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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • “installing apps from outside the Google Play Store”

    To me that implies it’s somehow different than just installing software. You could say ‘install from play store’ or ‘install from f-droid’ if you need to specify which app repository you should use, as that what it is. Sideloading might be an appropriate term if you need to upload apk to your device via USB-cable from your PC, which the term originally meant.

    to make it sound somehow dangerous or complicated in order to justify

    [Citation needed]

    From the article:

    This “advanced flow” is for power users and enthusiasts who “want to take educated risks to install software from unverified developers.” Google says it was “designed carefully to prevent those in the midst of a scam attempt from being coerced by high pressure tactics to install malicious software.”

    Sure, the term itself comes from 1990s, but lately specially Google tries to twist that to mean something only ‘power users’ do and it comes with a ‘educated risk’.





  • Age verification is one thing, but I routinely verify my id online. Banking, insurance, taxes, various other government things, car registrations, some of the kids school stuff and so on. We have pretty decent infrastructure in place here in Finland and the entities I identify myself online already has my info anyways. I can use either my banking app or mobile verification to securely prove I am who I claim to be and the systems have roughly the same user experience than MFA tokens.

    Each of those are roughly zero-knowledge, the website I log in receives just “User with login token xxx is IsoKiero with SSN 123456789” and the tokens expire after a while. Also there’s restrictions in place that my insurance company can’t just sell my data to whomever unless I opt-in for their “marketing” program (not going to happen) and even then there’s some limitations on how they can use the data.

    The same system could be adopted to age verification, but that’s a whole another can of worms.



  • In theory Canonical could lock down Ubuntu like that, but it would be the end of Ubuntu. Switching over to Mint or Debian is not a big deal for majority of the linux-users and also Ubuntu would lose all the advantages they can currently pull off from Debian package maintainers. Also I suppose it would bring a ton of headaches with licenses, but IANAL, so don’t quote me on that. And, obviously, that would kill snapcraft too as I don’t see any incentives for developers to support walled gardens for free, so it wouldn’t be all bad.










  • Cameras don’t stop anyone, but I still have few recording my yard. It’s more of a hobby and I’m planning to integrate person detection on those to home automation but for me it’s also a small piece of peace on my mind. Should someone steal my car trailer (or a car) I’d have some footage for the police and insurance. Also a while ago we had a decent storm around and we weren’t at home so it was nice that I could check for possible damages remotely.

    But absolute majority of time I don’t even think about them. I don’t have any notifications enabled, I’m not interested about neighbors cat running across our yard or getting interruptions every time someone on the family comes or goes. And while Frigate has some AI things built in, the whole thing runs locally. There’s no way I’d install nest or some other camera which sends/stores data to anywhere which isn’t 100% in my control.