From my understanding, the biggest issue is that just about every smartphone is closed hardware with no real info on how to make drivers, so it’s extremely difficult to get hardware support.

Not the person who drew the short straw and had to implement it.

That’s the whole point, though, they don’t have to implement it. They’re under no obligation at all to do so. Try to rule Linux is illegal in California and watch Silicon Valley lobbyists damn near riot. They’re just giving in, but even just procrastination would be a ridiculously effective tactic.

Ah, yeah, then they can’t be touched unless Canada passes something stupid, too. Which in the general global political climate… Isn’t impossible. But they may just geoblock California and other jurisdictions with similar laws so they can have plausible deniability. Of course, users could circumvent that entirely a dozen different ways, especially those technically inclined enough to install GrapheneOS, so I’m not sure how much it would really hurt them.

Are the devs even in a jurisdiction where that matters? Given they’re working on a project specifically focused on privacy and security, even if they are in such a jurisdiction, are they actually traceable, or have they been obfuscating their identity with tools like Tor? It might not be enforceable.

God dammit, we can be tracked by the fucking tire sensors? Fucking hate this timeline…

That’s better, at least. GrapheneOS users should be fine at least since there are extensive restrictions on Play. Other Android ROMs may have issues, though. Maybe not if they use MicroG.

repeating the digital beacons of everyone else

You can’t perfectly mimic everyone else and accomplish something unique at the same time, even if it’s something as simple as pulling up a webpage nobody else around is requesting. Your device must in some way identify itself to the network so it can actually receive everything they request, and that’s an avenue for identification and tracking.

Not too long ago I was watching a video about a guy that was a 100% match in the eyes of AI as someone that was trespassed by the casino. When the cops showed up and he presented his documents, the cops brought him to the station as they thought he must have given false ID when he was originally trespassed.

Sure, modern AI can’t push the limits like I’m talking about, but I’m not talking about doing all this with modern AI as it is now, and things are advancing extremely rapidly. Processing power available is, too, as companies churn out as many new data centers as they can. It might not be as long as we hope before the things I suggest become feasible.

He was eventually able to prove his innocence but the fact he was taken into custody because AI messed up makes me have no issue with people doing stuff to intentionally poison the data.

Yeah, modern AI is trained unethically at just about every step of the process, so poison away.

GrapheneOS is built on AOSP, which is where the change is being made. Graphene and other custom ROMs will need to maintain a fork that cuts out the feature if they want to avoid. Google is also starting to close off Android to make that more difficult, so it’ll become a genuine project to maintain the fork well.

Pretty sure it’s a change to AOSP, the basis for every single Android ROM in existence.

Even if businesses are willing to settle for good enough, governments most certainly will NOT. Those attempting to evade detection will be those they’re most interested in identifying, which is why I mentioned that failure to successfully falsify will get you flagged as having attempted it and probably how. From a government’s perspective, the ones attempting to evade detection are the ones most likely to be criminals or, even worse in their eyes, rebels. Governments, especially authoritarian ones, will make sure the tech constantly pushes the boundaries of what’s possible, or at the very least defeats the vast majority of known evasion techniques.

Then, if business really has left the evaders unidentified, they’ll start adopting the tech from government. Better data with no R&D? Why wouldn’t they at that point? Governments might even subsidize it because it helps them spread the greater surveillance network.

The clothing they wear solves most of those

For now. This cat and mouse game will continue on and on. We’ll develop evasion techniques, they’ll learn how to recognize and see through them. We’ll develop new ones again, they’ll learn them again. What about if you speak near a camera? It’ll learn to analyze voice and diction. Voice scrambler? AI is learning to descramble video, can probably learn it for voice, too. Your clothing style will become a data point and an expensive one to consistently falsify. The locations you’re seen at is suggestive. If you walk a dog, good fucking luck convincing it to help you falsify data for the AI monitors.

Still, this is predicated on the assumption that you can recognize and falsify enough of the data points. My point is that they will collect however many data points it takes to make it nigh impossible to get a failure to identify you or a false positive. And if it’s a false positive, we have to question the ethics of pinning your trail on some other random dude.

That won’t stop corporations and governments from surveiling. They’ll still collect highly accurate information about you. They may not trust public data, but they’ll still trust the systems they use to surveil. They’ll still be right.

It won’t work alone for long in the age of AI. You won’t be tracked and identified by face alone. It’ll be a complex array of data points. Your face, your hair, your eye color if the cameras have the resolution, your height, your gait, your posture, your scars and injuries, your visible birth defects, whether you use mobility aids, the wireless devices emitting signals in your pockets, the list goes on and on. They’ll assemble dozens of data points and make it extremely difficult to falsify enough to avoid detection instead of just getting flagged as suspicious.

I’m not talking about people who had a “cure” but about those who shared their experiences openly while being censored and dismissed. People who are not part of a campaign.

You’re assuming you can tell when a stranger on the internet is part of a campaign or mistakenly parroting something from a campaign. The internet is heavily astroturfed, especially social media. Several hugely popular pieces of misinformation have been traced back to just a handful of accounts that look like and pose as regular people but, upon thorough inspection, are very clearly lying either for money or for propaganda. Those accounts lied, not got it wrong, lied, and millions of people parroted it. Many of them lied a bit themselves and framed it as something that totally happened to someone they directly know.

You assume a lot, and the way you associate everything with anti-vaxxers only shows how much governments have turned this into a political issue.

…Motherfucker, it’s not a politics issue, it’s a science issue. Antivaxxers have REPEATEDLY shown they don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. At best, they’re scared of what they don’t understand and make mistakes. At worst, they’re grifting at the expense of people’s health. Many just want to feel smart, like they’re in on a secret the rest of society can’t recognize, and they’re willing to endanger people’s health and wellbeing to get that feeling. In no case are they overall correct, even if they manage to occasionally brush against truth as they flounder. You wanted examples of why regular people might go on the internet and lie about the vaccines, and antivaxxers are a great example because everything that comes out of their mouths on that topic is either half baked or, relevant to the question at hand, an outright lie. Some of them will just make up random shit on the fly to defend their incorrect beliefs. Shit, some people are just pathological liars, and some portion of them will be antivax or whatever.

If I say someone close to me had side effects after the vaccine, suddenly I’m assumed to also drink bleach and take dewormers.

I don’t think anyone with sense and information doubts that people experienced side effects. When I got my COVID vaccines, we had to wait a little while on site in case we had an allergic reaction or any other sort of adverse reaction. What most of the doubters don’t believe is the people suggesting it’s way more dangerous than anyone thought because the vast majority of the evidence is someone claiming that their cousin’s uncle’s dog’s vet’s new girlfriend he just met totally suffered life altering consequences. The vast majority is bullshit, whether the person saying it knows it or not, and the remainder is such a small portion, it most likely doesn’t make a significant difference from reported results and risks.

At this point, you’re basically unable to think critically or discuss the negative. Being part of a herd also comes with some dangerous aspects.

No, I can do that. The problem is that critical thinking leads me to the realization that there’s never any fucking evidence, at all, ever. Some schmuck that may or may not be AI with a username I’ve never seen before can write some words on social media about a thing that totally definitely happened to someone, but that’s it, that’s all it is. There’s never unadulterated pictures or video. No medical records from the hospital visit such a severe reaction surely must have required. No articles from a respected journalist known to thoroughly vet sources. No medical or scientific studies that hold up to thorough scrutiny. Do some people have severe negative reactions? Yeah, the manufacturers literally warn us of them. Is it the huge threat that some people made it out to be? Almost certainly not according to the available legitimate evidence.

Cue the classic Arthur meme, “do you really think someone would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies?”

How about for money? How many grifters pushed their own protective supplements? You think pharma maybe would pay some astroturfers to push the ivermectin that didn’t do dick for anyone that didn’t have worms already because it’s fucking dewormer? How many antivaxxers made up bullshit about it just like they do every other vaccine? How many wealthy people down played everything and helped push lies so their workers would get the fuck back in the office/factory? How many people just said some stupid shit and doubled down to protect their ego when called out?

Like here’s the real issue. You’ve put no real thought at all into why someone might lie about it, as evidenced by the fact that you can only conceive of it being state actors while I came up with all those people incentivized to lie off the top of my head. And then, after putting no real effort into reflection or anything, you look around at all the people who can come up with reasons you’re wrong and claim it feels like a cult.

Probably more to do with the fact that there is, at most, a tiny grain of truth at the core, but it’s wrapped in a mountain of bullshit.

It’s a whole lot more than just firmware, though. The UI is proprietary. A bunch of the basic system apps are proprietary. The Android compatibility layer is proprietary. You’re not really buying into an open OS that happens to have proprietary components; you’re getting a proprietary OS built in open components.

A lot of people who are eager to install Linux on their phones this early are out off by the proprietary parts of SailfishOS. I personally want a Linux phone in large part due to distrust of proprietary software for a device with such capacity to invade my privacy.

You don’t need it to be unanimous, but if it’s not unanimous, you have to rewrite the parts from people who refused or can’t be contacted. If their sum contributions aren’t too big, it can be feasible but a lot of work. If too many or if key contributors refuse, the work can scale exponentially.

GPL is especially popular with people who don’t want their labor of love to become a source of free labor for corporations who will tweak it, close the source, directly profit off it, and never donate or contribute patches. For them, it’s an antiparasitic license.