Brief items

A study of data collection by Android devices

A group of researchers at Trinity College in Dublin has released the results of a study into the data collected by a number of Android variants. There are few surprises here, but the picture is still discouraging.

We find that the Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei and Realme Android variants all transmit a substantial volume of data to the OS developer (i.e. Samsung etc) and to third-party parties that have pre-installed system apps (including Google, Microsoft, Heytap, LinkedIn, Facebook). LineageOS sends similar volumes of data to Google as these proprietary Android variants, but we do not observe the LineageOS developers themselves collecting data nor pre-installed system apps other than those of Google. Notably, /e/OS sends no information to Google or other third parties and sends essentially no information to the /e/OS developers.

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Security quotes of the week

We need to fix the internet, not the tech giants. The problem isn't just that Zuck is really bad at being the unelected pope-emperor of the digital lives of 3,000,000,000 people – it's that the job of "pope-emperor of 3,000,000,000 people" should be abolished.

I believe that people who rely on digital tools should have the final say in how those tools serve them. That's the proposition at the core of the "nothing about us without us" movement for accessible tech, and the ethos of Free Software.

— Cory Doctorow

It’s why “see something, say something” doesn’t work. If you put amateurs in the front lines of security, don’t be surprised when you get amateur security.

— Bruce Schneier

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Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 5.15-rc5, released on October 10. Linus said: "So things continue to look quite normal, and it looks like the rough patch (hah!) we had early in the release is all behind us. Knock wood."

Stable updates: 5.14.10 and 4.4.287 were released on October 7, followed by 5.14.11, 5.10.72, 5.4.152, 4.19.210, 4.14.250, 4.9.286, and 4.4.288 on October 10, and 5.14.12, 5.10.73, 5.4.153, and 4.19.211 on October 13.

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Quote of the week

Well, I was thinking simple locking could work too. But I guess RCU is like Batman. You know, "Always be yourself. Unless you can be Batman, then always be Batman!". So always use locking, unless you can use RCU, then always use RCU.

— Steve Rostedt

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Jörg Schilling is gone

Jörg Schilling, a longtime free-software developer, has passed on. Most people will remember him from his work on cdrtools and the seemingly endless drama that surrounded that work. He was a difficult character to deal with, but he also contributed some important code that, for a period, almost all of us depended on. Rest well, Jörg.

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