https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/genetics-firm-23andme-says-user-data-stolen-in-credential-stuffing-attack/

The information that has been exposed from this incident includes full names, usernames, profile photos, sex, date of birth, genetic ancestry results, and geographical location.

The threat actor accessed a small number of 23andMe accounts and then scraped the data of their DNA Relative matches, which shows how opting into a feature can have unexpected privacy consequences.

• Usernames Profile Photos DoB

They can be linked to other online accounts. This allows for phishing, potentially scamming or getting additonal information on them which can lead to more sophisticated/personalised scams. Older, less tech savvy users are better targets for scammers.

• Username Sex DoB Genetic Ancestry Location data

Data aggregators can sell this info to Health Insurance Companies or any other system who can then discriminate based on genes sex age or location

• All of this information

Can contribute to people committing fraud with their information if they collect enough information from different sources.

• DNA relatives

Having enough information about a user to use it to target their now known relatives in personalised scams.

The people that did this probably didn’t know what information they were going to get, maybe they were hoping for payment info, and settled for trying to just sell what they got.

Any information, no matter how useless it might seem, is better than no information and enough useless information in the wrong hands can be very valuable.

Theres countless data breaches every year and people will collect it all and link different accounts from different breaches until they have enough information. Most people use the same email address for every website and a lot of people reuse the same passwords, which is how this data leak occurred. Knowing that these users reuse the same email/password combination here means theres a very good chance they’ve reused it elsewhere.

You can check out what data breeches have occured and if your email or password has been posted in any of these dumps here https://haveibeenpwned.com/

Once the information is out there, its out there for good and what might seem trivial now to you could be valuable tomorrow to someone else

I see the Extend part of Embrace Extend Extinguish is about to start…

This guy is a DRM developer and he experienced frequent crashes and instability after bypassing Denuvo so he’s not going to be the next Empress unfortunately

Please no, not bigger! Its been months and I’ve only reached Wyrms Crossing this week! I have so many other games to play and not enough time to play them all

Flowit (Fill all boxes with the color of their border) https://f-droid.org/packages/com.bytehamster.flowitgame/

2048 Open Fun Game (2048 game with AI, Replay, History and other fun features, Open Source, no ads) https://f-droid.org/packages/org.andstatus.game2048/

Minesweeper - Antimine (A puzzle game where you search for all hidden mines. ) https://f-droid.org/packages/dev.lucanlm.antimine/

Shattered Pixel Dungeon (A roguelike game based on Pixel Dungeon) https://f-droid.org/packages/com.shatteredpixel.shatteredpixeldungeon/

Blockinger (Tetris clone) https://f-droid.org/packages/org.blockinger.game/

I’ve been degoogled since 2019 so I have never actually used RCS so I’m not 100% sure.

If I were to guess I would assume it has something to do with Apples support for RCS. The last time I checked, Apple won’t support end-to-end encryption in RCS and the messages are only encrypted in transit so maybe Android users that will use RCS with Apple users will have all of the chats saved unencrypted within the system folders and that would be no bueno for Google

But I’m honestly not sure, I have no interest in learning about RCS unless GSMA helps open source apps integrate it so I’m not stuck with either Samsungs or Googles messaging apps

Its unlikely that they’d get involved, RCS might be default on Googles messenger app but people still mainly use alternatives like WhatsApp so there’s not a big enough user base that would be affected and since Google is pushing RCS as interoperal, DSA won’t apply.

As of 2024, Google is now quietly blocking RCS messages on unlocked/rooted android devices. Even if your device only has an unlocked bootloader, it is now at risk of being quietly shadowbanned from sending RCS text messages.

According to the OP that opened the issue with Google, it doesn’t work with devices with unlocked bootloaders so it would affect the majority of custom ROM users since very few custom ROMs and devices support relocking the bootloader, and I think it probably would still affect these devices too since the last time I relocked a bootloader with DivestOS I still had the error message about system integrity on boot

Rooted users can probably bypass this issue with some Magisk modules the same way they do with GPay and banking apps.

If Google really does want to push RCS then disabling access to the more technically inclined users now seems a bit silly.

I thought they’d at least wait for wider adoption before locking it down like they’re doing with YouTube and ad blockers, especially with imessage and WhatsApp being such big competitors. At least in Europe, I don’t see anyone dropping WhatsApp for RCS anytime soon.

• Less bloat ware/spy ware - custom ROMs don’t come prepackaged with random shady games from shady companies or random shady social media apps from shady social media companies.

• Better privacy and security implementations along with DeGoogling - a lot of ROMs offer Gappless ROMs which is really important since Google is way to big and has too much influence on android OEMs and its easily the biggest ad company in the world and constantly refused to respect peoples privacy. e.g GrapheneOS https://grapheneos.org/features and DivestOS https://divestos.org/

• Long term software support to help against e-waste e.g LineageOS supports so many phones who’s manufacturers have stopped supplying software updates. https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/

• Customization e.g Crdroid includes loads of custom settings from a variety of other custom ROMs and OEM ROMs that rarely get implemented by any stock ROMs. https://crdroid.net/

• Rooting android phones gives users the ability to access system files that they may not have been able to backup if the apps don’t support it. It also allows for a full system backup and restore

• It also allows users to block ads and unwated connections without using a local VPN e.g adaway

Enabling Google to dictate what a user can do with their own device by limiting features is a slippery slope and the last thing we want to happen is for Android to end up like iOS with its walled garden approach.

Both https://divestos.org/pages/our_apps Mull is based on Firefox and Mulch is based on Chromium

DivestOS https://divestos.org/ same developer for Mull browser

No need to go to a repair shop, Google offers this publicly https://pixelrepair.withgoogle.com/

It does factory reset the phone so make sure your data is backed up

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/07/apple-geep-iphone-recycle-shred/ and they’ll sue you if you try to stop them from making more E-waste! https://youtu.be/rZjbNWgsDt8

Lemuroid https://github.com/Swordfish90/Lemuroid is by far my favourite console emulator on android and its free and open source. Its got quick saves and fast forwarding which is great for Pokemon. It also supports zipped ROMs so no need to unzip anything and it has worked with any ROM hack I’ve tried.

I mainly use it for GB, NDS and 3DS since I usually only play on my phone when I have some time to kill when I’m travelling, but it supports so many other consoles too.

- Atari 2600 (A26)
- Atari 7800 (A78)
- Atari Lynx (Lynx)
- Nintendo (NES)
- Super Nintendo (SNES)
- Game Boy (GB)
- Game Boy Color (GBC)
- Game Boy Advance (GBA)
- Sega Genesis (aka Megadrive)
- Sega CD (aka Mega CD)
- Sega Master System (SMS)
- Sega Game Gear (GG)
- Nintendo 64 (N64)
- PlayStation (PSX)
- PlayStation Portable (PSP)
- FinalBurn Neo (Arcade)
- Nintendo DS (NDS)
- NEC PC Engine (PCE)
- Neo Geo Pocket (NGP)
- Neo Geo Pocket Color (NGC)
- WonderSwan (WS)
- WonderSwan Color (WSC)
- Nintendo 3DS (3DS)

The issue with this is the difference between GB (1,000,000,000 bytes) and GiB (1,073,741,824 bytes) https://massive.io/file-transfer/gb-vs-gib-whats-the-difference/

HDD manufacturers use GB, which is a metric measurement, because its better for marketing while computers use GiB, which is a binary measurement. So people think they’re buying 15GiB but in reality they’re buying 13.5GiB marketed as 15GB

Libretorrent https://gitlab.com/proninyaroslav/libretorrent is free and open source and isn’t anywhere near as shady as uTorrent.

Material Files https://github.com/zhanghai/MaterialFiles is a free and open source file manager that allows decompression, archive viewing and compression of files and folders using 7zip, tar or zip. If you prefer the command line, p7zip CLI can also be installed on Termux, https://github.com/termux/termux-app both free and open source.

I don’t edit photos or play many games on android so I don’t have any alternatives there but Lemuroid https://github.com/Swordfish90/Lemuroid is a free and open source console emulator with a whole bunch of consoles built in and Dolphin https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin emulates the GameCube and Wii

If you go with a refurbed website, make sure that the phone has the ability to use OEM unlock. Some refurbed sites sell Verizon versions of the phones and don’t disclose this and Verizon along with other US carriers block OEM unlocking which means you can’t install another OS. There is no known workaround as far as I know. I had this issue before with a refurbed Pixel 4

AI regulations is definitely needed, selfregulations never works, look at how Google and Meta have been operating and even now with GDPR in place they’re still getting away with abusing users data with no consequences.

OpenAI did not tell us what good regulation should look like,” the person said.

What they’re saying is basically: trust us to self-regulate,” says Daniel Leufer, a senior policy analyst focused on AI at Access Now’s Brussels office.

I should hope OpnAI didn’t tell them how to regulate OpenAI and I really hope this isn’t the only regulation that we see since technology is constantly advancing we’re going to need to constantly update regulation to keep companies like OpenAI from getting out of control like Google.

OpenAI argued that, for example, the ability of an AI system to draft job descriptions should not be considered a “high risk” use case, nor the use of an AI in an educational setting to draft exam questions for human curation. After OpenAI shared these concerns last September, an exemption was added to the Act

This bothers me, job descriptions are already ridiculous with over the top requirements for jobs that don’t require them, feeding these prompts into AI is only going to make that worse.

With regards to drafting exams, does it not start to make these exams redundant if the experts on the material being examined can’t even come up with questions and problems, then why should students even bother engaging with the material when they could just use AI because of this loose regulation.

Researchers have demonstrated that ChatGPT can, with the right coaxing, be vulnerable to a type of exploit known as a jailbreak, where specific prompts can cause it to bypass its safety filters and comply with instructions to, for example, write phishing emails or return recipes for dangerous substances.

Unfortunately since this regulation isn’t global and there are so many open source models that can run on consumer hardware there is no real way to regulate jailbreaking prompts and this is always going to be an issue. On the other hand though, these open source low power models are needed to give users more options and privacy, this is where we went wrong with search engines and operating systems.

Funnily enough some of the best phones to avoid google and improve online privacy are the google pixel phones.

GrapheneOS supports pixels and is regarded as the most privacy and security focused ROM atm.

Other options are vanilla builds of custom ROMs, which don’t include gapps, LineageOS being the best known with the most amount of supported devices.

Another privacy focused, but less well known ROM is DivestOS which offers support for a good range of devices and allows for the bootloader to be relocked on some devices. The main Dev for this ROM is the same guy that develops the Mull android browser.

These are the ones I’ve had personal experience with but there are other out there like CalyxOS and /e/ that are marketed as privacy respecting ROMs but I have not tried these before.

Unfortunately, even though Android is open source, google likes to ensure that all android phone vendors include google play services with their phones. They do this by having most android apps integrate with google services for things like real time notifications.

If you choose to avoid google, some applications won’t work properly such as banking apps and google pay and notifications for apps may not work properly either, there are ways around some of these issues such as microg and magisk modules but magisk requires root access which can make your phone less secure.

If you decide you want to install a custom ROM make sure the phone you have can unlock the bootloader, I don’t think Verizon or other carriers allow unlocking the bootloader of the phones they sell, this is different to network unlocking, and right now there is no known way to unlock these phones bootloaders and the companies don’t provide any support to do this.

So the best thing to do is buy directly from the manufacturer such as google. I don’t have experience with Samsung phones but I know that they have their own security implementation which may limit the ability to unlock some of their phones but I’m not too sure. XDA forums are a good place to see what phones have custom ROM support and if the phones bootloader can be unlocked.

There are only really 4 ways to avoid google on your phone these days

1. No phone/ dumb phone

2. GNU/Linux based OSs such as Ubuntu touch or System76 phones

3. Custom ROMs without gapps

4. iPhone

The first 2 options aren’t really viable for most people.

The 3rd option is my favourite and the 4th option is my worst nightmare

Syncthing, super easy to set up and use on android and linux. It works with everything, not just photos.

To access files stored on my home server from my phone, I use Material Files with sftp set up