FriendOfDeSoto

How dare you!

Yes, you must have missed it. And so it begins.

Google is moving to make Android less open source. I’m not sure more devs following suit is going be good for them or their users. The G doesn’t give an F.

What we need is an OS fork that gets maintained. If not that, some other workaround that fools the Google servers. Because you can bet money that nobody made from flesh and blood is going to look at this inside Google.

Maybe devs can band together and form Middle Finger Corp. and designate one willing person as their contact to serve as registered dev for a gazillion apps. Follow the letter of the law, not the misguided spirit of it, in a manner of speaking.

If you are sitting on a mobile OS and you were afraid to fail like Windows, maybe now is the time to give it a go?

I wouldn’t buy these type of glasses either. I have neither the money nor the need so I’m not in the target group anyways. And if I had money, I would under no circumstances give it to a company like Meta.

I don’t think the huge privacy concerns are going to hold. There is all sorts of equipment people can buy that is less obvious to film you surreptitiously. Always scan your air b’n’b, people. We are virtually all okay with strangers filming shit in our vicinity with their smartphones as long as we feel it isn’t us they’re filming. I think this will over time translate to an unbotheredness w/r/t smart glasses. And after a while even the LED light altering others to a rolling camera will disappear. These devices become main stream by their usefulness. The HUD for directions or names of acquaintances is one useful aspect. The immediate way to record your toddler’s first steps or the funny face they pulled. An interaction with the law. Over time, this will outweigh the creepiness that we have perceived since the Google glasshole days.

This is another cut, among thousands. It’s bad because we can see the motivation behind it. Free speech only for one team.

I don’t want to be victim-blaming when I say expecting any big US corp to protect your privacy is futile. I know they want the reach of Insta and that’s of course not a bad thing. But it’s a threat considering who runs it. Another threat is editorializing the content. Don’t put music on it, don’t opine on the shamefulness of what the jackboots are doing, just post it. It’s the best chance of this dying in the courts before the independence of the judiciary has completely gone. Constant dripping wears the stone and the MAGAs are pissing on it full force.

Another consideration must be at this point to host or mirror your content on servers outside the US. Countries that already didn’t give an eff about the US or cooperating with its authorities. If you run your digital opposition on US-run/controlled infrastructure, you’ll be shut down soon.

“Nambia”

I fear you either misunderstand my comment or what martyrdom means. I’m no fan of the man who got shot. And for me he’ll never be a martyr. But those who did like him can now hail him as such, make him a hero - for all the other people who liked him. Martyrdom is in the eye of the beholder.

When and where did you go to school? That capital A that looks more like the lowercase one I’ve only ever seen from people from North America.

Whoever wrote this was probably still in school and I would guess in a North American one because of the cursive they wrote in. I think they also copied the text, badly, and that explains the mistakes.

I fear it will the shooter’s legacy that we will all remember the name. He may have otherwise continued his life as a weird, argumentative footnote in history. Now he will be a vessel of martyrdom that will fill itself with content poured in by those who instrumentalize his unfortunate death.

No, no, no, and no. If you see nothing but hateful and negative content, then you have been badly served by algorithms where they roam or you’ve been bad at building your feed on the fediverse.

Define civility.

I think there will be fork and there will be fork. A company like Samsung will continue to take what Google churns out, put their more proprietal stuff on it, and ship it. Probably not as Tyzen any more but who knows. I suspect a FOSS fork will never go back to Google after the last version that didn’t require this dev register check. They will find a way to maintain feature parity with it but it will be delayed.

Forks haven’t worked that well for Samsung Tyzen or Amazon because they never gained enough users, nor probably contributed they enough to the bottom line given the investment. It remains to be seen whether the more privacy conscious people can move the needle enough for a FOSS version.

It’s always nice to read Corey eating at the buffet of corporate shenanigans and leaving no crumbs.

If this developer registration really comes to pass and/or has staying power, I suspect there will be eff it we will just fork it movement. A FOSS Tyzen or Fire version of Android that would then not go back to whatever Google does with their Android updates. That would probably work better if all the privacy-friendly Android devs banded together, which probably won’t happen.

At the same time, I don’t think the last word has been spoken on Google’s plans here. They haven’t implemented it yet. And even if/when they do, I suspect there will one or two courtrooms that will hear about this shit in excruciating detail. If European devs could rally behind this flag there is a good chance the EU will use its golden formula of 50% good intentions and 50% wanting to eff American tech giants to intervene on privacy grounds.

A dult R ecording S urveillance E nforcement

would be a better acronym if you ask me.

It did for me. Anything with file access will ask for permissions first time around. (Android 13)

Consider leaving reddit. Vote with your feet. I did when they made these API changes and I beat the FOMO with my furious anger.

A lot of good ideas like that died when reddit pulled APIs or made access to them prohibitively expensive for developers. They are so set on making you use their shitty app.

If you were using Photos as a photo roll app you need to stay angry at yourself a while longer. That’s on you when you should know you cannot trust the G. Don’t grant an app permissions to photos and videos that could sync it to the cloud. And as another precaution, don’t keep sensitive pictures in the DCIM folder. If I have to take pictures of sensitive documents like that I disable WiFi (sync set up on WiFi only), take the picture, move it to a folder that’s never backed up elsewhere on my phone, and then turn WiFi back on.

You are not normal because you care about these things. The normal user doesn’t care and that’s who they are catering for. I’m not excusing their behavior (I don’t like it either) and at the same time you need to be more on your toes.

I’m planning to move to Ente this year when my Google cloud subscription runs out. Not looking forward to the work it entails but to the [paints face blue] FREEDOM!

I think the future will surprise us with a new method of digital obfuscation other than bitcoin et al. Crypto is a bit tainted. We can only look at the tools we have available today to make a guess about the future. My belief is that we will come up with something new, something else that isn’t as speculative and volatile. People don’t want their bribes to be devalued because some people found their long forgotten hard drives with crypto wallets and eff up the exchange rate.

Maybe barter is the wrong word in this instance. I mean rudimentary, handshake trade within an equally rudimentary community. Farmer A has wheat, hunter B shot two deer. A agrees to give half a blurb of wheat to B for 2 blorbs worth of prime venison. Both make it through the winter. That’s what I meant.