kyub

@kyub@discuss.tchncs.de

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are your favorite 1000+ hour games?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Deep Rock Galactic

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cyberpunk 2077 released in December 2020. Almost 4 years later, what is your opinion on it?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Before Phantom Liberty / 2.0: average game. Overpromised and underdelivered. Good at first but getting boring fast.

  After Phantom Liberty / 2.0: very good game overall, fixes most old problems. PL by itself one of the best DLCs ever made, sad that such high quality was necessary to save the base game. It’s like the game was meant to be from the start.

  Still not on W3’s level overall though, but if you can get it at reduced price it’s a really good experience now. Start PL before the meeting at Embers. After PL, resume that main quest.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dragon Age: The Veilguard releases today, and players are celebrating the famous ‘Bioware Turn’⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Larian’s CEO / producer of Baldur’s Gate 3 apparently likes DA: Veilguard. That alone probably means I have to play it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is china as bad as america makes it out to be?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Broad question, broad answer:

  Is the situation in USA bad? Yes, in several aspects (and getting much worse if the current fascism movement wins out in the end).

  Is the situation in China bad? Yes, in much more aspects.

  Most important goal for USA right now is to ensure they’re not regressing into an authoritarian, fascist regime. Because then, the situation for US citizens will start becoming really similar to China or Russia. After that, goal is to combat climate change. And preventing World War 3.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there any privacy-friendly way to use Facebook on iOS?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In that case, you probably have to:

  • Use Tor respectively Tor Browser (without any additional extensions, and set the default security level to “Safer” if possible with Facebook) to create a completely new, anonymous account on Facebook. Don’t enter any data there that could be linked to your person, e.g. no real mail address (use an alias, ideally a completely new one), no real names, no real data, also no real billing or delivery address. Literally nothing that could be linked to your person. Only ever use Facebook’s site within the Tor Browser, to ensure that your real IP address and browser data aren’t leaked. Never use their apps, never use your regular browser for it, also don’t use PWAs because that’s similar to using a regular browser, which reveals your real current IP address to the site. Unless you use a VPN to have a different IP, but you’d have to minimize your VPN usage just for that app interaction. If you continue to use the same VPN IP for other stuff as well, you could de-anonymize yourself later on. Mullvad or Proton are commonly regarded as good choices for trustworthy VPNs which don’t log or sell any user data, or at least there are no known cases for it (yet).
  • Don’t add any friends on the site, try to limit your interactions with the site so that it can’t create a big psychological profile from you and try to link that behavioral data to existing persons (the more you use the site the easier this method might become for them). Behave slightly differently than you would normally.
  • When you buy something, remember that you’d have to conceal your real delivery and billing data/addresses as well. Which is hard to do when you actually want to buy and receive something. Your payment data and/or address data can EASILY and instantly de-anonymize you, also in front of Facebook. So my suggestion for something still practical would be to have a relative or friend buy it after you arrange that with them, have it delivered to their address, and you pay them for it and gather it from their place. So in essence you need a proxy person to do the receiving and paying for you. If you want to sell something, that’s more inconvenient of course, but you’d also have to do it similarly.

  The most problematic de-anonymizing data about you is going to be your real current IP address (which is revealed when you use a regular browser, PWA or their app, all with a non-VPN or non-Tor IP address) as well as billing or address data. In case you’re using their app, they’ll receive even more data to de-anonymize you more easily.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there any privacy-friendly way to use Facebook on iOS?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Normally, no.

  You’d have to set up a completely new account which you only ever access via e.g. Tor, then use Tor Browser on iOS to log into that account and only ever use your account exactly like this or else you’ll leak your current IP address as well as related data about you or your device to Meta. Also you’d have to never give any kind of personally-identifiable info to them. Then you’d have an anonymous account, but the goal of Facebook is to connect to other people you know. Once you add and talk to friends on Facebook, they again know who’s behind that account, especially if you already had a different account in the past which pretty much had the same set of friends already. So you’d also have to behave anonymously when using your anonymous account. Which kind of goes against the whole thing of social media like Facebook. So yes it’s possible, but inconvenient, and maybe even counters your goals on that platform. Which is why I recommend to not use such platforms at all, and instead keep in touch with your friends via secure and private open source based messengers like Signal or Threema (Libre?) or any Matrix client.

  Using Facebook in any other way, shape or form isn’t going to be anonymous to Meta. They’ll automatically receive your current IP address (which might already be enough to be probably personally-identifiable for them, since they also have trackers in place in lots of other apps and websites), and on top of that various information about your device or browser (which, again, can be a key factor to link your current usage data to your person), if you use their app (which you shouldn’t ever do) they get even more data on you (not just you, also your contact list, nearby devices, and things like that), because those apps require so many permissions and have so much tracking integrated that it’s a whole treasure trove of information that’s being sent about you and your device, and they’ll interconnect all that data with the other data they’ve gathered about you or your device(s) in the past (which, as a rule of thumb, will always be much more than you think they’d have). So using Facebook in a somewhat normal or convenient way and at the same time wanting to remain anonymous to them is basically impossible.

  Also, you’ll never be anonymous to government-based mass surveillance (who are collecting almost all network traffic, constantly) when you use your real IP address online. Anywhere. Your real IP is always connectable to your real person for them (also in retrospect). Even if they can’t look into encrypted communication data, like the contents of chat messages or what you did on a specific website, they can see the metadata, among that is which hosts you contacted, and when, as well as more unencrypted details, and such metadata can already be very revealing. To quote the ex NSA chief “we kill based on metadata”. You can only protect yourself somewhat against commercial-based surveillance by companies like Meta, because it’s easier to avoid or evade commercial tracking (by blocking all or most of their tracking methods like app-integrated trackers, tracking Javascripts and cookies on countless of websites, and so on) than it is to evade someone who’s sitting directly at all relevant network cables AND buys additional data from companies. Lots of easy-to-use tools exist to counter commercial surveillance, like ad/content blockers, blocking host lists, PiHole, ad-blocking DNS servers, prefer open source software and operating systems (because they are almost always free of trackers and surveillance tech), and things like that. It all minimizes your exposure to these data hoarding companies. And the less data you transmit overall to such companies, the better. But if you also want to protect yourself against any government-based mass surveillance, you’ll have a much harder time than that. You’d need to always use different IP addresses (again, via Tor or VPN etc.) and avoid having anything leak out that can connect your other IP to your real IP. Which is hard.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What happened to the turn based RPG and RTS genres?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s a perceived unpopularity with these genres. However, some truly great games like Baldur’s Gate 3 are living proof that you can make a niche genre very popular. It’s just that almost no one tries, or doesn’t like the risk involved. That’s why you don’t see a lot of these genres anymore. Well, you DO see them, if you look close enough and include indie and A/AA titles, but a massive AAA title with big budget and advertising for those genres is pretty much non-existant (I’m not familiar of any other exception like BG3). I think big studios are unlikely to risk such things. Look for smaller game studios, they’re much more innovative and either keep “dead” genres alive or they try mixing genres in innovative ways.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Social media is becoming infested with climate change denial and misinformation⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, it’s a dangerous combination of media/IT illiteracy/incompetence within the general public and profit-driven proprietary social media algorithms that only aim to keep people engaged for the longest time, no matter the content they are being served. And usually, the more extreme the content is, the higher the engagement, the more revenue to be made from serving ads to the users and selling their collected data. This currently leads to a rise of misinformation, anti-scientific thinking, and so on. Which just so happens to align with extreme right-wing ideologies.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Delectable⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Well with food something unusual at first feels weird but once you try it it might actually be good. I’ve had this experience quite a lot. Probably shows how much you’re conditioned to liking certain foods just because you’re used to them and grew up with them. So I’m not gonna judge how this would taste. But the first impression was like “ugh”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If you use Google’s Play Services and/or other Google proprietary apps and services (they are standard on all commercial Android phones), then your battery will be drained slightly more due to it having spyware (euphemism: “telemetry”) integrated. The Google Play services app, for example, does transmit at the minimum this data roughly every 20 minutes to Google:

  Phone #
  SIM Card #
  IMEI (world-wide unique device ID)
  S/N of your device
  WIFI MAC address
  Android ID
  Mail Address of your  logged in Google account
  IP address
  

  And that is just if you have disabled ALL telemetry in ALL of the options, even the most hidden ones. So this is the minimum amount they are always gathering from every Android user, no matter what you selected. To make matters worse, the Google Play services is typically installed as a “system critical app” which means you as the owner of the phone can’t even uninstall it or reduce some of its permissions.

  (If you have an iPhone instead, and think you’re safe from this, no you aren’t. Apple also collects a minimum amount of telemetry data which you cannot ever completely disable, it just does it slightly less frequently (IIRC, it was like every hour or so, compared to Google’s every 20min at the minimum).

  And then there’s also the advertisement ID, a world-wide unique identifier set in all commercial Androids as well as iOS, for apps to track you. You can only reset it to a new random ID but never disable it fully.

  To stop all of this bullsh!t, and also to stop the additional battery/resource drain caused by this, I recommend getting a Pixel phone and replacing the proprietary stock Android OS with GrapheneOS and then not installing any Google apps/services on top of it. You can get apps via F-Droid, Obtainium, Aurora store (those are the convenient methods). You can use ntfy as an alternative to the Google firebase messaging (notification) service that you won’t have access to when not having Google Play services running.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨iPhones in the EU get ability to set more default apps, delete more built-in ones⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  AFAIK, browser choice is still limited (as usual with Apple) because every browser on iOS needs to use Apple’s WebKit engine. That means they only differ in UI.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reminder that Jagex Privacy Policy is Opt Out - Link in Description⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Well this whole area is mostly based on deceit. Like if they claim they MAY do something they will absolutely do it all the time, if they claim they aren’t getting anything from it, it just means they aren’t getting anything directly, but indirectly instead, or from a different involved party. I also like the message at the top of the page: “Under certain circumstances, you have rights under data protection laws in relation to your personal data.”. Under some circumstances you have rights. Which is weirdly accurate. Because in most circumstances, they will just sh*t on data protection rights. Which is also evident by everything being opt-out, rather than opt-in. Then again, it’s an industry-wide problem. Not specific to Jagex.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The DMA already having an impact. Brave Browser installs surge after introduction of browser choice splash screen on iOS.⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That doesn’t surprise me, and yes it was always because of anti-competitive practices, so I’m all for more neutrality, I’ll just add 2 shower thoughts:

  1. Seeing that Brave is at the top of the browser list, I wonder how many selected Brave just because it’s at the top of the list.
  2. It’s nice to have such a thing for browsers, but it would have to be expanded to other apps as well, e.g. mail client. Oh well, maybe in another 10 years or so.