I did something similar with a receipt printer, an Arduino and a PHP script in 2011. It got replaced by an iPhone very soon after, but I'm thinking of reviving it, because it forces you to filter what's important.
There's also GrapheneOS, which excludes Google APIs completely and is additionally hardened down to its memory allocation implementation, at the cost of performance and app compatibility[1].
lineageos and calyxos should as well, unless you opt-in. I guess they would still use the google captive portal detection? Is that what you're referring to?
> and is additionally hardened down to its memory allocation implementation
That's really interesting. Do you use GrapheneOS? Is it easy to lock the bootloader on Pixel devices?
It is just Android minus the nosy bits, it works just fine. I've used AOSP-derived distributions since 2011 and never felt I was missing out on anything, au contraire. Longer battery life, no ads, no spying other than through the radio firmware (which is part of all devices from all manufacturers using all operating systems [1]), no nonsense.
[1] I seem to remember that RIM (of Blackberry fame) made devices which used combined radio and systems firmware so those would be an exception to this rule
It's all I've ever used. I think it works great but I think your experience will depend heavily on your expectations.
I don't use any proprietary apps and only install them from fdroid or build them myself.
But if you do, you're going to have a different experience. Let's say you want to run Whatsapp. From what I can tell you basically have three options:
1) Install google apps.
When you install your rom you will also download a gapps bundle and install it. This will be a very vanilla android experience but with the ability to uninstall whatever you want, root, etc. You can open the play store and install Whatsapp. Everything should work OOTB. However you're running all of the google service including google play services, so privacy-wise this is not significantly different than stock android.
2) Install microg
When you install your rom you can also install microg. This is an install time option in Calyxos. Microg replaces many of the google apis. You can install Whatsapp through Aurora store, which can install apps from the play store. Whatsapp will use the microg FCM implementation. FCM is google's notification service. It allows your phone to make a single persistent connection to receive notifications, allowing for better battery efficiency b/c you don't have many apps activating the radio. FCM just communicates that an app has a notification, it doesn't carry the contents of the message. Unlike play services, microg registers the FCM connection with an anonymous.
So google knows your device is running whatsapp and when you get notifications, but not what they are.
3) No gapps / no microg
Don't do either of the above. You won't get push notifications with whatsapp. Many free/libre apps have alternative notification schemes involving separate persistent connections. This is less power efficient but works without involving google. I use Signal and Element like this and my battery still lasts >24 hours.
I use it as a daily driver for 2+ years now (LineageOS without gapps, or even microg). I use the f-droid store for my app needs, and the occasional proprietary app I download with Aurora store, or use whichever APK hosting site seems the least shady. I sometimes use MS Teams - complains on each start about needing the G framework, but works just fine regardless. Or, I played another game that had in game purchase, and it worked fine until I opened the in-game store, when it froze. Otherwise perfectly playable.
From the f-droid store I use a ton of apps, games, mostly utilities. For navigation I like Organic Maps.
None of the systems current or proposed scan local files. They all work on cloud storage. You could not use icloud and none of this change would affect you. Also I don't believe anything in icloud is encrypted so they could have scanned it at any time.
On device hash generation is 'scanning local files.' The fact that this process is only initiated by being flagged to being uploaded to iCloud doesn't change the fact that it is being done on-device, and increases the capacity for surveillance significantly.
Yup. Good luck telling repressive regimes that the technology doesn’t exist. How is the hash list to be trusted, especially in foreign countries? Who will be reviewing the images in foreign countries?
>The lawsuit is brought on behalf of four American Muslim men with no criminal records who were approached by the FBI in an effort to recruit them as informants. Some of our clients found themselves on the No Fly List after refusing to spy for the FBI, and were then told by the FBI that they could get off the List if they agreed to become informants. Our other clients were approached by the FBI shortly after finding themselves unable to fly and were told that they would be removed from the List if they consented to work for the FBI.
>A House representative said Thursday she is requesting an investigation after learning a CNN reporter was put on the federal no-fly list shortly after his investigation of the Transportation Security Administration.
>In my case, I started having trouble flying after I blew the whistle in the case of “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh, the first terrorism prosecution in the United States after Sept. 11. As the Justice Department ethics attorney in that case, I inadvertently learned that my e-mail records had been requested by the court. When I tried to comply, I found that the e-mails, which concluded that the FBI committed an ethics violation during its interrogation of Lindh, had been purged from the file. I managed to recover them from the bowels of my computer archives, gave them to my boss and resigned. I also took home copies in case they “disappeared” again. Eventually, in accordance with the Whistleblower Protection Act, I turned them over to the media when it became evident that the Justice Department withheld them from the court.
Maybe someone can comment on this: Does Google scan the cloud fotos of its users for CP? Have we seen an uptick of false positives/SWATings since they do that?
Apple is - rightfully and understandably IMO - criticized for their plans, but does anyone know how Google handles this?
Google and FB both scan storage for several different types of contraband, and also have triggers and thresholds for things that use too much bandwidth (eg pirated software download links that are shared widely et c).
Yes they do. The reason apple has done this is because they lagged behind other providers considerably in detecting this sort of content. Facebook for example are reporting millions per year compared to a few hundred for Apple.
Instead of scanning you whole library they came up with a way to do it on device, which is the main difference between other services. If you don't enable iCloud photo storage the system can't work at all.
I never realized that that's whats being done but now it's so obvious since everything we upload to GDrive/iCloud/Dropbox isn't encrypted without additional effort and reduced convenience.
I use Boxcryptor for Dropbox and it prevents them snooping on my files but if I started using that for pictures, I'd lose all convenience of being able to look at it in the Photos app, create shared albums, etc. It's a pity. I wish there was an encrypted photo service that let me share photos and create albums.
It's not even that I have anything to hide but I'm scared that one day, police will knock at my door because of a hash collision or a borked logfile or whatever. What else can I do other than me and my family becoming digital hermits?
>It's not even that I have anything to hide but I'm scared that one day, police will knock at my door because of a hash collision or a borked logfile or whatever.
Easiest thing is not to worry about that and just use the services as normal. You’d have to trigger the system multiple times before there was even a chance of having police involved and even then there’d be no actual evidence if you don’t have that content.
I have some respect for privacy absolutists that want to go down that path on principal but it sounds like a massive pain in the ass with no upside for most people.
-Apple "lagged behind" because it built private and secure services it could not monitor by design. This is a feature, not a bug.
-Facebook's reporting overwhelmingly flags burner accounts signed up via tor etc, only absolute idiots would post actual CP on their real name account on facebook.
-Apples solution is highly invasive and dangerous, and your statement about "only running with iCloud upload" is false. It took less than a week for Apple to announce that they will open these APIs to 3rd party apps.
> It took less than a week for Apple to announce that they will open these APIs to 3rd party apps.
That just means they are allowing other apps to scan for CP if they want to (or if they are required to by law). As controversial as it may be, I would trust Apple's implementation way more than I would trust a random photo editor app's implementation.
Right? There are people seriously saying they’d rather 3rd party apps ship all your images to whatever YC startup has integrated with NCMEC as a service with god knows what privacy assurances.
I have ADHD and live in an apartment <1000sqft and have lost my keys moments after finding them, but before I made it out the door. My second most frequently used command with my smart home setup is "Where's my phone?". I ordered 4 air tags. As to the e-waste concern, I'm trusting Apple's recycling program to handle them for me once they're no longer in service. It's admittedly not ideal for the environment, but I think it's better than the companies that sell disposable commercial trackers that are intended to never be recovered.
That might make you the only person to have never misplaced your keys. It's not exactly uncommon. In the above scenario, finding of an umbrella prevents waste as otherwise you need a new one.
Totally yeah, no car though. I walk in to a shop and I'm already tagged. I walk in to the streets, I'm tagged. There's no hiding from surveillance. But now to allow a tag report back where your X is located is ridiculous.
Why you want to submit to a heat map of your objects, and what you do with them, I don't know. Call me cynical. I pity the people who feel its a fantastic toy when normally it's the same people criticizing about X FANG company thing. Yet they go and buy the recent crud they release. Talk about hypocritical.
Come to think of it, a malicious company could probably set up their systems so they get auto-confirmed by the plugin. I'm not sure they'd be valid in that case.
Similar attacks: load the fine print via JS and stick it into an /ads/advertisement.js so adblockers will block the loading of it.
Can the company claim "we showed it to the user, if their software hides it, that's not our problem"?
No, the user did not consent. They have to be aware of such systems not game it. The intent and the consent have to be clear to both parties. Agreement is about respect not about malice. If an consent is maliciously hidden away, no matter how technically then it's not valid. Law is not binary in these cases, it's all about the circumstance.
That's what I figure, but how does that work for e.g. Cookie Consent? The user has a plugin that just clicks "Accept" on the consent overlay. They don't read the consent, they're not aware of what they consent to specifically.
Is their (or their plugin's, acting as their agent) consent valid because they know about the general framework (tracking cookies)? And would that consent depend on the overlay not including any surprising terms (e.g. "you're also buying a washing machine", "you're also allowing us to mine crypto in your browser" or "we may also use browser finger printing, not just cookies")?
You age inevitably, because your genetic code will degrade over time, increasing the chances for malignacy. If you can reverse that in each of the 10^16 cells in your body, you will stop ageing.
I think the current understanding of the relationship between aging and cancer is a bit nuanced than this; e.g. immune system distinction is thought to play a major role in failing to eliminate precancerous cells.
1) Not enough for starting a biotech startup as OP would like to do. Having a PhD means that you've spent years on a certain subject. You cannot just read a book and be up to speed on biomedical research and CRISPR.
2) Having hands-on experience in wet labs is useful and relatively easy to learn. People can learn wet lab skills sufficient to carry out experiments (i.e. pipetting stuff together) in under a year. This is not what research is about though.
3) True
4) You don't need a PhD. But to truly succeed in biology, you need to learn things from the ground up, which takes years of studying. If you just read a few books, you will be able to understand certain parts of it, but as a founder of a biotech startup, you will be the equivalent of a tech startup founder blindly following buzzwords such as "blockchain".
Never recommended just "reading a book" - although books are for knowledge transfer. In fact, I recommended the exact opposite. Creating or joining a lab to do DIY genetic engineering is not pipetting. Anyone can easily obtain the materials to do CRISPR and implement various ideas they get from reading the latest research and literature. It is exactly analogous to the computer and internet revolution. All of those founders learned things from the ground up, often outside of academia, while others were completing academic research. The truth is that the same opportunity is now available to biotech and genetic engineering. The odin project, for example (I am not affiliated in any way whatsoever), offers all the materials to build your own home DIY bio engineering lab. That is certainly enough to do the required research and test / validate various research ideas, and ultimately creating a startup.
Just taking a quick look at the DIY stuff, that only seems to cover the initial genetics experiments. The equipment offered on the Odin project sites doesn't really cover what comes after that.
What do you do after you introduced a plasmid or modified the genome of some bacteria?
There are plenty of ways to get access to and use the advanced equipment that you may need for research after getting past the beginner and intermediate level. This comes to mind: https://www.biolabs.io/
RE: "Having a PhD means that you've spent years on a certain subject. You cannot just read a book and be up to speed on biomedical research and CRISPR."
Isn't that what books are for? To compile, document and share knowledge some people spent years to figure out?
There is a huge gap between having knowledge from books and being able to do original research, let alone solving a biomedical niche problem using CRISPR. This gap is usually filled with an advanced degree, where you spend years in the lab, keep track of the latest research in the field, try to find your niche and solve the actual problem.
I mean, by all means, try it. But life sciences are not computer science. The approach is entirely different and quality of the work you need to do is different. It looks much, much easier than it is. (Which is, on a different note, why I believe the whole pseudoscience crap such as anti-vaxxers is gaining so much traction)
Computer programming is a stuf that uses reciclable electricity and "eating your own dog food" kind programs, cheap to produce or free to copy, easily available and in many cases free except by the hardware (Hardware that can be hired, "clouded" or increased gradually).
You don't need to pay a dime for using R, C, Perl or Python and you can obtain the four, ready to use in your computer in less than a half hour. If you need a microscope, there is not an equivalent open source stuff replacement available.
In Biology the matherials will be sold to you only in packages of 10 Kg each pigment, with a caducity date, even when you would need to mix just 10 grams of each one. The spendable one-use only stuff is not free and the price for a single kit is incredible. You will pay it in any case because is indispensable for validating your work and you plan to use 500 of those kits the next year so you are a captive client from this company (that could decide to stop selling you if you try a way to lower the price, and will sue you if you try to copy the formula and make the product by yourself).
2) Documentation is not free and obtaining it is time consuming
In computer programming, you dont need to spent weeks to be delivered to you, or plan a travel to Peru to collect samples of a plant virus. You don't need to spend days just to reach the documentation navigating a miriad of closed or pay per viewed journals, at 50 dollars to peek in each paper.
You can expect to learn something and use it for years. Fortran is still there. You can program automatically your computer to make a hundred of safety copies each working day. In biology you can not clone your amazonian beetles collection, is unique and will be atacked and reduced to dust by real bugs from day one if you do not protect it.
3) There is not an obvious, linear path to success
Errors are random events that you can't always control
In biology you will lose eight months of your research because your samples travelling from Swedden to Madrid end somehow stuck in a Lithuanian airport for ten days and now are defrozen and unusable. You needed this research to assure the new funds and keep running, and now you have three months to obtain new samples, redo and fix it.
You can lose years chasing a dead end or be superseeded by a genius in some part of the planet that discovered the same as you first, or a different and better way to do it.
4) You don't just buy a lab and hire a team to create "something" nice.
Unless you are in the bussiness of teaching science you design the lab according of the exact product what you are trying to create. Any machine that you ordered and will not use enough frequently later is a hole in your presupuest. Any timed out kitt that you bought in excess quantity is your money ending in the dumpster bin.
You need to hire somebody familiar with what "hardware" is trendy and works and what machines are outdated since ten years even if you see it in each faculty and in propaganda.
Describing the current state of CS and comparing it to the current state of biotech/genetic engineering is like comparing apples to oranges. In the beginning of the computer revolution the obstacles were extremely similar to the current obstacles (or opportunities) with biotech. The materials were expensive, documentation wasn't abundant, people didn't think personal computers would ever be a thing or that people would interact on the internet using social networks, and server/computing costs were extremely capital intensive before cloud computing.
There is a great opportunity at this moment, similar to the opportunity that Bill Gates and Paul Allen had. Mainframe computers were expensive, yet they found ways to practice and become highly skilled. There wasn't documentation like there is now, yet hacking culture found ways to build cool and effective stuff. Obviously there wasn't a linear path to success - people thought personal computers would never be necessary, yet Apple and Microsoft were huge successes that no one ever expected. There are people that see opportunity in fields like biotech and bioengineering, and there are people that only see the obstacles. The former create amazing things, while years later the latter are envious that they didn't have similar vision and courage.
I wouldn't advice to invest in the company of this guy, but is their money, not mine, so... do as you please. Honestly, I would love to hear that he became billionaire.
You cannot just read a book and be up to speed on biomedical research and CRISPR.
FWIW, the OP didn't specifically say ze wanted to do "biomedical". Biotech is bigger than just medical applications. Biotech could skew more towards materials science, or environmental engineering, or any number of areas besides "treatment for diseases in humans" or whatever.
