This guide is weird. It suggests to replace US products by other US products
I think federated vs cetralised should be a classification for social media platforms
I cannot recommend Internxt their software and servers are buggy.
The desktop app (on Linux at least) would give lots of errors and refuse to upload files. In addition some uploaded files were corrupted when trying to download them.
I like their idea and philosophy but at the moment their excecution is quite poor making the product unrealiable.
The incomplete guide…
Cryptpad, ONLYOFFICE, Fennec, Mullvad Browser, Librewolf, Thunderbird, FairEmail, SimpleX, Lemmy, PeertubeBluesky? Wtf
I prefer Only Office (Desktop Version) to Libre Office, because
- it does not look like over 20 year old Office 2003
- it uses docx and xlsx as native format which makes it easier for noobs
I heared Only Office has some Russian connections. Otherwise it still is Open Source.
@Wrdlbrmpfd @FallenWalnut Why don’t you try Free Office? It has a free tier and it’s German.
Profit Share missing for Ecosia.
Is there a European Netflix or Youtube?
I think its called BitTorrent.
SoundCloud always missing wtf???
WTF!!!’
Lol 😂
the legend is incomplete. what’s red? what’s the globe icon? how come some products marked not majority EU owned have the EU flag?
how come some products marked not majority EU owned have the EU flag?
The EU flag is used here for the whole Europe (see the top-right corner), but “not majority EU owned” is specifically looking at the EU, which is very confusing. So Vivaldi being Norwegian and Canonical being British stick out.
I will try to answer these, and hope someone corrects any potential innaccuracy:
what’s red?
There is a comment there saying “see deep-dive for details” so the red-highlight caveat is likely explained there.
what’s the globe icon?
My assumption is that icon just indicates Free/Open-Source projects which have no “owning company” (not “based” anywhere), just globally scattered contributors.
how come some products marked not majority EU owned have the EU flag?
My guess (merely a guess) is that those are run by EU-based companies, but which don’t have a solid policy guaranteeing “majority of shareholders are in the EU” (…?)
I think the hardest part are mobile OS 😔
Beside : eOS, sailfish and postmarket we have a long way…Yes, but it turns out you can do a lot of ‘switching’ even if you can give up on android or iOS straight away. I follesdd this guide for degoogling my Samsung, not done yet but feels like I made some good changes: https://androides.nl/degoogle-guide/
Though large part is already covered by switching services / apps
You do a great job! 👏 Thank you!
Isn’t Waterfox quite slow on the updates?
I’ve been using LibreWolf, but I’ve been meaning to try out Zen
Zen has quite a steep learning curve, especially wjith workspaces and such. It’s a cool concept, but I switched back to Librewolf out of convenience and a leaner ux.
Sadly there’s no librewolf on mobile.
there’s IronFox
• Operating system
OpenSuse👉Here is explained: https://privsec.dev/posts/linux/choosing-your-desktop-linux-distribution
• Messenger
SimplexI do not want to start a discussion about Linux since I’m no expert and a million of Linux experts will know better.
But don’t all the suggested distros here (as well any user friendly ones in general) rely on the kernel written by Torvald’s team. With that team being based in the US and at least Linus himself having acted as a three letter agency asset before, can they really be called privacy friendly or even secure? (I’m talking about the CIA or NSA having had a backdoor into Linux in the past and Linus also having banned Russian contributions last year while not banning American contributions, much less moving the operation outside of the US)
What is this backdoor you speak of?
Bvp47
Having not heard of this one, I was curious so checked some sites about it, like:
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux4noobs/comments/kd0yml/does_the_nsa_have_a_backdoor_to_linux_this/
https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/23/chinese_nsa_linux/
My quick impression from those seems to match what was said by some commenters on the FreeBSD forum - https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/nsa-linked-bvp47-linux-backdoor-widely-undetected-for-10-years.84258/
msplsh: This looks like an implant that opens a backdoor, not an intrinsic backdoor built into the OS.
and:
sko: From el reg: To us it seems whoever created the code would compromise or infect a selected Linux system and then install the backdoor on it. So if someone already gained privileges to install anything on one of your machines, it doesn’t matter what it is - this host is compromised and has to be nuked from orbit.
So, unless I’m missing something this is not really about “the Linux kernel devs being compromised by NSA” as much as the endless list of Windows-targetting malware is not about “the NT kernel devs being compromised by NSA”.
If this is the case, this still wouldn’t exclude a NSA compromise though. There is the ban of Russian contributions.
You can say this is all about politics and the war, but then those politics are clearly aligned with US agencied interests. American contributions are still allowed despite the US being just as much as if not more of a threat to security and privacy. Just like they’re just as war mongering.
I don’t know the details of that part directly, but I do remember reading things like this which seemed to indicate delisting of some maintainers (positions of responsibility, as opposed to blocking all developer contributions) who were associated with certain sanctioned Russian companies. This seems to be in line with standard sanctions being imposed by many companies & organisations in various countries (not just USA). Regardless of personal opinions about whether that was “right, wrong, or otherwise” at the time it at least seems a far cry from “an NSA compromise”.
