NSA buster - Lightbeam add-on for Firefox

[tek_heretik]

Once you root it, you're free to install any ROM you wish -- check the appropriate forum on XDA Developers for your device. The choices there will likely be more up-to-date than Replicant.

Ah, thanks, you're such a nice guy.

[SteveRiley]

Aww *blush*

[tek_heretik]

@Steve...I'm a little chicken to root/flash the phone myself, there is still 1 year left on the 3 year contract, part of the contract is slowly paying off the purchase price of the phone, which is astonishingly still about $300! The last thing I want is a $300 brick, lol. But, I am fairly chummy with the phone geeks at the carrier's local storefront, they basically said they would do it for me 'off the books' if ya know what I mean.

[whatthefunk]

I'm on the verge of wiping Samsung/Rogers/Google's Android (gee willickers Beave, that makes me 4th party, 5th if you include the forced facebook) off my Galaxy S2 and replacing it with Replicant, it's really snoopy now too, worse than ever, went to update just my banking app (couldn't proceed without it, want to tear my bank a new rear exit too), 10 unwanted/forced/snoopy updates followed it (they just started downloading/installing without so much as an OK to any EULA, etc), that really peeved me off. The forced snoopy bloatware is way out of control now.

Just imagine how much the average Joe/Jane is tracked because they don't know how to turn things off or wipe forced collected data, we are a small percentage users that really understand what's going on.

You can probably control a lot of that. I turned off auto-updates on my phone, deleted all the bloatware possible, and disabled the rest of the crap my provider put on it. from the manage apps page I have no weird updates.

[Feathers McGraw]

Try CyanogenMod first! It's not free but it's a lot freer.

Gives you stock Android without the proprietary Google bits. You can add the google bits (Gapps) back in afterwards if you like.

Go here for Cyanogenmod:
http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Device...chable="s ii";

And here for Gapps:
http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Gapps

Feathers

[tek_heretik]

You can probably control a lot of that. I turned off auto-updates on my phone, deleted all the bloatware possible, and disabled the rest of the crap my provider put on it. from the manage apps page I have no weird updates.

Oh yes, bin dair, dun dat, it's still 'infested'.

[tek_heretik]

Try CyanogenMod first! It's not free but it's a lot freer.

Gives you stock Android without the proprietary Google bits. You can add the google bits (Gapps) back in afterwards if you like.

Go here for Cyanogenmod:
http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Device...chable="s ii";

And here for Gapps:
http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Gapps

Feathers

Thanks bud, will check that out too, maybe I'll grow a pair and do it myself, lol.

[Feathers McGraw]

The worst bit is that you lose your data when you unlock the phone, but you can always back up then restore afterwards.

The rest of the process isn't that scary, just new. Read up on it enough beforehand and it'll be a breeze. Your phone is so popular that it's very well supported by CM and other custom ROMs.

Feathers

[SteveRiley]

Try CyanogenMod first! It's not free but it's a lot freer.

Gives you stock Android without the proprietary Google bits.

Feathers, if you've been paying for CyanogenMod, then someone is scamming you. CyanogenMod is entirely free and open source.

And it is not stock Google. Instead, CM is based on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), which is slightly different than stock Google ROMs. CM then adds many modifications and improvements.

While free of the bloat typically associated with carrier-supplied Android builds, CyanogenMod is not necessarily the fastest ROM available. The Android Open Kang Project (AOKP) often beats CM's performance in real-world usage.

More info:
http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/About
http://aokp.co/about/

[Feathers McGraw]

Free as in freedom!!

That's the second time on this forum I've said free meaning libre and it has been read gratis! My fault, but I thought I could get away with it here.

Definitely haven't been paying for CM. It's not actually strictly 100% libre (I mentioned this because Tek was talking about Replicant, which is).

I have a Nexus device running CM, so I know it's not quite stock Android, which I used for a while. Having done this, I am quite aware of the differences and I think almost every change they have made is an improvement. Took a bit of artistic licence saying CM=stock, because I know that Samsung like to slap extras on top of stock Android, and those extras are one of the specific things that Tek was complaining about. CM is so much closer to stock than a factory Samsung device that I thought it would be a useful simplification, "install CM and get stock with no bloat" kind of thing.

So, in essence, in the same post I was both sloppy and pedantic, and both cost me! Sorry

Feathers

[tek_heretik]

You guys are cracking me up, from Lightbeam to 'free' as in running in to a lake in your birthday suit to skinny dip, lol. Speed isn't a huge issue, anything less bloated would naturally run faster, stable and functional would be ideal, the only two things that I really only use is the LTE packet network and the 8MP camera. The carrier did release Jellybean for the phone but mine doesn't show that there is an update available, no matter anyway because it would still need rooting to rid it of facebook, etc anyway and, others complained after going to Jellybean it lagged the poop out of the phone and the packet network consistently showed connections less than LTE (4G and less).

[Feathers McGraw]

From my admittedly limited experience, the "free" (libre!) thing is something that always seems to come up when people discuss security, and kicking the bloat, etc. - for good reason! Usually libre software is a good way of cutting the fat, and some malicious software.

Install a libre(ish?!) ROM on your phone and then tell us you don't experience the skinny dipping glee

[tek_heretik]

Install a libre(ish?!) ROM on your phone and then tell us you don't experience the skinny dipping glee

Yes, there will be glee, lol.

[SteveRiley]

the "free" (libre!) thing is something that always seems to come up when people discuss security, and kicking the bloat, etc. - for good reason! Usually libre software is a good way of cutting the fat, and some malicious software.

Thing is, this argument, while popular, ignores several inconvenient realities. Open source is not an automatic guarantee of "better" security. More eyes on the code doesn't mean that the code necessarily becomes higher quality; spotting security vulnerabilities is specialized skill that most developers lack.

There's also the issue of where you place your trust. Most of you here probably don't trust Microsoft (for example); you should be equally stingy with your trust and not extend it toward Apple, Adobe, Oracle, VMware, and anyone else who primarily supplies only compiled binaries. Because of this, you instead choose FLOSS for your computing needs. I bet 99% of you install compiled binaries from Canonical and from PPAs, and that 99% of you phone rooters install compiled builds from XDA. Why? For what possible reason do you not trust $BIG-SOFTWARE-COMPANY but do trust Canonical and some random XDA developer? What evidence do you have that the downloaded binaries are built from the same source tree?

OK, so you're part of the 1% who downloads from source and compiles it yourself. Now you're trusting your compiler and your linker. Again, why? The compiler has plenty of opportunity to inject unknown (to you) code; same with the linker. Do yourself a favor: please read that link.

So you're left with having to bootstrap your own compiler. But wait, unless you read every single line of the compiler's source, which is the only way around this problem, you really have no clue what your own bootstrapped compiler will do.

tl;dr: Running a Linux distribution on your PCs makes you no safer than running Windows. People who believe otherwise are either misinformed or deluded.


Edit: "you" in this post is generic and not directed toward Feathers, whose quote I began this post with.

[tek_heretik]

Running a Linux distribution on your PCs makes you no safer than running Windows. People who believe otherwise are either misinformed or deluded.

Oh wow, this is too easy, and I don't need any "research" for this...
MOST viruses are written to attack Windows based devices...
Maybe if the user is running their distro(s) in the root account, which doesn't even exist in many distributions now, except when a executing something in sudo, I could go on but I think you get the point.
Just the mere fact I don't have any/accept any Windows based files (*.exe's, media files, etc, even *.doc can be comprimised) is half the battle, laughing my fargging arhz off.