Full stack developer and privacy advocate. I like to keep the mentality, if you can program one language well, then you can program in any language!

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  • 110 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • There’s 2 parts to this:

    • Android Auto app (on your phone)
    • Android Auto Head Unit software (in your car)

    Both of which are currently proprietary,
    and would need to be written as FOSS from the ground up by reverse engineering the above 2, which would be a huge undertaking.

    Also flashing custom Head Unit software to your car will be very hard, is not well documented, and likely will void your warranty, giving low incentive for developers to even attempt it :/

    The best you can do right now is aa4mg (Android Auto 4 MicroG),
    which at least allows to replace the proprietary Google Play services with a privacy respecting FOSS alternative and Android Auto’s dependencies with empty stub packages:
    https://github.com/sn-00-x/aa4mg

    Full disclosure,
    I helped with writing aa4mg :)




  • My coping mechanism:
    Block/filter out the news!
    (Except for positive/uplifting news)

    It does wonders for your mental health!

    Most news sources are for-profit,
    and they did some research,
    apparently depressing news draws more attention / clicks, which results into more profit for them, but it isn’t good for your mental health.

    Other news sources just drive an hidden agenda, and aim to manipulate you to believe whatever the rich guy that owns the news site wants.

    Also, try to have fun while humanity is sliding down in the background!

    Whether you’re depressed or acknowledge and then ignore the facts, will have zero impact on the final outcome which will apply to the whole world.

    So might as well aim to be happy in the meantime :)
















  • Imagine living in China,
    where the government is able to request data of each company in their country.

    Imagine that China would setup an AI/LLM, to feed all private chat data into it,
    and automatically flagging opposition of the government regime.

    Imagine a white van appearing in front of your house and disappearing into a concentration camp because you got flagged after expressing your opposition to the government to your mate in a private chat.

    All collected data can be abused like that,
    or by other means (E.g. a country at war gets hacked, which could lead to leaking critical private information on political/defensive decisions).

    To me the question is not if data collected on you will be abused, but rather when will it be abused?

    Just having it stored somewhere imposes risks.