• 6 Posts
  • 38 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 28th, 2023

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  • These two form a “mesh VPN” which use direct encrypted links between any number of devices. You can think of it as forming a virtual LAN where you can communicate with devices, including open ports. A lot of them have clever tricks to overcome CG-NATs, which you seem to be struggling with.

    Another option is to just rent a server. You can get massive storage space for less than some VPNs cost and you don’t need powerful hardware if your device supports the codecs you’re using. You could even get a cheapy VPS and reverse proxy to your Jellyfin server through an SSH tunnel or similar. Lots of options here.



  • Has anyone independently verified that this is the case for the FP4? It’s well known that the FP3 accepts testsigned ROMs, but all discussions regarding the FP4’s trusted keys points back to the same FP3-specific thread on Fairphone’s forum.

    It seems so.

    I don’t know, it does make flashing custom ROMs easier but I would rather have to install my own signing keys or signing keys for the ROM as this way renders a part of the device security completely useless. I’d at least like to have known when I bought it.

    I’m not paranoid which is why I’m still using the device but these three points were each huge disappointments which make me not want to buy another Fairphone.


  • I think it’s a Qualcomm Snapdragon SM7225.

    It’s not really about better, it’s more knowing what I’m getting. It’s not their fault that Qualcomm’s support is only 3 years (at the time) or that it takes them 10 months to develop support for the chosen SoC which eats into part of that 3 years. Still, I got the phone thinking I would have a reasonably secure device for 4-5 years which wasn’t entirely accurate.

    I love the idea and, if you’re willing to sacrifice some security for sustainability, that’s great. I just want people to know what they’re getting into because I didn’t.


  • As the owner of a Fairphone 4, don’t get one.

    It’s sold as a 5G phone but crashes intermittently if you actually enable 5G. I bought a 5G phone and I’m still on 4G. I wish I could say that’s the most of the problems, I could live with that.

    The software support, in my opinion, is falsely advertised. You do get 5 years of kernel and Android updates but the system-on-chip updates, which aren’t made by Fairphone, end October of this year. That’s a whole important part of the updates which cease only 2 years into support.

    Then, there’s the real kicker; the hardware root of trust has the (publicly available) AOSP test keys installed. This means anyone can sign and flash a verified ROM if they have access to the unlocked phone. That’s perhaps not too important for most people, but it screams incompetence and it means you cannot trust a second hand device.

    When the SoC support is up, I’m moving to a Pixel. I’m done rolling the dice on Android phone manufacturers and I want a well implemented device.


  • I agree. When I learned programming over a decade ago, I didn’t follow a course and I’m not sure courses were particularly widespread. Looking back, what I made was terrible quality but it got better with time. At first I’d even copy entire sections of code into place unsure of what it really does and eventually I would make it work. It sounds like OP is much further along than that. Just make something, it’s the best part!




  • I’ve noticed advocates for exclusively for libre software and actively discourage simple open source software for not going far enough, also want censorship of not allowing any proprietary software to be mentioned, and don’t allow any critiques of the software they use because it’s libre software so there are no faults or bad designs.

    I mean, proprietary software isn’t popular with people who strongly advocate for free and open source software. At the same time, lots of companies criticize FOSS. Shall we talk about that too? Either way, they have no obligation to cater to you.

    I thoroughly enjoy the code purity of what is labelled as libre software, for license I only like the ISC license for freedom. My attitude is if someone changes my code and doesn’t give back, it does not harm me or injury me in any way.

    It may or may not harm you, it depends. It will probably harm the user. Namely; some software is inherently monopolistic. For example, operating systems are monopolistic because targeting more than one is hard for many applications and so we target the few most popular. If you create an OS with a permissive license and it becomes popular, whoever manages to create the most popular fork of it has the power to close the source, drop compatibility and form a monopoly because application developers want to target the most popular fork and users want to run those applications so will use the most popular fork. Whether the owner of the fork did most of the work on the OS or not, they get to reap the rewards of the monopoly. How is that fair or beneficial to anyone in this situation except the owner of the monopolistic fork? How are people supposed to reliably share a standard with each other if the draw bridge can be raised any time major popularity is achieved? The problem here is, only proprietary forks have the ability to do this. You have to actively deny or limit proprietary forks to stop this situation. It depends on the application but the choice of license can have huge implications.

    I also believe libre software can be used for the surveillance of other people, libre software does not be default mean privacy.

    Yes there are examples of this and we fork those projects to not include tracking for those who care enough about it. Can you do that with proprietary software?

    On the principal of freedom, I do support the right to develop proprietary software. The fact that it exists does not harm anyone who chooses not to use proprietary software.

    How does the existence of FOSS infringe on your right to create proprietary software? If you mean that people at the FSF disagree with you, that’s just a disagreement. Maybe their personal view is extreme and against your personal liberties but that’s not the same as software freedom.

    It seems the die hard libre software crowd, not open source people but the ones who want to live in an only GPLv3+ world can start to live in ther own world, their own bubble, and become disconnected losing perspective that which software other people use is not something that should affect your day in any way.

    As is their right. I mean, it only gets difficult if someone exclusively uses FOSS and you only accept contact via iMessage. Though, if you disagree that much, maybe you shouldn’t be in contact.

    Maybe you’ve just found the folks at the FSF have some extreme views? Please consider, what would it say if Richard Stallman waltzed into a presentation holding an iPad? They kind of have to take the most extreme view, they’d be pretty shoddy advocates otherwise.



  • I don’t know how some developers manage it. I’ve written web apps in React and, without even using available optimisations, the UI is acceptably snappy on any modern desktop.

    We inherited an application from another vendor (because of general issues with the project) and it’s just S L O W. The build is slow and takes several minutes, the animations are painful and even the translations are clearly not available for the first 5 seconds.

    My question is, how? I’m not an expert, I generally suck at frontend and I just had to fill in for it. I didn’t purposely write optimised code, the applications are similar in the amount of functionality they provide and they both heavily use JavaScript. How do you make it that slow?







  • Thanks for the info. From the perspective of GrapheneOS, verified boot for custom firmware is going to be one of the most important aspects and that wasn’t something I expected from the device. It would be a nice-to-have for longevity as running an unlocked bootloader is an awful idea. The lack of a secure element also won’t help the case. I was aware that “support” might mean “only security patches past two years” which is acceptable to me.

    However, I can see your point about fixes from SoC manufacturers as that is a crucial part of these updates. I was aware that the SoC was older but only really thought about performance impacts. In that case, the device will only receive Android platform and kernel fixes?

    Maybe I’ll have to think about switching to something else after that point, then. I spent about as much as I wanted to on a phone and it will only be unfortunate that I didn’t get more years out of it. I’ve already been slightly concerned that they’re steering away from their “mission” and selling ordinary earbuds which are unsustainable by their own standards.