chirospasm

Read this entire thing, and it breaks my heart open + enrages me.

I have been doing my damnedest not to let anger be any more of a motivator than morality or principle. I want to retain some sense of rationality. I want to navigate this all well enough.

Today, after this article, anger is a major motivation. I am pissed.

If you are looking for a hardened phone, I would consider trying GrapheneOS for a bit, see if it does what you are looking for. Uses SELinux and a seccomp-bpf policy for app sandboxing, as well as runs a hardened kernel with a hardened memory alloc. Great isolation approach, too, so that you can run apps on a ‘completely different phone,’ so to speak – think of the isolation like a small version of the OS that can keep apps entirely separate. Finally, if desired (and needed for certain apps), you can sandbox all Google services so that they don’t have direct access. It’s is a different approach to, say, microG.

GrapheneOS is all about hardening. Security is solid.

VPN wise, Mullvad wireguard servers are also solid. You can do multihops, which help you obsfucate traffic to degree. They have also been playing around with packet shaping (if you use their app directly).

Sim cards can be swapped out if use a VoIP service like jmp.chat.

Thank you for posting this! I assumed some FF-based browsers, while claiming to remove telemetry, in fact still phoned home to a degree. This is good know!

Also, I was surprised by a few others on the list, like Mullvad, Kagi, and DuckDuckGo, being so straightforward – not that making fewer connections implies better privacy, as even a single connection can transmit any kind of data, but moreso that there some browsers that are designed to operate with less complexity.

Really surprised by Zen, which is a FF derivative claiming to be all about a ‘beautiful’ and ‘simple’ web browsing experience, having a ton of connections.

Holy shit.

If you have a smart TV, you’re already at a disadvantage.

One solution to consider might be a black hole DNS on your local network, like Pi-Hole, that can target this device and prevent all Google requests.

Another, unfortunately, might be to get a dumb TV and use an HTPC as your streaming solution for the content you already watch.

And another might be to look into custom TV OS options out in the wild.

Jmp.chat

I have looked for something similar. There are a number of spaces where FOSS project lists are maintained, but they are often focused on a singular topics like ‘privacy’ or something akin, and they aren’t often parts of larger lists that can be sorted based on the conditions you mentioned above.

The closest thing, if you are interested in other possible tools that might help: Alternative.to, a crowdsourced software searching tool, which has a means of filtering to show only, say, open source projects, or sort by tags that denote stacks used, languages used, etc. (see screenshot of tags I added). It has been useful enough for my own needs when looking for what you’ve been looking for.

Either way, best of luck! I haven’t been able to find something yet, myself.