It’s been hours now (and a very busy day), but I swear that half of that comment (including that section) wasn’t there when I commented regarding safer seas.
But there’s no mark showing the comment has been edited either.
Scurvy must be eating me brain.
Good news! No need to wait for unofficial servers. Over a year ago they opened a feature called safer seas where you can play without PvP!
Good news! Over a year ago they opened a feature called safer seas where you can play without PvP!
Yes, you’re correct.
But that rollout doesn’t make headlines like all the ones from the US government telling people to use encrypted messaging like WhatsApp or Signal. That’s what got them to WhatsApp to begin with. FBI tells everyone very loudly to get off standard texting. They jump as a collective to where half of them already are.
As I’ve already alluded to: this has precisely zero to do with the technical aspects of security. Ease of use does matter (why pushing to Signal didn’t work at the time the FBI spooked everyone), but only a little bit, and is overshadowed by momentum of where people already are.
I might be able to get my family off WhatsApp with the recent article about it being banned from (I think it was) Congress’s phones.
But again, this isn’t a technical problem where you can just point at what’s obviously the better choice. There are complications of personal relationships, individual resistance to change, whether or not you’re willing to train your family members, etc.
My grandmother is in her late 80s and it is astonishing that she can even manage WhatsApp to pariticipate in the family group chat. I’m not upending that and causing her the added stress, work, isolation if it fractures the family groip chat, and signing myself up for all that extra work to try and drag people to new platform and hold their hand through the bumps… just so I can be comfortably principled, using the best option, and trying to prevent Meta from getting info about me for a few more years that they likely are getting through other means.
I’ll revisit as the elders age off.
I care about my privacy, but I’ve thought long and hard about my specific threat model and what is and isn’t important enough for me to make a big deal out of. For me, this is an acceptable sacrifice.
Doesn’t have to be that way for anyone else. Just has to work for me and my life. And it does.
Ultimately I’m just trying to give reasons why people are still on these platforms. I took the initial comment I responded to at face value. I’m not really looking to debate here, and my opinions don’t invalidate anyone else’s.
How is that fucking legal?
Give us this very sensitive information, we promise we won’t misuse it, and we’ll let you fiddle our AI as a treat.
Momentum of where friends and family are.
It’s nice to be able to say “well they’re not worth talking to then”, but at some point I need to be able to reach my parents so they can babysit my daughter. Or be able to know that family will be in town and expecting me to be available. Or be able to have any way of knowing what life events are happening to my loved ones without having to wait for it to be brought up in casual conversation months later as if I should already know.
My extended family and friends do a poor job communicating on a good day. If I try to add another hurdle, I’m not the one who wins that fight.
Buddy, given your relatively basic questions and how you’re posting to every single fucking vaguely relared community, I would highly suggest you do some studying on just… basic computer concepts and how to use them. Not sure what resources are out there anymore, but maybe some basic “these are the parts of a computer, these are programs and how they work” stuff from the 90s. They used to do middle school classes on how to properly use google and other seaech engines to find trustworthy information for citing in research papers. I seriously suggest you start there.
Then, after you understand the basics maybe you start trying to understand how all of that works in regards to security and the concept of trust in the software you install and run.
Spoiler alert: Computers are not designed with any sort of “zero trust” architecture like you seem to be shocked that they don’t have. Things are not sandboxed, segmented, or otherwise prevented from accessing other stuff as a general rule.
This is why one of the bare minimum basics is “don’t run anything you don’t trust”.
Don’t forget “styrofoam walls painted to look like tunnels”. Fucking looney tunes.
Most still are/can be. Enough that I find it hard to believe people are missing out without podcasts through these paid services.
Harsh question: Do you have a real need to prevent this data from being collected, or are you investigating just for funsies best practice advice? There are a lot of posts like this where people overestimate the threat model they have and insist on needing to block things that are nearly impossible to, or at least have significant tradeoffs like you are dealing with now.
Javascript is also not the only source that sites can use for these pieces of info from your machine. Local time in particular can be estimated by looking up the rough location of your IP address then matching to a time zone.
Anyway.
I would assume you could technically fork localCDN (replaces remote javascript libraries with local copies) and then manually edit the local javascript library copies to remove the calls you are concerned about.
There’s also options like uBlock Origin’s methods of only whitelisting specific scripts. Much more flexible than NoScript. You can block scripts that are third party and only allow site specific ones fairly easily, without digging deep into the settings.
Bear in mind that your specific combination of installed extensions can also be a unique identifier though.
It also tracks what you’ve downloaded to provide update notifications and encourage you to participate in the mod quality ratings system.
It’s not 100% without reason beyond tracking users.
The issue with using torrents is longevity. You’d still want/need traditional storage backing it all. Don’t want some mod to become lost media because nobody is actively seeding it.
I mean, that’s at least functional grammar.
“advertiser’s creative”? The fuck is that? You aren’t cool by dropping the noun out and trying to use an adejective in its place.
Thanks! That’s damn good for “best effort”! A convincing lead on what company it may be.
Personally, I still don’t think it’s time for immediate red alert, but I’ll have to keep an eye on things. Hopefully we’ll see some competitors like GameBanana step up to the challenge.
Wait, was it confirmed sold? The news post on Nexus fron this morning indicated that the existing head admin and CEO (of 24 years) was just stepping back (and not even away entirely), and had already put the year+ in of identifying two successors from his existing team.
I didn’t see anything regarding a sale, and the existing admin said quite a bit about taking this seriously from a standpoint of what’s best for mod makers and users and not best for business profits.
Edit: I’m not seeing any company name given because as far as I can tell, it wasn’t sold. It’s the same company, same employees, the person at the tip top is just shifting.
And since when is “comicbook dot com” a source for game modding news? Unless someone can show me something from a more direct or reputable source, I think this is just someone running with the most click bait interpretation of the nexusmods post.
Edit x2: Dormedas’s resetera link has some convincing investigation that the two people named as taking over the reigns may work for a company that provides esports training, and also consulting services for user generated content focused companies.
Why does this description sound entirely like someone trying to sell me something?
Yeah, but they’ll still create a shadow profile on you and track your data anyway. Have a friend with an account? Your name and phone number is known to them. Even without a true identity attached, they will track you from your own devices, and then correlate that with everything else they can at every opportunity.
Also, Facebook is preinstalled as a system app (cannot be uninstalled without adb) on various manufacturer’s and carrier’s android builds.
What? Corded phones exist, and most schools and offices have at least one in each room. Dumb phones exist. Pagers exist.
Smart phones are not the only singular solution for easy, quick contact.
The fluff text in the terminals is what really got me about the repetition. Like you couldn’t write a few more similar paragraphs and shuffle them?
Especially from Gartner of all places. Maybe this will finally start tempering the hype in the executives.