To use the Mastodon web ap­pli­ca­tion, please en­able JavaScript. Alternatively, try one of the na­tive apps for Mastodon for your plat­form.

tl;dr: I’m join­ing OpenAI to work on bring­ing agents to every­one. OpenClaw will move to a foun­da­tion and stay open and in­de­pen­dent.

The last month was a whirl­wind, never would I have ex­pected that my play­ground pro­ject would cre­ate such waves. The in­ter­net got weird again, and it’s been in­cred­i­bly fun to see how my work in­spired so many peo­ple around the world.

There’s an end­less ar­ray of pos­si­bil­i­ties that opened up for me, count­less peo­ple try­ing to push me into var­i­ous di­rec­tions, giv­ing me ad­vice, ask­ing how they can in­vest or what I will do. Saying it’s over­whelm­ing is an un­der­state­ment.

When I started ex­plor­ing AI, my goal was to have fun and in­spire peo­ple. And here we are, the lob­ster is tak­ing over the world. My next mis­sion is to build an agent that even my mum can use. That’ll need a much broader change, a lot more thought on how to do it safely, and ac­cess to the very lat­est mod­els and re­search.

Yes, I could to­tally see how OpenClaw could be­come a huge com­pany. And no, it’s not re­ally ex­cit­ing for me. I’m a builder at heart. I did the whole cre­at­ing-a-com­pany game al­ready, poured 13 years of my life into it and learned a lot. What I want is to change the world, not build a large com­pany and team­ing up with OpenAI is the fastest way to bring this to every­one.

I spent last week in San Francisco talk­ing with the ma­jor labs, get­ting ac­cess to peo­ple and un­re­leased re­search, and it’s been in­spir­ing on all fronts. I want to thank all the folks I talked to this week and am thank­ful for the op­por­tu­ni­ties.

It’s al­ways been im­por­tant to me that OpenClaw stays open source and given the free­dom to flour­ish. Ultimately, I felt OpenAI was the best place to con­tinue push­ing on my vi­sion and ex­pand its reach. The more I talked with the peo­ple there, the clearer it be­came that we both share the same vi­sion.

The com­mu­nity around OpenClaw is some­thing mag­i­cal and OpenAI has made strong com­mit­ments to en­able me to ded­i­cate my time to it and al­ready spon­sors the pro­ject. To get this into a proper struc­ture I’m work­ing on mak­ing it a foun­da­tion. It will stay a place for thinkers, hack­ers and peo­ple that want a way to own their data, with the goal of sup­port­ing even more mod­els and com­pa­nies.

Personally I’m su­per ex­cited to join OpenAI, be part of the fron­tier of AI re­search and de­vel­op­ment, and con­tinue build­ing with all of you.

The claw is the law.

Claude Sonnet 4.6 is our most ca­pa­ble Sonnet model yet. It’s a full up­grade of the mod­el’s skills across cod­ing, com­puter use, long-con­text rea­son­ing, agent plan­ning, knowl­edge work, and de­sign. Sonnet 4.6 also fea­tures a 1M to­ken con­text win­dow in beta. For those on our Free and Pro plans, Claude Sonnet 4.6 is now the de­fault model in claude.ai and Claude Cowork. Pricing re­mains the same as Sonnet 4.5, start­ing at $3/$15 per mil­lion to­kens.Son­net 4.6 brings much-im­proved cod­ing skills to more of our users. Improvements in con­sis­tency, in­struc­tion fol­low­ing, and more have made de­vel­op­ers with early ac­cess pre­fer Sonnet 4.6 to its pre­de­ces­sor by a wide mar­gin. They of­ten even pre­fer it to our smartest model from November 2025, Claude Opus 4.5.Performance that would have pre­vi­ously re­quired reach­ing for an Opus-class model—in­clud­ing on real-world, eco­nom­i­cally valu­able of­fice tasks—is now avail­able with Sonnet 4.6. The model also shows a ma­jor im­prove­ment in com­puter use skills com­pared to prior Sonnet mod­els.As with every new Claude model, we’ve run ex­ten­sive safety eval­u­a­tions of Sonnet 4.6, which over­all showed it to be as safe as, or safer than, our other re­cent Claude mod­els. Our safety re­searchers con­cluded that Sonnet 4.6 has “a broadly warm, hon­est, proso­cial, and at times funny char­ac­ter, very strong safety be­hav­iors, and no signs of ma­jor con­cerns around high-stakes forms of mis­align­ment.”Al­most every or­ga­ni­za­tion has soft­ware it can’t eas­ily au­to­mate: spe­cial­ized sys­tems and tools built be­fore mod­ern in­ter­faces like APIs ex­isted. To have AI use such soft­ware, users would pre­vi­ously have had to build be­spoke con­nec­tors. But a model that can use a com­puter the way a per­son does changes that equa­tion.In October 2024, we were the first to in­tro­duce a gen­eral-pur­pose com­puter-us­ing model. At the time, we wrote that it was “still ex­per­i­men­tal—at times cum­ber­some and er­ror-prone,” but we ex­pected rapid im­prove­ment. OSWorld, the stan­dard bench­mark for AI com­puter use, shows how far our mod­els have come. It pre­sents hun­dreds of tasks across real soft­ware (Chrome, LibreOffice, VS Code, and more) run­ning on a sim­u­lated com­puter. There are no spe­cial APIs or pur­pose-built con­nec­tors; the model sees the com­puter and in­ter­acts with it in much the same way a per­son would: click­ing a (virtual) mouse and typ­ing on a (virtual) key­board.Across six­teen months, our Sonnet mod­els have made steady gains on OSWorld. The im­prove­ments can also be seen be­yond bench­marks: early Sonnet 4.6 users are see­ing hu­man-level ca­pa­bil­ity in tasks like nav­i­gat­ing a com­plex spread­sheet or fill­ing out a multi-step web form, be­fore pulling it all to­gether across mul­ti­ple browser tabs.The model cer­tainly still lags be­hind the most skilled hu­mans at us­ing com­put­ers. But the rate of progress is re­mark­able nonethe­less. It means that com­puter use is much more use­ful for a range of work tasks—and that sub­stan­tially more ca­pa­ble mod­els are within reach.Scores prior to Claude Sonnet 4.5 were mea­sured on the orig­i­nal OSWorld; scores from Sonnet 4.5 on­ward use OSWorld-Verified. OSWorld-Verified (released July 2025) is an in-place up­grade of the orig­i­nal OSWorld bench­mark, with up­dates to task qual­ity, eval­u­a­tion grad­ing, and in­fra­struc­ture.At the same time, com­puter use poses risks: ma­li­cious ac­tors can at­tempt to hi­jack the model by hid­ing in­struc­tions on web­sites in what’s known as a prompt in­jec­tion at­tack. We’ve been work­ing to im­prove our mod­els’ re­sis­tance to prompt in­jec­tions—our safety eval­u­a­tions show that Sonnet 4.6 is a ma­jor im­prove­ment com­pared to its pre­de­ces­sor, Sonnet 4.5, and per­forms sim­i­larly to Opus 4.6. You can find out more about how to mit­i­gate prompt in­jec­tions and other safety con­cerns in our API docs.Be­yond com­puter use, Claude Sonnet 4.6 has im­proved on bench­marks across the board. It ap­proaches Opus-level in­tel­li­gence at a price point that makes it more prac­ti­cal for far more tasks. You can find a full dis­cus­sion of Sonnet 4.6’s ca­pa­bil­i­ties and its safety-re­lated be­hav­iors in our sys­tem card; a sum­mary and com­par­i­son to other re­cent mod­els is be­low.In Claude Code, our early test­ing found that users pre­ferred Sonnet 4.6 over Sonnet 4.5 roughly 70% of the time. Users re­ported that it more ef­fec­tively read the con­text be­fore mod­i­fy­ing code and con­sol­i­dated shared logic rather than du­pli­cat­ing it. This made it less frus­trat­ing to use over long ses­sions than ear­lier mod­els.Users even pre­ferred Sonnet 4.6 to Opus 4.5, our fron­tier model from November, 59% of the time. They rated Sonnet 4.6 as sig­nif­i­cantly less prone to ov­erengi­neer­ing and “laziness,” and mean­ing­fully bet­ter at in­struc­tion fol­low­ing. They re­ported fewer false claims of suc­cess, fewer hal­lu­ci­na­tions, and more con­sis­tent fol­low-through on multi-step tasks.Son­net 4.6’s 1M to­ken con­text win­dow is enough to hold en­tire code­bases, lengthy con­tracts, or dozens of re­search pa­pers in a sin­gle re­quest. More im­por­tantly, Sonnet 4.6 rea­sons ef­fec­tively across all that con­text. This can make it much bet­ter at long-hori­zon plan­ning. We saw this par­tic­u­larly clearly in the Vending-Bench Arena eval­u­a­tion, which tests how well a model can run a (simulated) busi­ness over time—and which in­cludes an el­e­ment of com­pe­ti­tion, with dif­fer­ent AI mod­els fac­ing off against each other to make the biggest prof­its.Son­net 4.6 de­vel­oped an in­ter­est­ing new strat­egy: it in­vested heav­ily in ca­pac­ity for the first ten sim­u­lated months, spend­ing sig­nif­i­cantly more than its com­peti­tors, and then piv­oted sharply to fo­cus on prof­itabil­ity in the fi­nal stretch. The tim­ing of this pivot helped it fin­ish well ahead of the com­pe­ti­tion.Son­net 4.6 out­per­forms Sonnet 4.5 on Vending-Bench Arena by in­vest­ing in ca­pac­ity early, then piv­ot­ing to prof­itabil­ity in the fi­nal stretch.Early cus­tomers also re­ported broad im­prove­ments, with fron­tend code and fi­nan­cial analy­sis stand­ing out. Customers in­de­pen­dently de­scribed vi­sual out­puts from Sonnet 4.6 as no­tably more pol­ished, with bet­ter lay­outs, an­i­ma­tions, and de­sign sen­si­bil­ity than those from pre­vi­ous mod­els. Customers also needed fewer rounds of it­er­a­tion to reach pro­duc­tion-qual­ity re­sults.Claude Sonnet 4.6 matches Opus 4.6 per­for­mance on OfficeQA, which mea­sures how well a model can read en­ter­prise doc­u­ments (charts, PDFs, ta­bles), pull the right facts, and rea­son from those facts. It’s a mean­ing­ful up­grade for doc­u­ment com­pre­hen­sion work­loads.The per­for­mance-to-cost ra­tio of Claude Sonnet 4.6 is ex­tra­or­di­nary—it’s hard to over­state how fast Claude mod­els have been evolv­ing in re­cent months. Sonnet 4.6 out­per­forms on our or­ches­tra­tion evals, han­dles our most com­plex agen­tic work­loads, and keeps im­prov­ing the higher you push the ef­fort set­tings.Claude Sonnet 4.6 is a no­table im­prove­ment over Sonnet 4.5 across the board, in­clud­ing long-hori­zon tasks and more dif­fi­cult prob­lems.Out of the gate, Claude Sonnet 4.6 is al­ready ex­celling at com­plex code fixes, es­pe­cially when search­ing across large code­bases is es­sen­tial. For teams run­ning agen­tic cod­ing at scale, we’re see­ing strong res­o­lu­tion rates and the kind of con­sis­tency de­vel­op­ers need.Claude Sonnet 4.6 has mean­ing­fully closed the gap with Opus on bug de­tec­tion, let­ting us run more re­view­ers in par­al­lel, catch a wider va­ri­ety of bugs, and do it all with­out in­creas­ing cost.For the first time, Sonnet brings fron­tier-level rea­son­ing in a smaller and more cost-ef­fec­tive form fac­tor. It pro­vides a vi­able al­ter­na­tive if you are a heavy Opus user.Claude Sonnet 4.6 mean­ing­fully im­proves the an­swer re­trieval be­hind our core prod­uct—we saw a sig­nif­i­cant jump in an­swer match rate com­pared to Sonnet 4.5 in our Financial Services Benchmark, with bet­ter re­call on the spe­cific work­flows our cus­tomers de­pend on.Box eval­u­ated how Claude Sonnet 4.6 per­forms when tested on deep rea­son­ing and com­plex agen­tic tasks across real en­ter­prise doc­u­ments. It demon­strated sig­nif­i­cant im­prove­ments, out­per­form­ing Claude Sonnet 4.5 in heavy rea­son­ing Q&A by 15 per­cent­age points.Claude Sonnet 4.6 hit 94% on our in­sur­ance bench­mark, mak­ing it the high­est-per­form­ing model we’ve tested for com­puter use. This kind of ac­cu­racy is mis­sion-crit­i­cal to work­flows like sub­mis­sion in­take and first no­tice of loss.Claude Sonnet 4.6 de­liv­ers fron­tier-level re­sults on com­plex app builds and bug-fix­ing. It’s be­com­ing our go-to for the kind of deep code­base work that used to re­quire more ex­pen­sive mod­els.Claude Sonnet 4.6 pro­duced the best iOS code we’ve tested for Rakuten AI. Better spec com­pli­ance, bet­ter ar­chi­tec­ture, and it reached for mod­ern tool­ing we did­n’t ask for, all in one shot. The re­sults gen­uinely sur­prised us.

Sonnet 4.6 is a sig­nif­i­cant leap for­ward on rea­son­ing through dif­fi­cult tasks. We find it es­pe­cially strong on branched and multi-step tasks like con­tract rout­ing, con­di­tional tem­plate se­lec­tion, and CRM co­or­di­na­tion—ex­actly where our cus­tomers need strong model sense and re­li­a­bil­ity.We’ve been im­pressed by how ac­cu­rately Claude Sonnet 4.6 han­dles com­plex com­puter use. It’s a clear im­prove­ment over any­thing else we’ve tested in our evals.Claude Sonnet 4.6 has per­fect de­sign taste when build­ing fron­tend pages and data re­ports, and it re­quires far less hand-hold­ing to get there than any­thing we’ve tested be­fore.Claude Sonnet 4.6 was ex­cep­tion­ally re­spon­sive to di­rec­tion — de­liv­er­ing pre­cise fig­ures and struc­tured com­par­isons when asked, while also gen­er­at­ing gen­uinely use­ful ideas on trial strat­egy and ex­hibit prepa­ra­tion.On the Claude Developer Platform, Sonnet 4.6 sup­ports both adap­tive think­ing and ex­tended think­ing, as well as con­text com­paction in beta, which au­to­mat­i­cally sum­ma­rizes older con­text as con­ver­sa­tions ap­proach lim­its, in­creas­ing ef­fec­tive con­text length.On our API, Claude’s web search and fetch tools now au­to­mat­i­cally write and ex­e­cute code to fil­ter and process search re­sults, keep­ing only rel­e­vant con­tent in con­text—im­prov­ing both re­sponse qual­ity and to­ken ef­fi­ciency. Additionally, code ex­e­cu­tion, mem­ory, pro­gram­matic tool call­ing, tool search, and tool use ex­am­ples are now gen­er­ally avail­able.Son­net 4.6 of­fers strong per­for­mance at any think­ing ef­fort, even with ex­tended think­ing off. As part of your mi­gra­tion from Sonnet 4.5, we rec­om­mend ex­plor­ing across the spec­trum to find the ideal bal­ance of speed and re­li­able per­for­mance, de­pend­ing on what you’re build­ing.We find that Opus 4.6 re­mains the strongest op­tion for tasks that de­mand the deep­est rea­son­ing, such as code­base refac­tor­ing, co­or­di­nat­ing mul­ti­ple agents in a work­flow, and prob­lems where get­ting it just right is para­mount.For Claude in Excel users, our add-in now sup­ports MCP con­nec­tors, let­ting Claude work with the other tools you use day-to-day, like S&P Global, LSEG, Daloopa, PitchBook, Moody’s, and FactSet. You can ask Claude to pull in con­text from out­side your spread­sheet with­out ever leav­ing Excel. If you’ve al­ready set up MCP con­nec­tors in Claude.ai, those same con­nec­tions will work in Excel au­to­mat­i­cally. This is avail­able on Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans.How to use Claude Sonnet 4.6Claude Sonnet 4.6 is avail­able now on all Claude plans, Claude Cowork, Claude Code, our API, and all ma­jor cloud plat­forms. We’ve also up­graded our free tier to Sonnet 4.6 by de­fault—it now in­cludes file cre­ation, con­nec­tors, skills, and com­paction.If you’re a de­vel­oper, you can get started quickly by us­ing claude-son­net-4-6 via the Claude API.

We’re wrap­ping up our live cov­er­age of the Supreme Court de­ci­sion in Learning Resources, Inc v. Trump.

The ma­jor rul­ing - and Trump’s re­sponse - can be ex­pected to have an ef­fect on trade, the global econ­omy, Americans’ per­sonal fi­nances, pol­i­tics and more.

You can read what North America Correspondent Anthony Zurcher thinks it means for Trump’s sec­ond-term agenda here, as well as how Canada, one of the top US trad­ing part­ners, views the de­ci­sion.

We also have cov­ered the ma­jor turns of the day here, and our White House cor­re­spon­dent Bernd Debusmann has de­scribed what it was like to cover Trump’s press brief­ing about the rul­ing in this video.

We’ll be back when more big trade, Supreme Court, or other news breaks.

Skip to main con­tent

New EU rules to stop the de­struc­tion of un­sold clothes and shoes­New EU rules to stop the de­struc­tion of un­sold clothes and shoe­s­The Delegated and Implementing Acts will sup­port busi­nesses in com­ply­ing with new re­quire­ments.

The European Commission to­day (Feb 9) adopted new mea­sures un­der the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) to pre­vent the de­struc­tion of un­sold ap­parel, cloth­ing, ac­ces­sories and footwear. The rules will help cut waste, re­duce en­vi­ron­men­tal dam­age and cre­ate a level play­ing field for com­pa­nies em­brac­ing sus­tain­able busi­ness mod­els, al­low­ing them to reap the ben­e­fits of a more cir­cu­lar econ­omy.Every year in Europe, an es­ti­mated 4-9% of un­sold tex­tiles are de­stroyed be­fore ever be­ing worn. This waste gen­er­ates around 5.6 mil­lion tons of CO2 emis­sions — al­most equal to Sweden’s to­tal net emis­sions in 2021.To help re­duce this waste­ful prac­tice, the ESPR re­quires com­pa­nies to dis­close in­for­ma­tion on the un­sold con­sumer prod­ucts they dis­card as waste. It also in­tro­duces a ban on the de­struc­tion of un­sold ap­parel, cloth­ing ac­ces­sories and footwear.The Delegated and Implementing Acts adopted to­day will sup­port busi­nesses in com­ply­ing with these re­quire­ments by:Clar­i­fy­ing dero­ga­tions: The Delegated Act out­lines spe­cific and jus­ti­fied cir­cum­stances un­der which the de­struc­tion will be per­mit­ted, for in­stance, due to safety rea­sons or prod­uct dam­age. National au­thor­i­ties will over­see com­pli­ance.Fa­cil­i­tat­ing dis­clo­sure: The Implementing Act in­tro­duces a stan­dard­ised for­mat for busi­nesses to dis­close the vol­umes of un­sold con­sumer goods they dis­card. This ap­plies from February 2027, giv­ing busi­nesses suf­fi­cient time to adapt.In­stead of dis­card­ing stock, com­pa­nies are en­cour­aged to man­age their stock more ef­fec­tively, han­dle re­turns, and ex­plore al­ter­na­tives such as re­sale, re­man­u­fac­tur­ing, do­na­tions, or reuse.The ban on de­struc­tion of un­sold ap­parel, cloth­ing ac­ces­sories and footwear and the dero­ga­tions will ap­ply to large com­pa­nies from 19 July 2026. Medium-sized com­pa­nies are ex­pected to fol­low in 2030. The rules on dis­clo­sure un­der the ESPR al­ready ap­ply to large com­pa­nies and will also ap­ply to medium-sized com­pa­nies in 2030.“The tex­tile sec­tor is lead­ing the way in the tran­si­tion to sus­tain­abil­ity, but there are still chal­lenges. The num­bers on waste show the need to act. With these new mea­sures, the tex­tile sec­tor will be em­pow­ered to move to­wards sus­tain­able and cir­cu­lar prac­tices, and we can boost our com­pet­i­tive­ness and re­duce our de­pen­den­cies.“The de­struc­tion of un­sold goods is a waste­ful prac­tice. In France alone, around €630 mil­lion worth of un­sold prod­ucts are de­stroyed each year. Online shop­ping also fu­els the is­sue: in Germany, nearly 20 mil­lion re­turned items are dis­carded an­nu­ally.  Tex­tiles are a ma­jor part of the prob­lem, and a key fo­cus for ac­tion. To cut waste and re­duce the sec­tor’s en­vi­ron­men­tal foot­print, the European Commission is pro­mot­ing more sus­tain­able pro­duc­tion while help­ing European com­pa­nies stay com­pet­i­tive. The ESPR is cen­tral to this ef­fort. It will make prod­ucts on the EU mar­ket more durable, reusable and re­cy­clable, while boost­ing ef­fi­ciency and cir­cu­lar­ity.Del­e­gated Regulation set­ting out dero­ga­tions from the pro­hi­bi­tion of de­struc­tion of un­sold con­sumer prod­ucts | European CommissionImplementing Regulation on the de­tails and for­mat for the dis­clo­sure of in­for­ma­tion on dis­carded un­sold con­sumer prod­ucts | European CommissionThe de­struc­tion of re­turned and un­sold tex­tiles in Europe’s cir­cu­lar econ­omy | European Environment Agency (EEA)

EU Environment newslet­ters de­liver the lat­est up­dates about the European Commission’s en­vi­ron­men­tal pri­or­i­ties straight to your in­box.

During out talks with F-Droid users at FOSDEM26 we were baf­fled to learn most were re­lieved that Google has can­celed their plans to lock-down Android.

Why baf­fled? Because no such thing ac­tu­ally hap­pened, the plans an­nounced last August are still sched­uled to take place. We see a bat­tle of PR cam­paigns and whomever has the last post out re­mains in the me­dia mem­ory as the truth, and hav­ing jour­nal­ists just copy/​paste Google posts serves no one.

But Google said… Said what? That there’s a mag­i­cal “advanced flow”? Did you see it? Did any­one ex­pe­ri­ence it? When is it sched­uled to be re­leased? Was it part of Android 16 QPR2 in December? Of 16 QPR3 Beta 2.1 last week? Of Android 17 Beta 1? No? That’s the is­sue… As time marches on peo­ple were left with the im­pres­sion that every­thing was done, fixed, Google “wasn’t evil” af­ter all, this time, yay!

While we all have bad mem­o­ries of “banners” as the dreaded ad de­liv­ery medium of the Internet, af­ter FOSDEM we de­cided that we have to raise the is­sue back and have every­one, who cares about Android as an open plat­form, in­formed that we are run­ning out of time un­til Google be­comes the gate-keeper of all users de­vices.

Hence, the web­site and start­ing to­day our clients, with the up­dates of F-Droid and F-Droid Basic, fea­ture a ban­ner that re­minds every­one how lit­tle time we have and how to voice their con­cerns to what­ever lo­cal au­thor­ity is able to un­der­stand the dan­gers of this path Android is led to.

We are not alone in our fight, IzzyOnDroid added a ban­ner too, more F-Droid clients will add the warn­ing ban­ner soon and other app down­load­ers, like Obtainium, al­ready have an in-app warn­ing di­a­logue.

Regarding F-Droid Basic rewrite, de­vel­op­ment con­tin­ues with a new re­lease 2.0-alpha3:

Note that if you are al­ready us­ing F-Droid Basic ver­sion 1.23.x, you won’t re­ceive this up­date au­to­mat­i­cally. You need to nav­i­gate to the app in­side F-Droid and tog­gle “Allow beta up­dates” in top right three dot menu.

In apps news, we’re slowly get­ting back on track with post Debian up­grade fixes (if your app still uses Java 17 is there a chance you can up­grade to 21?) and post FOSDEM de­lays. Every app is im­por­tant to us, yet ac­tions like the Google one above waste the time we could have put to bet­ter use in Gitlab.

Buses was up­dated to 1.10 af­ter a two year hia­tus.

Conversations and Quicksy were up­dated to 2.19.10+free im­prov­ing on clean­ing up af­ter banned users, a bet­ter QR work­flow and bet­ter tablet ro­ta­tion sup­port. These are nice, but an­other change raises our in­ter­est, “Play Store fla­vor: Stop us­ing Google li­brary and in­ter­face di­rectly with Google Play Service via IPC”. Sounds in­ter­est­ing for your app too? Is this a path to hav­ing one sin­gle ver­sion for both F-Droid and Play that is fully FLOSS? We don’t know yet, but we salute any trick that re­moves an­other pro­pri­etary de­pen­dency from the code. If cu­ri­ous feel free to take a look at the com­mit.

Dolphin Emulator was up­dated to 2512. We missed one ver­sion in be­tween so the changel­ogs are huge, luck­ily the devs pub­lish highly de­tailed posts about up­dates. So we’ll start with “Release 2509” (about 40 mins to read), we side-track with “Starlight Spotlight: A Hospital Wii in a New Light” (for about 50 mins), we con­tinue to the cur­rent re­lease in “Release 2512” (40 more min­utes) and we fin­ish with “Rise of the Triforce” delv­ing in his­tory for more than one hour.

Image Toolbox was up­dated to 3.6.1 adding many fixes and… some AI tools. Were you ex­pect­ing such helpers? Will you use them?

Luanti was up­dated to 5.15.1 adding some wel­comed fixes. If your game world started flick­er­ing af­ter the last up­date make sure to up­date.

Nextcloud apps are get­ting an up­date al­most every week, like Nextcloud was up­dated to 33.0.0, Nextcloud Cookbook to 0.27.0, Nextcloud Dev to 20260219, Nextcloud Notes to 33.0.0 and Nextcloud Talk was up­dated to 23.0.0.

But are you fol­low­ing the server side too? Nextcloud Hub 26 Winter was just re­leased adding a plethora of fea­tures. If you want to read about them, see the 30 min­utes post here or watch the one hour long video pre­sen­ta­tion from the team here.

ProtonVPN - Secure and Free VPN was up­dated to 5.15.70.0 adding more con­trol to auto-con­nects, coun­tries and cities. Also all con­nec­tions are han­dled now by WireGuard and Stealth pro­to­cols as the older OpenVPN was re­moved mak­ing the app al­most 40% smaller.

Offi was up­dated to 14.0 with a bit of code pol­ish. Unfortunately for Android 7 users, the app now needs Android 8 or later.

QUIK SMS was up­dated to 4.3.4 with many fixes. But Vishal praised the du­pli­cate re­mover, the de­fault auto de-du­pli­ca­tion func­tion and found that the bug that made deleted mes­sages reap­pear is fixed.

SimpleEmail was up­dated to 1.5.4 af­ter a 2 year pause. It’s just a fixes re­lease, up­dat­ing trans­la­tions and mak­ing the app com­pat­i­ble with Android 12 and later ver­sions.

* NeoDB You: A na­tive Android app for NeoDB de­signed with Material 3/You

Thank you for read­ing this week’s TWIF 🙂

Please sub­scribe to the RSS feed in your favourite RSS ap­pli­ca­tion to be up­dated of new TWIFs when they come up.

You are wel­come to join the TWIF fo­rum thread. If you have any news from the com­mu­nity, post it there, maybe it will be fea­tured next week 😉

To help sup­port F-Droid, please check out the do­na­tion page and con­tribute what you can.

🇬🇧->🇵🇱 Przejdź do pol­skiej wer­sji tego wpisu / Go to pol­ish ver­sion of this post

Just a year ago, I was re­ally deep into the Apple ecosys­tem. It seemed like there was no turn­ing back from the or­chard for me. Phone, lap­top, watch, tablet, video and mu­sic stream­ing, cloud stor­age, and even a key tracker. All from one man­u­fac­turer. Plus shared fam­ily photo al­bums, cal­en­dars, and even shop­ping lists.

However, at some point, I dis­cov­ered Plenti, a com­pany that rents a re­ally wide range of dif­fer­ent de­vices at quite rea­son­able prices. Casually, I threw the phrase “samsung fold” into the search en­gine on their web­site and it turned out that the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 could be rented for just 250-300 PLN per month. That was quite an in­ter­est­ing op­tion, as I was in­sanely cu­ri­ous about how it is to live with a fold­able phone, which af­ter un­fold­ing be­comes the equiv­a­lent of a tablet. Plus, I would never dare to buy this type of de­vice, be­cause firstly, their price is as­tro­nom­i­cal, and sec­ondly, I have se­ri­ous doubts about the longevity of the fold­ing screen. I checked the rental con­di­tions from Plenti and noth­ing raised my sus­pi­cions. Renting seemed like a re­ally cool op­tion, so I de­cided to get the Fold 6 for half a year. That’s how I broke out of the or­chard and slightly re­opened the doors to my heart for so­lu­tions with­out the ap­ple logo. I even wrote a post about the whole process - I be­trayed #TeamApple for bro­ken phone. What I’m get­ting at is that this is how Android re­turned to my liv­ing room and I think I started lik­ing it anew.

My ad­ven­ture with Samsung ended af­ter the planned 6 months. The Galaxy Z Fold 6 is a good phone, and the abil­ity to un­fold it to the size of a tablet is an amaz­ing fea­ture. However, what both­ered me about it was:

pay­ing 300 PLN (~80 USD) for rent is a good short-term so­lu­tion to get some­thing to test, but not in the long run.

All the points above made me give up on ex­tend­ing the rental and start won­der­ing what to do next. Interestingly, I liked Android enough that I did­n’t nec­es­sar­ily want to go back to iOS. Around this time, an ar­ti­cle hit my RSS reader: Creators of the most se­cure ver­sion of Android fear France. Travel ban for the whole team (I think it was this one, but I’m not en­tirely sure, it does­n’t re­ally mat­ter). It talked about how France wants to get its hands on the GrapheneOS sys­tem and thus carry out a very se­ri­ous at­tack on the pri­vacy of its users. I thought then, “Hey! A European coun­try wants to force a back­door into the sys­tem, be­cause it is too well se­cured to sur­veil its users. Either this is ar­ti­fi­cially blow­ing the topic out of pro­por­tion, or there is ac­tu­ally some­thing spe­cial about this sys­tem!”. At that mo­ment, a some­what for­got­ten nerd gene ig­nited in me. I de­cided to aban­don not only iOS, but also main­stream Android, and try a com­pletely al­ter­na­tive sys­tem.

GrapheneOS is a cus­tom, open-source op­er­at­ing sys­tem de­signed with the idea of pro­vid­ing users with the high­est level of pri­vacy and se­cu­rity. It is based on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), but dif­fers sig­nif­i­cantly from stan­dard soft­ware ver­sions found in smart­phones. Its cre­ators com­pletely elim­i­nated in­te­gra­tion with Google ser­vices at the sys­tem level, which avoids track­ing and data col­lec­tion by cor­po­ra­tions, while of­fer­ing a mod­ern and sta­ble work­ing en­vi­ron­ment.

The sys­tem is dis­tin­guished by ad­vanced “hardening” of the ker­nel and key com­po­nents, which min­i­mizes vul­ner­a­bil­ity to hack­ing at­tacks and ex­ploits. A unique fea­ture of GrapheneOS is the abil­ity to run Google Play Services in an iso­lated en­vi­ron­ment (sandbox), al­low­ing the user to use pop­u­lar ap­pli­ca­tions with­out grant­ing them broad sys­tem per­mis­sions. Currently, the pro­ject fo­cuses on sup­port­ing Google Pixel se­ries phones, uti­liz­ing their ded­i­cated Titan M se­cu­rity chips for full data pro­tec­tion.

When I used to read about GrapheneOS, the list of com­pat­i­ble de­vices in­cluded items from sev­eral dif­fer­ent man­u­fac­tur­ers. Now it’s only Google Pixel de­vices. This does­n’t mean you can’t run this sys­tem on a Samsung, for ex­am­ple, but the cre­ators sim­ply don’t guar­an­tee it will work prop­erly, and you have to deal with po­ten­tially port­ing the ver­sion your­self. Note that it’s quite funny that a sys­tem freed from Google ser­vices should be run ex­actly on Google de­vices. If any­one wants to read more about why Pixels are the best for GrapheneOS, I rec­om­mend check­ing out the fol­low­ing key­words - Verified Boot, Titan M, IOMMU, MTE.

At the stage of choos­ing a de­vice to test GrapheneOS on, I was­n’t yet sure if such a so­lu­tion would work for me at all and if I’d last with it in the long run. So it would be un­rea­son­able to lay out a sig­nif­i­cant amount of money. Because of this, prob­a­bly the only sen­si­ble choice was the Google Pixel 9a. This was a few months ago, when not enough time had passed since the pre­miere of the 10 se­ries mod­els for them to make it onto the fully sup­ported de­vices list. At that time, the Pixel 9a was the fresh­est de­vice on the list (offering up to 7 YEARS of sup­port!) and on top of that, it was very at­trac­tively priced, as I bought it for around 1600 PLN (~450 USD).

In ret­ro­spect, I still con­sider it a good choice and def­i­nitely rec­om­mend this path to any­one who is cur­rently at the stage of de­cid­ing on what hard­ware to start their GrapheneOS ad­ven­ture. The only thing that both­ers me a bit about the Pixel 9a is the qual­ity of the pho­tos it takes. I switched to it hav­ing pre­vi­ously had the iPhone 15 Pro and Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6, which are ex­cel­lent in this re­gard, so it’s no won­der I’m a bit spoiled, be­cause I was sim­ply used to a com­pletely dif­fer­ent level of cam­eras. Now I also know that GrapheneOS will stay with me for longer, so it’s pos­si­ble that know­ing then what I know now, I would have opted for some more ex­pen­sive gear. However, this is­n’t im­por­tant to me now, be­cause for the time be­ing I don’t plan to switch to an­other de­vice, and by the time that changes, the mar­ket sit­u­a­tion and the list of avail­able op­tions will cer­tainly have changed too. Besides, I’m pos­i­tively sur­prised by the bat­tery life and over­all per­for­mance of this phone.

A suit­able smart­phone - in my case, it’s a Google Pixel 9a.

A ca­ble to con­nect the phone to a com­puter; it can’t be just any ca­ble, but one that is used not only for charg­ing but also for data trans­mis­sion. It’s best to just use the ca­ble that came with the phone.

A com­puter with a Chromium-based browser (e.g., Google Chrome, Brave, Microsoft Edge, Vivaldi?). Unfortunately, I must rec­om­mend Windows 10/11 here, be­cause then you don’t have to mess around with any dri­vers; it’s the sim­plest op­tion.

If it’s new, we take it out of the box and turn it on. If it was pre­vi­ously used, we re­store it to fac­tory set­tings (Settings -> System -> Reset op­tions -> Erase all data (factory re­set) -> Erase all data). I think it’s stat­ing the ob­vi­ous, but I’ll write it any­way - a fac­tory re­set re­sults in the dele­tion of all user data from the de­vice, so if you have any­thing im­por­tant on it, you need to back it up.

We must go through the ba­sic setup un­til we see the home screen. We do the ab­solute min­i­mum. Here is a break­down of the steps:

we don’t con­nect to Wi-Fi, so we skip this step too

we don’t need to do any­thing with the war­ranty terms, so just the Next but­ton

there is no need to waste time set­ting up bio­met­rics, so we po­litely de­cline and skip fin­ger­print and face scan

First of all, we need to make sure that our phone’s soft­ware is up­dated to the lat­est avail­able ver­sion. For this pur­pose, we go to Settings -> System -> System up­date. If nec­es­sary, we up­date.

Next, we go to Settings -> About phone -> find the Build num­ber field and tap it 7 times un­til we see the mes­sage You are now a de­vel­oper. In the mean­time, the phone will ask for the PIN we set dur­ing the phone setup.

We go back and now en­ter Settings -> System -> Developer op­tions -> turn on the OEM un­lock­ing op­tion. The phone will ask for the PIN again. After en­ter­ing it, we still have to con­firm that we def­i­nitely want to re­move the lock.

When the screen goes com­pletely dark, we si­mul­ta­ne­ously press and hold the power and vol­ume down but­tons un­til the text-based Fastboot Mode in­ter­face ap­pears. If the phone starts up nor­mally, it means we per­formed one of the ear­lier steps in­cor­rectly.

We go to the com­puter and open the browser (based on the Chromium en­gine) to the ad­dress https://​graphe­neos.org/​in­stall/​web.

A win­dow with a list of de­vices to choose from will pop up in the browser. There should ba­si­cally be only one item on it, and that should be our Pixel. We se­lect it and press the Connect but­ton.

Changes will oc­cur on the phone’s dis­play. A mes­sage will ap­pear ask­ing to con­firm that we ac­tu­ally want to un­lock the boot­loader. To do this, we must press one of the vol­ume but­tons so that in­stead of Do not un­lock the boot­lader, Unlock the boot­lader ap­pears. At this point, we can con­firm by press­ing the power but­ton.

On the GrapheneOS web­site, we scroll down to the Obtaining fac­tory im­ages sec­tion and press the Download re­lease but­ton. If the phone is still con­nected to the com­puter, the web­site will de­cide on its own which sys­tem im­age to down­load.

We wait for the down­load to fin­ish. It is ob­vi­ous that the time needed for this de­pends di­rectly on the speed of the in­ter­net con­nec­tion.

Locking the boot­loader is cru­cial be­cause it en­ables the full op­er­a­tion of the Verified Boot fea­ture. It also pre­vents the use of fast­boot mode to flash, for­mat, or wipe par­ti­tions. Verified Boot de­tects any mod­i­fi­ca­tions to the OS par­ti­tions and blocks the read­ing of any al­tered or cor­rupted data. If changes are de­tected, the sys­tem uses er­ror cor­rec­tion data to at­tempt to re­cover the orig­i­nal data, which is then ver­i­fied again — thanks to this mech­a­nism, the sys­tem is re­silient to ac­ci­den­tal (non-malicious) file cor­rup­tion.

Being in Fastboot Mode, when we see the Start mes­sage, we press the power but­ton, which will cause the sys­tem to start nor­mally. If we don’t see Start at the height of the power but­ton, we have to press the vol­ume but­tons and find this op­tion.

This is a stan­dard pro­ce­dure, so we will only go through it briefly:

I rec­om­mend turn­ing off the lo­ca­tion ser­vice, be­cause it’s bet­ter to con­fig­ure it calmly later by grant­ing per­mis­sions only to apps that re­ally need it

se­cur­ing the phone with a fin­ger­print; I per­son­ally am an ad­vo­cate of this so­lu­tion, so I rec­om­mend us­ing it, GrapheneOS does not (yet) sup­port face un­lock, so fin­ger­print and a stan­dard pass­word are the only meth­ods we have to choose from (of course I re­ject pat­tern un­lock right at the start as a form of screen lock that can­not even in good con­science be called any se­cu­rity)

I as­sume that if you are read­ing this post, you are a graphene fresh­man and you have no backup to re­store, so we just skip this step

We land back in Fastboot Mode. I as­sume the phone was con­nected to the com­puter the whole time (if not, re­con­nect it). We re­turn to the browser on the com­puter. We find the Locking the boot­loader sec­tion and press the Lock boot­loader but­ton.

Again, con­fir­ma­tion of this op­er­a­tion on the phone is re­quired. It looks anal­o­gous to un­lock­ing, ex­cept this time, us­ing the vol­ume but­tons, we have to make the Lock the boot­loader op­tion ac­tive and con­firm it with the power but­ton.

Just like when re­mov­ing the lock, we go to Settings -> About phone -> find the Build num­ber field and tap it 7 times un­til we see the mes­sage You are now a de­vel­oper. In the mean­time, the phone will ask for the PIN we set dur­ing the phone setup.

We go back and now en­ter Settings -> System -> Developer op­tions -> turn off the OEM un­lock­ing op­tion. The phone will ask us to restart to change this set­ting, but for now we can­cel this re­quest, be­cause we still want to com­pletely turn off Developer op­tions, which is done by uncheck­ing the box next to the first op­tion at the very top, Use de­vel­oper op­tions.

Now the real fun be­gins. You’ll hear/​read as many opin­ions on what you should and should­n’t do re­gard­ing GrapheneOS hard­en­ing as there are peo­ple. Some are con­ser­v­a­tive, while oth­ers ap­proach the topic a bit more lib­er­ally. In my opin­ion, there is no one right path, and every­one should dig around, test things out, and de­cide what suits them and fits their se­cu­rity pro­file. You’ll quickly find out that GrapheneOS is re­ally one big com­pro­mise be­tween con­ve­nience and pri­vacy. While this same rule ap­plies to every­thing be­long­ing to the dig­i­tal world, it’s only in this case that you’ll truly no­tice it, be­cause GrapheneOS will show you how many things you can con­trol, which you can’t do us­ing con­ven­tional Android. I don’t in­tend to use this post to pro­mote some “one and only” method of us­ing GrapheneOS. I’ll sim­ply pre­sent how I use this sys­tem. This way, I’ll show the ba­sics to peo­ple fresh to the topic, maybe I’ll man­age to sug­gest an in­ter­est­ing trick they did­n’t know to those who have been users for a while, and on a third note, maybe some ex­pert will show up who, af­ter read­ing my ram­blings, will sug­gest some­thing in­ter­est­ing or point out what I’m do­ing wrong / could do bet­ter. I’m sure that’s the case, since my ad­ven­ture with GrapheneOS has prac­ti­cally only been go­ing on for 3 months. I warn you right away that I’m not sure if I’ll be able to main­tain a log­i­cal train of thought, as I’ll prob­a­bly jump around top­ics a bit. The sub­ject of GrapheneOS is vast and in to­day’s post I’ll only man­age to slightly touch upon it.

One of the first things I did af­ter boot­ing up the freshly in­stalled sys­tem was to cre­ate a sec­ond user pro­file. This is done in Settings -> System -> Multiple users. The idea is for this fea­ture to al­low two (or more) peo­ple to use one phone, each hav­ing a sep­a­rate pro­file with their own set­tings, apps, etc. Who in their right mind does that? While I can imag­ine shar­ing a home tablet, shar­ing a phone com­pletely eludes me. It there­fore seems like a dead fea­ture, but noth­ing could be fur­ther from the truth.

For me, it works like this: on the Owner user, be­cause that’s the name of the main ac­count cre­ated au­to­mat­i­cally with the sys­tem, I in­stalled the Google Play Store along with Google Play ser­vices and GmsCompatConfig. This is done through the App Store ap­pli­ca­tion, which is a com­po­nent of the GrapheneOS sys­tem. Please don’t con­fuse this with Apple’s app store, even though the name is the same. From the Play Store I only in­stalled the fol­low­ing ap­pli­ca­tions:

And that’s it. As you can see, this pro­file serves me only for apps that ab­solutely re­quire in­te­gra­tion with Google ser­vices. In prac­tice, I switch to it only when I want to pay con­tact­lessly in a store, which I ac­tu­ally do rarely lately, be­cause if there’s an op­tion, I pay us­ing BLIK codes. Right af­ter switch­ing from Samsung there were more apps on this pro­file, but one by one I suc­ces­sively gave up on those that made me de­pen­dent on the big G.

It’s on the sec­ond pro­file, which let’s as­sume I called Tommy, that I keep my en­tire dig­i­tal life. What does this give me? For in­stance, the main pro­file can­not be eas­ily deleted, but the ad­di­tional one can. Let’s imag­ine a sit­u­a­tion where I need to quickly wipe my phone, but in a way that its ba­sic func­tions still work, i.e., with­out a full fac­tory re­set. An ex­am­ple could be, say, ar­riv­ing in the USA and un­der­go­ing im­mi­gra­tion con­trol. They want ac­cess to my phone, so I delete the Tommy user, switch to the Owner user, and hand them the phone. It makes calls, sends SMS mes­sages, even has a bank­ing app, so the­o­ret­i­cally it should­n’t arouse sus­pi­cion. However, it lacks all my con­tacts, a browser with my vis­ited pages his­tory, a pass­word man­ager, and mes­sen­gers with chat his­to­ries. This is rather a dras­tic sce­nario, but not re­ally that im­prob­a­ble, as ac­tions like search­ing a phone upon ar­rival in the States are some­thing that hap­pens on a daily ba­sis. Besides, the ba­sic rule of se­cu­rity is not to use an ac­count with ad­min­is­tra­tor priv­i­leges on a daily ba­sis.

On GrapheneOS, Obtainium is my pri­mary ag­gre­ga­tor for ob­tain­ing .apk in­stal­la­tion files and au­tomat­ing app up­dates. It’s like the Google Play Store, but pri­vacy-re­spect­ing and for open-source ap­pli­ca­tions. It would be a sin to use GrapheneOS and not at least try to switch to open-source apps. Below I pre­sent a list of apps that I use. Additionally, I’m toss­ing in links to the source code repos­i­to­ries of each of them.

To un­der­stand how Obtainium works and how to use it, I rec­om­mend check­ing out this video guide.

I have a few apps that are not open-source, but I still need them. In this case, I don’t down­load them from the Google Play Store, but ex­actly from the Aurora Store, which I men­tioned above.

Aurora Store is an open-source client of the Google Play store (I guess you could call it a fron­tend) that al­lows down­load­ing ap­pli­ca­tions from Google servers with­out need­ing Google ser­vices (GMS) on the phone.

* Privacy - you don’t need to log in with a Google ac­count to down­load free apps (you can use built-in anony­mous ac­counts).

With these anony­mous ac­counts, the thing is that some­times they work, and some­times they don’t, due to lim­its that are un­reach­able with a nor­mal ac­count used by one per­son, but when a thou­sand peo­ple down­load apps from one ac­count at once, it starts to get sus­pi­cious, and the lim­its are ex­ceeded quite quickly. Using Aurora Store vi­o­lates the Google Play Store terms of ser­vice, so on the other hand if we use our Google ac­count, it might be tem­porar­ily blocked or per­ma­nently banned. Some op­tion here is to cre­ate a “burner” ac­count just for this, but that takes away some of our pri­vacy, be­cause Google can still in­dex us based on what we down­loaded. Anonymous ac­counts in this case pro­vide al­most com­plete anonymity, be­cause then we are just a drop in the ocean.

When it comes to se­cu­rity, yes, in the­ory we down­load .apk files from a ver­i­fied source, but only un­der the con­di­tion that the Aurora Store cre­ators don’t serve us a Man in the Middle at­tack. The de­ci­sion whether you trust the cre­ators of this app is up to you.

Below I pre­sent a list of ap­pli­ca­tions that I down­loaded from the Aurora Store, checked, and can con­firm that they work with­out GMS (Google Mobile Services).

* My mu­nic­i­pal­i­ty’s app - be­cause I need to know when they’ll col­lect my trash :)

* OpenVPN - I use it as a tun­nel to my home net­work

* Perplexity - I switched to Gemini, but I con­firm it works

* Synology Photos - my home photo gallery on a NAS

* Pocket Casts - pod­casts, I plan to mi­grate to AntennaPod

* TickTick - to-do lists, it’s hard for me to find a sen­si­ble al­ter­na­tive that is mul­ti­plat­form and has all the fea­tures I need

Has any­one ever won­dered if all apps on a phone need Internet ac­cess? Indeed, in the vast ma­jor­ity of cases, a mo­bile app with­out net­work ac­cess is use­less, but you can’t gen­er­al­ize like that, be­cause for ex­am­ple, the pre­vi­ously men­tioned FUTO Voice Input uses a lo­cal LLM to con­vert speech to text, which works of­fline on the de­vice. Why would such an app need Internet ac­cess then? For noth­ing, so it should­n’t have such per­mis­sion. Now let’s take apps like FairScan (document scan­ning), Catima (loyalty card ag­gre­ga­tor), Collabora Office (office suite), or Librera (ebook reader). They too do not need Internet ac­cess!

The sit­u­a­tion looks even more bizarre when you look at which apps ac­tu­ally need ac­cess to all of our de­vice’s sen­sors. If we think about it calmly, we’ll con­clude that in this spe­cific case it’s com­pletely the op­po­site of the pre­vi­ous one, mean­ing prac­ti­cally no app needs this in­for­ma­tion. And I re­mind you that by de­fault on Android with Google ser­vices, all apps have such per­mis­sions.

To man­age a given ap­pli­ca­tion’s per­mis­sions, just tap and hold on its icon, se­lect App info from the pop-up menu, and find the Permissions tab. A list cat­e­go­rized by things like - Allowed, Ask every time, and Not al­lowed will ap­pear. I rec­om­mend re­view­ing this list for each app sep­a­rately right af­ter in­stalling it. This is the foun­da­tion of GrapheneOS hard­en­ing.

A col­lec­tive menu where you can view spe­cific per­mis­sions and which apps have them granted is avail­able in Settings -> Security & pri­vacy -> Privacy -> Permission man­ager. Another in­ter­est­ing place is the Privacy dash­board avail­able in the same lo­ca­tion. It’s a tool that shows not only app per­mis­sions, but also how of­ten a given app reaches for the per­mis­sions granted to it.

In GrapheneOS we don’t only have user pro­files, but each user can also have some­thing called a Private space. I en­coun­tered some­thing sim­i­lar on Samsung, where it was called Secure Folder, so I as­sume this might just be an Android fea­ture im­ple­mented dif­fer­ently by each man­u­fac­turer.

Private space is turned on in Settings -> Security & pri­vacy -> Private space. It acts like a sort of sep­a­rated sand­box that is part of the en­vi­ron­ment you use, but at the same time is iso­lated from it. For me, it’s a place that gives me quick ac­cess to apps that nev­er­the­less re­quire Google ser­vices. You might ask - why then do I keep the mBank and T-Mobile apps on the Owner user if I could keep them here? Well, for rea­sons un­known to me, I’m un­able to con­fig­ure my pri­vate space so that pay­ing with con­tact­less BLIK via NFC works cor­rectly in it. The same goes for Magenta Moments from T-Mobile, which don’t work cor­rectly de­spite GMS be­ing in­stalled in the pri­vate space.

* Google Drive - I use it as a cloud to share files with clients

* mOby­wa­tel - at first I kept this app in the main pro­file as down­loaded from Aurora Store and every­thing some­what worked, but every now and then the app caught a to­tal freeze and stopped re­spond­ing, I think it might be re­lated to the fact that it does send some Google ser­vices-re­lated re­quests in the back­ground and does­n’t re­spond un­til such a re­quest times out, I have this on my list to in­ves­ti­gate

* Play Store - I have to down­load all these apps from some­where, do­ing it via Aurora Store in the pri­vate space would­n’t make sense since I have the whole Google ser­vices pack­age in­stalled here any­way

* XTB - an­other in­vest­ing app… works with­out GMS, but like I said, I keep all fi­nan­cial ones in one place

Oof… I did it again, sorry. I’m just count­ing the char­ac­ters and it comes out to just un­der 35,000… I’ll prob­a­bly break that bar­rier with these next few sen­tences. Well, long again, but purely meaty again, so I don’t think any­one has rea­son to com­plain. As I men­tioned ear­lier, I’ve only touched upon the topic of GrapheneOS, which is ex­ten­sive, and it’s a good thing, be­cause it’s a great sys­tem, and the biggest re­spect goes to the peo­ple be­hind this pro­ject. It’s thanks to them that we even have the op­tion of at least par­tially free­ing our­selves from Google (Android) and Apple (iOS). Therefore, I highly in­vite you to the fi­nal chap­ter of this post.

Finally, I would like to en­cour­age you to sup­port the GrapheneOS pro­ject. The de­vel­op­ers be­hind it are do­ing a re­ally great job and in my opin­ion de­serve to have some money thrown at them. Information on where and how this can be done can be found here.

A main­tained uBlock Origin fil­ter list to hide all traces of YouTube shorts videos.

Copy the link be­low, go to uBlock Origin > Dashboard > Filter lists, scroll to the bot­tom, and paste the link un­der­neath the ‘Import…’ head­ing:

https://​raw.githubuser­con­tent.com/​i5heu/​ublock-hide-yt-shorts/​mas­ter/​list.txt

> uBlock Origin sub­scribe link < (does not work on GitHub)

> uBlock Origin sub­scribe link < (does not work on GitHub)

After the ini­tial cre­ateor of this list @gijsdev is now van­ished for half a year, i ( i5heu ) took it on me to main­tain this list.

This pro­ject is an in­de­pen­dent, open-source ini­tia­tive and is not af­fil­i­ated with, en­dorsed by, spon­sored by, or as­so­ci­ated with Alphabet Inc., Google LLC, or YouTube.

A few days ago, peo­ple started tag­ging me on Bluesky and Hacker News about a di­a­gram on Microsoft’s Learn por­tal. It looked… fa­mil­iar.

In 2010, I wrote A suc­cess­ful Git branch­ing

model and cre­ated a di­a­gram to go with it. I de­signed that di­a­gram in Apple Keynote, at the time ob­sess­ing over the col­ors, the curves, and the lay­out un­til it clearly com­mu­ni­cated how branches re­late to each other over time. I also pub­lished the source file so oth­ers could build on it. That di­a­gram has since spread every­where: in books, talks, blog posts, team wikis, and YouTube videos. I never minded. That was the whole point: shar­ing knowl­edge and let­ting the in­ter­net take it by storm!

What I did not ex­pect was for Microsoft, a tril­lion-dol­lar com­pany, some 15+ years later, to ap­par­ently run it through an AI im­age gen­er­a­tor and pub­lish the re­sult on their of­fi­cial Learn por­tal, with­out any credit or link back to the orig­i­nal.

The AI rip-off was not just ugly. It was care­less, bla­tantly am­a­teuris­tic, and lack­ing any am­bi­tion, to put it gen­tly. Microsoft un­wor­thy. The care­fully crafted vi­sual lan­guage and lay­out of the orig­i­nal, the branch col­ors, the lane de­sign, the dot and bub­ble align­ment that made the orig­i­nal so read­able—all of it had been mud­dled into a laugh­able form. Proper AI slop.

Arrows miss­ing and point­ing in the wrong di­rec­tion, and the ob­vi­ous “continvoucly morged” text quickly gave it away as a cheap AI ar­ti­fact.

It had the rough shape of my di­a­gram though. Enough ac­tu­ally so that peo­ple rec­og­nized the orig­i­nal in it and started call­ing Microsoft out on it and reach­ing out to me. That so many peo­ple were up­set about this was re­ally nice, hon­estly. That, and “continvoucly morged” was a very fun meme—thank you, in­ter­net! 😄

Oh god yes, Microsoft con­tin­voucly morged my di­a­gram there for sure 😬— Vincent Driessen (@nvie.com) 2026-02-16T20:55:54.762Z

Other than that, I find this whole thing mostly very sad­den­ing. Not be­cause some com­pany used my di­a­gram. As I said, it’s been every­where for 15 years and I’ve al­ways been fine with that. What’s dispir­it­ing is the (lack of) process

and care: take some­one’s care­fully crafted work, run it through a ma­chine to wash off the fin­ger­prints, and ship it as your own. This is­n’t a case of be­ing in­spired by some­thing and build­ing on it. It’s the op­po­site of that. It’s tak­ing some­thing that worked and mak­ing it worse. Is there even a goal here be­yond “generating con­tent”?

What’s slightly wor­ry­ing me is that this time around, the di­a­gram was both well-known enough and ob­vi­ously AI-slop-y enough that it was easy to spot as pla­gia­rism. But we all know there will just be more and more con­tent like this that is­n’t so well-known or soon will get mu­tated or dis­guised in more ad­vanced ways that this pla­gia­rism no longer will be rec­og­niz­able as such.

I don’t need much here. A sim­ple link back and at­tri­bu­tion to the orig­i­nal ar­ti­cle would be a good start. I would also be in­ter­ested in un­der­stand­ing how this Learn page at Microsoft came to be, what the goals were here, and what the process has been that led to the cre­ation of this ugly as­set, and how there seem­ingly has not been any form of proof-read­ing for a doc­u­ment used as a learn­ing re­source by many de­vel­op­ers.

Your browser does not sup­port the au­dio el­e­ment.

This con­tent is gen­er­ated by Google AI. Generative AI is ex­per­i­men­tal

Last week, we re­leased a ma­jor up­date to Gemini 3 Deep Think to solve mod­ern chal­lenges across sci­ence, re­search and en­gi­neer­ing. Today, we’re re­leas­ing the up­graded core in­tel­li­gence that makes those break­throughs pos­si­ble: Gemini 3.1 Pro. We are ship­ping 3.1 Pro across our con­sumer and de­vel­oper prod­ucts to bring this progress in in­tel­li­gence to your every­day ap­pli­ca­tions. For de­vel­op­ers in pre­view via the Gemini API in Google AI Studio, Gemini CLI, our agen­tic de­vel­op­ment plat­form Google Antigravity and Android StudioFor en­ter­prises in Vertex AI and Gemini EnterpriseFor con­sumers via the Gemini app and NotebookLMBuilding on the Gemini 3 se­ries, 3.1 Pro rep­re­sents a step for­ward in core rea­son­ing. 3.1 Pro is a smarter, more ca­pa­ble base­line for com­plex prob­lem-solv­ing. This is re­flected in our progress on rig­or­ous bench­marks. On ARC-AGI-2, a bench­mark that eval­u­ates a mod­el’s abil­ity to solve en­tirely new logic pat­terns, 3.1 Pro achieved a ver­i­fied score of 77.1%. This is more than dou­ble the rea­son­ing per­for­mance of 3 Pro.

3.1 Pro is de­signed for tasks where a sim­ple an­swer is­n’t enough, tak­ing ad­vanced rea­son­ing and mak­ing it use­ful for your hard­est chal­lenges. This im­proved in­tel­li­gence can help in prac­ti­cal ap­pli­ca­tions — whether you’re look­ing for a clear, vi­sual ex­pla­na­tion of a com­plex topic, a way to syn­the­size data into a sin­gle view, or bring­ing a cre­ative pro­ject to life.

Code-based an­i­ma­tion: 3.1 Pro can gen­er­ate web­site-ready, an­i­mated SVGs di­rectly from a text prompt. Because these are built in pure code rather than pix­els, they re­main crisp at any scale and main­tain in­cred­i­bly small file sizes com­pared to tra­di­tional video.

Complex sys­tem syn­the­sis: 3.1 Pro uti­lizes ad­vanced rea­son­ing to bridge the gap be­tween com­plex APIs and user-friendly de­sign. In this ex­am­ple, the model built a live aero­space dash­board, suc­cess­fully con­fig­ur­ing a pub­lic teleme­try stream to vi­su­al­ize the International Space Station’s or­bit.

Interactive de­sign: 3.1 Pro codes a com­plex 3D star­ling mur­mu­ra­tion. It does­n’t just gen­er­ate the vi­sual code; it builds an im­mer­sive ex­pe­ri­ence where users can ma­nip­u­late the flock with hand-track­ing and lis­ten to a gen­er­a­tive score that shifts based on the birds’ move­ment. For re­searchers and de­sign­ers, this pro­vides a pow­er­ful way to pro­to­type sen­sory-rich in­ter­faces.

Creative cod­ing: 3.1 Pro can trans­late lit­er­ary themes into func­tional code. When prompted to build a mod­ern per­sonal port­fo­lio for Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights,” the model did­n’t just sum­ma­rize the text. It rea­soned through the nov­el’s at­mos­pheric tone to de­sign a sleek, con­tem­po­rary in­ter­face, cre­at­ing a web­site that cap­tures the essence of the pro­tag­o­nist.

Since re­leas­ing Gemini 3 Pro in November, your feed­back and the pace of progress have dri­ven these rapid im­prove­ments. We are re­leas­ing 3.1 Pro in pre­view to­day to val­i­date these up­dates and con­tinue to make fur­ther ad­vance­ments in ar­eas such as am­bi­tious agen­tic work­flows be­fore we make it gen­er­ally avail­able soon.Start­ing to­day, Gemini 3.1 Pro in the Gemini app is rolling out with higher lim­its for users with the Google AI Pro and Ultra plans. 3.1 Pro is also now avail­able on NotebookLM ex­clu­sively for Pro and Ultra users. And de­vel­op­ers and en­ter­prises can ac­cess 3.1 Pro now in pre­view in the Gemini API via AI Studio, Antigravity, Vertex AI, Gemini Enterprise, Gemini CLI and Android Studio.We can’t wait to see what you build and dis­cover with it.