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No user accounts, by design

f-droid.org

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Re: No user accounts, by design

#61

Post by lucb1e »

sneak wrote: post #27
wpietri wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm familiar with the theory. But accounts just aren't a big barrier to determined bad actors. Note that the world's biggest content site, Wikipedia, allows anonymous edits and always has. And note also that some of big tech companies, despite having all the money in the world, still have problems with fake accounts. So at best, requiring user accounts is one possible anti-abuse step, but it's neither necessary nor s…

> 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.

> The edits aren't really anonymous if they publicly [show your IP]

Counter-example: stackoverflow is also reasonably big and allows anonymous questions, answers, and even edits, without publishing an IP address or anything. The edits end up in a review queue, the rest I think is actually published immediately.

Re: No user accounts, by design

#62

Post by lucb1e »

13415 wrote: post #54
newaccount74 wrote: post #52

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.

Or for those less blockchain-inclined, you can just send them cash as well...

https://mullvad.net/en/pricing/ ctrl+f cash (the section has no anchor)

Re: No user accounts, by design

#63

Post by fsflover »

imiric wrote: post #53
encryptluks2 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still hopeful to get a proper Linux phone someday.

The PinePhone (Pro) and its ecosystem looks promising, no? I'd say we're closer than ever to it being a capable daily driver, certainly by the next iteration.

Or Librem 5, whose software is developed not by volunteers but by a company.

Re: No user accounts, by design

#64

Post by prvc »

ancientsofmumu wrote: post #40
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #30

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.…

> ...but it's just not usable in practice. > ...this makes using packages installed through F-Droid a nightmare. I run 2x Androids with near 80%-90% of the packages installed from F-Droid repos (to include Bromite and Bitwarden custom repos); it has quirks and is not perfect - but far from "not usable" and "nightmare" as your hyperbole would suggest.

This is exaggerated language, but the described traits are certainly inconvenient, unpleasant, and unnecessarily time consuming for the user.

Re: No user accounts, by design

#65

Post by mod50ack »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #30

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.…

This action is supported by Droid-ify, an unofficial client.

Re: No user accounts, by design

#66

Post by [deleted] »

bduerst wrote: post #33
tedunangst wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You send the url to your friends however you like. Email, chat, QR code. You don't send it to people who aren't your friends.

> How do you prevent others from sharing URLs with bad actors? Sure, but then the student who shares their interactive class URL (w/ or w/o password) on 4chan still isn't accounted for.

[deleted]

Re: No user accounts, by design

#67

Post by thaumasiotes »

wpietri wrote: post #32
sneak wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Oh? My current IP is 2601:646:4300:758:f676:3f1b:8b5:42a. Please show me how to turn that into my name and home address. Thanks!

3270 23rd street, 94110?

Re: No user accounts, by design

#68

Post by thaumasiotes »

infinityio wrote: post #59
thaumasiotes wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the last handful of years there have been 2 or 3 Windows updates that either permanently erased data or caused some other insane issues. I'm still mad about the Windows update that permanently stopped Windows from working with my Bose headphones. The headphones continued to work perfectly with anything that wasn't running Windows.

Out of interest, have you tested them on win11? One of the later win10 updates broke my Bluetooth headphones (actually, Bluetooth in general became pretty buggy), but they 'magically' unbroke after the upgrade

No, I haven't.

Re: No user accounts, by design

#69

Post by AshamedCaptain »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #30

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.…

> UPDATE_PACKAGES_WITHOUT_USER_ACTION

I actually tried to play with this not long ago, and it is so broken that it makes me think they just wanted to "check the box" in case some judge thought this was abusive behavior. It probably still is.

Not only this API is available only on Android 12, it also _only_ works for programs that have Android 12 as target level API (i.e. when you try to upgrade older programs the prompt will still show up), and only works for programs that your package manager installed in the first place. GPlay does not have this limitation and will happily update packages you installed, after which your package manager is no longer allowed to upgrade them. It's all a big mess.

Re: No user accounts, by design

#70

Post by lsferreira42 »

andai wrote: post #56
staindk wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 look over and install Windows updates once a way-too-long I thought you needed some kind of registry hacks or something to disable automatic updates since W10, can you elaborate on how you got it to stop pestering you?

I followed this website and it works:

https://www.windowscentral.com/how-stop-updates-installing-a...

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