For the love to privacy and security

Feature Requests
#1

First I know there could be some duplicates, but i thought its time to sum up things that privacy/security oriented people like me missing in sfos, and I think lack of these missing features following cant be ignored if sfos really want to be privacy and security oriented, too.

  1. The Search Engines. Ok we have a seach engines switching app (all hail to @coderus). But isnt it strange after all we know about tracking from bigtech, a privacy oriented OS like sailfish gave us google, bing - Microsoft, yahoo and yandex as the only alternatives? Hell, even apple gave their ios duckduckgo or ecosia. So what is wrong with you guys?

  2. A personal big wish of mine would be openpgp, s/mime support in the mail app. Mail encryption is a must have if you want to use sailfish OS with sensible accounts, companies or government.

  3. Wireguard, a new shiny and fast/easy vpn is missing in the vpn section. But hey lets use the insecure L2TP. Really?

  4. There are a lot of communication channels today and people who choose sfos aren’t people who first installs whatsapp or Skype (i mean, i hope so). So why isnt there an official jolla “chatty” app (name shameless stolen from phosh). I mean a chat app with foss protocols to todays federated api’s matrix / xmpp or whatever. so people could use their own servers or something like “matrix.jolla.com” as the standard definition for people who are new / or unfamiliar with it.

  5. Adblocking, Tracker, Malicious Pages, Gambling, Malware, we have the Defender App. A must have (actually broken). A main app like this needs to be a core utility.

P.S. I know there are workarounds for near all these points, but I tried to use the perspective of a new user with a fresh install, who read about the privacy oriented sfos, and got confronted with these missing stuff.

Thx for reading.

12 Likes
[OpEd] Shall we stop asking jolla to build a native messenger?
#2
  1. Should come to you soon, anyone can contribute to Browser really, it’s open source.
  2. Uhm… tricky, just have your personal email server as an alternative?
  3. What’s wrong with OpenVPN? Wireguard appeared in kernel 5.4, not all mobile phones ship with that, you can ask Google to encourage a better ecosystem, firstly by getting rid of bionic, secondly by licensing Android in a way that manufacturers have to open source their drivers. This would allow anyone to build any kernel
  4. XMPP has been supported from day 1. I hear there are matrix clients in the works, too
  5. Like 1. - anybody can contribute to Browser

Sorry for being snappy, I mentioned elsewhere that it’s easy to shout at Jolla when they give us a channel to do so. Try to do the same with point 3 :slight_smile:

1 Like
#3

2 - though definitely a cool feature it is also a niche feature that even clients like Thunderbird took years to get into mainline, I don’t know what the OSS status of the mail client is but I expect it is similar to the browser and if it is based on Thunderbird it may be possible to backport from there.

3 - the VPN function was probably mainly created for enterprise users, Wireguard is not a thing there and with the exception of some very bleeding edge places won’t be a thing there for the next decade (year or two in the most bleeding edge places). Also as @gabrielg pointed out it’s in the 5.4 kernel something not a singe SFOS X (or sony Open Devices program) device actually has.

1 Like
#4

WireGuard doesn’t have to be a kernel thing. It can use an out of the kernel implementation. Ie. there is a package on open repos.

However to make it user friendly it needs to be configurable from the settings. So if someone needs that feature and knows what to do he will probably need to work with jolla also. I don’t expect them to implement it on their own.

3 Likes
#5

Could you please elaborate on this?

#6

Indeed; however, including out of kernel code requires even more testing, and anything Android base is already a fruit salad of out-of-tree code, often closed source.
Sure, if Jolla were 100x bigger, this wouldn’t be a problem.
I’m sure folks are welcome to port devices with kernels running Wireguard reliably.

#7

Someone could use https://github.com/cloudflare/boringtun which is userspace, written in rust, open, bsd licensed, and backed/developed by cloudflare which is quite “big” company.

3 Likes
#8

Regarding 2, there is some pgp/smime signature verification stuff already in Sailfish, it just isn’t enabled by default, I think and does not support encryption. I think that was blocked on some dependency being out of date and time to finish it or so. I think that is sorted out now, so someone could pick it up? Not sure.

#9

Yes, it is time to give us the choice and to make the list of search engines default in Sailfish!
The first thing I do after having rebooted my device: setting the browser in Bing, then I go to openrepos and install Coderus’ list of search engines. Then I choose Qwant. It is such a nuisance seeing Google in search and in accounts, while I want to avoid Google as much as possible. Also sharing with Dropbox but not with Cozy Drive e.g. sounds a bit strange.
I don’t know if Matrix is the solution for everyone. I use Wire messenger and Telegram. The first is privacy respecting, like Threema and Signal. Swiss jurisdiction.
I am not a dev. so I, like many, have to trust someone or some company. Some apps are in Jolla store for years, such as Here. Is this a safe client app?
The Android version isn’t, therefore I prefer MagicEarth instead and others prefer Pure Maps. Perhaps Jolla store need a check-up?

2 Likes
#10

And makes use of Google servers.