This. No matter how convenient and useful current smartphones are in daily life, there's always the nagging discomfort by knowing you are carrying a half-nefarious spying device. One where even the so-called reputable vendors can't be trusted to not put in malicious adware, planned obsolecense, and do everything in their power to ensure you don't really own the thing.
About a year ago I switched from Windows to Linux for my home media PC, and it's such a relaxing experience. My computer just does what I tell it to do, and nothing changes unless I want it to.
By contrast, whenever I do have to boot into Windows to run some specific application, it's like I've invited a corporate representative from Microsoft into my home. Things are changed for me on updates. The OS suggests things to me I have no interest in. When I want to use Microsoft software, I have to log into accounts for some reason, which often means a round trip through email to reset the password. Once Windows even changed firmware settings without asking me which broke things in Linux.
The best things about Linux are not what it does, but what it doesn't do. I want this for my phone as well.
Its time to upgrade your PC. Now. We don't care you're running a presentation. yeah We'll let you delay it... for now.
Its time to dim your screen. We don't care if you're reading a recipe while you cook. No we won't put a widget to allow this temporarily. We think its better buried in the settings. And you'll have to set it back later.
Its time for feature X to not work or not exist anywhere. We don't care that it worked in the old version. We don't like it.
My roommate in college refused the Windows update request enough times that it just took the decision out of his hands and _told_ him it was rebooting...in the middle of a LAN Starcraft game we were having. (Hilariously, Starcraft also ran perfectly on my Wine/Ubuntu and had all sort of weird bugs and visual artifacts on his Vista/7)
I truly can't imagine how anyone can consider a system that reboots without your consent, no matter whether you're playing Starcraft or giving a presentation or launching nuclear warheads, to be appropriate for serious work. It seems like one of the very basic jobs of an OS to _not turn off while you might be doing something important_. Perhaps the answer is as simple as "there's a setting buried somewhere that all technically-literate Windows users change", but the default behavior is beyond insane.
With all the editions and versions of Windows 10, there doesn't appear to be a single definitive answer to that.
I for one settled on https://github.com/marcosbozzani/Win10ActiveHours , which prevents reboots by scheduling a task to update Windows' own "Active Hours" twice a day.
But wow, phones and computers nowadays are like a giant steamroller, squashing users common sense, interests and privacy.
There are settings that only apply to some "apps", there are "app wide settings", there are important settings hidden 4 layers deep under some category where one would never suspect them to be.
Then there's the fact that MS has the tendency to just silently revert settings, often privacy and telemetry related, after updates. On that end, Windows 10 very much feels like it's actively working against the user, it feels like you are only a tolerated guest on your own system.
This is so user-hostile it's not even funny. Imagine if you had someone in your life who silently went back on agreements when you weren't looking. You would work to remove them from your life as soon as possible.
> We think its better buried in the settings. And you'll have to set it back later.
A criticism of the Settings App as it stands today based on your usage of it a year ago is very unfair as it's continuously improving and evolving.
How do you know his/her opinion is based on year-old usage?
As MS has slowly whittled down and removed features from the Control Panel, they have simultaneously added analogs where appropriate in the Settings App. The Settings App in 20H2 is very different and far from useless when compared to what shipped a year ago, or when Windows 10 launched.
You shouldn't need a third-party utility for re-disabling settings after updates, and it's pretty clear at this point that Microsoft just doesn't give a damn about respecting the user's choices.
Definitely a refreshing feeling compared to the use of a million cloud services.
May I inquire about the name of this app? Is it desktop-environment specific?
My experience with Linux on the Desktop is that it wants to install updates. It doesn't force me to install updates, which I appreciate. However, eventually I also want to install updates. Unfortunately, on numerous occasions these updates have rendered the system unbootable. This is not a worthwhile tradeoff.
This has never happened to me with Windows. I'm aware that it does happen to some users, but I have trouble believing that I'm just really unlucky with Ubuntu/Debian/PopOS and Fedora.
Are these "updates" or "upgrades"? If the problems are with updates, I would say that your experience is not typical of most Linux users.
Its a shame that you are having problems because the modern Linux experience is pretty slick.
I don't think you can blame linux, it's just a specific distro trying to do a task which is too hard and fail.
Not sure if it's still the case with ubuntu, I just run Arch which is a rolling release distro; I decide when to upgrade and what it implies + their info on breaking updates is always punctual.
No, of course you can't but that's also the problem. It's always someone else's fault.
If you try to upgrade Ubuntu you're told to RTFM. If you try to upgrade Raspbian, you're told you should have just installed a new image.
Linux distros routinely offer up options and features that do not work and there's no responsibility to be had.
With Windows, it's Microsoft's fault and they fix it (eventually).
And to be fair, updates broke my Windows systems multiple times in the past as well. This isn't really a problem by itself since errors and mistakes happen, the problem is that the state of recovery tools in both systems is somewhat lacking. Linux can be repaired from Live USB and has Timeshift, but it doesn't have an easily accessible built-in rescue environment that's actually useful. Windows has DaRT, but all decent Live USB's for it are third-party and it's very hard to repair its internals if the existing tools don't work. FreeBSD is probably the closest to being bulletproof, but it has its own problems.
"Unlucky" is probably the wrong word, since I doubt all those failures were independent, but you're presumably in some niche with a high probability of update failure (just as the users failing their Windows updates are). For a counter anecdote, I've used Linux laptops/workstations (primarily Debian/Ubuntu, but dabbled in others) exclusively for 15 years and have never had an update break _anything_.
If I had to guess, I'd say that it's a hardware compatibility issue? Linux can still be a _terrible_ experience relative to Windows if you have strong opinions about the hardware you want to use. IME, all the people who talk about Linux being a vastly superior user experience to OS X/Windows are those whose hardware preferences line up with good Linux support.
Lucky you! When this happened to me with Windows last time, I had no idea what to do and how to diagnose it even though I spent a lot of time on it and had the knowledge of all of the Internet available. I had to reinstall and painstakingly redo my whole setup.
When it happened to me with GNU/Linux, it gave me enough rope to actually debug what happened, so I could fix it and get back to where I was before. And I went through several Ubuntu and Debian dist-upgrades, and now I'm even using Arch which is a rolling distro that's somewhat expected to break from time to time.
So sure, it does happen more often than it did on Windows - but I don't think I actually waste more time with that than I did when using Windows.
If you want modern-looking LTS, try KDE Neon.
Across well over a decade of using Apt on Debian, Ubuntu & Mint, the amount of times I have seen Apt crash, is never. By contrast I have seen Apt tasks fail leaving packages partially installed. If relevant, it may seem a trivial, semantic difference, but I think it is a little more important than that.
Following the typical Microsoft paradigm of 'just reboot and hope for the best' will rarely result in the desired outcome, and in the case of something like grub could well end up with a system that will not boot.
For me a key difference in this case, is I have never encountered an unbootable Linux system (outside of hardware issues), that I could not fix with some basic tools. I can't say the same of Microsoft products (Personally, I don't consider a fresh install a fix :) ).
IME, there's a lot of talking past each other when it comes to OSes. The vastly superior experience that Linux fans describe requires a couple of one-time boxes to be ticked, like constraining yourself to known compatible hardware platforms and stable software versions. There are plenty of people who don't realize this dynamic exists and trip over it, and it's not dodging the question to make them aware of these limitations and let them decide whether the cost/benefit fits their situation. Eg, in my case, I like Thinkpads, don't game, and need a stable, reliable, and performant system that I can be productive on. The pitfalls of Linux don't affect me personally, and I obviously can't meet the needs I describe with a Windows system (or to a lesser extent, OS X).
[1] I hear this is getting much better with things like Valve's Proton, but I assume that Linux is still far worse than Windows for a dedicated PC gamer that wants to play new games.
I'm not trying to bash on Linux, merely point out that for everything it does right there's just as much it does wrong. The same is true of Windows and MacOS.
Saying "linux" has a poor update process or stability issues is meaningless.
> If, for example, you are running Arch Nightly and constantly pulling in the latest and greatest features, you're likely to see some stability issues. If you're using something like Ubuntu LTS, you'll miss out on a few new bells and whistles, but you'll get a very stable OS.
"You're doing it wrong, if you did it right it would work"
That's true of software in general. You can use (often older) more stable tech and lose access to some newer features, or you can used the latest and greatest and get a few more features and accept a reduction in stability in exchange.
I've never once ran into an issue with Fedora.
Fedora (at around version 20 iirc) was the absolute worst in my experience. I haven't used it since.
If anything Google is so far ahead they are advocating more privacy and less data being sent if you choose, because they don't sell it directly to people like a local grocery store with its own app or Amazon does.
Federated learning AI is basically making it where Google can continue to have all the benefits of massive data mining without any personal information ever having to leak out
The parts involved with spying on you will update regardless of what you want or say. Unless of course you're not using the play store (or any other google services).
It's a huge advocate of keeping all my data private but now knowing how useful it is to anonymize, encrypt and use it all on my device with things like Google Pay, I strongly advocate if you're using Google or Samsung services to update.
Plus these updates usually are Android level and not related to Samsung or Google
Maybe, even probably, no one have any nefarious motives behind the latest changes, but someone decided that if I want to upgrade my system now I have to start using systemd-resolve, and while I can and probably will alter it so it won't bother me, I wouldn't be installing it on my own.
Also, Firefox is the king of unwanted changes with little to no warnings, and while technically it isn't Linux, one day an innocent yum or dnf update install just killed my customized setup, flagged all my beloved addons as unsupported, and left them in disabled state.
>whenever I do have to boot into Windows to run some specific application, it's like I've invited a corporate representative from Microsoft into my home. Things are changed for me on updates
Yeah, it is really nice to have a consistent interface. But there is a flip side. Sometimes, people have to change in light of new security problems, and these sometimes need to be done quickly. The most obnoxious of these updates are interface changes (both UI and API). I think Windows does this too much and maybe for non-security related issues. The only real example I can think of is how OpenSSL uses envelope functions because ppl would abuse the primitives [Source: Alexandra Boldyreva, Christopher Patton, Thomas Shrimpton: Hedging Public-Key Encryption in the Real World].
I'm running about 10 windows 10 machines, various builds, auto updates enabled. Some in a domain, some in a workgroup. The last time an update bricked a system, or even broke a feature, must be over a year ago.
Now on Ubuntu, I have the same experience as some other posters. I'm reasonably confident that I can update if I do it semi regularly. But the number of times I've experienced breakage that lead to hours of bugfixing during $DAYJOB, is way too high. Now everything is in its own tightly controller docker, no more random breakage (unless docker breaks, or a key expires...).
A debian 9 apt upgrade actually managed to render my install inoperable once. But that might be semi-unfair as it had to do with graphics drivers.
Are you running windows systems on semi-recent hardware? Or is it all decades old thinkpad laptops with shitty thirdparty drivers?
The same paranoia applies to my MacBook Pro as well that was provided by work. All user generated content gets backed up regularly to aid recovery if things go north.
Do you? I don't. Microsoft is exclusively profit-oriented, they'll sell all your information in a heartbeat if they believe to have a legal way to do it and that it won't kill them in the next 5 years.
A group of open source maintainers (the more radical the better) will not. They will (usually) not polish the product as well, and they might be difficult to deal with if you found an issue (but you _can_ talk to them, unlike Microsoft).
I definitely trust open source people more, because they do their thing for ideological reasons and based on principles, not to maximize engagement and ad-spend and their yearly bonus.
This is why it's way more dangerous to give data to even open source apps that are encrypted and secure because if they ever do change your privacy policy and you don't pay attention to it, they could say they start selling your data and you continue to agree to it.
Have you really thought through that all the way?
Google has actually went even further in making it transparent where they show every bit of data they have on you. You can delete it all review it all have it auto delete, they don't need any of it
You nerd-sniped me there. I'm now trying to come up with some consistent metric of the nefariousness fraction of a product/service...
What I feel when using Android.
This will never happen. Personal radio communication is innocuous compared to what a modern cell phone is, yet personal radio communication is heavily restricted since decades.
Maybe we will eventually see an open source radio stack and truly open source apps. This will only happen once surveillance and kill switches have been moved to another layer.
A cell phone will never be on our side, it is far to dangerous.
You could use proof-carrying code or reproducible artifacts to keep the radio stack out of the users' control while still making it obvious what it is that radio stack does.
The BIOS analog would then only accept radio code that behaves in a particular way, but it would be clear from the (open) source that the radio code is not spying on you.
If you’re contrasting it with the HAM/Shortwave community, there’s an obvious difference in transmission power. The Electromagnetic Spectrum is a public resource we have to share intelligently. All the core tech in a cell phone is about how to use spectrum efficiently, delivering high speeds with minimal interference. Shortwave is much less sophisticated and operates at much higher power. There are real costs to amateur radio enthusiasts blasting transmissions with incorrectly configured equipment.
Radio firmwares can be open source. It's a red herring.
One of the frustrations people have with Google is that they're making it increasingly closed and problematic to make modifications. Given that nowadays some banks for example are mobile only and everyone is waiting for Google to completely shut down modified boot systems(probably in response to Qualcomm TrustZone being untrustworthy), people are re evaluating whether it makes sense to invest in the Android ecosystem.
EDIT: google could have capitalized on this and made it a part of their offering.
Caveat: It's been almost 4 or 5 years since I used it. I used to prank colleagues on Facebook by posting from a local prison or other weird places. Have had no use for it since I deleted my fb account. So I don't know if it can still do what you want.
On iOS the app installs and works and THEN it might ask you for GPS permission and you can deny that and the app keeps working, just without the feature that needs GPS.
I just installed Mi Home, a chinese app which requested every permission there is. I just denied all of them, could still use the app and am 0 afraid that the app somehow accessed my data.
A phone that would truly value the user would allow the user to provide a fake GPS location. Then you could use features that need GPS and not give up your privacy. But Apple doesn't allow that since it would make the phone less useful for companies who want to use phones for tracking.
A phone that truly valued the user would allow users to install multiple copies of an app, and allow the user to log in with different accounts. But Apple doesn't allow that, because they don't want people to share devices.
So you, I suspect, don’t want to “avoid tracking” so much as you want to avoid geo-gating of apps and content.
Content distributors rely on such features to satisfy legal obligations about what content they can show where. If the OS started adding features like “pretend I’m in location X” or “download movie regardless of app restrictions” (as an example of another feature that could be argued is pro-user) then at some point you’ll have a platform that isn’t commercially supported or viable.
Honestly, Apple is by far the most pro-user company in this field and there are countless examples of this.
But a very small minority chafe against the restrictions that are actually in most users interests (eg not allowing side loading of apps, which for most people would simply be an attack vector).
Many apps require location data for access to features. If you can't provide a fake location, your only choice is to either accept tracking, or not use the service.
Lots of companies use phone apps for tracking (eg. for tracking location of agents). The company will immediately realise when you turn off GPS access. If you had a way to spoof a location (eg. tell the phone to pretend you stayed in the current location), you could go to the toilet without your employers knowledge and without leaving your phone behind.
Abusers often use phone apps to track their victims. If you are in an abusive relationship, you may be too scared to turn off Find My Friends. If the phone was actually on your side, you would be able to enter a fake location, and your abuser wouldn't have to know that you visited your parents on your way home from work.
Apple wants location data from iOS users to be hard to fake, because it is more valuable this way. Apple's most important asset is the value of their ecosystem. It's why they can charge companies 30% to access it. The user's needs are secondary.
That's not to say I wouldn't want it either but I'm pretty privacy conscious, and a tech enthusiast. I just don't think you can say Apple is putting user's needs second, I don't imagine most users need this.
This exact same feature you are asking for would be useful for people abducting children, who could make it look like the child was still at school while they took them away.
This is far more likely to be why Apple hasn’t implemented it.
Oh and as for tracking, at least for the company they can already track you by what towers you’re connected to. So there’s no technical limitation on this being provided to apps regardless of what you might spoof.
Strava refuses to let you track your ride if you don't allow always-on background tracking. (They changed this about a year ago. Previously "while using the app" was sufficient)
A lunch menu app that I used before Covid allowed you to show nearby restaurants based on location. But there was no way to manually enter a location (without GPS it was just a huge unsorted list).
These are two examples that come to my mind (I'm not a person who uses a lot of different apps, I'm sure there's more out there. Try rejecting location access for a few apps and see what happens)
Edit: I'm also not sure why you are so hung up on geo restrictions. I don't really care about geo restrictions, and even if, you could avoid them trivially with VPNs that are widely available. That just has nothing to do with keeping my GPS coordinates private.
Are you an Apple employer with access to confidential memos or meetings?
I can’t see how you would know this otherwise.
But it is true that Android won't reject apps that refuse to work without a permission while iOS mandates that basic functionalities of an app work even when permission is denied.
https://www.androidpolice.com/2021/03/22/android-12-isnt-sim...
Think of it like this: if I'm actively using an app that's giving me turn-by-turn directions, then of course I'm not going to want to spoof GPS, since it would make the app useless to me. But if your app demands GPS data just for ad analytics, then yes, I would absolutely and without any remorse spoof GPS data for that app. In that latter case, I don't care that a developer might be unhappy with it, because as a user I'm unhappy that the developer is slurping up data they don't need!
https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/sensors/gnss on android now apps can access the raw gps data, which is much harder to fake
That's the issue with augmented reality games like Pokemon Go.
If the app wants to force a user to not modify their phone just so they have a secure enclave for which they can implement DRM, then i can't agree to it. This includes things like spoofing, but also things like memory edits or hacking save files, or anything else client side. If the app needs secure storage that's unchangeable, they can save it on their servers.
Considering that most of the world has some form of travel restrictions over the past year, and I believe that being able to interact with friends in the game requires you be be in very close proximity. Can you explain how spoofing GPS data so that people are allowed to play together even though they are not close is bad?
You could attack a pokemon gym at your convenience (from your couch, whatever time of the day). This negatively impacts other players because a legit, non-cheating spoofer will have to expend far more effort to do the same thing.
>Can you explain how spoofing GPS data so that people are allowed to play together even though they are not close is bad?
Friend interaction or just interaction in the game has to do with raiding and trading. You can already league battle (pvp) over any distance.
Niantic has made some changes along these lines - main one is the remote raid pass. One person close enough to a gym can invite friends to raid, no spoofing needed. They also upped the trade distance, how close you need to be to interact with a gym/pokestop, etc.
So the answer to your question is the game itself has made changes to address actual in-game scenarios. That leaves spoofing GPS as a way to asymmetrically cheat against gyms, or perhaps trivialize collecting pokemon (some are region locked and so on).
If you can just spoof, the whole nature of augmented reality falls apart and someone could simply spoof themselves anywhere and take those positions. It was a big problem before the android os made it harder to spoof.
There's no point/ fun in playing augmented reality games if enough people simply cheat and the real world limitations aren't a factor.
not to say how it you are anywhere not in a medium size city you need either spoofers or endless grind to unlock significant parts of the game
[1] to be fair I left before the pandemic, so I cannot comment on how they handled that
It really stopped being a large scale issue after Android started making it harder to spoof.
If your app needs to get info that benefits the user (as the mapping app GPS example), nobody will deny it because it makes sense.
If your app wants to get info that benefits you but not the user, it only makes sense for that data to be denied (preferably) or faked (as a backup plan). You have no right to it.
That's the whole issue - it's not the case anymorez now it's the ads that pay
Not only does Safari allow for 3rd-party adblock extensions that are pretty good, there are iOS browsers available, like iCab Mobile[0] for instance, that allow for extremely fine-grained, granular and tweakable ad-blocking, filtering, domain-blocking, and CSS and javascript rules - all of which can be user-edited and refined to fit exactly the user's own requirements.
There are always so many comments like the above in these threads: often characterized by people banging on iOS because it "can't be customized the way I want it after I paid so much for my iPhone". But these seem to be just standard consumer-mindset complaining from users that don't even have the intellectual curiosity to investigate whether there's actually anything already available that solves their imagined problem, or even try to fix it themselves - just as the article says.
[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/icab-mobile-web-browser/id3081...
Android also randomly breaks things now and then, but I can at least direct users to Firefox, which never seems to have any problems.
Please understand redirecting users to another browser is only ever a last resort. If I can fix the code I will, but sometimes something just stops working and I can't even reproduce it.
...and I have a teacher who is relying on my app for their classes this week and "try firefox" could save them...
Did you read my entire comment?
Can you see that there are entire browser apps that implement really granular and user-controllable ad-blocking.
In other words exactly the thing the poster I was responding to is complaining about.
(Am I misinformed?)
Quick appreciation regarding the intellectual humility required to add this to the end of your comment. In my humble opinion, this kind of attitude and approach represents some of the best of the HN community.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/cre...
Plus it applies to Safari View Controller for in-app browsing.
https://www.imore.com/ios-9-content-blocking-extensions-expl...
There's a weird situation with mobile phones where for most people who aren't going to go out of their way to make their devices private, Apple's ecosystem is the right choice; it has better defaults and better sandboxing. But once you do decide to go out of your way to make your device private, Apple's ecosystem stops being the right choice.
On a rooted Android phone I have network-level adblocking on my device that directly works with the firewall. I also run Ublock Origin in my phone browser, which blows every single Safari adblocker out of the water. I can also cut off Internet access to specific apps and games, not just to domains. I also have access to a litany of Open Source apps that wouldn't be allowed on app stores like NewPipe that improve my privacy by replacing services. And LineageOS imposes additional sandboxing on top of Android's built-in features.
But if a friend buys a phone, they're not going to do any of that. They can't get NewPipe because they're not using F-Droid. They're probably going to stick with Chrome, which has next to no adblocking or extra privacy controls. An iPhone will be more private and more secure for them in almost every way.
So it's a weird situation where which device is more private depends a lot on who you are. For most average consumers, it's likely iOS. But it's not quite so simple to say that iOS has the best privacy overall.
The shortcoming of using Blockada is that I can't use another VPN. I don't really need it yet, but if I would that could be a big problem.
I don't know why Google doesn't allow chaining VPNs. Maybe the UX would be too difficult on a phone, maybe it's a real edge case not worth spending money on, maybe it would be used only to block ads.
It's all about for who's benefit the product is built. I like the phrasing of having a phone "on my side".
In a recent thread here on obsolete hardware I was commenting how up to the fairly recent past products were built with the idea of competing on features the user wanted (or at least presumably wanted).
But no longer - in the last ten years that has shifted in too many industries to be all about features that the company wants (spyware, tracking, DRM, cloud lock-in, and on and on). The phone duopoly is a poster child of this evil trend. Neither platform puts the user first and into the drivers seat.
So no, I don't want an open source phone nor a Linux phone, specifically. (Not saying I'd mind if one or both are true, that'd be cool, but not a deciding factor.) I want a phone where I the customer are in full control of what it does. I must be able to override anything the OS wants to do and to override anything any app wants to do.
I couldn't agree with "people want a phone that is on their side" more.
I also agree that Linux matters as much as iOS's BSD heart—that is, it doesn't. But this is also why the Vulkan example doesn't serve your point. As with Linux, technical implementation details aren't why people are using iPhones.
Most people use iPhones because of the complete experience. For the few who care whether the iPhone is "on their side", it is clear that Apple's business model is generally aligned with their interests. This is either unknown or untrue for alternatives.
This is where open source phone vendors will fail. Trust is not simply a technology problem.
But it's also not going to, for example, let me install a web browser which is anything other than a Safari reskin.
There are other factors to 'being on the users side' than just privacy.
A better example might be places where it's hard to switch away from Apple's systems, or perhaps how they only support hardware that doesn't last very long and are notoriously hostile to attempts to repair your device.
> What people really want is a phone that they can trust to be on their side implicitly.
Absolutely! These days our computers only do things that align with big company interests. I want a phone that will obey me even if it means ruin for its maker.
100% this.
Why is it so difficult to copy files to/from my phone?
Why is it so difficult to list all the files in a folder?
Why is it so difficult to get a list of what's running?
_Why is it so difficult to know that my phone is working for me_?
Because they want you to have no choice but use their cloud storage
> Why is it so difficult to list all the files in a folder?
Because they don't want you to know what is a folder, just to type everything in their cloud storage search engine so you are even more locked in
Or maybe because Vulkan was a standard so long and late in the making that Apple released their own graphical stack a year before the Vulkan was even announced?
Both of those are missing the point IMO. What people really want, is a phone that is on their side. iOS doesn't support open standards like Vulkan mainly because it's not in Apple's interest to support them. Not because it's in the user's interest, necessarily.
What people really want is a phone that they can trust to be on their side implicitly. The nugget of brilliance in Free Software is saying "if you do all this stuff, then the power will be so tilted towards you that you will be able to trust your software to be on your side".
People want something that's both polished, and won't [forego polish in one particular area for the sake of the company's interests/$$$].