I try to respond to every genuine engagement. I block trolls, contrarians, and provocateurs because life is too short.
Because FOSS isn’t the problem. The problem the law seeks to address is profit-driven big businesses like Meta and Fortnite who don’t care to provide any protections for kids or actively target them in their manipulative behaviour, hence targeting the laws at the actual problem (non-FOSS software).
Google has simply officially said they won’t block ADB sideloading as part of the change, so it’s the same old ADB install method for unsigned APKs that devs use.
Shizuku uses ADB commands to install apps so it’s much of a muchness there - same thing. Though I speculate Google will start to block Shizuku installs (of the main Shizuku app) from the Gplay store in soonI’m sure due to ‘breech of T&Cs’ of some kind, but really to add more side-loading hurdles.
You can definitely remove the APK, but it’ll just reinstall itself next time Play Store services do their thing. In addition, Google Play won’t allow installation of new apps without approval from the service, so removing it will block install via official GPlay.
The main ways to avoid it to my knowledge are to either go through the official ADB method (if you have official Google Play) or use a de-Googled phone and install via alternative stores eg Aurora / F-Droid.
Its not as egregious as you think. ‘Everyone’ group means every Synology user account - not that everyone on the network that can talk to the NAS, they’d still need both a Synology account and Shared folder permissions. Any Synology user trying to access those files would still have to have read and write access to the Share to actually access it (eg via file explorer SMB/CIFs or app-level access to Synology File Manager, or they would need to be granted SSH access to get in via terminal, etc) in order to R/w/m the files.
I know it’s a bit confusing, but it’s correct. Docker often causes confusion with file permissions. There are file-level permissions (this article) and there are share-level permissions. You need both to access folders and files via mapped drives / SMB, this setting is just to ensure that Docker containers which can be running as a variety of user names (depending on how you config docker and the container) don’t experience issues accessing files you’re expecting them to be able to access, as Synology says, the default Docker folder permission is for the ‘everyone’ group to have Read-only access. This should allow most Docker containers configs to at least run and then if you run into issues writing/modifying files… That’s a clue you have missed some file permission configuration settings that need to be done, and the only reason it’s running at all is because that default ‘everyone’ permission is saving your butt.
The one I’m thinking of specifically recently is the revelation by Indian subcontractors that META was lying about their Rayban smart glasses having private mode that would not recording in private areas you set like bathroom, shower, in bed etc… And in fact it had sent tens of thousands of videos of people nude or fucking to the Indian subcontractors.
METAs response? Fire them, admit nothing. Lol. That’s some grossss shit that even normies want nothing to do with.
Agree. One thing that I’ve noticed is that if it’s about social media I say I “had to delete it for mental health, that shit is so bad for you”, and generally get a much more receptive response than when I explain it’s primarily for privacy and that I don’t trust them with my data.
Though Zuck and others are making it way easier to point out how creepy their platforms are, so that becomes a good entrypoint re: privacy also.
I use very popular router by Gl.Inet called Flint 2 (GL-MT6000). Goes on special for about $125 USD. Great specs, solid device.
Fully supported by OpenWRT, and I recommend flashing to that so that you have completely FOSS software with no possibly hijinks from the manufacturer’s OEM OS.
You’ll need to read some guides or watch some vids to get you set up on OpenWRT, bit of a learning curve, but it has everything you could possibly need. Check it out.
Anonymous works fine 99% of the time if you only install occasional apps from Google. It works by grabbing a random Google account from a large pool of Google accounts that Aurora (or someone) runs, and accesses the store for searches and downloads after logging you in. You’re logged out after a set period (several hours iirc) and then grab a new ‘anon’ account from the pool next time you do updates or search for an app.
The only issue you may face occasionally is if the app you want is geofenced to your area, and the ‘anon’ account was made in a different geographical location - in which case you won’t be able to find the app in the store to install (or update) it. I usually just log off and on a couple of times and this resolves. It’s a minor irritation.
Many create their own throwaway Google account on a different device (not linked to them in any way), but I haven’t bothered… Might be worth it if you install a lot of apps from Google store and want minimal issues though.
I think that would undo a lot of the attempted anonymity though, even if it’s just for app istalls/updates. I’ve used Aurora for… 4… 5?.. years as my only means of apps from the Google app store, only using anon accounts and only having occasional hiccups where updates don’t kick off automatically or geofenced apps can’t be located. I only use maybe a dozen apps from the store though, all the rest are F-Droid/etc.
Over the past few months, our former payment provider Nexi S.p.A. (“Nexi”) requested access to private data, which we understood to be specifically the usernames and passwords of our supporters. We have refused this request. All our attempts to clarify Nexi’s request, or to understand how their need for such information was necessary and legal, were met with what we consider to be vague and unsatisfactory explanations relating to a general need for risk analysis.
Y tho. What in fuck does a payment provider have to do with asking for this?
His opinion is actually that AI can use his code no problem, they just have to pay a fee.
The problem is that the big LLM AI companies will just say… ‘Fuck off’, because they don’t like paying for any data, and they also think their models will be advanced enough to write their own libraries soon (if not now, depending how much they believe their own marketing hype).
Pricing is an additional unanswered problem in his new model. As a hypothetical: if 1000 traditional OSS users generate $1000 value in conversion to paid users in his old model - what would an AI license cost? Because one license (eg to Anthropic/Claude) would theoretically be cutting off millions of users, maybe 80%+ of his userbase. Would he ask for millions as a licensing fee?
Whole idea is half-baked IMO, but I am sympathetic to the bullshit situation he finds himself in.
I’ve used it several months and can recommend it. No issues so far and seems to get regular updates for bugfixes and minor new features.
Yeah DuckDNS gave me many false positive outages where its resolution failed, for multiple half-days every year I used it (5yrs+).
I moved to the afraid.org and its been solid, if anyone’s looking for another free service - only cost is you have to log in once every six months to validate your account is not dormant. They have a paid tier which gives more features (that most home users will never need), and that allows the guy running it to fund a very reliable service.
I’m surprised the amount of people saying they have had no issues with DucksDNS. I’ve used it for about five years and had issues on and off with it being unresponsive many times.
Gave up and moved to afraid.org about a year back and that’s been a very solid service ever since.
People used to not use VPNs too - until they realized how useful they can be by spread in pop culture and increasing tech awareness of the general public.
If commercial VPNs are banned the tech savvy will move onto a replacement immediately, and the knowledge will slowly expand through social circles and social media until it has similar penetration in society.
A VPN ban would be both harmful (to business and consumers short term) and pointless.
remembers Gofer programming language from CS unit and shudders
Every Catfriend build since v2 has been reproducable. Most apps on F-Droid are and they are encouraging it for all devs, to build trust.
https://verification.f-droid.org/packages/com.github.catfriend1.syncthingfork/
Update from Simon aka imsodin, Syncthing Maintainer
tl;dr for android users: No need to switch apps at this time, the current install continues to work and is safe. If you can disable app auto-updates, please do that for now to be on the safe side.
Good news: Had a good chat with @nel0x. He is a collaborator on researchxxl’s repo and just marked those releases as “pre-release”, which prevents the obtainium auto-upgrades. So we are back to no immediate risk for users and we can take it slowly, trying to establish communication and more context. It’s still possible and imo likely that nothing nefarious is going on, just a very suboptimal handover that needs clearing up. There’s no need to go dig for repos on github, the technicalities of continuing to publish an app are not an issue - the open/relevant points are about a possible direct continuation of the existing app (or not), the time/effort that needs to be volunteered to publish an app and the trust in whoever does that. Hopefully we can work something out. If you are interested in helping maintain the app, let us know, other than that imo nothing to do here except if you are a user, to do the above in the tl;dr and every now and then check-in on the status (now and then being more like every week than every hour 😉 ).
Sounds like a really good reason not to use Obtainium, if any repo you have tracked for updates can just redirect you to a completely different repo If they have the keys - and throw no complaints when updating to an entirely different apk.
With F-Droid they at least have to have the same signing keys, and the code is built by F-droid from source - meaning the code for the supplied APK always matches the code on the repository for the build. Whereas Obtainium will just offer you any APK the dev releases on their GitHub/Gitlab/etc, this places much higher trust on the dev.
Edit:
my bad, I wrote earlier that all F-droid builds are reproducable. But that’s not accurate F-droid does not enforce that all builds must be reproducible. They have been helping devs with the tools and assistance to do so since 2015, and all the apps that I use I’d checked in the past and are all using reproducable builds, so I wrongly presumed it was mandatory now. Eg, Syncthing-Fork from Catfriend has had all builds reproducible since v2:
https://verification.f-droid.org/packages/com.github.catfriend1.syncthingfork/
I dont use SMS much but there are services and people that still rely on it, QUIK is great.
I love the delayed sending feature (initially in QKSMS), many times I have hit send and then gone “wait… typo”, and edited it.
Has a great inbuilt backup & restore feature too.
I don’t understand why people like AppleTV so much, we have one too.
It had the worst interface by far of any streaming or video player we use. Its like Apple went out of their way to make it unintuitive.