Some things are - on purpose - made easy to misuse and - by design - accessible to people, who are likely to misuse them. All this money, this supposedly cutting edge technology, and reporting to the police, but they aren’t able to tell when a child is at risk and report it as well?

Smells like bullshit to me. More like they don’t care. I’m not so sure children should even be allowed to use chatbots in the first place. Or only allowed to use versions specifically trained for interactions with children. But of course - banning children from accessing youtube and wikipedia is a much more pressing concern.

Hey everyone! As many have noticed, the PinePhone Pro is currently out ot stock on the Pine Store. Unfortunately we have to deliver you the following news: the PinePhone Pro is officially discontinued. We were told it didn’t sell well enough to keep production going. But the good news for current owners are that spare parts will still be made for up to two years, depending on demand. Meanwhile, the trusty PinePhone (A64) is still alive and kicking, and Pine Store plans to keep it rolling for about two more years.

Well, that sucks. So I guess the better move here would be to wait for something new? I don’t think the regular PinePhone is at all viable as a daily driver.

OnlyOffice, not OpenOffice. This is a different suite entirely. Might be better for people coming from MS Office, since it looks practically identical. Also supports opening multiple files as tabs.

I’m a huge fan of Pine64, but I wouldn’t expect the PinePhone to be a great replacement for an Android smartphone. Personally I have quite extensive experience with PineBook Pro, PineTime and PineBuds Pro. I haven’t had the chance to try the PinePhone, but I’d definitely go for the Pro.

Even then, prepare for a junky experience and forget about lixuries such as good camera, nice screen, smooth UI/UX. Their devices are great, and the ideas behind them more so. But unfortunately they rarely work well, perhaps with the exception of PineBuds Pro.

Good point. Sometimes it helps to read properly

no more locked bootloader

Likewise modifying the bootloader requires unlocking it - which means no more secure boot and anyone who takes your phone can happily boot whatever they like on it. This is also bad.

Except for Graphene. The last step in the installation is locking the bootloader back, and the phone clearly says it’s locked.

As of right now, it’s looking like GrapheneOS will be unaffected, and Google has yet to lock down the bootloader. So this should remain a valid option for at least 2 years.

Other than that:

• Any smartphones with an unlocked bootloader + any ROMs without gapps
• Chinese smartphones with non-Google Android builds
• Linux smartphones
• Bonus: Huawei is about to release their own non-Android OS, but I wouldn’t expect it to be privacy-friendly

Honestly there probably isn’t any good, long-term solution. Personally I’m somewhat shocked we’ve gone this many years with reasonably open smartphones. Next step is probably closing bootloaders in new laptops, as part of the switch to ARM (which is already undergoing).

It’s very likely that no amount of negative feedback will change anything. Why not waste some of their time anyway? Write to them, call them, spread the word. This is the only thing we can do. Even if it goes through regardless - at the very least we can make it as unpleasant as possible.

Two things especially worth noting from the article.

If you have a non-Google build of Android on your phone, none of this applies.

This means that at least GrapheneOS will be unaffected for now. Other ROMs without gapps will be unaffected only as long as you don’t install gapps. Since Graphene has a sandbox for them, I’m assuming it’ll be fine. That is, unless Google decides to lock the bootloader entirely.

In September 2026, Google plans to launch this feature in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand. The next step is still hazy, but Google is targeting 2027 to expand the verification requirements globally.

So most users worldwide still have at least 1.5 years until it’s implemented. Plenty of time to get a Pixel and install Graphene on it. Or to figure out some other plan.

Don’t get me wrong - this is insane, unreasonable and horrible news for everyone. We should push back as hard as physically possible against it. However, at the very least we still have some time to figure things out before the policy rolls out.

(…) it was all avoidable.

It really wasn’t. Everything in American politics for long years has been leading to this point. It was always bound to happen, sooner or later. Sure, by choosing another president you could have potentially delayed it by a few years. But later it would have happened anyway. This is not a ‘Trump issue’. This is a ‘USA issue’.

I think Americans are the only ones who haven’t seen this coming. And I don’t mean that in a hostile way. Your education system has been sabotaged for decades, so it’s no wonder the people are uninformed and ignorant to what’s going on. The only ones to blame are the psychopathic politicians and billionaires who deliberately made this happen over the last 200 years.

That’s a great question! I’ll be happy to help you count the lights. I see five lights.

This symbolizes the fact that for the last five hundred years white people have been victims of genocide in South Africa.

Would you like to learn more?

Session is basically what people think Signal is.

Here’s a tinfoil hat take: Five Eyes is significantly reducing inter cooperation. The non-fascist parts of the alliance (…)

Who are those non-fascist parts exactly…? New Zealand?