this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023
246 points (98.4% liked)

World News

38255 readers
2414 users here now

A community for discussing events around the World

Rules:

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.


Lemmy World Partners

News [email protected]

Politics [email protected]

World Politics [email protected]


Recommendations

For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago (2 children)

How about GApps tho? You know, the piece of spyware Google embeds in Android's system partition?

FYI:
Private open source alternative to it,
is MicroG

[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Micro g is still downloads Google proprietary blobs and runs those. So it is not open source so much as it's an open source launcher of Google's proprietary software. It's an interesting improvement, but it does not a panacea it does not fix the issues

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Are you sure? I thought that what you describe is what packages suck as NikGapps did, while MicroG is a reimplementation of the code. It does call Google webservers, but it doesn't run Google's blobs (which is also why it's severely limited/fragile compared to packages that run them)

https://github.com/microg/GmsCore/wiki

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

You're both kinda right afaik.

MicroG reverse engineered, and re-written as much as possible from GApps libraries, from the ground up, as open source software.

These re-implementations are as light weight and privacy respecting as possible on your local device,
however the same does not count for the Google servers it communicates with (if you choose to enable them).

For SafetyNet attestation, a proprietary, isolated, DroidGuard blob is downloaded (if you choose to enable it).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I see the graphene OS community says micro g downloads binaries from Google.

I did a couple minutes of looking at the micro g website, and the wiki, and I don't see anything that says they aren't downloading extra components from Google. So I'm not sure.

....

It seems I was confusing OpenG apps, which does download proprietary bits, and micro g which apparently does not download proprietary bits

The thing that comes with lineage OS by default is OpenG apps.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

I believe microG still use Google's services, at very least it connects to supl.google.com