Don’t get me wrong, Graphene would still be my choice for privacy & security. But what started out as a quest for privacy has somehow morphed to include FLOSS idealism, even AOSP derivatives feel “too google” now and I feel bad carrying a Pixel.

It’s a neverending process. 😄 I’ve been at this for some 3-4 years now, and was ready to delete WhatsApp only about 6 months ago, and it’s already left me out of some local groups. Worth it though, and one group moved with me. And just now in the process of hopefully moving from Graphene to PostmarketOS (functional on an OP6) or Ubuntu Touch (to be installed on a FP4), just a matter of deciding which one. In retrospect, I could have skipped this Graphene phase and just gone from Divest to Linux, but I wasn’t ready then.

IMHO if you try to do things before it feels like “okay this works, next I want to try…”, you’re likely to just get overwhelmed and take a step back.

1. “Easy and painless” depends on your point of view, and we here tend to be biased. For example, just a couple of months ago I had to explain to “a normal person” how to make backup copies of a folder to a pen drive. She did not want additional backup software (and I still don’t know if W10 would have had the functionality out-of-the-box). Copypasting files was too difficult. In the end she decided to go with “save as”, which sounded like a horrible idea to me, since she’couldn’t remember how to open anything in Word that wasn’t in the recently used list when starting the software, and she is going to lose track of which file is which at some point. I doubt it would be “easy and painless” for people like her, who are very common outside our little bubble.

2. Making someone change their opinion is not a sprint, but a marathon. State your opinion openly when relevant, don’t get into an argument, let it brew, mention it again when it comes up, live as you “preach”. That person I mentioned? Happily using Signal with me. Eager(!) to try Linux once W10 support runs out. I’ve told her I’ll install Mint DE on my laptop and loan it to her for unhurried testing and learning this summer while having her familiar backup to lean on if it gets difficult, and to install the same on her own computer when the support runs out, if she still wants me to.

Ehhh.

As much as the traditition of yearly votes on some version of Chat Control sucks, it’s just two mentions (The Register missed the reference to COM (2022) 209 under “Fighting serious crimes/child sexual abuse”, because of course it’d be there) in a document with way juicier tidbits. Like

• actual enforcement of the DSA (finally some consequences for social media giants gleefully profiting from manipulation, or an affront to freedom of speech, depending on your opinion)
• overhauling Europol’s mandate to make it “a truly operational police agency”, whereas the current mandate doesn’t cover such things as “sabotage, hybrid threats or information manipulation” (cool or creepy)
• “strengthening border security”, “countering weaponised migration”, “security considerations in EU visa policy”, and “revision of the Visa Suspension Mechanism” are all probably necessary steps, but taken together paint a picture of something that shouldn’t be allowed to go too far

The DSA enforcement is something strongly opposed by social media giants, so I’d expect more denigration of the document as a whole in the future.

Same. Hetzner has a solid business in hosting, they don’t make their money from mining my data. They’d hand it over for a lawful request, but the data is not -that- secret and thus possible false accusations aren’t really an issue.

I’ve barely hosted anything and those must have leaked like a sieve. Trusting Hetzner way more.

Oh, they trust the government too, or would say so if asked. Kinda “work with the system and the system works with you” trust, firm belief in not making waves or drawing undue attention to yourself. And, well, it works for upper middle class native white people in EU, if you can look away or give your silent consent to whatever is happening.

Big companies and the government are familiar 🙄, known 😐 and thus safe 😑.

My messenger needs to be one my 70+ parents, who trust big companies and mistrust anything too small, or different, or “extreme”, are willing to use. Getting them to install Signal so we could still have our family group chat after I deleted WhatsApp was a major win. Scanning each others’ QR codes, having to go through some process when they change phones…? Yeah, they would’ve been scared of being “put on a list” and wouldn’t have gone through the technical stuff even for me.

There’s also the Lineage-based DivestOS that attempts to keep up with more security updates, and relocking the bootloader in phones that support it.

https://divestos.org/

They’ll keep bringing this up again and again and again until it passes, huh.

Next Council deliberations and vote in October-December.