Using the Internet makes you subject to TLA spying.

I use many software installation sources, including Obtainium from GitHub. I do not assign the same trust levels to each. E.g. F-Droid at least has some shallow level of review for the packages they build.

It’s a privacy hardened Fennec available from the GOS Accrescent app installation source. I only use Vanadium for sites that don’t run in it.

Tried Ironfox yet?

The Great Chinese Firewall isn’t nearly as oppressive.

A lot of legitimate connections are affected. There is a whitelist of mostly useless services and Telegram users are being MAX-herded. There currently seems to be no VPN that works reliably, out of the box.

This is a stupid move, and is causing a lot of anger. Telegram has become effectively unusable to Russian users overnight.

Russia has harsher blocks than China, meanwhile.

Right.

Can’t even watch it with my always on VPN.

Hello, this was never about kids. Do you routinely believe what politicians are telling you?

If you want to see where we’re going, look no farther than Russia’s Internet. Which is currently much worse than China’s.

So be prepared for your service to be degraded to unusability.

You can run your VPN on your firewall (mine is opnsense, behind a cable modem in bridge mode). E.g. wireguard with Mullvad is a good option. Or you can set up a VPN client on your end devices – Mullvad gives you 5 endpoints for one account.

I also don’t trust my ISP nor my national government, which is why the bulk of my private Internet use goes over a fail-close VPN.

I prefer GOS due to better privacy and security, and buy my hardware for OS compatibility.

Yes, completely unproblematic. Using it on Pixel tablet and 7a, old devices are on Lineage OS.

You’re engaging in a strawman. Privacy is not a boolean choice, there are degrees. Making a few connections to some Google servers is not the same as having stock Android.

Obviously Graphene OS is the current gold standard for privacy, but you can run a Lineage OS device without Google Play Services, with only free/libre software installation sources, and without the telemetry for those users who can’t or won’t use current GOS. This is obviously a considerable improvement over a Chinese or other commercial manufacturer.

But, yes, if you can run GOS rather than LOS, you should.

When general computing is outlawed, only outlaws will have general computers.

I’ll meet you in the digital underground, netizen.

You can build browsers from source. And import open hardware from China. RISCV is getting close to usable, these days.