Open source, privacy-enabled smartphone operating systems

https://gitlab.e.foundation/e

by DyslexicAtheist • 7 years ago

190 81 7 years ago

gitlab.e.foundation

niutech4• 7 years ago

How does it compare with Replicant (https://replicant.us)?

megaraid999• 7 years ago

Some information here: https://gitlab.e.foundation/e/wiki/en/wikis/faq

niutech4• 7 years ago

Where does it mention Replicant?

bubblethink3• 7 years ago

It doesn't. Replicant is a much more ambitious project. They (replicant) received $200k recently in donations. Hopefully, they can get one reasonably new device up and running in good shape. The galaxy s3 is close, but it's really old at this point.

indidea• 7 years ago

Project website at: https://e.foundation/

nhqt• 7 years ago

I can't even imagine what went through the head of whoever chose the name of that project. Literally ungoogleable. Congratulations.

PrimeDirective• 7 years ago

They did want to remove all the tracking by Google...

G4BB3R• 7 years ago

He tried to say that it is a difficult name to find in search engines.

giornogiovanna• 7 years ago

I searched "e foundation" on Google, DuckDuckGo and Bing and this was the first result on all of them. Yeah, "/e/" is atrocious, though.

flixic• 7 years ago

Same with just “e os”. Name is fine.

voyager2• 7 years ago

"It's the current project codename, we will probably introduce a new and more convenient name for our mobile ROM in a few months."

tyingq• 7 years ago

It is the first organic result if you search for '/e/': https://www.google.com/search?&q=%27%2Fe%2F%27

Granted, not how most people would search.

jmathai• 7 years ago

e....f....g

Kinda clever if you ask me.

niutech4• 7 years ago

It is described here: https://www.indidea.org/gael/blog/leaving-apple-and-google-e...

They had to get rid of the trademark Eelo.

zulln• 7 years ago

All potential jokes around escaping Google aside, searching for it was easier than expected: https://www.google.com/search?q=e+os

mehrdadn• 7 years ago

Also see Ungoogled Chromium: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium

bigbugbag• 7 years ago

srware's iron has been out there since the beginning: https://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron.php

schaefer• 7 years ago

this is a step in the right direction.

but your carrier is also constantly tracking you physical location via triangulation of your cell signal.

in the states, we really need stronger legal protections on how this data is collected, stored, etc.

bubblethink3• 7 years ago

Underwhelming and doomed to fail. Questionable, if any, value over standard AOSP. Microg, while technically an interesting solution, is a violation of google's ToS, and cannot really make it into any sort of a real product. And microg itself seems to have slowed down/stalled anyway.

Edit: I should add some context since their site doesn't have much. Per their faq (https://gitlab.e.foundation/e/wiki/en/wikis/faq), it's a fork of lineage without any clearly stated benefits other than bundling of microg, which is arguably a worse stance to take for privacy (their goal) than lineage since microg implements a subset of google play services, is not exactly legal in its use of google apis, and opens up other security issues.

albertgoeswoof• 7 years ago

Is anyone else really excited about pureOS (https://pureos.net/) as a mobile OS? It seems to completely sidestep all of this BS by being actual Linux.

vblord• 7 years ago

0xfaded2• 7 years ago

My Google pay was recently locked, probably as a result of moving countries and using VPNs. To make matters worse, with a locked account I can't change play store countries and access the local play store, so I can't get the app from my accounting firm (Which would seriously make my life easier). It finally hit me that I don't own my phone.

I have (own is the wrong word) a pixel 2 and used to pay Google ~$400/year for YouTube, domains, gsuite, hangouts dailer...

My next phone will be a librem, though I'm going to wait until my pixel dies. I'll probably also buy a cheap iPhone for apps I can't get on the librem.

Kuinox• 7 years ago

I have a "workaround" for you: On another phone, download the apps, and you can transfer the APK to your phone to install the app without the play store. You can also download alternative to google play store.

dorfsmay2• 7 years ago

Could you not download the APK for that apps and installed directly?

Don't get me wrong, I had not realised google was locking the play store and totally agree that it is an issue, but wondering if that could have helped you at the time.

Also, I run lineageOS to be able to update old phones with recent Android version, and tend to get better battery life and faster boot!

untog3• 7 years ago

Unfortunately there's no Google Pay equivalent, right?

bubblethink3• 7 years ago

pureOS not so much, but the potential of a mainlined mobile device, yes.

squarefoot2• 7 years ago

I am, although being Gnome 3 based it won't be the snappy experience one would expect. I can understand their choice though: having to liberate a tablet recently (Asus T101) I tried at first to use XFCE as I do on all my other hardware, but though it ran really fast that was a usability nightmare: absolutely no way to have a reliable screen rotation and trackpad management without patching here and editing there with the risk that it would lose the functionality at the first upgrade. I also tried lxde, mate and other light desktops with results from bad to very bad (wrt screen rotation, all hardware except camera runs fine) then just before giving up I threw Gnome3 at it which worked immediately, but it's definitely a resource hog.

doublepg23• 7 years ago

the Librem 5 phone will actually be using their own Phosh [1] shell - made for mobile devices. It's targeting GTK3+ apps but it is not GNOME 3 based.

[1] https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/phosh

ensiferum• 7 years ago

Great. Now how to get the closed source drivers that are essential for actually using your device for anything?

Wifi, cell, gfx, camera, video enc/dec drivers in any android device are just binary bundles and neither in the kernel or in the AOSP.

warp_factor• 7 years ago

deeply needed. Happy to see that more and more individuals realize how Google and other Adtechs are not a net benefit for humanity.

detaro• 7 years ago

previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18521970

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17529703

erhardm2• 7 years ago

"We build open-source mobile operating systems that respect users’ data privacy." yet your website pulls gstatic.com.

How can I trust the project when I can't even visit the official website without being logged by the biggest company of online tracking?

liquidise• 7 years ago

Dismissing privacy projects because the website pulls from google fonts or analytics is a recent favorite behavior here. It’s become a sort of inspector fueled “first!”.

When someone shows me an: open sourced, graphical, log based, spam ip filtering, self hosted, server alternative to GA that I can set up in < 10x the time I will happily switch to it. In the meantime, if I want to know how my website performs I don’t know of privacy-forward competitive options.

erhardm2• 7 years ago

You have to be willing to pay the price. If you want privacy for your users from $E_CORP then you have to protect yourself from becoming the $E_CORP.

How can you say "Privacy is important! $E_CORP is tracking you! - btw, here run this script so I can track you"?

y0ghur7_xxx• 7 years ago

When someone shows me an: open sourced, graphical, log based, spam ip filtering, self hosted, server alternative to GA that I can set up in < 10x the time I will happily switch to it.

If privacy is your core business you make compromises, and you should be prepared to spend some time to set up something like a self hosted piwik instead of using GA.

This should be obvious.

Of course if your site is about your new facebook app, just go ahead and use GA, nobody will bother you about it.

krn• 7 years ago

When someone shows me an: open sourced, graphical, log based, spam ip filtering, self hosted, server alternative to GA that I can set up in < 10x the time I will happily switch to it.

https://goaccess.io/ ?

I would pick it over Google Analytics for any privacy-focused open-source project even if it doesn't tick every single box in your list.

xorcist• 7 years ago

Don't know if the above is meant seriously or not (the reason people don't switch from a piece of software is lack of familiarity, never ignorance), but I've had luck installing Piwik (which has now changed name to Matomo) for a few clients.

It works very much like Google Analytics and is not log based but should otherwise tick all your boxes. Installation is very straightforward but the using the dashboard, reporting etc. has a bit of a learning curve.

Nothing can ever compete with Google if you need statistics for "single middle aged mothers in a major city" simply because few others can profile users at that level but although it looks impressive it's not always correct and can be hard to use correctly. Piwik has great reporting tools and is easy to integrate with other systems.

It's also less likely to be blocked by adblock lists.

14• 7 years ago

Every once in a while I see someone talk about how a page loading loads a bunch of tracking elements from various known tracing sites and things like scripts. I don't suppose you could head me in the right direction as to where I could read a bit on how to do this myself? Thanks for any help

YawningAngel• 7 years ago

Chrome has developer tools which allow you to see every request a page makes.

https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/

aw3c2• 7 years ago

Also give https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lightbeam/ a try

tya99• 7 years ago

A good place to start is https://www.privacytools.io/#browser

Spend some time using uMatrix (much better than NoScript these days). If you're running uMatrix you do not need NoScript.

Some good documentation in regard to uMatrix:

https://www.electricmonk.nl/docs/umatrix_tutorial/umatrix_tu...

https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/wiki/The-popup-panel

https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/wiki/How-to-block-1st-par...

https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/wiki/How-to-create-rules-...

coldtea2• 7 years ago

You can trust (or not) the project, because what BS their website uses is not relevant at all to what the project is making.

The website could just have been some pages thrown together by someone with a ready made template or a total afterthought...

Their value proposition, good or bad, is on their main focus: an FOSS/clean Android fork.

Not on how privacy friendly their website is...

laurent123456• 7 years ago

I understand where they are coming as often it's convenient to know from where visitors come from - that's how you can find threads in here, Reddit and elsewhere, and then contribute to the discussion. There aren't good alternatives to GA for this unfortunately, even paid options aren't as convenient. As a user though you can choose to block GA using various extensions so that's always an option.

fourier_mode• 7 years ago

How can I trust the project

Simple. Just scroll through the source code.

akerro• 7 years ago

January 2019: smartphones with /e/ OS start selling

So where can I buy it?

Vinnl• 7 years ago

So... If I use plain AOSP without the Play Store and the likes (this is even an officially provided image by my phone's manufacturer) - what tracking would still be left? Until now I was under the impression that there was none.

boudin5• 7 years ago

By default it still uses google dns I think. But other than that, not much. What you describe is what this project is about though, i don't think they are saying that alternatives like lineageos are tracking you, they just compare to stock operating systems

kop3167• 7 years ago

I actually think AOSP uses whatever DNS is given to it. I use AOSP plain and network info says I am using the DNS server that my router gives it.

kop3167• 7 years ago

I was wondering that as well. I think they mean things lime AOSP still connects to Google's 204 page to see if your online.

My thought is, if I was Google, why would I embed any tracking in AOSP? It's right in the source code for people to see and remove (not to mention the PR headache it would cause if offending code was found). It's far easier to embed in Googly Play Services, where its far harder to find, nearly impossible to remove, and any phone that wants to use Google services has to use.

dorfsmay2• 7 years ago

https://gitlab.e.foundation/e/wiki/en/wikis/faq#is-e-lineage...

"We've implemented several /e/ online services, with a single /e/ user identity (user@e.email). This infrastructure will be offered as docker images for self hosting: drive, email, calendar... to those who prefer self-hosting."

This reminds me CyanogenMod which after they shutdown and shutdown their services, the phone became unuseable, I assume because they kept trying to sync to dead services.

tyfon• 7 years ago

Self-hosting would be a solution to this, but you are never guaranteed continued development though.

As long as it's open source it should be fine however.

users123• 7 years ago

Grateful

hiq2• 7 years ago

According to them the only proprietary component is their map app (https://gitlab.e.foundation/e/wiki/en/wikis/maps). It would great if they could expand on the reasons why OpenStreetMap (which is available in F-Droid) is not a good option for them.

I also doubt they are completely free of proprietary components beyond this app, and that they managed to get rid of all the proprietary blobs to support the devices they currently support.

In summary, I'm not convinced this brings anything compared with https://lineage.microg.org/ but I'd love to be proven wrong.

emptysongglass• 7 years ago

OSM is not a good option because it doesn't do transit. Oeffi is a FLOSS alternative that does do transit but is not a good option because the developer doesn't answer calls to update backends when they change (in the case of Poland's switchover, for example).

Doctor_Fegg• 7 years ago

Their maps app is Magic Earth which _is_ OSM-based. I presume when you say "OpenStreetMap (which is available in F-Droid)" you mean OsmAnd?

hiq2• 7 years ago

Indeed, thanks for the clarification!

niutech4• 7 years ago

Previously it was known as Eelo, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16062659

vinay_ys• 7 years ago

I'm curious to know why one has to fork Android instead of fixing it to provide privacy out of the box?

AOSP is a respectable open-source project, yes? If patches were submitted to make google tracking optional and improve privacy for privacy minded folks, would they not accept those patches?

Open source, privacy-enabled smartphone operating systems

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