Zak

@Zak@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple adds red exclamation mark warnings on EU App Store listings for apps using third-party payment systems, not Apple's “private and secure payment system”⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago⁩:

  “Butthurt” implies personal offense. This is about maximizing profit, nothing else.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nextcloud cries foul over Google Play Store app rejection⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  It is, and it looks like the bad press got to Google and it will soon be fixed on Play Store.

  I’d generally recommend getting things from F-Droid where possible anyway, but that could be a tech support headache for a larger institution using Nextcloud and requiring people to install the client.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How can I federate my ghost blog?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  They probably will once it’s not in early alpha as the readme says it is.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How can I federate my ghost blog?⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  If you’re hosting it yourself, ActivityPub is a separate component. If someone else is hosting it for you, they will have to add support.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google Says iPhone Adoption Of RCS Has Led Users To Share 'More Than A Billion' Messages Daily, Yet SMS/MMS Still Reign Supreme In The U.S.⁩ ⁨⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Google could theoretically build a Google Messages counterpart to iMessage and skip the Carrier as the middleman, but then it wouldn’t be interoperable with iPhones since it wouldn’t be an “open standard”

  Google did that, in 2013. Hangouts was briefly the default SMS client on Android, and it would upgrade conversations from SMS to its protocol when available. It was available for iPhone, but couldn’t be an SMS client there.

  Rumor has it, carriers whined about it, and Google caved out of fear they would promote Windows Phone devices instead. I think that was a foolish move on Google’s part, but I think I’m glad Google doesn’t own a dominant messaging platform.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nextcloud cries foul over Google Play Store app rejection⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  They bullied Syncthing the same way. Fortunately, Syncthing-fork is still developed and available on F-droid.

  I understand a well-curated app store (which Play Store is not) placing some limits on apps getting all files access. In a modern security model, that’s not a permission most apps should have, however synchronization and file management apps obviously should have it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Losing my Meta account because of release delays⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  If you’re willing to endure a lot of inconvenience to maybe move the needle a tiny bit, I admire you. It also differs from place to place; if no restaurants exclusively put their menus on Instagram where you live, and most people do use SMS, then it wouldn’t be as painful for you as for the author.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Losing my Meta account because of release delays⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  every cafe that only distributes its menu solely via Instagram will not be visited by me

  There’s a good chance I’d walk out over that too. I’ve never encountered it in the USA or Germany, but the author made it sound common in Australia.

  you can write an SMS or call me

  The author specifically mentioned people telling her “Oh I don’t text, do you have Insta or WhatsApp?” This is also true in Europe; WhatsApp is essentially universal, and some people have to pay per SMS sent. Some people also have another messaging app (Signal is reasonably common among my social group), but that won’t cover everyone, and group chats with more than three or four participants just aren’t going to happen.

  If you are not willing to do that much, you do not really understand what meta is doing.

  The average person does not really understand what Meta is doing. I do, and I think the author does, but neither of us is in a position to change the behavior of a majority of people in our regions.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Losing my Meta account because of release delays⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The author goes into detail about the problems she experienced as a result of not having access to Meta products. She seems to recognize that it’s bad that there’s no way to read a cafe menu without an Instagram account or that the only messaging services some of her contacts use belong to Meta.

  These are not problems the author can fix. She would be negatively impacted in the real world by not having access to Meta products.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨“No Apple tax means we will lower prices” - Proton announces lower prices for users by up to 30% after US ruling against Apple fees⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Companies that were app-first like mobile games probably won’t cut prices much if any. Companies that were web-first like Proton and Patreon probably will.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple Fights Back Against Ruling Requiring External Payment Options⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  This doesn’t seem to be the mainstream press, but a small tech blog. Mainstream American news outlets have been far more straightforward in their coverage of this case.

  Furthermore, this case was a fight between two large corporations; there’s no little guy here. Smaller developers may benefit from the outcome though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple Fights Back Against Ruling Requiring External Payment Options⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m disappointed the court didn’t strike down the app store monopoly itself. The iPhone might actually appeal to me with unlimited sideloading.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple Fights Back Against Ruling Requiring External Payment Options⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  However, this U.S. court order is inconsistent with the Apple App Store business standards

  This is terrible writing. The court order is inconsistent with the Apple App Store business standards? No. The court ruled that Apple’s business practices were illegal.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Facebook Allegedly Detected When Teen Girls Deleted Selfies So It Could Serve Them Beauty Ads⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d bet on it being algorithmic from Facebook because leaning into algorithms is part of that company’s culture. A bunch of manual tweaks require maintenance, though it wouldn’t surprise me if someone was thinking about this when deciding that deleted selfie should be a different signal to the algorithm than deleted picture of cat.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Decentralization Scoring System (v1.3)⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s on a VPS. Whether that’s really self-hosted may depend on how much of a purist you are, but it’s fully self-managed, not SAAS.

  It’s recommended to have a PTR record mapping your IP address to your domain, which you wouldn’t be able to do with a residential connection from a typical ISP. I do send mail from multiple domains though and I haven’t had issues with deliverability. What I do not send is any kind of high-volume mail, which would likely attract a different kind of scrutiny.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Decentralization Scoring System (v1.3)⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  For example it is terribly difficult to self host email, and very few people actually do it.

  I read this a bunch of times and put off trying it because it sounded like such a hassle. Eventually I did and… it wasn’t bad at all. I just had to add a few extra DNS entries. I haven’t had any delivery problems.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A New Form of Verification on Bluesky⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sort of. This is apparently done on-protocol so anyone can issue verifications, but they’re only shown in the official client if they’re from BlueSky or someone approved by BlueSky.

  A better way to do this would be to let users subscribe to verifiers the way they can labelers. Better still would be for the label to indicate what the verifier has verified about the account, like “nytimes.com says this person is an employee of the New York Times”, which is something labelers can already do.

  So I really think they should have just leaned into labelers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Angry, disappointed users react to Bluesky's upcoming blue check mark verification system⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It appears to depend on Bluesky designating entities to do the verification.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Angry, disappointed users react to Bluesky's upcoming blue check mark verification system⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think the existing domain-based verification system is a better way of doing that. Something like Mastodon’s verified links might be a nice addition. This more centralized system is… not what I hoped for.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Signal and the noise: Why the messaging app is great for privacy but not for war plans.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Each participant is sent a separate copy of each message encrypted with their own key.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Europe’s GDPR privacy law is headed for red tape bonfire within ‘weeks’⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  A problem is that some sites that don’t need cookie banners use them anyway due to a poor understanding of the law and excess of caution.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Online ‘Pedophile Hunters’ Are Growing More Violent — and Going Viral: With the rise of loosely moderated social media platforms, a fringe vigilante movement is experiencing a dangerous evolution.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  And I think we’d all agree a sophomore dating a college student would be pretty imbalanced.

  I was a college student at 17, but I think you had a larger age difference in mind. I do think we can all agree there should be laws against adults sexually exploiting teenagers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Online ‘Pedophile Hunters’ Are Growing More Violent — and Going Viral: With the rise of loosely moderated social media platforms, a fringe vigilante movement is experiencing a dangerous evolution.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, though legally that’s a bit of a grey area. It’s only really entrapment if law enforcement or informants entice the offender to commit a crime they weren’t predisposed to commit. I imagine it would be an uphill battle to convince a judge or jury of that when it comes to meeting minors for sex.

  The decoys were careful so that it would never even be a question.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The fediverse has a bullying problem⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s a significant distinction between servers that are actively malicious as you’re describing and servers that aren’t fully compatible with certain features, or that are simply buggy.

  Lemmy, for example modifies posts federated from other platforms to fit its format constraints. One of them is that a post from Mastodon with multiple images attached will only show one image on Lemmy. Mastodon does it too: inline images from a Lemmy post don’t show on vanilla Mastodon.

  I’ll note that Lemmy’s version numbers all start with 0. So do Piixelfed’s. That implies the software is unfinished and unstable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Online ‘Pedophile Hunters’ Are Growing More Violent — and Going Viral: With the rise of loosely moderated social media platforms, a fringe vigilante movement is experiencing a dangerous evolution.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I remember looking up the people To Catch A Predator worked with and reading some of their chat logs. The decoy was always very upfront in giving an age unambiguously below the age of consent in their jurisdiction, and never initiated conversation about sex or suggested meeting in person.

  Of course, the decoy would always agree to do so if the offender asked, but the criminal conduct was unambiguously criminal, and unambiguously the offender’s idea. What we see in this article appears to abandon that sort of rigor to manufacture more opportunities to confront someone.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Online ‘Pedophile Hunters’ Are Growing More Violent — and Going Viral: With the rise of loosely moderated social media platforms, a fringe vigilante movement is experiencing a dangerous evolution.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  We’ve decided, as a society, that humans cannot consent until 18.

  Older criminal laws were based on that idea, usually called “statutory rape”. Modern laws about sexual abuse of children usually ignore the concept of consent entirely to allow for more nuance.

  One example of nuance is exceptions for people close in age so that non-abusive relationships between teenagers don’t suddenly become crimes when someone has a birthday. Another is that consent is often a factor in the severity of the penalty.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨lightweight blog ?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Federation doesn’t inherently require large amounts of memory. Fundamentally, it’s a matter of selecting a list of unique servers (likely tens, maybe hundreds) from a larger set of followers (likely hundreds, maybe thousands) and sending an HTTP request to each when there’s a new post. There’s a speed/size tradeoff for how many to send in parallel, but it’s not a resource-intensive operation.

  Growth beyond a few tens of megabytes was a bug in Writefreely, which is a likely-suitable option several comments here recommended.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨lightweight blog ?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d put it farther removed from the technical side than that; dreadbeef is thinking like a manager. OP might be better off paying a third party $3/month to handle the details and host a heavyweight, full-featured blog for them, but that’s not what they asked for.

  This is selfhosted, which I think implies a desire to self-host things even if it might seem a wiser use of resources to do something else.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨lightweight blog ?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m thinking like a programmer about what a basic blog has to do and the computing resources necessary to accomplish it. Software that needs more than a few tens of megabytes to accomplish that is not lightweight regardless of its merits.

  This comment seems to be arguing that one should not demand blog software be lightweight because there’s inexpensive hosting for something heavyweight. That’s a fine position to take, I guess, but OP did ask for lightweight options.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In the latest Windows 11 preview build, Microsoft removed the “bypassnro” command, which let users skip signing into a Microsoft Account when installing Windows.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m sure there’s a way around it for institutional customers.