First, don’t buy new phones. You’re paying a massive premium to be first. Especially since you’re going to flash a rom, which has a little risk anyway (I’ve bricked phones by flashing, though not for years).

I just upgraded from a 2017 flagship to a Pixel 5 (only because my cell company decided to stop it working on their network, when I can throw a different Sim in and it works fine). I was able to buy 3 Pixel 5’s for less than you paid for your new phone. Which means I have a daily driver, a hot spare, and a test device for a little over $400.

If my daily breaks, I pickup my spare and swap the SIM, since I keep both phones synced with Syncthing. I don’t even have to login to anything because that’s all done. (I had 4 functional devices of my 2017 phone, they had become so cheap).

So pick a 1-2 year old model that you like the features, and pay far less for it.

Before (finally) coming to the pixel, I would look at the Lineage device list, then check those phones out at gsmarena.com and phonearena.com to see which I’d prefer, because Lineage has the broadest device support that I’ve seen.

Today I run DivestOS, a fork of Lineage with some changes to a few things. I forget now exactly what I preferred (I’d have to pull up my comparison spreadsheet), but average battery consumption is a staggering 0.5% per hour, with microg services installed and a couple apps using it. Consumption average increases to about 4% per hour when I’m doing a lot of intensive stuff - copying files over the network, using nav, watching a video, etc.

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You’d get those kinds of attic temps in many places in the US.

Attics are no place to store stuff, keeping them under 140f in the summer is a challenge

Cell tracking is external to the phone. It’s done by the towers - they know signal strength, and by using known tables of that data, cell providers know pretty accurately where your phone is.

To block this you’d need a device that lacks any cellular technology whatsoever. Wifi only.

And that has the same issues, especially with companies like Comcast/Xfiniti using their cable modems to track all the devices around them, even if you don’t connect to them.

Texting uses http over the data channel for MMS.

Yep.

But in the Real World, what’s the pragmatic difference between Graphene and a well-managed Lineage or DivestOS device, since security and privacy are both managed via layers?

I’m genuinely not being snarky. I tried running Graphene and had issues, and their support was atrociously condescending and critical, so now I’m running DivestOS instead. I’ve run Lineage on other devices without Google.

Snikket seems to be it for iOS. But it does work pretty well, I haven’t run into any issues with it.

For Windows well, nothing does voice as far as I know.

Tailscale has the Funnel feature, which can funnel traffic into your Tailscale net for you.

The databases at my company nearly 30 years ago were staggering at the time. I can only imagine.

Ubiquiti?

You can’t give me that garbage. I despise it, after setting up a single access point (plus also watching friends deal with it at client sites).

Besides the discovery issues and slow performance when trying to manage it, I had a random open network on it after setup. This network didn’t appear anywhere in the control panel. I could turn off the access point and the network disappeared.

It didn’t show up in the guest network config (which was turned off anyway). It had the same name as the WPA-protected network, it was just open - no security at all.

I had to reset the access point to get rid of this weird random open network.

What kind of garbage product does that?

Now let’s look at cloud keys. One has a hard drive in it. Just one drive, 3.5", which besides storing data also stores the OS. What? Why is the OS not on some firmware or at least an M2, since the drive is really for storing surveillance data (did I mention it’s a single drive?), what a joke. Why would I bother with such an expensive device that has zero fault tolerance, when I could simply buy a cheaper real machine, run multiple drives, and host the software there?

I lack the vocabulary to describe how bad Unifi is.

Wow, great article, thanks for the link.

The moment I read the quote from Signal’s president, I called bullremoved. I was there, working at a company that had massive records, probably of about 1/3 of Americans.

We were very much concerned with this data in private hands. We were concerned about this kind of data in anyone’s hands.

Such BS coming from Signal is part of why I no longer use or reccomend the app. I simply can’t trust them when they make such blatantly bullremoved statements.

Like their reasononing for dropping SMS support because the “engineering costs”. There’s nothing your app does for SMS, other than to hand the message to the SMS system (technically, it reads and writes to the single SMS database on Android, which was a change implemented in about 2015), using a published API.

I’m starting to suspect the motives after reading such lies.

It also depends on your layering, or lack of. It’s the complexity issue you ran into.

Great post by the way.

It still exists! (Or did about a year ago).

When I got my first Android (2009 ish), I searched high and low for a way to run Hamachi on it. There have been solutions, but always clumsy and difficult to implement.

I miss Hamachi, it was so simple to use.

Tailscale is wireguard (it uses the wireguard protocols, even says so on the box), just with a centralized resolver to make things easier to setup and manage.

I’m not sure what you’re saying with the rest of your comment, as Tailscale is a mesh network, not a VPN as most people think of it.

It encrypts your traffic, but only into the network of which your device is a member. You can’t even see any devices, or networking, outside the Tailscale network, unless a device is configured as a Subnet router. Then you can see devices in the network which the Subnet Router links together.

For example, you have 3 machines, a laptop on mobile data, and 2 desktops on your home LAN. One desktop and the laptop have Tailscale, they can communicate over Tailscale to each other, but the laptop cannot connect to the second desktop because it’s on a different network, since there’s no routing between Tailscale and your home LAN.

You then configure Subnet Routing on the desktop that has Tailscale, now your laptop can connect o any device on the home LAN, so long as the desktop is running and Tailscale is up.

Think of mesh networks as Virtual LANs in software, configurable on each device (mostly, sort of). Twenty years ago Hamachi was the go-to for this, it was brilliant, and much easier to use than today’s mesh networks, just far less capable/manageable/configurable.

I’d consider 5% to be trivial, for what it does.

My battery consumption really depends on how much traffic I send over it.

Archive.is is your friend

It definitely gets better once it’s all caught up.

But it’s still much harder on battery than ST when folders have changes.

It’s kind of not Foldersync’s fault, it’s really because of the protocols - it’s all connection-based, and FS has to compare each file at sync time.

Syncthing keeps an index so it knows what files have changed. Very different tools with different use-cases and approaches.

I used FS for years until I found ST, and had to do a lot more tweaking to get sync to work the way I wanted with FS. FS doesn’t have sync conditions like ST, so I had to use Macrodroid to trigger it when on WiFi, for example.

FS can be a solution, it’s just a lot more work for anything beyond basics.

It’s stupid easy to setup, even has a built-in photo backup job.

I use Syncthing-Fork because it moves all the sync conditions into each job.

So my photos sync regardless of charging state or network (I’m willing to pay for the data to ensure photos are instantly synced). While other things only sync while on WiFi and charging (e.g. Neobackup).

Only one I can think of is Resilio, but it’s hard on RAM and battery for large folders.