Author: Michael G

Continuing our series on Anonym’s technology, this post focuses on Anonym’s use of differential privacy. Differential privacy is a cornerstone of Anonym’s approach to building confidential and effective data solutions. In this post, we’ll explain why we integrate differential privacy (DP) into all our systems and share how we tailor our implementation to meet the […]

The post Raising the bar: Why differential privacy is at the core of Anonym’s approach appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

This Week in F-Droid

TWIF curated on Thursday, 16 Jan 2025, Week 3

Community News

Fennec F-Droid was updated to 134.0.0, and we urge users that still use Mull to switch. We’ve been announcing this for the last 3 TWIFs, we’ve added a warning in the last cycle that you’ll see in the Updates tab and we marked the app for archival in the next index update. If you’ve been using the DivestOS repo, either by will or by running DivestOS Android on your device, the same advice applies even if, for now, that repo does not warn you about this.

Katawa Shoujo: Re-Engineered, (18+) A fan-made modernization of the classic visual novel, was added one year ago and back then we were amazed of its size. The app just got a huge assets update and also changed its application ID. The new app is Katawa Shoujo: Re-Engineered (yes it’s the same name adding to the confusion) and it’s now even bigger, weighting at 1GB (you read it correct, gigabyte!). The size comes from using the archive of the original developers which contained all assets including photo pictures of backgrounds with nicely preserved metadata. The devs spent most of the year with two artists drawing and formatting these 4:3 CGs to be used with current modern widescreen resolutions. Going forward, users that have it installed need to uninstall the old version and install the new one.

RetroArch was updated to 1.20.0 fixing an old pain point in the initial setup. Previously users would have needed to jump through the hoops in Online Updater, digging through 5 menus, to first download a list of assets and then be able to access them. Latest version packs an updated UI which will download everything needed in the first menu as expected.

Syncthing, Open, trustworthy and decentralized file synchronization, has been finally archived, as announced back in October ‘24, just in time for a new Syncthing-Fork update to 1.29.0.0. Still waiting to switch?

WG Tunnel, An alternative VPN client app for WireGuard with additional features, is now built reproducible, hence users will need to uninstall the old version and install the latest one.

Wikipedia was updated to r/2.7.50515-r-2024-12-16. In related news, the app team released a new study based on the behavior of its users. You can read a summary of it in “Wikipedia Searches Reveal Differing Styles of Curiosity” and the full paper here: “Architectural styles of curiosity in global Wikipedia mobile app readership”.

Concerned users brought up this study as an issue since “the team tracked more than 482,000 people using Wikipedia’s mobile app in 50 countries or territories and 14 languages”, which sounds like a grave privacy invasion. We want to remind you that until last year or so, the app was rightfully flagged with the Tracking anti-feature as users were unable to disable the in-app analytics. Since then, as far as we know, tracking was removed from the app. Remember: the anti-features flags are there to inform the users, not to punish the developers.

@linsui puts elements together:

Element – Secure Messenger was updated to 1.6.26 with the fix for an annoying bug that made replies from bridges not visible. It’s not marked as suggested yet so, if you want to get this version, please update manually or enable “beta updates” for it. In related apps, did you test Element X yet?

NClientV2 was rebuilt to fix the API compatibility. A rebuild will not pop-up as an update and you can’t update to the rebuild version from the F-Droid Client directly but you can install the APK, from the app page linked above, without uninstalling the broken version. Also of note, it seems this project has been discontinued so it’s unlikely to get any future updates.

Removed Apps

3 more apps were removed

• Launcher3: Home screen
• Music: The stock audio player
• SafePrice: check SafeCoin price from notification bar

Newly Added Apps

9 more apps were newly added

• knkpanime: Anime app with multiple source and danmaku support
• Musekit: A simple tuner and metronome, no distractions
• Pixelix: A user-friendly Pixelfed client for photo uploads, browsing, & sharing
• QRshare: Generate QR codes on share intent
• ssrDroid: OverTLS & SSRoT Android client
• TerraTactician Expandoria: Hexagon based logic game
• Valet: The Bitcoin Lightning Wallet with Extra Features
• venera: A comic reader that support reading local and network comics.
• Weather: Cool and Hot: Another weather app

Updated Apps

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