🏳️🌈 hi there, i’m blake! i’m a silly gay bear 🌀
How did the satellite take this picture? We should send another satellite to take a picture of how the first satellite took this picture to confirm the validity of the image.
Edit: my dumb sleep deprived ass tried to rotate the earth on that satellite website 🤦♂️
This is steel-manning an argument for a feature no one wants which is most likely the thin end of the wedge for increased surveillance and censorship.
This is just how it starts so they can trick well meaning developers into making websites and platforms which make use of this verification while it is still self-ID, but when the laws become more demanding and require connecting your user account to your real-world identity, it’ll already be too late, all of your online activity can be tied back to you.
When I make this argument, people like to call it a slippery slope, but the fact is that there are so many nations cracking down on free, unmonitored access to the internet, with social media restrictions, platforms like Discord requiring you to provide identification, and so on.
All for this, all of that risk, all for a feature that adds very little value to the computing experience of anyone.
Now that Linux is cool I’m bored with it. They should swap to either GNU/Hurd or NetBSD. /s
Probably more likely to go for SUSE, since it’s European but still Enterprisey.
C’est l’année de l’ordinateur Linux!
To send you a push notification, an app requires a special token specific to that app and your device, kinda like an API key, which can only be generated for a device using Google Play Services. Without that token, a push notification cannot be sent. These tokens expire, so if you used Google Play Services and just turned it off, push notifications will still get sent into the ether - but never delivered - until the token expires, at which point notifications can’t be sent anymore. Badly developed apps might still try to send push notifications with expired tokens, I have no idea what Google servers would do with that, but I’d guess they would just discard it immediately.
Edit: Sorry, I think I misunderstood your question. If you don’t have Google Play Services enabled but your friend does and messages you, no, a push notification won’t be sent, but if you message them, one will be sent to them.
I thought you were asking if you just disabled notifications on your phone if that would prevent push notifications from being sent. I’ll leave my original answer in case someone else has that question.
It depends on what exactly you mean, but usually not. If you mean in your phone’s notifications management settings, that does not affect the push notifications being sent to Google/Apple servers, that’s just a local setting to decide how your phone handles it.
Some apps, though rarely, allow you to disable push notifications from being sent. If it exists, this is inside a settings screen in the app itself or on the app provider’s website somewhere. Generally, only privacy-conscious apps provide such settings.
As I wrote elsewhere:
It depends on the app. Some apps do (or can be configured to) indeed send “empty”/blank notifications which just notify you that you’ve received a new message from an app, but not from whom, or what the message contains.
However most apps by default will contain more data, such as who the message is from, and some/all of the sent message body.
If you get a push notification on your phone, everything you see in that notification must by definition pass through the push notification service.
I’d disagree with “most messengers” doing that, in my experience, most don’t do it by default. Signal is a pretty rare exception to do so by default.
Yes, I know! Sorry for the confusion, I just wanted to take the opportunity to raise awareness about a privacy issue that lots of people aren’t aware of
If you use GrapheneOS with push notifications, after enabling Google Play Services, those push notifications are relayed through Google servers. Most apps will include message sender and text in the push notification, meaning that data will pass through Google servers and they can read it.
If you are a GrapheneOS user and leave Google Play Services disabled - which they are by default - you have nothing to worry about, but notifications are generally delayed and use more battery as a downside.
So it’ll use TLS encryption, meaning that others on your network won’t be able to snoop it, but not end-to-end encryption, so Google/Apple servers will see the plaintext of the push notification content.
This is a limitation of the specific implementation of how push notifications work. End-to-end encrypted push notifications would be technically possible but it would require Apple/Google to make it possible. Developers can’t implement it without getting you to run some services yourself, either self-hosted or a long-running background process on your phone, which would be a battery drain.
The link you shared isn’t really relevant to push notifications specifically.
The best happy medium we can get is to send empty/blank push notifications, which some apps including Signal offer as an option, but you often need to set it that way in the settings. I think Signal does that by default, but very few apps do.
It depends on the app. Some apps do (or can be configured to) indeed send “empty”/blank notifications which just notify you that you’ve received a new message from an app, but not from whom, or what the message contains.
However most apps by default will contain more data, such as who the message is from, and some/all of the sent message body.
You might be getting pull notifications, that’s generally the workaround for push notifications being disabled - it generally increases battery usage because it forces the app to stay open in the background.
The message you send them would probably go through as a push notification to them, but the message they send you wouldn’t.
I’m actually talking about sensitive data on Google/Apple hosted servers, as well as on the phone itself!
If you don’t use Google Play Services, you don’t get push notifications, so yes. Libre reimplementations of Google Play Services such as Gapps etc. or alternative push notification providers do not circumvent this issue, except possibly self-hosted push notification providers. This approach is really rare though and limited generally to very few apps.
It always bears repeating, push notifications are not private, neither for Android, GrapheneOS, nor iOS, even if you use end-to-end encryption. If you are privacy conscious, you should either use settings to hide sensitive data from push notifications or turn them off altogether.
Is the powerful AI in the room with us right now?
No, I’m just talking about liberalism. You probably have some high-minded enlightenment-era ideals floating around in your head about what liberalism is, but I’m telling you, your ideas about how liberalism is about freedom, that’s the actual psyop to divide the proletariat you spoke of. Liberalism is functionally one big propaganda operation to replace monarchies with oligarchies.
Can’t believe they’re not letting us move the satellite around, smh