Most of the “Is open source software safe?” section of this post seems to advocate for what’s conventionally called Security Through Obscurity, which is widely considered very ineffective at preventing exploitation and at best a minor hurdle.

There are a lot of differences between Android and iOS in terms of security, attack surface, and exploitation, but attributing that to open vs closed-source completely misunderstands the entire subject. For just two of the countless reasons: Many of the worst vulnerabilities that affect Android devices are in closed-source proprietary Qualcomm firmware. A platform being open in the sense of allowing users to install any application they want to (like Windows and Android to a limited extent) or closed off to prevent installation of unapproved software (iOS, PlayStation, Toyota cars, TiVo, etc.) is completely separate from whether that platform is open-source or not. GPLv3 has license terms that try to tie the two concepts but I chose examples that don’t use it at all. Also, iOS has public kernel source code.

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A related issue I still see very often, even with files newly created just this year, is when trying to extract zip files on my Linux systems that contain non-ASCII filenames and that were created on Windows systems, especially ones with apparently non-English locales like Japanese. Need to trial and error the locale I give to unzip and sometimes hack together fixed names with iconv until the mojibake seems to fix itself.

For years I’ve been using KeepassXC on desktop and Keepass2Android on mobile. Rather than sync the kdbx file between my devices, I have each device access it through the network. Either via sftp, smb, or nfs, but regardless I need to connect to my home’s VPN to access it when away from home since I don’t directly expose those things to the outside world.

I used to also keep a second copy of the website-tied passwords in Firefox Sync, but recently tried migrating that to Proton Pass because I thought the PIN feature might help, then ultimately decided to move away from that too and start using the KeepassXC-Browser plugin instead. I considered Bitwarden too but haven’t tried it out yet, was somewhat deterred by seeing people say its UI seems very outdated.