Someone is making money off of the surveillance and that someone knows someone else in the board of education. That’s why it exists. It has nothing to do with sudent safety.

I trust my kids to mostly only use the devices how I say. The security is mainly to keep their mum happy

It sounds like you should simply trust your kids and convince your better half that she should do the same.

If there’s one thing I learned both as a kid and as a father, it’s that restricting kids’ access to computers - or anything really - just doesn’t work: software solutions that exist for that purpose are almost always defeated by kids, who are reliably more clever than the adults who try to restrict them, and only exist to falsely reassure their parents.

If you’re serious about controlling your children’s cellphones, I’d suggest buying them Linux phones, or phones that you can install a mobile Linux distro on: nobody makes Linux apps, so good luck getting malware or shitty social media apps on them. And of course, you can keep the root password to yourself and set up your kids as non-privileged users.

Either that or feature phones - if you truly hate your children.

I would cancel and tell the restaurant why.

Businesses need to know why they lose customers, because if enough of them report the same reason, they might do something about it.

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I’m a kid of the cold war.

It’s behind a firewall. The only thing exposed to the outside is port 22 - and only pubkey login too.

And gee dude… It’s been running for 18 years without being pwned 🙂

tl;dr: your money does not go to Google and the ppl you get it from would have purchased it anyway. The device just ends up in your hands instead of the land fill or being recycled

It all depends on how you look at it. You choose to see it as your money saving an object from the landfill, and I choose to follow the trail of my money going all the way to Google’s pocket ultimately.

But those two outlooks are not incompatible: they both hold true. You just choose to disregard the latter while I can’t get past it.

Really?

Say I buy a pack of gum at the supermarket. The supermarket got my $2. Then I resell the pack of gum to my neighbor for $1.50. Who do you think has my neighbor’s $1.50 in his pocket? Me or the supermarket?

Hint: it’s not me. I’m still down $0.50 from the moment before I bought the pack of gum. And even if I had sold it to my neighbor full price because it’s new and unopened, it’d like I never bought it in the first place and my neighbor did.

Nobody talked about Calyx

I did, and you replied to me 🙂

if you wanted to avoid anything primarily made by Google you’d have a Linux phone

That’s true.

Unfortunately that’s not possible: I live in a country that delegates secure authentication to banks, and banks only supply 2FA apps that work in Android or iOS. If I had a Linux phone, I’d still need another phone with Android just for the purpose of banking, interacting with social services, logging in my work hours, getting notifications from the post office…

That’s the misery of Android: Google is such a pervasive monopoly that even if you want a fully deGoogled OS, the basis of it has to be 95% made by Google anyway because the rest of society goes along and reinforces their monopoly. And at some point, even someone like me has to make compromises to simply live normally.

I would gladly buy a Linux phone and I’d even put up with their quirks (I tried one once so I know they’re not as polished an experience as Android). But I am also a practocal man and it’s just not an option.

I think GrapheneOS should come with a no-compromise-security branch that only supports Google Pixel phones and an “ordinary security” branch that supports a wide variety of less-secure but non-Google hardware for people who can’t stomach the idea of buying a Google phone.

GrapheneOS would reach a much wider audience, and not everybody needs perfect security. I for instance am a low-value target and I have no need for GrapheneOS-level security.

If you buy second-hand, you give money to Google.

Someone bought the phone the first time and gave their money to Google, and you reimbursed part of that money to that buyer. In the end, Google gets your money. Maybe not full brand-new retail price, but what you paid for your second-hand phone goes indirectly into Google’s coffers.

Buying anything Google, second-hand or not, supports Google’s business. Given the choice, I refuse to support Google in any way, shape or form.

Example Fairphone, which has horrible update schedules

Fairphone’s release schedule and Calix’ release schedules are two different things. CalyxOS is updated less often than GrapheneOS for sure, but it’s updated a lot more often than Fairphone OS.

I am aware of the shortcomings of my choice.

But my priority is to not give a cent to Google: what am I supposed to do then?

I argue that GrapheneOS gives Pixel phones more value, thereby supporting Google. That is not great.

And it still doesn’t support anything that isn’t a Pixel phone.

I respect GrapheneOS very much. But the fact that you need a Google phone to install a deGoogled Android ROM is one contradiction I just can’t get past. I hate Google and I’m never going to buy their hardware and give them money for the privilege of escaping the Google corporate surveillance.

I’m aware of the technical reason why GrapheneOS only supports Pixel phones, but that irony is just too rich for me. So I use CalyxOS on a very much non-Google FairPhone4, and while it’s formally slightly less secure than GrapheneOS, at least Google got none of my money and that’s a lot more important than security to me.

The most painless way to dual-boot is to install something that’s not Windows alongside something else that’s not Windows.

Another person discovers that big tech has taken control of our computers without asking permission.

Well, your computers. I run Linux. It only does what I tell it to, not the other way round.

practice the shortcuts

You know, I used to think like that when I first learned Unix shell commands and vi. I shlepped through the learning process because I had to when I was a student. Then after graduation, I joined a Unix company so I was dragged deeper into it screaming and kicking, and I kept picking up more and more commands and shortcuts until they etched themselves deep into my muscle memory. At some point, it all stopped being a chore and it became second nature.

And it went like that for many other software I’ve used. Decades later, I get the payoff: I’m a fast engineer and the friction between what I want to do and the final result is very low despite working 90% of the time with the keyboard.

It was a pain to get there and it took a mighty long time, I’ll be honest. but I reap the benefits now.

If I were you, I’d make the effort for that sort of thing. A couple of months tops: if you don’t like it, you’ll have wasted 2 months of your life. If you do, you’ll have gained skills that will pay for your efforts for the rest of your life many times over.