I’m the Never Ending Pie Throwing Robot, aka NEPTR.
Linux enthusiast, programmer, and privacy advocate. I’m nearly done with an IT Security degree.
TL;DR I am a nerd.
AOSP is open source, Google’s Certified Android is not. You can contest that if you want.
That doesn’t change that SailfishOS is straight up proprietary for most of its developed compotents. It does not belong in this community. The Wikipedia page for SailfishOS says under license “proprietary with some open source components”.
Sailfish OS is proprietary. It does not belong in this community.
I still dont understand /e/OS. Just use LineageOS. It supports all the same devices and doesnt lag as far behind. You can choose to run an insecure OS if you like (see: all Windows 10 users) but definitely don’t recommend it to others.
You cannot have privacy without at least basic security. Targeted attacks are not the most common kind of attack by long shot. Threat actors scan for vulnerable devices and use automated scripts to execute attacks. Android is one of the most exploited targets. With an outdated OS your browser could be exploited and used to get a sandbox escape, possibly chaining it into root escalation. It all depends on the vulnerabilities found and the longer you wait the more likely for the “stars to align” for the perfect attack. Look at CVE-2025-48593 for an example, zero-click RCE. In recent memory there was also a zero-click RCE utilizing specially crafted MMS, meaning an threat actor could send messages to all phone numbers and try the attack in mass.
/e/OS is by far the most behind on updating security patch levels of the AOSP ROMs (at ~2 months), iode is ~1 and everything else is better than those two.
Privacy without security is not real privacy, it is a mirage.
Security without privacy is like a fortress with cameras inside, a known threat (eg. Gapps Android).
Privacy with security is like a fortess with no known threats at all (eg. AOSP with timely security patches).
Privacy without security is like a fortress where some of the locks have rusted through and if someone tries they can open the doors. It is like replacing the walls with cardboard. “No one can spy on me now” you say in your cardboard castle.
There is no privacy without security. Android is one of the most widely exploited OSes and every month a dozen or more critical severity vulnerabilities are patched. Being 1-2 months behind on security patches is inexcusable for a privacy project.
From the description of this repo:
OpenCal is a web-based open-source software designed to make online appointment scheduling effortless and efficient. Whether you’re managing a team or running a business, OpenCal takes the hassle out of coordinating appointments, eliminating the need for endless back-and-forth emails. With OpenCal, you can streamline communication, save time, and focus on what really matters.
Can you give a description instead of just posting a plain link. Low effort post.
Screensharing is the only thing i dont think it does. Voice and video good. See snikket or conversations.im
Yes, I understand what GVisor does. Cgroups2 are for isolation of system resources, bit arent even the main sandbox feature used for isolation by Docker. I am pretty sure namespaces significantly more important for these containers’ security.
GVisor helps with one of the main risks in a container setup which is the shared kernel by hosts and guests. I understand it comes with a performance penalty (and I didnt know it was incompatible with SELinux), but that does change my original point that GVisor is a security improvement to default Docker. I understand there is more nuance, even when I wrote my original comment I understood (just like any other security feature) it cant be used in every scenario. I was being intentionally general, and in my second comment I was pretty specific about what it protects against: Kernel vulnerabilities and privilege escalation.
I researched cgroups2 more and I still dont understand why you brought it up in the first place. Cgroups2 and gvisor provide very different security benefits. Cgroups help to keep a system available (lessening the risk DoS attacks) by controlling access to some system resources (io, devices, cpu, memory) and grouping processes of a similar type. It seems rather optimized to solve resource control on a container host. I mentioned gvisor because it is mostly just a drop-in replacement container runtime which doesnt need setup to be used.s
Now for a different container runtime which provides significantly more features (than gvisor) with less downsides (if configured correctly for a specific workload), Sydbox provides syd-oci which id an application kernel runtime which uses a permission config file to create a sandbox, isolating using namespaces, seccomp, landlock, and more. It can sandbox in many different categories (often times leveraging multiple features to provide a multilayer sandbox), you can see the categories at the syd manpage. The biggest downside is that you must really understand what your container application needs otherwise it will prevent it from running. It is a “secure by-default” sandbox which can be softened through config.
I dont really understand what you mean in your last sentence.
My reason for saying GVisor is safer is because it is an application kernel which provides traps and emulates most Linux syscalls in the guest with a far smaller set of syscalls to the host kernel, helping to prevent container escapes and privilege escalation. GVisor also fully drops privileges early into start up (before running any significant logic), helping to prevent privilege escalation.
Cgroups is not a really a security feature (from what I understand). It is about controlling process priority, hierarchy, and resources limiting (among other things). You can not use GVisor with LXC.
The UI is proprietary.
In order of most to least secure
VM > Docker+GVisor > Docker/LXC
Docker+GVisor is good middle ground because it provides the guest container with an application kernel in a memory safe language and reduced syscall attack surface to avoid kernel container escapes. Docker/LXC share the kernel with the host.
Being 2 months late to a quarterly patch is still very bad. /e/OS should be avoided.
The embargo on security patches isnt what i am talking about. Once security patches are released, /e/OS takes 1-2 months to patch these vulnerabilities. This isnt because of the embargo but in addition to it! They are by far the worst about this out of any of the alt Android ROMs (2nd worst is iode, at around ~1 month). /e/OS has been terrible about security for years even before all this “Google security patch” nonsense.
There was drama last year because the (or one?) moderator of fosstodon is a fascist.
Just so people known (or a reminder), Grayjay is NOT open source. FUTO is very sus and the cofounder techbro guy (not rossmann) is a fascist wierdo.
/e/OS is terrible for security. They are often 1-2+ monthly behind on monthly Android security patches, leaving their users vulnerable to dozens (i am not exaggerating, often more) of critical and high severity vulnerabilities which are widely exploited. Stay away from that shit.
On fdroid, it reports these anti-features for Xtra
The other problem with Matrix for me is that Element call (the protocol) is not present in most public instances and isn’t very straightforward to selfhost. The default is jitsi which is not E2EE. Pretty major IMO because if Matrix is supposed to be a Discord alternative and supposedly E2EE but VC isnt encrypted, pretty yikes.
Also they have claimed for years that they have forward secrecy. Has something actually changed recently?
Where did you read that Signal uses MLS? I could not find any claims of using MLS on Signal’s specs page or their GitHub repo. Also MLS doesn’t mean anything on its own, see Soatok’s blog on MLS.
Soatok is currently in the process of writing a blog post about another vulneribilty they found in Matrix’s encryption, and with Matrix’s history of numerous vulnerabilities, I would stay away from that shit. No matter how “good” the algorithm is in theory, it is all about implementation. Matrix also has very brittle encryption, often times many messages will become unrecoverable, which is terrible UX.
You’d be better off just selfhosting XMPP+OMEMO, with the caveat that it is also flawed and leaks plenty of metadata.
The best alternatives to Signal (but not Discord) are SimpleX and Briar. Both are significantly better than XMPP/Matrix for privacy and security.
I am not trying to say that SailfishOS (or Jolla) isnt a cool project, it just doesnt belong here. Whenever people post Obsidian.md in here I say the same thing for the same reason. Try posting in the Linux phones community. I don’t subscribe to this community to see proprietary software invade the FOSS space.