From F-Droid? Are you not choosing Aurora store? (Yes, I know what those apps are, I'm in the same region and time zone as you)
Not from F-Droid. I was just replying to the parent's claim that normal people don't need a lot of apps. If I don't have a laptop or desktop, why wouldn't I have a lot of apps on my phone?
That wasn't what I was asking though... I was talking specifically about the number of apps through F-Droid. They don't seem to require updates every two days unlike the Grab superapp.
I try to follow this as much as possible, but at some point when providing a paid service you run into the problem that you need to track whether the user has paid for the software or not. So even though my software does not require user accounts, it requires a serial number to activate all features. That serial number can be linked to the purchaser, so in theory my app could do really invasive tracking. (It doesn't,…
Mullvad allows Bitcoin purchases of tokens, which can then be used as a serial for the VPN that works for the time period you've purchased. Users can change tokens any time. That's probably close to what you're already doing.
I'm not sure how Mullvad does it, but I keep a record of who purchased what serial number. My number one customer support request is people asking for their serial numbers because they lost them, which is why I keep a record.
F-droid gets many things right (e.g. verifiable builds), but it's just not usable in practice. Installing applications is a rare event, updating them is frequent, and needs to disrupt the user as little as possible. Android used to not allow alternative app stores to update apps without user interaction, but now supports this through UPDATE_PACKAGES_WITHOUT_USER_ACTION, which doesn't seem to be supported by F-droid.…
Not really a counter point because you mention a lot of other issues with f-droid that sound valid (I haven't used it myself) - but as a tangent regarding auto updates, I disable them basically everywhere because I seem to have buggy experiences too often if I allow stuff to update all the time. I then go through the list of updates in the Play Store once a week or so and install those that I think might improve app…
> regarding auto updates, I disable them basically everywhere because I seem to have buggy experiences too often
With Play Store I agree. With F-Droid, I do not. You can easily install older revisions if you find a problem, which I almost never do with F-droid.
> Note that the world's biggest content site, Wikipedia, allows anonymous edits and always has. Not really. You can't edit Wikipedia from a VPN (even with a user account!), and I think they ban most datacenters. The edits aren't really anonymous if they publicly associate with a piece of PII that, for most people, directly maps to their name and home address.
Wikipedia also locks most interesting pages so only established accounts can edit them.
This is a good and sad point. I was on the wiki page for derivatives and found it was locked due to vandalism. On one hand, we don’t want pages locked because that defeats the point. On the other, how do we stop every troll high schooler who just learned derivatives and messes up the wiki page for lulz? We either need active watchers (surprisingly and fortunately pretty easy, wiki editors are a passionate and eagle-eyed group, but I wonder how long and how much of this is just the initial hard core fans from the early days) or to have some deterrent to vandalism in the first place. For some, maybe this is IP address logging (although as someone else noted in the thread, at what point does this sink anonymity?). For others, maybe creating an account. In practice, neither of these work 100% of the time. I have seen vandals from both IP accounts and registered accounts in about equal frequency.
Not from F-Droid. I was just replying to the parent's claim that normal people don't need a lot of apps. If I don't have a laptop or desktop, why wouldn't I have a lot of apps on my phone?
That wasn't what I was asking though... I was talking specifically about the number of apps through F-Droid. They don't seem to require updates every two days unlike the Grab superapp.
That limitation perhaps also drives the infrequent updates?
In any case, it's fine for F-Droid to choose that behaviour, but then it limits itself to a niche of possible apps.
Yes, I do live a privileged life. I think I get it. And I do not want to spark some kind of fight here. I am interested in your views and would be interested in specific cases / archetypes of concern. But I do not want to be on the side of "we need a better way to hide". Staying hidden should not be the solution to death threats. Jail is the solution. I hate that we (western ? US/UK?) society has abandoned hope of pr…
My friend dragged me to an Amnesty International meeting in college and for like the first half hour I thought they were joking. Surely... no, they're serious. There are movie villains out there in the world. But since then I've had friends who volunteered for domestic abuse situations, and I've had a few friends who talked about former stalkers. In one case, the stalker was a LEO. My best friend's parents found asyl…
I see. I guess it's something about trust or hope. I hope that we can build a society that respects the individual rights of all, while using the powerful insights of digital surveillance to improve our lives (obvious answer is how much medical epidemiology will benefit from minute by minute data).
I can certainly see I am putting hope over experience. But that is the excuse to do nothing as well.
The world has changed. We must chnage our laws and our culture.
Yes there is a danger of totalitarianism, but we have had that without iPhones. We will have it with iPhones. The problem lies not in our stars.
F-droid gets many things right (e.g. verifiable builds), but it's just not usable in practice. Installing applications is a rare event, updating them is frequent, and needs to disrupt the user as little as possible. Android used to not allow alternative app stores to update apps without user interaction, but now supports this through UPDATE_PACKAGES_WITHOUT_USER_ACTION, which doesn't seem to be supported by F-droid.…
Not really a counter point because you mention a lot of other issues with f-droid that sound valid (I haven't used it myself) - but as a tangent regarding auto updates, I disable them basically everywhere because I seem to have buggy experiences too often if I allow stuff to update all the time. I then go through the list of updates in the Play Store once a week or so and install those that I think might improve app…
i got stung a few times and have turned off updates since. it wouldn't be such an issue if the play store would allow you to roll back to a previous version
Wikipedia also locks most interesting pages so only established accounts can edit them.
This is a good and sad point. I was on the wiki page for derivatives and found it was locked due to vandalism. On one hand, we don’t want pages locked because that defeats the point. On the other, how do we stop every troll high schooler who just learned derivatives and messes up the wiki page for lulz? We either need active watchers (surprisingly and fortunately pretty easy, wiki editors are a passionate and eagle-e…
I don’t think it really matters. Wikipedia has surprisingly strict standards and traditions that aren’t very intuitive. If you as a brand new user attempted to edit the page for Donald Trump or Apple, there is a close to 0% chance your edit would not be reverted anyway. These pages are highly curated and there is minimal value you can add to them as a new user. So the semi lock almost just stops people wasting their time.
Much better to start off editing your local country town which has no power users patrolling and tends to be significantly out of date.
Or Librem 5, whose software is developed not by volunteers but by a company.
Note that the Librem 5 is practically a scam. There are still people who ordered in 2017 who have not received their phone. Requesting a refund takes hundreds of days to be issued.
I feel that no user accounts just makes things harder. For some things it isn't required, like joining a video call. But user accounts helps reduce spam, save profiles and enable cross platform syncing. Sure you could do something like have a user account-like process, which involves unique ids and all that jazz. Except, at that point, you're making a user account with 10 more steps.
Yeah, but I think a lot of things could do well with just a pseudonym and a passphrase. Sure, that's still a user account, but no email or phone number or other stuff required (unless you want notifications, or to be able to reset your passphrase).
And maybe prefer procedurally-generated identicons rather than photo avatars if you want a visual aspect.