where did you read that?

To give you an example, if you have no water in your house you need to report on wp. No other way. And this is the standard for a lot of services, wp is the ONLY way to ask for support.

whatsapp requires phone numbers. surely they can be called

It’s a nightmare, i really want to get rid of meta services but it is impossible for my case.

if you have tech skills, try running a matrix bridge for whatsapp for yourself. take it slowly if you need it, you are not in a hurry. your own server, federation off. keep using whatsapp as you did before, and check for a month or two if the bridge is running stable. subscribe to notifications for github releases of the bridge to know if there’s an important update.
you won’t be able to leave whatsapp behind, but at least you’ll be able to get rid of its apps that do whatever that’s not for your benefit

??

windows 12 now runs in the cloud! requirements: always available internet, with low latency and high bandwidth, and ignorance over privacy

what, you could move the taskbar across monitors in 10??

I use duckduckgo for searches and proton for emails for 4+ years, and I have been less frustrated than with google services

you can get somewhat of an impression of it if after a reboot you get a logcat dump. for that, you need to enable ADB, and install the ADB tools on a computer. but disable ADB if you don’t use it

or automated trains, which would probably be more efficient

and diesel fuel

they’ll just send a missile to any building that does not only house white males

I really don’t want to switch US tech to a Chinese one. that country is really not any better, unless you see everyday mass surveillance and the loss of personal privacy as the way to go

I think they think most users are absolutely stupid.

can’t blame them for that, sadly it is true

but other then that, it might be also about security. e.g. Magisk loosens the selinux policies so that it can work at all, and it has patched a few holes in the past years that it itself have opened

oh don’t worry that won’t change

it always had ads. that was its point, not the shortening

with graphene you can’t backup everything. for that you will need to root it, and graphene devs are vehemently against that

these only handle crypto. they’re not a replacement for stripe, and saying that it is is a very large stretch. stripe is used for handling fiat payments, and there’s a reason even Liberapay only supports that and Paypal: because all others are worse or questionable.

such services (recurring payment services) can’t really make use of crypto right now anyway, can they? they would either need to store your keys, or create a specialized wallet program and stop being a service, but the latter would also remove any possible transparency that the donation receiver may want to provide

ok. what should we use instead? paypal?

this is not the first time they do something like this

https://beehaw.org/comment/4094773

I don’t think so. most often you just need to put a steam emu’s dll besides it, and that’s because most games are not coded to handle when steam was not installed. when a game has steam drm, you have to use an additional program that modifies the game’s executable. so far I only had to do this once

The steam store page of a game should to tell on the right sidebar if

• it uses 3rd party DRM
• or online-only restriction
• or requires 3rd party account sign-in

All of these are marked in a visible yellowish frame below the steam-feature list.

If it uses DRM that is not 3rd party, I think that means it uses Steam DRM, which is not common in my experience. This one is also kind of easy to patch out, or at least it was the last time I did so which was years ago

Or just pirate the games you purchase, and it won’t matter if your Steam account is banned or deleted. Which is honestly often the better option these days, because it has the bullshit DRM ripped out of it.

most games don’t have DRM, so this is easily done by making a copy of the game files, and using the goldberg steam emu on it

It’s still not retroactive

I fear just the same will happen to all the other encrypted messengers too, to discourage everyone from using it. it’s a bit like if this was connected to the same gang that so much wants to outlaw secure encryption

It’s literally insane that they are doing this even though they don’t even have the replacement. It really shows their colour.

Several law firms have pursued this option, one of which was sued by Valve for allegedly attempting to “extort” the company with a threat of mass arbitration with more than 50,000 people. (This lawsuit was dismissed in August without prejudice, meaning Valve could re-file.)

The idea is that the sheer number of arbitration cases would force Valve to settle with all of them with the same resolution, instead of arbitrating them all individually. Arbitration is usually less expensive than litigation, but on this mass scale, it can easily become overwhelming for the company the disputes are with. “In states like California where businesses must pay most of the arbitration fees in a consumer claim, the business would be required to pay a filing fee for each individual claimant,” Steinberg said. “With fees of approximately $1,500 per claim, a claim with thousands of individuals could cost millions in filing fees.”

Chinese vehicles sold in the US would have the same internet connectivity as a base 2007 Honda Civic. Surveillance by the Chinese would be practically impossible with those limitations.

yeah sure, we all know the us government blocks trackers of the bloatware built into chinese smartphones, chinese network routers, and all other things. Except they don’t.

Chinese vehicles sold in the US would have the same internet connectivity as a base 2007 Honda Civic.

I would even consider buying them, then. Honestly. It’s increasingly hard to find such cars.

I’m not a US citizen, neither of them are safe in any amount. Speaking of that, my country has ever increasing chinese influence, imported by our most corrupt goverment ever, along with loans that we will pay for decades, if not for longer. Chinese surveillance tech is appearing everywhere, like hundres of hikvision cameras.

I don’t think I’m a minority here.

I also don’t want to buy a Tesla ever, neither travel in one, and I’m pretty confident with today’s climate that I won’t ever have a car.
I dont want to travel to the US, but to china even less so.
The wrongdoings of the US does not make china any better of an option.

oh you absolutely have to be worried about china. I don’t care specifically about anyone, and so I don’t care specifically about the US. Everyone having this much access is dangerous

there is this approach where if the neighbor is loud, you first try to speak with them, and if they don’t care then you go to the police. have you heard of it?

I think a big part of the problem is that they didn’t show anyone a notification or an onboarding dialog or whatever about this feature, when it got introduced.

Firefox is still the superior browser in my opinion.

or the least bad, as I have been thinking about it lately

I’m pretty sure anyone who believes that is quite misguided. tell me next that xiaomi phones and robot vacuums are privacy minded. we should also shift to wechat, right?

I’m surprised they aren’t offsetting the cost by selling all our data to language learning models like everyone else is

aren’t they doing it? but at least by looking at how much they like locking out people until they give out their phone number, I suspect they are not collecting it without having further use for it

Same. In the last few years (2?) I don’t think I have given it out anywhere. I just pretend to not have a phone number, and if people think that’s weird I don’t care, deal with it. Nowadays if a service requires my phone number, I don’t need that service. Or in rare cases I’ll try to find a free online number for receiving a code, but that’s the only alternative I take.

It was even just registered 4 days ago

None of the samsung devices are in my book. Especially since they strive to physically destroy all of your devices if their certified services detected that you have done any servicing to it.

By the way, does anyone know if this also applies to replacing the software?
Because then, thanks to their e-fuses, flashing the original software will not save you either.

Because paying is easy and convenient

Besides, with uBO (or a custom addon or userscript) you can replace the value of that list, for all sites or selectively

Websites don’t get to see what addons are you running

New means from yesterday, not from last week