There seem to be two main arguments put forth here:

1. F-Droid does not thoroughly audit the apps it distributes, so they might include bad behavior that is not initially obvious.
2. It is theoretically possible to provide a package to F-Droid that does not match the source code it claims to be based on.

To which I respond:

1. No app store thoroughly audits the apps they distribute. You must ultimately decide if you trust the developer enough to run their app, or audit the code and build it yourself.
2. This creates a theoretical opportunity for a developer or maintainer to upload a package that doesn’t match its purported source code, but it’s possible to check for this manually, and to automate that process. It’s likely anyone exploiting this would be caught and their reputation tarnished. It comes back to the first point: do you trust the developer or maintainer enough to run their app?

If you have average security needs, you probably don’t need to worry about this. If you have reason to believe someone well-resourced and dangerous wants to compromise your phone, you should probably be extremely selective about what apps you install and where you get them.

That’s a little less surprising to me. Organizations are likely to pick competing communication software if Teams is not available to everyone. Web browsers are generally interoperable after Microsoft lost the war to popularize one that wasn’t.

I’m pretty neutral about the mere existence of software I’m not interested in using.

Microsoft Edge was a recent surprise. It’s surprising both that Microsoft would create it and that any Linux users would run it. Since its Chromium based, there should be no need for developers to test Edge separately.

It is increasingly unrealistic to entirely prevent children from having unsupervised access to internet-connected devices from a young age, but attempts to make it impossible for anyone under 18 to access porn are equally unrealistic, and often far worse than the problem they purport to solve.

With good parenting, the possibility of accessing porn won’t harm most kids. It’s not just about keeping them away from it, but about teaching healthy and realistic attitudes toward sex.

I agree, and I think my solution in combination with some filter lists addresses that problem pretty well. Very few eight year olds will have the ability or desire to bypass restrictions like that to look at porn.

Kids can’t use computers, and that’s not good for the world. If teenagers figure out enough about how the computer works to get around the parental controls and watch porn, I consider that a net win.

I don’t actually care if teenagers sophisticated enough to do that see porn.

In a January blog post, it said age verification should take place on users’ devices, such as through their operating system, rather than on individual, age-restricted sites.

The details of this are potentially problematic, as they could preclude the use of open source browsers and operating systems.

It would be great to standardize an HTTP header that says the user is underage, which could be sent by any OS/browser combination that has suitable parental controls.

That seems likely to work.

# ls -l /dev/video0
crw-rw---- 1 system camera 81,   0 1974-07-26 10:09 /dev/video0

Android doesn’t handle users and groups like standard Linux, but the user account assigned to Termux is not a member of the camera group.

I’ve been self-hosting Mastodon for a while and mostly using it to share bird photography, but also to provide comments on a static site. Since Mastodon and Lemmy both speak ActivityPub, those get crossposted to /c/flashlight so Lemmy comments are also included on my site. Federation is cool.

I don’t follow many accounts that post Fediverse meta stuff on Mastodon. While I have some interest in the best examples of that content, the only way to attract a broader community is to promote accounts and content appealing to the interests of that broader audience.