If you’re willing to endure a lot of inconvenience to maybe move the needle a tiny bit, I admire you. It also differs from place to place; if no restaurants exclusively put their menus on Instagram where you live, and most people do use SMS, then it wouldn’t be as painful for you as for the author.
every cafe that only distributes its menu solely via Instagram will not be visited by me
There’s a good chance I’d walk out over that too. I’ve never encountered it in the USA or Germany, but the author made it sound common in Australia.
you can write an SMS or call me
The author specifically mentioned people telling her “Oh I don’t text, do you have Insta or WhatsApp?” This is also true in Europe; WhatsApp is essentially universal, and some people have to pay per SMS sent. Some people also have another messaging app (Signal is reasonably common among my social group), but that won’t cover everyone, and group chats with more than three or four participants just aren’t going to happen.
If you are not willing to do that much, you do not really understand what meta is doing.
The average person does not really understand what Meta is doing. I do, and I think the author does, but neither of us is in a position to change the behavior of a majority of people in our regions.
The author goes into detail about the problems she experienced as a result of not having access to Meta products. She seems to recognize that it’s bad that there’s no way to read a cafe menu without an Instagram account or that the only messaging services some of her contacts use belong to Meta.
These are not problems the author can fix. She would be negatively impacted in the real world by not having access to Meta products.
Companies that were app-first like mobile games probably won’t cut prices much if any. Companies that were web-first like Proton and Patreon probably will.
This doesn’t seem to be the mainstream press, but a small tech blog. Mainstream American news outlets have been far more straightforward in their coverage of this case.
Furthermore, this case was a fight between two large corporations; there’s no little guy here. Smaller developers may benefit from the outcome though.
I’m disappointed the court didn’t strike down the app store monopoly itself. The iPhone might actually appeal to me with unlimited sideloading.
However, this U.S. court order is inconsistent with the Apple App Store business standards
This is terrible writing. The court order is inconsistent with the Apple App Store business standards? No. The court ruled that Apple’s business practices were illegal.
I’d bet on it being algorithmic from Facebook because leaning into algorithms is part of that company’s culture. A bunch of manual tweaks require maintenance, though it wouldn’t surprise me if someone was thinking about this when deciding that deleted selfie should be a different signal to the algorithm than deleted picture of cat.
It’s on a VPS. Whether that’s really self-hosted may depend on how much of a purist you are, but it’s fully self-managed, not SAAS.
It’s recommended to have a PTR record mapping your IP address to your domain, which you wouldn’t be able to do with a residential connection from a typical ISP. I do send mail from multiple domains though and I haven’t had issues with deliverability. What I do not send is any kind of high-volume mail, which would likely attract a different kind of scrutiny.
For example it is terribly difficult to self host email, and very few people actually do it.
I read this a bunch of times and put off trying it because it sounded like such a hassle. Eventually I did and… it wasn’t bad at all. I just had to add a few extra DNS entries. I haven’t had any delivery problems.
Sort of. This is apparently done on-protocol so anyone can issue verifications, but they’re only shown in the official client if they’re from BlueSky or someone approved by BlueSky.
A better way to do this would be to let users subscribe to verifiers the way they can labelers. Better still would be for the label to indicate what the verifier has verified about the account, like “nytimes.com says this person is an employee of the New York Times”, which is something labelers can already do.
So I really think they should have just leaned into labelers.
It appears to depend on Bluesky designating entities to do the verification.
I think the existing domain-based verification system is a better way of doing that. Something like Mastodon’s verified links might be a nice addition. This more centralized system is… not what I hoped for.
Instagram and Tiktok are usable in a web browser, though they do want you to make an account.
Terms like “safe” and “private” are not binary.
Are the contents of your Signal conversations on an iPhone private with regard to mass surveillance conducted by governments and ISPs? Probably. Apple uses security and privacy as marketing points, and there are a whole lot of people looking for vulnerabilities in its products who are incentivized to disclose them (possibly with a delay for patches). Signal itself takes steps to prevent data leaks to less secure parts of the OS and other apps.
Would your conversations remain private in the face of a targeted attack against your device by a nation state willing to spend a significant amount of time and money when you’re using Signal on an iPhone that’s presumably used for purposes other than secure conversations with a small set of people you know? Almost certainly not.
I’ve read that it’s because fairphone has to pay a fee for each unlocked device, but it sounds a little weird so no idea if that’s real.
The posts seem to suggest that Google is charging them a fee in that case, but that would be a little surprising given Pixels have a no-fuss unlock, and Google permits third parties to redistribute its proprietary add-ons to Android free of charge for installation by end users.
In any case, you’ve convinced me this probably isn’t Fairphone being evil, though some sort of public explanation would be nice.
I don’t understand why this requires a code rather than a toggle in developer settings like a Pixel. That doesn’t seem like openness and a commitment to treating users fairly since they could change their policy at any time.
TOR is designed to resist surveillance and censorship by ISPs or national governments. Communications are encrypted in transit, and there’s no way for a node to tell whether it’s talking to another relay node or the end user.
It’s fairly easy for a website to detect that a user is accessing it via TOR; there are lists of exit nodes like this one which a firewall or intrusion detection system can update programmatically. Many websites block or limit access via TOR using such lists, making it unsuitable for use cases such as the one I’m discussing.
I couldn’t care less what the employer wants. This almost certainly doesn’t violate any criminal laws, but could lead to loss of employment.
I care that my friends can be somewhere they’re physically safe while making enough money to be OK.
They bullied Syncthing the same way. Fortunately, Syncthing-fork is still developed and available on F-droid.
I understand a well-curated app store (which Play Store is not) placing some limits on apps getting all files access. In a modern security model, that’s not a permission most apps should have, however synchronization and file management apps obviously should have it.