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And now:

Trump clarifies some of the tariffs were actually 245% for some unknown reason

Is this phone also more secure?

Probably not.

Apple & Google have spent considerable amounts of time building out hardware security infrastructure for their products that I find it extremely unlikely Fairphone would have been able to match.

For example, the popular alternative Android OS GrapheneOS only supports Google Pixels, because: (Emphasis added by me)

“There are currently no other devices meeting even the most basic security requirements while running an alternate OS. GrapheneOS is very interested in supporting a non-Pixel brand, but the vast majority of Android OEMs do not take security seriously. Samsung takes security almost as seriously as Google, but they deliberately cripple their devices when unlock them to install another OS and don’t allow an alternate OS to use important security features. If Samsung permitted GrapheneOS to support their devices properly, many of their phones would be the closest to meeting our requirements. They’re currently missing the very important hardware memory tagging feature, but only because it’s such a new feature”

If even Samsung, the only other phone brand on the market they consider close to meeting their standards, doesn’t support every modern hardware security feature, and deliberately cripples their security for alternate OS’s, as a multi billion dollar company, I doubt Fairphone has custom-built hardware security mechanisms for their phones to the degree that Google has.

Not to mention the fact that the stronger IP law is, the more it’s often used to exploit people.

Oh, did you as an artist get given stronger rights for your work? That platform you’re posting on demands that you give them a license for any possible use, in exchange for posting your art there to get eyeballs on your work.

Did your patents just get stronger enforcement? Too bad it’s conveniently very difficult to fund and develop any product at scale under that patent without needing outside investor funding into a new corporate entity that will own the patent, instead of you!

To loosely paraphrase from Cory Doctorow: If someone wants a stronger lock, but won’t give you the key, then it’s not for your benefit.

If corporations get to put locks on everything with keys they own, but also make it hard for you to get or enforce access to the keys to the locks on your stuff, then the simplest way to level the playing field is to simply eliminate the locks.

I’ve had some odd experiences with TSA.

One agent did a full body X-Ray, then pulled my bag to the side and searched through it because I had the gall to opt-out of the facial recognition (where he then accidentally took five photos of other people before figuring out how to hit the “no” button) He yelled at me and my family, then made someone else take over his spot specifically so he could handle every step of my extra screening that he solely decided to do himself. A different agent saw and just came to have a chat with me though. Hard to believe they had to work together.

Another time, 3 TSA agents had to give me a randomly assigned screening on my boarding pass, and they started gambling real money with each other on what my age was. (all of them were wrong)