Generally GrapheneOS is looking for sufficiently secure hardware it seems.

Non-exhaustive list of requirements for future devices, which are standards met or exceeded by devices starting from Pixel 8 (shiba) through Pixel 10a (stallion):

Support for using alternate operating systems including full hardware security functionality
Complete monthly Android Security Bulletin patches without any regular delays longer than a week for device support code (firmware, drivers and HALs)
At least 5 years of updates from launch for device support code with phones (Pixels now have 7) and 7 years with tablets
Device support code updated to new monthly, quarterly and yearly releases of AOSP within several months to provide new security improvements (Pixels receive these in the month they're released)
Linux 6.1, 6.6 or 6.12 Generic Kernel Image (GKI) support
Hardware accelerated virtualization usable by GrapheneOS (ideally pKVM to match Pixels but another usable implementation may be acceptable)
Hardware memory tagging (ARM MTE or equivalent)
Hardware-based coarse grained Control Flow Integrity (CFI) for baseline coverage where type-based CFI isn't used or can't be deployed (BTI/PAC, CET IBT or equivalent)
PXN, SMEP or equivalent
PAN, SMAP or equivalent
Isolated radios (cellular, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC, etc.), GPU, SSD, media encode and decode, image processor and other components
Support for A/B updates of both the firmware and OS images with automatic rollback if the initial boot fails one or more times
Verified boot with rollback protection for firmware
Verified boot with rollback protection for the OS (Android Verified Boot)
Verified boot key fingerprint for yellow boot state displayed with a secure hash (non-truncated SHA-256 or better)
StrongBox keystore provided by secure element
Hardware key attestation support for the StrongBox keystore
Attest key support for hardware key attestation to provide pinning support
Weaver disk encryption key derivation throttling provided by secure element
Insider attack resistance for updates to the secure element (Owner user authentication required before updates are accepted)
Inline disk encryption acceleration with wrapped key support
64-bit-only device support code
Wi-Fi anonymity support including MAC address randomization, probe sequence number randomization and no other leaked identifiers
Support for disabling USB data and also USB as a whole at a hardware level in the USB controller
Reset attack mitigation for firmware-based boot modes such as fastboot mode zeroing memory left over from the OS and delaying opening up attack surface such as USB functionality until that's completed
Debugging features such as JTAG or serial debugging must be inaccessible while the device is locked

https://grapheneos.org/faq#supported-devices

Oh right, the KTY part is also part of the region. By INF I meant what you said above in the post (XXX.XXX.XXX (INF.REC.ENC)), which makes it look like each part corresponds to something called INF, REC and ENC. I didn’t realise that it was supposed to be an example.

Two things that comes into my mind:

• The meaning of INF, REF, and ENC are not clear. The INF section has been used for both topic and country code.
• In “USA.KTY.BGN”, shouldn’t it say USA.XXX.XXX instead to make it clearer?

I don’t quite understand the problem this protocol solves that existing solutions don’t, to be honest. I think it would be great to add what problems it solves in the document.

If by malware you do genuinely mean those that exploits vulnerabilities on your system to gain unauthrorised access (as opposed to apps that have heavy telemetry), I think apps from official sources are sufficient like Play Store or F-Droid. Malware will usually ask you excessive number of permissions. Deny them whenever possible. Installing them in second profile would make the damage contained.

But since you said degoogling, I would go with F-Droid, or directly from GitHub, where most apps are open source. Obtainium is a great tool to manage those applications. Last but not least, denying network access can block some telemetry on apps that don’t require network to function.

You should check out .gitignore templates and .gitignore file in other open source Android apps to see what needs to be published, what doesn’t need to be published, and most importantly what you should not publish. You should get a couple of results when you search “gitignore android studio”.

I don’t quite see how AI assisted searching would be different in terms of privacy from normal search engine from the searcher’s perspective. Biggest issue with AI in the context of privacy is that it gets trained on a lot of personal data and can also be used to deanonymise when used against others. The only kind of information you would give away to the third party uniquely in AI search engine (I think) would be your speech pattern if you are having a conversation with it instead of simply typing in keywords. Duck.AI claims to ensure your data is not used to train the AI, but there’s no way to verify if the AI provider is holding up that promise. Still it’s a good choice since you don’t have to log in.

Accuracy is not very relevant in privacy, so it would depend almost solely on what you choose as your provider.

If I were to use one, I would choose whichever you can use without logging in, and gives reasonably accurate information.

I don’t really see a point in rotating your VPN provider regularly; It would cost more, make you stand out more, and unless you are putting significant delay between switches, it wouldn’t hide much.

If not trusting whoever is handling your traffic is a must, I would honestly just use Tor, preferably in Tails really.

Their website (https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/learn) do mention the concern you have; Blocking trackers means you are a user with a very specific privacy settings. I suppose it would be like going around with a full face mask; You are technically private, but you are uniquely identifiable unless someone else does that. I also get “Uniquely Identifiable” on my personalised browser, but nothing like it when I try it out on newly installed Mullvad browser with no changes.

Not that I know much about how Tor traffic is identified, but Tor bridges seems like a potential solution? I would dig into that a bit more.

If you have another personal email address, you can set up automatic forwarding. Google will still be able to read your emails you receive since it all goes into Gmail server, but they will be forwarded to your non-Google email address, and you can use any client for your personal email.

I know Hasleo WinToUSB allows you to install Windows on a USB stick. I have personally tested it with Windows 10 and it worked well, but I have not tested it with Windows 11 (but they claim that it works) or Lockdown Browser. You can try their free version which has manual partitioning and BitLocker behind a paywall.

Kvaesitso. It’s the only FOSS app I found that supports folders within the drawer. Well, at least it was the closest thing to it; You can select a tag and apps with that tag is shown to you. I really don’t like how most launchers treats app drawer like a app dump. I miss the folder feature in Nova launcher.

reproducible

You tried writing bash scripts that set things up for you, haven’t you? It’s NixOS for you.

Other than keeping an eye on their changelog or waiting until it breaks, I don’t think you can do anything about that. I do have automatic update, but the config rarely changes from my experience.

I also recommend it.

It works with containers so I can create a setup where requests sent from the container goes through the VPN. I use it for my Redlib setup to bypass rate limiting by rotating its IP regularly. Unless you have your host to route all traffic through a certain node, it should work independently from Tailscale.

Anubis, though I always had it before I removed Cloudflare.

CLOUDFLARE IS NO MORE FOR MY NETWORK

Soon I’ll drop Cloudflare for my public services too

Yup, that would be CardDAV and CalDAV respectively. There’s a number of programs that does this. Ones I remember are Nextcloud, Radicale and Baikal.

Definitely more than a year! If you have tried it in the past, you probably dropped it either because you used it before the revival, or the UI looked really old. At least that was what I did.