to consider that a publicly trading company will always use all methods at their disposal to keep up profit so shareholders are happy. Expensive hardware was probably enough a decade ago, but the golden rule is: as long as a company can fuck you over in a way that increases profits, they absolutely will, given enough time.
We need federal privacy law in the U.S. and we need it fast.
Wow, you just… described the problem we had on our Windows PCs that I never managed to describe
But Quick Share isn’t actually part of AOSP is it? :(
Looks like everyone will have to implement this for themselves and it’ll be a mess.