I’ve never stumbled across Apple Insider before, it’s quite the apologist for the company. Here’s some tone deaf quotes from the article that made me laugh:

“It’s true that the buck stops at the CEO, but without Tim Cook, Apple would not have so many bucks.”

I guess if you make a lot of money you get a pass for allowing misleading and anti-consumer marketing campaigns?

“If billions and trillions are hard numbers to imagine, here’s another one. Apple could, if its valuation could be converted to cash without loss, give every person living in the continental USA a free iPhone 16e — and then 13 spare ones. Each.”

I love how they chose to illustrate Apple’s obscene level of wealth with how much it could benefit people if they ever distributed that wealth through altruistic giving 😂

Heres a summary of the predictions made, from never all the way up to within the year. It seems to me the closer you get to the dollar bill the sooner the projections become.

“Some experts predict it will never happen…”

“Some experts argue that human intelligence is more multifaceted than what the current definition of AGI describes.” (That AGI is not possible.)

“Most agree that AGI will arrive before the end of the 21st century.”

“Some researchers who’ve studied the emergence of machine intelligence think that the singularity could occur within decades.”

Current surveys of AI researchers are predicting AGI around 2040"

“Entrepreneurs are even more bullish, predicting it around ~2030”

“The CEO of Anthropic, who thinks we’re right on the threshold—give it about 12 more months or so.”

I feel your pain 😅🫠

Yeah, just to add another confirmation to the other comments, if you have a separate home partition you can reuse it with a new / partition and expect it to work fine. The only stuff that gets saved in your home folder is comfiguration files for your apps, along with whatever actual files you have stored. You can even swap distros (Ubuntu/Arch) and keep your home folder, though sometimes the config files and settings don’t translate perfectly.

Seriously. It seems like the subconscious anxieties and fears of the writer’s mind come through in statements like this and a few others. Whatever positives (real and imagined) there are about the situation, there is an underlying loss of personal autonomy that causes a sense of unease. The thing that’s continuing to intrigue me now is: did the writer intend for that to come through, showing the losses a society of that nature would sustain as a commentary on those that promote it, or are they unaware that their words reveal that distress and anxiety? Idk, weird article.

“Once in awhile I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy. No where I can go and not be registered. I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me.”

The consensus seems to be that this is a propaganda piece (or at least heavily opinionated by the writer) but I just don’t understand how they could write this with a positive frame of mind. The article is a strange mixture of perspectives that don’t seem consistent. Bizarre.

You’re doing the lord’s work 🫡

I’d suggest looking in to it farther. The commenter above basically covered it, but no, beeper is not all closed source. Their hosted server has never been open source, but all the self-hosted bridges have been, and continue to be. You can run your own, open source, self-hosted beeper server, just like you’ve always been able to. There’s nothing embrace, extend extinguish about that.

Where did you read that? The github pages are all still open and receiving updates, you can still self-host the bridges and its under the apache-2.0 license, just like it’s always been.

Sadly it doesn’t 🥲. Copying app data is the hardest part of the process without a system level backup like seedvault, neobackup or traditional google backup services.

Only if you’re currently running stock android.

NeoBackup is the only one I’ve run across that seems to really fill the role of backup and restore thoroughly. The trouble is, in order to work it needs root, so I’ve never actually been able to try it. Almost reason enough to root in my book 😅, I love a good back up system.

Seedvault is another fairly well developed option, but it needs to be hardcoded in to the OS by the ROM developer.

You’ll probably benefit from a series of different backup apps in combination. Here’s a few that I’ve used and benefited from:

SMS import/export - backs up all SMS, MMS, call logs and contacts. Does not backup RCS.

Applist backup - back up your installed app list. This includes data on where you installed the app from and where you can get it again along with other useful info. The apps still have to manually installed.

Aside from those two, most FOSS apps include a backup and restore function, such as: signal, neo launcher, fossify calendar, newpipe, metro (music player), aegis (2 factor), obtainium, etc…

I hope this helps. I tend to tinker and install various ROMs, so am well aquainted with the pain of setting up a fresh OS without a system wide backup program. Its not as bad as it seems though, and as long as you get your messages, contacts and call logs moved over it goes pretty smooth.

It does, you can turn it on in the YouTube plugin settings.

I see what you did there 😏👏

Not the OP, but there was a time about a year ago (can’t remember if it was pre- or post- Daniel leaving the team lead role) where graphene was very vocal about how they felt that the Google play store security model was superior to that of F-Droid and Aurora. They poured massive amounts of development in to making it possible to use the play store directly in the OS through the sandboxed plag services. They expressed very clearly that they felt the only safe places to get apps was either directly from the developer or through the play store.

Graphene hasn’t been as vocal about this kind of stuff since Daniel stepped out of the limelight, and I did a quick search for the old twitter posts that covered the topic but couldn’t connect to them on twitter. That could just be because I don’t have a Twitter account and Elon is jacking up Twitter access these days.

I’ve been using GrapheneOS for about a year and I’ve never seen F-Droid bundled in their installer or app store. They’ve been vocally against F-Droid for quite some time. Other more FOSS focused projects bundle F-Droid.

Is user data stored on air-gapped computers? I’d be very surprised if it was. Offline doesn’t necessarily mean innaccessible, and in fact user data must be accessible as a database on the company’s intranet in some way in order to perform the search and removal efforts. Plus there’s the (albeit small) possibility of rogue employees deciding to do something nefarious with their personal access to that info.

Trusted to do their job? Personally, I think so, and would go as far as to say the main contenders are not doing anything fishy with your data.

I think the trouble comes in with the fact that they become a high-value target to hackers because of how much information they have on their customers. I’m sure that they take a lot of technical precautions to safeguard user data, but for me personally, the risk is not worth the value proposition.

I’m on KDE 🥲 That Gnome app has been almost enough to get me to switch though. There’s a few Gnome apps that KDE doesn’t have a comparable parallel to.

I haven’t heard of 2fas before, they seem pretty interesting. I’m inclined to keep my password and 2fa vaults out of the cloud (thus Aegis and Keepass) so I’m interested in how the browser extension syncs data with a phone. If it uses a shared network or ephemeral data transfers that would be pretty nice.

I have a few codes duplicated in my keepass vault for the services I log in to often on desktop. The autotype is super nice in those cases. Other than that I do generally prefer having a separation between password manager and 2fa data though. Probably only a theoretical safeguard in my case, but simple enough to keep in place for the time being.