Could This Be the End of F-Droid?
Our top stories this week:
- F-Droid warns that Google's mandatory developer registration would destroy the project.
- Google confirms that there will be free and paid tiers for developer registration. However, FOSS developers may need to pay after a certain number of downloads.
- Apple receives another technical capabilities notice by the UK to implement a backdoor into iCloud's Advanced Data Protection Program. This time, it will only target British users.
- AMD and Intel CPU were discovered to be vulnerable against physical attacks. The companies refuse to implement a fix as they are "out-of-scope".
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Updates from the team
As always, we have some exciting news from the Privacy Guides team!
Many of you may have noticed, or if you’re reading this (hey there!), that we’ve relaunched our newsletter. This includes paid memberships where we plan to offer exclusive perks to our members for supporting our work.
With a paid Privacy Guides Membership you get:
- Public badge on your forum account
- Prioritized questions during our This Week In Privacy live-stream
- Exclusive articles
- Early access to video content
- Recognition on the Privacy Guides website
- Warm fuzzy feeling by supporting independent media 😇
Your membership will directly support Em's writing work, Jordan's top-quality video content, and Kevin's work keeping our daily tasks on point. It also helps us find the best guest contributors, and review paid products completely independently.
This week we released a video that Jordan spent quite a lot of time researching behind the scenes, which was about quantum computing and encryption. So if you haven't seen that yet, definitely check it out!
Jonah also released a video version of his recent article on Memory Integrity Enforcement for the A19 SoC:
Last but not least, Privacy Guides team member Fria published an article on differential privacy, check it out:
fria
Sources
F-Droid says Google’s new sideloading restrictions will kill the project
F-Droid has authored a blog post condemning Google's push to register Android developers for "security" purposes. Google's verification program is seen by F-Droid as a threat to free app distribution, despite Google's claim that it reduces malware. They cannot comply with these requirements without compromising its principles, as it curates its apps to avoid tracking and other anti-features. This would jeopardize F-Droid's existence, as Google may demand registration fees from developers who typically distribute their apps for free. In a way, none of F-Droid apps would be compliant with the app store's FOSS principles.