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Android Security Tips

Sadly the carriers shutting down 3G unneccessarily to mandate people use 'modern' phones still upsets me. It's unethical. 3G, 4G and 5G were obviously coexisting just fine and dandy so the spectrum was there. But imagine the amount of tossed out phones that were rendered paperweights and amplify that to an environmental scale, and suddenly the claims of 'helping the planet' by not including a charging brick seem laughable.

What was hurting carriers by allowing people to keep using the phone they're comfortable with? It still angers me that they could get away with forcing people to upgrade to something they're not frustrated using. I myself would love to have a Nokia N95 as a daily driver given all I do anymore is text, call and play music. But sadly thanks to carriers being dicks I cannot. All the variety is gone and them shutting down networks for no reason (and without the free market demand) makes the only possible options the endless sea of 6.5" flat glass slabs that all look the same and have the same boring flat UI.

Carriers denying service because someone prefers their 10 year old phone (because it does what they need it to do) is no less a crime than denying someone electricity because their home still has knob-and-tube wiring. Even if they pay their bills on time. That's a crime called 'denial of service'

It's why I despise the idea of corporations. They get away with tons of unethical and criminal acts all the time. Small businesses used to listen to the free market. Corporations don't give a damn what the customer wants, and ruins the whole premise of free market economics. All they care about is the shareholders, and that means customers are constantly screwed over. But when all you got is corporations, there's nowhere to turn to, no way to 'vote with your wallet' not that it would help given we're all a bunch of docile sheep these days. If anyone tried what the carriers tried in the 50s, they'd go bankrupt since they'd lose too many customers. Today? No one seems to care. On either end. I'm a byproduct of a bygone era, and apparently everything I was taught in high school about economics was a lie.

If free market economics existed, we'd still have Kmart, Ames, Sears, Bradlee's and Woolco instead of the behemoths such as Walmart, Target, and Verizon. Explain how Walmart survives with the ethical issues and employee treatment issues while a far superior company like Kmart cannot? It makes no sense.

Corporations are also why there's literally no competition anymore. Lack of competition is a monopoly, and illegal. Lack of competition also stifles innovation. We only have Android and iOS today. We only have Windows and Linux. We've stagnated since 2015 with no real 'advancement'. Tell me how that's a good thing? Does everyone want to live in a stagnant, homogenized dystopia?
 
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The most important advice: Do not go to unknown sites (only in extreme cases) and do not download unknown files).
In 13 years of using Android, I have never caught a virus.
 
Yeah that advice works for any internet-connected tech, from laptops, to tablets and smartphones. the whole premise is 'don't be stupid'.

My grandmother bless her soul always fell for those blinking 'you got a free iPad' ads. I often had to come over to fix her 'shrinking internet' (Internet Explorer full of tons of garbage toolbars). She would never use any other browser, not even Firefox (which she always called FoxFire) and no, changing the Firefox icon to the IE icon wouldn't fool her a bit. She knew her browser.
 
Yeah that advice works for any internet-connected tech, from laptops, to tablets and smartphones. the whole premise is 'don't be stupid'.

My grandmother bless her soul always fell for those blinking 'you got a free iPad' ads. I often had to come over to fix her 'shrinking internet' (Internet Explorer full of tons of garbage toolbars). She would never use any other browser, not even Firefox (which she always called FoxFire) and no, changing the Firefox icon to the IE icon wouldn't fool her a bit. She knew her browser.
Maybe you should set her router to AdGuard DNS. Then even with all the messing around she does on her computer, a lot of the ads will be blocked.
 
Well, she died on us in January. She had already given up on that computer when she turned 91, and just watched TV. When she did use it last, she kept having issues with the taskbar moving to the top or side of the screen, so I can easily see why Microsoft removed that option in Windows 11.
 
If your device is old enough installing a more recent app will just slow it down or reduce battery life anyway.
Puffin Cloud Browser is an exception. I've been using it on my new tablet computer: New to me that is, but I inherited it from my father who bought it ten years ago. Puffin gives far more security then an ordinary browser by loading the webpage on their own servers rather then on my computer, thus protecting me from webpages attempting to hack my computer. That also speeds up my computer.
 
I once had to install that monstrosity on a laptop to allow me to play Flash content (namely, FarmVille and Gardens of Time--their respective iOS and Android apps had long since stopped working) after another corporation decided to up and kill it. It was a slow, unstable mess. Didn't help I was attempting to run it on a Vista machine with only 2GB RAM, but obviously it was too much for the specs of that system. I was able to at least SEE Gardens of Time and play a couple levels (had to restart from level one sadly) before it failed to work thereafter. There are two games called 'Gardens of Time' today, and the one that shows up on a modern device is not the same game. The one I remember was set in the Victorian era and was a Facebook game at one time, similar to FarmVille. I forget the developer, but Disney had rights to it for a while. That game no longer shows up on a search, only a game with the same name that has nothing in common. I miss that game personally. Like FarmVille, it died with the death of Flash, and the death is so involved that even installing an older copy on Windows Vista can't bring it back. Can't use any of the self-contained players either because those games depend on their internet servers. I wonder how NewGrounds is coping?
 
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