It feels like a gimmick, is the thing to me.

I’m sure, there’s going to be tech enthusiasts who will love it, but as a techie, I’m just imagining all the glitches and whatnot that hastily-made, non-standard Android modifications will cause on each of these manufacturers’ phones.

Or even just something like unfolding your phone, the app realizing that the screen size changed and it just forgetting the current UI state, because well, need to redraw the UI. Android’s UI framework has a talent for that, although I don’t know if that’s generally fixed by now.

Yeah, I was actually aware of that, while writing the above. The AndroidManifest.xml is zipped into the APK-file, so even for closed-source apps, you should be able to check it.

Problem is, of course, that it doesn’t help less techy folks, but also that you can’t prevent app updates from suddenly adding internet access.

And that you can’t take it away from apps that do claim to need it. At some point, I had some sort of root/XPosed/whatever setup, where I could take this permission away from apps, but because this was a thing that couldn’t happen normally, they all just flopped over sideways, saying things like “Please connect to WiFi 🥺”.

Some years ago, when Google introduced the permission system with Android Marshmallow, I watched this developer conference presentation. At the end of it, a visitor asked whether there’s also a permission to prevent internet access.

The Google guy who had presented it, responded that there was not, because with the other permissions in place, no app would have access to data that shouldn’t be on the internet.

I’d wager every single person in that room was techy enough to know that this was complete horseshit, including the presenter, but that did not stop him from pressing it out his grinning teeth.

To this day, when you install a third-party keyboard app, you either trust it with all your passwords and everything you type + internet access, or you don’t use one, even though 99% of third-party keyboards don’t need internet.
Similarly, you could allow camera apps etc. to not need to ask for permission, if they don’t use the internet, thereby reducing user fatigue.

Instead, Google decided to compromise security of the Android platform, I imagine, because they want apps to ship with (their) ads and trackers.

Privacy is one discipline of security…

I was gonna say, what even is “adware” in an ecosystem where every app ships annoying or intrusive ads?

Similarly, what is a “trojan” when those ads submit your data, too? None of this is in the interest of the user…

It is definitely possible, yeah. Tailscale and similar don’t do magic either.

I’m not sure on the specifics, though. I think, you want a TURN server or a STUN server.

Yeah, I don’t fully understand that one either.

I think, the only real advantage of Ubuntu Cinnamon over Mint is that you get non-LTS releases of Ubuntu. Mint can be quite out of data near the end of those 2 year cycles…

Right, I understand that you don’t care to deepen the conversation on Sync, but in the interest of mutual understanding, I’d like to point out how different our perspectives are.

I’m not scared of it being completely transparent – to be honest, I have not informed myself about Sync’s policies at all – because I consider it virtually impossible to create this transparency.

I’m a software engineer, this is how I think about our field:

• Companies will lose track of their data, even if they’ve created that data themselves.
• Software engineers are put under constant pressure to deliver features with security measures usually not being a requirement.
• Data processing pipelines frequently exceed the complexity that a single human can keep in their head. If those ads are from Google, it does so thousandfold.
• Chances are, this data is being correlated by AI. Literally no one knows, how a specific AI system makes correlations.

All of these aspects can have an impact on user privacy. If there’s not a single person in a given company who has transparency on all of this, it’s just not a thing that a user will have this transparency.

We’ve just dealt enough with computers to know that this never ends well. The dev has a financial interest of tracking as much as possible and no reason to not do so, because as a user, you cannot check what is being tracked.

I’m 100% on board with giving users the choice to provide data in exchange for services. But that choice requires full transparency with how much of your data you’re paying and who gets access to it.

As a fellow hackerman, that Linux meme triggers me hard…

Hmm, so you didn’t create that file yourself?

ystemctl

🙃

Ah, thanks. I’m normally good with terrible jokes, but somehow that one flew under my radar.

Well, do you want to explain the joke? Not everyone is deep into movies or stoner culture or wherever this joke comes from.

Yeah, on Reddit, especially in bigger communities, if you admitted you were wrong about something (or not at least technically correct in some way), you’d get downvoted and had asshats commenting how dumb you are, so they’d get upvoted for that.

Here, there’s less people to dunk on you, and I imagine, also just fewer kids, who need the validation from dunking and aren’t yet as self-reflected…

I was gonna say that I wouldn’t want to watch all that weird porn just to name it. But then I remembered that porn titles pretty much only need one screenshot and a whole lot of fantasy.

Every now and then, you’ll see some journalist uncovering the great revelation that Mozilla is doing unthinkable things, but I have never these stories actually being relevant, if you do more research on the topic.

Some examples:

• Mozilla use Google Analytics! → Yes, but they have a special contract with Google to protect user data: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=697436#c14
• Mozilla uses Google Safebrowsing! → Yes, but they have technical measures in place to limit user identification (on top of Google stating that they do not use Google Safebrowsing data for tracking): https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/how-safe-browsing-works-in-firefox/
• Mozilla has privacy-invading ads on the new-tab-page! → Again, they have technical measures in place to avoid privacy issues: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sponsor-privacy#w_what-data-is-shared

And telemetry by itself is not evil either. It depends entirely on what data is actually being sent. You can look at what Mozilla sends by typing “about:telemetry” into the URL bar. In my opinion, that is perfectly fine.

Ultimately, though, they enjoy so much trust, because they have no profit motive. The Mozilla Foundation is legally a non-profit and the Mozilla Corporation is a 100% subsidiary of the Foundation, so cannot pay out profits to anyone either.

Any ‘evil’ shit they do to make money, they do it to pay wages and to invest further into Firefox & their other projects.

You can criticize that the CEO takes a salary she can’t possibly spend (yet is below industry-standard, to my knowledge). And you can argue whether they should be taking so much money from Google rather than other sources.

But all in all, that still leaves them far above companies who need to exploit users as much as justifiable, to make the maximum amount of profit.

And Morrowind still makes it far too easy to empty complete rooms in NPCs’ homes. They just can’t be in the same room as you.

It’s certainly more of a traditional role-playing game, i.e. you have to pretend that you can’t rob everyone blind. The whole money system in that game collapses immediately, if you don’t…

Hmm, by what metric are the USA the richest country? Wealth of all citizens combined?

Certainly depends on the individual girl, but this style wasn’t called “emo” for nothing. You could have some deep talks with emos.

Obviously, they’re not going to open up to everyone, though, and many of them gladly played a bitch to sieve out all the people not worth opening up to. Seems like you got sieved out…