Onihikage

• Crash Course Pods: The Universe, with John Green & Dr. Katie Mack. Talks about how the universe came into existence.
• Volts, with David Roberts. Talks about electrification and the energy transition.

I don’t listen to many podcasts, but those two are pretty great.

Router-level VPN is going to be more difficult to configure and cause more problems than just having it on all your devices. There are some games where online play just refuses to work if connecting through a VPN. Some mobile apps are the same. When a website blocks your currently selected server, and the usual solution is switching to another server, that’s going to be more difficult and more tedious when it’s configured at the router level. In addition, if you do something like using a self-hosted VPN in order to connect remotely to a media server on your home network, that becomes more difficult if your home router is on a different VPN.

If you’re trying to keep local devices in the building from phoning home and being tracked, a PiHole or router-level firewall might be a better solution. I think if you’re running a pfsense or opnsense router and are a dab hand with VLANs then maybe you could get what you’re looking for with router-level VPN, but it’s a huge hassle otherwise. Just put Mullvad on your computers and phones and call it a day.

Web ads are a security risk that even the FBI has acknowledged, so your friends should be aware that having uBlock Origin installed is nearly as important as having virus protection.

Regarding profiles, having two is generally recommended - your main profile with no Google services, and a secondary profile only for apps that absolutely require Google Play Services. Personally, I just dump everything in one profile and deny nearly every permission to anything Google, and on top of the sandboxing that’s enough of an improvement over stock Android that I don’t bother with two profiles.

They advertise E2EE as a feature

They can call it E2EE as much as they want, but it’s a lie. It’s encrypted in transit and at rest, at least on the user’s device, but unlike true E2EE, they can decrypt and view any conversation they want to.

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-facebook-undermines-privacy-protections-for-its-2-billion-whatsapp-users

I wouldn’t trust any phone with GrapheneOS preloaded unless it was directly sold by GrapheneOS themselves. Especially not from a site that phrases things in an almost uncanny way.

You can add swipe (glide?) typing into HeliBoard. From their github readme:

• Glide typing (only with closed source library ☹️)
  • library not included in the app, as there is no compatible open source library available
  • can be extracted from GApps packages (“swypelibs”), or downloaded here (click on the file and then “raw” or the tiny download button)

The only reason HeliBoard doesn’t include this themselves is presumably legal liability plus their dedication to the app not having any network permissions at all.