I am using a phone without Google Services with no issues regarding YouTube, banking apps, etc. How?microG, an open source implementation of Google Services, and it works pretty damn well. Because it’s open source, I know that Google cannot steal any data I am not knowingly giving them :)

Yeah, that is inevitable, that’s indeed the price you pay for using public infrastructure. It is going to get a lot worse, Flock cameras being just the heralds of things to come. But this cannot be effectively fought at the personal level, this is just a matter of who has the political power. I am much more interested in what we, as individuals can do that the government can do nothing about. Basically we have kinda trustworthy public encryption algorithms, so preventing side channel attacks and trying to make hardware verifiably safe is IMO the principal battle to fight right now.

I get what you mean, but this website specifically works completely fine on my Firefox (with uBlock). Please check your browser settings for things like disabled JavaScript.

You are right, but I believe the final result has been improved by this mistake

Yeah, the mysterious Intel ME probably does similar things, but nonetheless these subsystems don’t have capabilities nearly as huge as the main OS, so they can’t store a lot of data, or do a lot of computation, or do stealth networking - (rant warning) such as embedding data in packets, that would require stealing the cryptographic keys from the main RAM, or even from other physical modules, basically so much convolution, that would be defeated by a simple update to the networking stack with changed offsets etc., I mean you would have to do crazy things to embed a universal rootkit you can never update yet is never detected doing shady stuff. This sounds more in the area of CIA capabilities, not really hardware manufacturers, but I really doubt they would risk revealing something so serious just to collect some meaningless data. TL;DR CIA backdoor probably exists, data collection backdoors are not feasible.

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Tbh, Google Pixels have an unlocked bootloader, which is pretty rare nowadays, and nothing stops you from installing an OS without Google services. And I highly doubt they are able to extract any meaningful data when you are using such OS, even if there are hardware backdoors installed. It’s just extremely hard to do complicated* stuff, including data collection, while not being detected, and with just access to low level hardware; network packet analysis would give away any such attempts immediately. (*as in ‘more complicated than a few hundred assembly instructions’)

Amazing, I have never thought of that! I have always carried my card behind the phone, which is a bit too thick for my liking, but this is such a great idea, thanks for sharing!

I have personally had a lot of issues with pop os on my laptop (related to power management, waking up the WiFi card, overheating leading to a kernel panic, GPU refusing to go to sleep), which disappeared as soon as I installed Endeavour OS.

You don’t have to move your hands while touch typing. This is the single biggest reason why vim is still used today, regardless of whether you have arrow keys or not. In fact vim does support arrow keys and using the mouse as well! It’s just much easier to edit files without needing to move your hands and/or use a touchpad/mouse.

Well, how do I put it… compliance is optional

USB killer would be a fun thing to bring to the US and have it searched despite your claims that it is not a flash drive

I mean, if somebody calls Linux an operating system, they definitely should not be working as an IT professional

Yeah, but then you can just share them with anyone. In this case, privacy always contradicts effectiveness, and that is why we need to fight the whole idea of age verification altogether.