The other 95% of us:

European Digital identity

looks inside:

Hosted on GitHub in the US 👏

Yes? Did you?

Example:

AVIF

AVIF is an image format developed by the Alliance for Open Media. AVIF was designed by the foundation to make up for the shortcomings of other image codecs, including PNG, GIF, and WebP.

AVIF is generally smaller in size than both WebP and PNG. AVIF supports animation while PNG does not.

They should have let it die because nearly everything else is nowadays somehow better:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PNG#Comparison_with_other_file_formats

Me on my de-googled phone:

I also found out a few other things that have changed:

• They now use Torx T5 screws
• The backcover and battery are now fixed with these screws
• The battery uses a dedicated connector
• Parts of the backcover now require a pick
• SIM/SD now sit at the bottom in a dedicated slot and don’t require the removal of the backcover.
• The volume buttons got replaced by the “moments” button and are now on the left

IMHO this is kind of a downgrade in repairability as you now need custom tools (not everyone has a T5 screwdriver at home). Moving the volume buttons to the other side is also kind of weird and unexpected as most (non Apple) phones have them on the right…

Why does The Fairphone (Gen. 6) use USB-2?

In order to make the device more affordable, we explored how we could best balance our spec choices with the least possible impact on user experience. Going from USB-3 to USB-2 was one of them.

https://support.fairphone.com/hc/en-us/articles/24463093338898-The-Fairphone-Gen-6-FAQ

I just checked my phone and the up/down speed for files is roughly 40MB/s despite having a USB 3 connection.

USB 2 has a max. transfer rate (under optimal conditions) of 60MB/s, so I think when the phone storage improves a bit or the cable is a bit longer it will likely become a bottleneck.

Also note that there are other applications than transfering files which might need more bandwidth.

To be fair it really doesn’t make much of a difference but USB 3 is now the standard for a century and has been around since 2008 so I somewhere expect a 600€ phone to also have it.

Compared to the Fairphone 5 it has some improvements but also a few downsides:

Pro:

• It’s a bit smaller (~4mm) and lighter (~20g)
• Slightly better camera (future tests will tell how much better)
• 120 Hz display
• More RAM and storage (although I feel that the previous 6GB/128GB option was also sufficient for most users)
• WiFi 6E Tri-Band (however you will likely never need this speed)
• Bluetooth 5.4
• Slightly larger battery

Con:

• Backpanel now requires a screwdriver
• Display has less resolution/PPI
• Performance of processor will likely be nearly identical to predecessor (however it’s more efficient and modern)
• Downgrade to USB 2
• 600€

My conclusion: Overall the improvements are ok, however just releasing the Fairphone 5 with a newer SoC might have been the better/more cost effective choice. Sacrificing display resolution for 120 Hz feels also quite wrong. 600€ is very pricy for a phone like this. Cutting some premium features away like the 120 Hz display or a bit of RAM and storage (that you can extend anyway with an SD card) might have saved enough to get the launch price down to somewhere near 500€ which would make it accessible for a wider audience.

IP based blocking is complicated once you are big enough

It’s literally as simple as importing an ipset into iptables and refreshing it from time to time. There is even predefined tools for that.

While AI crawlers are a problem I’m also kind of astonished why so many projects don’t use tools like ratelimiters or IP-blocklists. These are pretty simple to setup, cause no/very little additional load and don’t cause collateral damage for legitimate users that just happend to use a different browser.

because it takes a like 3 or 4 minutes to boot

What kind of PC is this? Does it have an SSD?

There are some more privacy friendly forks of “Firefox for Android”, which have sponsored shortcuts disabled or minimized by default. For example:

• https://gitlab.com/relan/fennecbuild
• https://gitlab.com/ironfox-oss/IronFox

Feel free to give them a try :)

The same apps that have access to more of your data (because they’re not sandboxed in a browser), use electron (ships a browser) and include trackers that one can’t simply block with an extension?