These are mostly very popular, very well attended liberal demonstrations. Is it a big deal that there is digital evidence that you were in the area at that time?
This is a “remind me in five years” question.
Probably we turn this thing around and nobody gets disappeared for their phone records showing attendance of a peaceful protest.
But that “probably” is doing a shit ton of lifting in the previous sentence.
Fair, but there’s a worse experience possible.
For a time, many people’s first encounter with vi was when it auto-opened a temporary editor to ask them to submit a commit message for the git command they just ran.
This experience skips the vi “welcome” screen, because a file is open.
As a bonus challenge, git did not inform the user what editor is in use, and the user had no particular reason to even expect an editor to appear, based on what they were just doing.
None of this was the fault of vi, really. But it was a terrible introduction.
It got better when various operating systems changed their default command line editor to nano, and git added some helpful adjustments - “if certain settings are not configured, assume a new user and show verbose welcome messages”.
That’s where the term “Enlightened Self Interest” comes from.
Naive short-sighted stupid self interest is destructive - both to the community and even to the self interested individual.
But self-interest doesn’t have to go away. We all have wants and needs, and most of our wants and needs are (mostly) harmless.
Instead, self interest can be enlightened - seasoned with understanding of the bigger picture, and with the wisdom of other’s experiences.
Do you think we can find a way to bypass these,
Yes. Direct physical access always wins. A device in my hands is my device.
or is the future of the digital world just authoritarian and dystopian?
Yes. Many people aren’t going to explore the solutions, or be willing to give up the convenience that comes with not changing what they’re doing.
we’re maaaaaybe 3% of the market on a good day, so they say “fuck it”
So true. And worse than that, we’re probably also the 3% most likely to skip buying a game that requires anti-cheat, anyway. Many of us are famously un-friendly toward closed source code running with invasive permissions.
There is probably no way to opensource it without also making it easier to bypass.
I want to highlight this in case OP missed it. Your point here is critical.
Now I’m going to nerd out a bit about it:
To expand on your points above (for OP), there’s an impasse here between the anti-cheat developer and the distro developers.
The anti-cheat developer needs support from the distro developer to get their anti-cheat packages signed, to allow them to run in the kernel. Any package not signed by the distro developer that tries to run at kernel level will be treated by the OS as a virus. (Windows has this protection as well.)
Getting the code signed is pretty easy. The only requirement is sharing the source code, so the distro developers can make sure there’s nothing nasty in it.
But the anti-cheat developers feel that they need to never share their source code, to prevent cheating. In some cases, they have even have contracts that prevent them from legally sharing parts of their source code (if licensed from a third party).
That’s also not a problem. All they have to do is sign a binding contract for secrecy with every contributor to the distro, and then privately share their source code, and get it signed.
On Windows, that means signing a contract with Microsoft. On Mac, with Apple.
But on Linux, is just means tracking down and making separate agreements with a few thousand independent individuals…
So the technical solution is pretty simple: share code, get code signed, run in kernel.
But the contrasting needs of everyone involved make it unlikely on Linux.
Interestingly, an Anti-cheat developer who felt very confident that their code was unbeatable, could just publish it publicly, and get it signed and running quite quickly.
But uh… Most anti-cheat is also pretty low quality code, according to most estimations.
He’s a VP that really gets things done, in Saints Row.
Haha. Uh…I never thought about it, but I liked it better, yes.
But my kids like Pacific Rim: Uprising better.
Here’s a bold one: “Atlantic Rim”.
Yes. It is just a low budget cash grab meant to fool grandparents into buying little Johnny the wrong film by accident. (When little Johnny asked for a copy of “Pacific Rim”.)
But somehow it actually has a decent script, and passable acting.
The effects are bonkers cheap, though.
Okay, I’m really stretching it with this one.
But I tried to hate-watch it, and couldn’t actually hate it.
The critics on this over were pretty funny to me.
“They made me watch another Hellboy film, and it’s a Hellboy film, and I’m angry.”
Some of those critics need to learn when to call in sick.
It’s a great Hellboy film. Haha.
the product placement was off the wall
And on the wall. And some of the walls themselves are ads. Also the rubble remains of some of the walls are also still product placement.
But yes, it’s a pretty good film.
This trend is, incidentally, solely because we a higher percentage of programmers knew what they were doing.
It’s easier to build a webpage, but more people can make them worse quality, now.
Element with Matrix.org is getting pretty decent.
Most Lemmy apps support switching quickly between instances.
In theory, this could ease the transition when an instance closes, I guess.
In reality, the Internet is for pornography.
It presumably makes it easier to quickly switch between porn-free and porn-full subscription sets.
I say “Presumably”, because I’m above all that… here on my non-porn account.
Plus…there’s probably someone here who carefully separates their Linux Lemmys into one account and their railway and mass transit news Lemmys into another.
A Steam Deck could fit on a shelf beside the computer, on the computer desk…
Come to the SteamDeck side…we have…just so many games.
To answer your top level question:
If it’s not Linux from Scratch, then we don’t know exactly what is running, and we need to consider that.
We made rocks think. There’s some trust decisions involved.
Should I blindly trust every app I find on F-Droid? No. The article correctly lays out reasons why.
Most of them also apply to Google Play and to Aurora.
Your decision which to trust depends which threat protections you need the most:
Google Play provides stronger protections against people who are trying to run up your credit card through Google Play purchases. Many of the protections cited in the article were developed for this reason. Google Play store apps can fraudulently charge your credit card. But Google works hard to prevent this, with mixed results.
Aurora serves the same apps as Google Play and effectively benefits from the same protections.
In addition, Aurora adds additional context about malicious corporate behavior. Google has slowly added some, but not all, of these to Google Play. But at the end of the day, Google is being payed to look the other way by some corporations.
Like Aurora, F-Droid includes details meant to protect you from abuses by corporations. I would argue that F-Droid’s protections are stronger than even Auroras.
F-Droid does not include a method to charge your credit card. This makes a number of security differences in the article much less important, to most people. Of course, there’s more harm that an app can do than credit card charges.
Because I am aware of many harms caused by individual bad actors and corporations, my preference order goes:
Yes. I have various ways I check, including reading the source code, looking for open known vulnerabilities, and reviewing recent commit history to see if it’s still actively maintained.
And…Looking at the other replies here - you’re all welcome, I guess. Yes. I am that part of the community. We exist. There may be dozens of usm…
Anyway. Thank you all for all you do in the community, too. High fives all around.
Which is why to this day, I have not watched a single Terminator film after T2.
I don’t want to spoil anything, but you might be interested in knowing that some of us feel that Terminator: Dark Fate avoids the issues you mention, and works as a direct and worthy sequel to T2.
This.
apology
I couldn’t resisit adding a quick low effort comment to emphasize your point. I’ll see myself out.