As long as even basic features like push notifications are locked behind Google services, I’d hardly count that as a win. The Google monopoly on android is even worse than the Microsoft monopoly on PCs. Microsoft has at least some good alternative with the current Linux environment, but Googles only competitor is apple with an even worse system.

Sure there are projects like LinageOS and GraphenOS, but both are still reliant on micro G or containerised Goggle apps.

The majority of people play at least some competitive games and most of those simply don’t work due to anticheats. These game usually are also the most important ones to them.

The main character of the novel “Infinite Mana in the Apocalyps” literally has the traits “I’m the Main Character”, “Plotarmor” and “Nexus Events”, so you are good with that choice.

And you didn’t understand what I said. While you can not monitor closed source at the code level, you definitely can monitor the apps behaviour. Even the automatic threat protection from the playstore protect function is worth more than the measly amount of people looking through smaller projects codebases.

I hate Google with a passion, but with all their control over android devices, they are more than capable of scanning apps for malicious behaviour and automatically removing them. These few apps in the article are the 0.01% of malicious apps that their algorithm didn’t detect.

If we are talking about bigger projects with hundreds of thousands or millions of downloads, than this may be true. But smal scale projects have so few people actively looking through them that even to automatic scan done by the playstore has a higher chance of catching malware. It doesn’t even have to be bad intent, two years ago there was a virus propagating trough the Java class files in minecraft mods which reached the PCs of quite a few devs before it was caught.

I don’t dislike FOSS, a lot of the apps I use come straight from github, but all this talk about them beeing constantly monitored by third parties is just wishful thinking.

Vanadium is purposefully made this way. It tries to minimise profiling by making your actions noise in a big mass of users. That only works if you use the standard config without anything to discern you.

Mull is the other extreme of this. They try to eliminate fingerprinting by reducing the amount of trackable things in your browser.

It’s hard to say what really is the better option. You can’t completely eliminate fingerprinting, and the more you try, the more you will stick out of the masses.

How is that even supposed to work? These search engines need per definition massive databanks to search through. Either you need your own crawler and indexer which is more than just inefficient, or you are limited to a relatively short list of curated static results.

It’s the implementation that will probably annoy me the most. If the ingame radio station in GTA tried to sell me coke or Pepsi I probably wouldn’t even notice since it fits in with the world. But knowing EA they will probably put them in as additional loading screen that you can’t skip.

I agree with the first part (not that it should mean they can just extract more money out of us), but the second part is something I simply don’t believe.

Don’t get me wrong, I know budgets have increased, but the dev cost definitely didn’t by remotely the same amount. Devs wages are pretty stagnant since the initial silicon Valley boom and new tools at our disposal have made it a lot easier to create games, be it for indi devs or the corporate giants. Sure, graphics got fancier, but so did the readily aviable stock assets. High end work stations cost maybe a bit more, but they are a drop in the bucket in the 100+ million budgets of today.

What has increased on the other hand is the amount of executives/managers and their wages. In addition to that marketing has gone up a lot, probably over half of most budgets go there. The growing corporate overhead with its archaic structures also eats up a lot.

If we go purely by dev cost, prices should go down since the overall profit would increase with the greater amount of players. Everything else is corporate overlords throwing shitloads of money at a mediocre game to make it seem worth something.

You can’t, end of discussion.

The most that the city or the police can do is issuing them a small fine for the noise complaints. The only one with even an ounce of power here is their landlord, but then it depends heavily on your country/state.

Lemmy is a nice place if you share the same values, but once your opinion differs even somewhat, you won’t have that good of a time.

This is not a ban and it was never meant to be. They just force tiktok to sell the US market to a US company. Said US company will continue the platform just like it is at the moment, just with a bit more of that sweet American propaganda mixed into it. Tiktok won’t be gone, all that data will just go to the NSA instead of the CCP, that’s all they wanted.

Because Bethesda doesn’t provide the legacy versions on steam, unlike other mod focused games, afaik. Once you’ve updated your game, you are stuck with whatever version you have.

Sure, you can always download the right version from somewhere else, but I wouldn’t count piracy + the risks coming with it as a viable excuse for their fuckup.

Their goal isn’t to completely shut this down, Google is fully aware that that’s impossible to achieve. They just want to annoy enough people and make it complicated enough so that the userbase doesn’t grow any further.

That’s just your bubble. Most VPN users just want to circumvent geo restrictions.

Besides that, the general VPN “propaganda” is that it encrypts your traffic and no-one can see it. The average user gets baited by that and doesn’t care to look further into it.

It also depends on your definition of cyberbullying. Is a mean comment under one or two posts already enough? Does it have to be consistent? Does it have to be from the same Person?

I don’t want to undersell Cyberbullying, it definitely is a problem, but a lot of these surveys have vague questions that can be interpreted in massively different ways, both from the person that answers them and from the researchers that formulated them.

To keep it short, there isn’t really any privacy.

Servers are public and Private messages are stored without any envryption. If you delete your account then the messages stay and can still be found with your unique ID (just like Reddit). From what ive read Discord also stores your HWIDs and monitors your running processes (with a valid reason considering their game integration). Some say they only store that locally, others claim something else, haven’t seen any proof for either side so far.

The problem really boils down to the fact that people treat discord as a private messenger instead of a public forum despite it clearly beeing the latter.

How did you suddenly go from spyware to propaganda and are even accusing me of beeing fooled by them? I don’t even have Tiktok on my phone, I just fiddled with the algorithm in a containerised emulator.

All I said is that I’d rather have China have my data than the US cause China is a much smaller potential threat to anyone outside their country.

Most governments even semi big companies don’t allow whatsapp or other meta products on their hardware, is that precedent enough to ban meta too? Very few apps comply with the GDPR requirements needed on company/government hardware.

Look, I despise Tiktok too, but most arguments on here are just “muh China bad” or “look at these other people doing something”

They don’t want to ban it, they want to seize controll of it and let it operate as is, just with different propaganda now.