Corpo marketing to obfuscate the idea of installing software and nurture dependency to pre-installed proprietary repositories for an entire crowd of dependent non-tech savvy users that doesn’t know what an apk is probably.
I avoid using the term unless I’m being cheeky about “sideloading” from Google Play.
5 Eyes has been simping for China’s Golden Shield for as long as China has had it. Now Curtis Yarven and his circle of authoritarian tech bro freaks and 5 corpos in a trench coat are running America. Then the UK gets Apple to remove ADP and now, a nation that already has a hard-on for security cameras decides to expand biometric surveillance in quick succession. Hmm… interesting.
McDonald’s wants your IQ too. Seriously, it’s in their privacy policy.
deleted by creator
A post from the reddit thread on this that led me down a “dark” (double pun in this case) rabbit hole:
Larry Ellison is either independently coming up with, or stealing, an idea from an authoritarian freak named Curtis Yarvin. From an article about his ideology:
Each patchwork would be ruled by a “realm”: a corporation with absolute power. Citizens would be free to move, but every other realm would also be ruled by corporate governments with chilling impunity. For example, Yarvin says the tech overlords of the San Francisco realm could arbitrarily decide to cut off its citizens’ hands with no fear of legal consequences—because they’re a sovereign power, beholden to no federal government or laws.
In “Friscorp,” as Yarvin calls the San Francisco realm, an all-seeing Orwellian surveillance system would enforce public safety: “All residents, even temporary visitors, carry an ID card with RFID response. All are genotyped and iris-scanned. Public places and transportation systems track everyone. Security cameras are ubiquitous. Every car knows where it is, and who is sitting in it, and tells the authorities both.”
Yarvin is a thought leader who influences many of the most powerful people in the world (and also a couple elected politicians).
Larry Ellison basically floated the idea of an AI surveillance panopticon several months ago.
Ars Technica: Omnipresent AI cameras will ensure good behavior, says Larry Ellison
It’s the details that make up the whole picture.
As an isolated situation, the renaming thing may be stupid and not worth giving any credence. Energy can be spent resisting elsewhere in more useful places. However along with the rest of the actions of billionare corpos that kissed the ring, it’s part of the overall trend with devastating consequences. Bullshit details shouldn’t be ignored, but acknowledged as “they’re fucking us from all directions right now and waging war on reality, and we really should stop letting them”.
Anything that uses FCM doesn’t get push notifications. That’s most of them. Very few apps work fine, others I have set up to use UnifiedPush. Unfortunately Proton Mail requires manually checking. I’ve not had any issues with location.
I’ve had one app straight up refuse to work at all and others that throw up an “enable Google Play Services” at every launch (dismiss it and it still works), but it’s nothing critical so I don’t care. Most of my apps come from F-Droid anyway. I haven’t had enough time without the play store to see if other apps trip the play integrity api stuff. Even if it did I don’t care.
But apps can’t hijack my entire screen anymore, battery life is improved, naturally privacy and security as well. No more “update available” pop-ups on app launches or that pop-up to scan all apps that I kept having to decline. No more anxiety from waking up to a bunch of marketing notifications. There’s also just the plain satisfaction of being free.
Google has Android by the balls but I’m so jaded and done with this corpo hell world shit to put up with even their privileged system apps anymore, even if it’s less convenient. Maybe Linux phones will become viable.
It feels good to say that I’ve been rid of Google for a while. They can shove Play Serives and Store too.
“Oh, but then the price of my McDonald’s cheeseburger will skyrocket!!” Fucking good
I don’t know why people keep repeating this propaganda. Plenty of countries pay actual wages to their employees, don’t have tipping, and the prices are still fucking cheaper than America.
deleted by creator
Honestly I’ll still be using Proton and recommending it because it’s just good and a net benefit for everyone, but goddammit Andy you should’ve taken Swiss neutrality to heart this time and not said anything.
transgenderism
At risk of going slightly off topic, trans people aren’t an -ism. It’s not an ideology, though transphobes love to frame it that way (not saying you are).
Your hubris is showing, Fuckerberg.
I hate forced 2FA that you can’t disable anyway. I don’t want to waste time waiting for an insecure text, I don’t want to input an unencrypted code you sent to my email, I don’t want to click your damn notification that runs through Play Services, and no I’m not enrolling in passwordless auth. I don’t need to be babied into securing my accounts. Any account I do actively and willingly secure is already using TOTP. Let me put in my username and password, then kindly fuck off.
Why not just disable the Ubuntu pro ads in the mean time?
deleted by creator
Edit: nevermind I typed a lot but that Lemmygrad user made a far better post that I agree with.
There is no metadata harvesting on Signal and the use of a phone number is so convenient and helped massively with adoption from the general unaware public.
I loved that it acted as a private and secure drop in replacement for SMS (particularly before they removed that integration) that does what I needed and does it very well and easily connects me with people that already have my number. This made sharing Signal very easy. The only data Signal has to even provide to the authorities is your registration date, phone number, and time of last connection. The absolute minimum. It’s fantastic. If you compare this to Whatsapp which has everything but the exact content of your messages, it’s not even a contest.
For myself on Signal and everyone else I’ve known that that uses Whatsapp or Insta or whatever, the extra absolute anonymity of also removing phone numbers from the already small equation just isn’t needed or worth it, otherwise you wouldn’t be using Signal, let alone fucking Facebook.
They’re killing third-party client access, limiting adblockers, blocking VPNs, and forcing sign in more and more. I sincerely hate it but this was inevitable. They have their monopoly, this is just the “abuse that position and enshittify for more data and money” stage. I hope an alternative takes off because I refuse to play by their rules.