I highly recommend an ad blocking VPN so rest of the apps hitting G ad network are blocked as well.
A privacy oriented VPN providers explicit goal is to give you some privacy, and you pay them for it.
Sure, a VPN can turn on you, but then they bite the hand that feeds them. Also, it would contradict what they explicitly say, completely unlike the situation with Google.
A Debian developer might also try to bring a backdoored package to your machine. Is therefore trusting Debian and trusting Apple the same? They are not, as Debians structure is transparent, the developers carry individual responsibility not just towards the Debian project, but towards every body that can see it, i.e. the whole world.
The theoretical possibility of multiple things being equally bad is irrelevant as long as other significant aspects are ignored.
I use Adblock VPN on iOS - it also has a dns proxy.
They have a build on the web; I compiled my own off of their source, though, so can't vouch for that.
Is there any other option?
It can leave connection open which prevents many cellular radio technologies from falling into lower power state.
Really depends on how optimized the cell modem is and how often keepalive packets are being sent by the VPN. Honestly, I haven't seen too much of a battery hit on ipsec VPN on the iphone SE. However, my older android phones used to get shredded on OpenVPN.
EDIT: If anyone's asking, I use the algo.sh script to deploy ipsec vpn on digitalocean (has option to enable adblocking too) https://github.com/trailofbits/algo.
It's designed to not use persistent connections, keepalives may have to be enabled in case of nat traversals though (to enable incoming packets).
How is Apple entirely closed?
Apple even stripped most of iOS related code for their MacOS open source drops. E.g they only recently started to release XNU source with code for iOS.
But as far as Android.... https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on...
You can use Firefox as your default browser on Android but are limited to a bastardized version on iOS. You can run an OpenStreetMap app as your default map on Android, but you have no choice on iOS. You can build your own apps and run them indefinitely on Android, but you have to pay a $99 yearly fee (on top of the Mac tax) or rebuild every 7 days on iOS.
I don't recommend iOS to anybody. People who think it is more secure don't understand defense in depth, and people who think it is more private don't understand that Pixel and Android One builds actually collect less information by default (before opting in on any of the dialogs).
If that's not it, report it. Every app I use works with microG, and any minor issues I had earlier were being resolved pretty quickly.
Source, please?
500 million is the number of devices which potentially had access to an app store containing apps that had malware. It's not the number actually infected. I mean, come on.
[1] https://www.cyberscoop.com/android-malware-china-huawei-zte-...
From the article: "XcodeGhost potentially affects more than 500 million iOS users, primarily because messaging app WeChat is very popular in China and the Asia-Pacific region." After that article was published, Angry Birds 2 was also discovered to be infected.
Did you notice how I compared to Google and Amazon app stores? Those are the devices that HN readers would buy (those Chinese app store phones are not available for sale in the US), and they have vastly more users than the iTunes App Store yet in total infected devices can't come anywhere close to the toxic hellstew that is the App Store.
> Compare to Google and Amazon, which run static and dynamic analysis of apps uploaded to their stores and allow third party security research on their stores, enabling both earlier detection of malware and faster takedown of all apps that share the same malware.
You're assuming that Apple doesn't do this?
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.macrumors.com/2015/09/20/xc... shows 500 million infected from 50 apps.
> You're assuming that Apple doesn't do this?
No need to assume. https://researchcenter.paloaltonetworks.com/2015/09/more-det... not only shows that there were thousands more apps affected by Xcodeghost than originally reported (and thus, more infected users than the approximately 500 million estimate from the earlier link based on the original 50 apps), but also that Apple was still taking down affected apps days later, waiting for third parties to report them. This despite that Xcodeghost represents a single malware that can be detected with a binary grep. That Apple didn't have the infrastructure to deal with even that demonstrates how woefully inadequate their app management infrastructure is for dealing with malware.
Where does the link say this? As far as I know Apple has all the information needed to make this decision themselves. As you said, a binary grep, coupled with many of Apple's static/dynamic analysis tools should be enough to find this issue.
"Starting September 18, Apple began to remove some iOS apps infected by XcodeGhost from its App Store.... As of this writing, on Monday, September 21, we notice that there are still some previously known infected iOS apps available in App Store."
> As you said, a binary grep, coupled with many of Apple's static/dynamic analysis tools should be enough to find this issue.
As I said, it should be so simple if Apple had set up the basic infrastructure for this. Since it had not, Xcodeghost remained on the App Store long after it was initially discovered, allowing researchers to find thousands more affected apps. Compare to Google's Play Store which not only performs static analysis but also crash analysis, battery usage analysis, and dynamic analysis through running the apps in cloud VMs (something Amazon did at launch).
To see proprietary and incredibly locked-down devices such as iPhones advocated for so strongly seems so weird. As if openness and security are at odds or something.
https://www.google.com/amp/amp.timeinc.net/fortune/2015/07/2...
https://www.google.com/amp/s/9to5mac.com/2014/08/29/seeing-t...
> … or rebuild every 7 days on iOS.
By tossing in a flippant remark, you undermine the legitimacy of the other arguments. I don’t think a reasonable person would conclude that you actually believe the above statement to be true. This type of rhetoric, in which reality is knowingly distorted to make a point, may be less effective than you consider it to be.
My two cents: half closed is pretty much the same thing as fully closed from a trust perspective, and apple’s incentives are much less in conflict with user privacy than google’s.