This is incredibly important. Signal is considered the “gold standard” of encrypted and private communication for a reason.

Wow, is this not the case everywhere? People can’t know the laws of their own country without paying? 😵‍💫

I totally get why he prefers to just update SDV.

He is already rich from the original game. He loves expanding on it. People love him for the additional content.

So there is not a huge incentive for him to not just do exactly what he likes and expand SDV indefinitely 😄

Some photographer took a picture of a politician in the Trump admin using a Signal clone. That signal clone allowed the user to archive chats to a third party.

While I agree in theory, in practice open source has a similar amount of expected trust as closed source can have in many cases. I use all sorts of open source software without reading the code. I ain’t got time for that.

I can trust that software from a lot of organizations are trustworthy even if it is closed source, but I can’t trust any open source repo without reading the code. I habe to use other ways to evaluate it, is it probable that someone has audited it? Is it popular? Is it recognized as safe and trustworthy? Is the published and finished build the same as the one I would get if I built it myself?

But yes, you can never be 100% certain without open source and auditing it yourself.

I do trust that my travel pass app from a government organization doesn’t install malware / spyware on my phone. I can’t trust a random github repo even if it is open source.

We had some emergency law that was almost passed recently. As in it passed the first of two rounds. The second voting round is just a formality, all laws are just passed after the first in practice. Luckily some law professor raised the alarms and it did not pass the second time. So within a couple of hours margin it was stopped.

The law gave the government the ability to force people to do a lot of stuff, work any job at any place in Norway. If you do not comply you could get up to three years in prison. It would not be a problem with the current or any government in the near future, but it is a law. And we can’t have laws that rely on trusting politicians. Because we might have politicians with anti democratic tendencies in the future

I think certain arguments work, and certain don’t.

I live in a very high trust society, Norway. This has a lot of advantages, but also some downsides.

We trust eachother, our neighbours, our government and our media. Which is fantastic, and well deserved. The government deserves the trust.

This makes it hard for me to make people realize how important privacy is, because they trust organizations with their data.

During COVID, Norway made their own app for tracking who met to prevent the spread. Of all the apps in the world, Norway wanted to push about the least privacy friendly app in the world. This from a country with the highest press freedom and rankings for democracy. Most people though it was fine, because why not? We trust our government.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/06/norway-covid19-contact-tracing-app-privacy-win/

Luckily someone protested enough, and it got scrapped for something better.

When I try to convince someone I have a couple of angles:

1. You trust the government and organizations with your data today. But do you trust the government in 30 years? Because data is forever. The US has changed a lot in a very short time, this can happen here as well

2. You have a responsibility for other peoples privacy as well. When you use an app that gets access to all your SMSes and contacts you spy on behalf of companies on people that might need protection. Asylum seekers from other countries for instance.

I have been thinking about how or if I would track my own children. I do not have any at the moment though.

I think the only system that would work with tracking and still be ethical is a system with accountability.

They need to know that I would never check unless there was an emergency. So we’d have to have some sort of immutable log that they can check regularly. So they know if I checked their location. It should not be like a panopticon. in which they don’t know if the parent is checking their location or not. That changes behaviour. Even with the trust that I would not check, just me having the option would alter behaviour probably.

Youth and kids are independent individuals with their own rights to privacy, autonomy, right to select their own friends and acquaintences, right to freedom of expression and movement, right to make mistakes, etc. If they are thought right and have a high trust bond with their parents, preferably with little judgement, then it will probably be fine and most issues can be solved.

As a happy and satisfied Linux gamer I disagree.

Linux is the best OS overall, at least for me, but not the best for gaming for most people. Not yet.

Emulators Xenia (xbox 360 emulator) was not mentioned, because it is Windows only. There is no Xbox 360 emulator for Linux.

Game compatibility 80% are platinum or gold on ProtonDB https://www.protondb.com/

This is impressive, but you can’t claim that a system that can’t play up to 20% of game titles is better. Not to mention that some of the other titles might need some tinkering as well.

Conclusion Linux gaming is now a great and viable option for most people. But it still isn’t better than Windows if you don’t care about bloatware, security or privacy, and just use your machine exclusively for gaming.

Bonus: Linux is free, so you could maybe also get slightly better hardware by selecting it over Windows.

I wouldn’t mind microtransactions, gacha games and gacha mechanics if there were sane upper limits to spend.

I was trying to learn how different gacha games work and monetization in f2p games in general, especially obes for smartphones.

I was surprised about how similar all the methods across games are. Some were a lot worse than others though.

I think the monetization method is sometimes viewed as acceptable by some, because the games often have a lot of content and can be a lot of fun to play. The thing I really dislike is that it’s unfairly monetized. Some people pay the majority of the income, they are also known as whales. There are of course some people that spend small sums, but the whales is where it is at.

After Arcade games went out of fashion we had a nice long period in which players paid about the same for a game, and got the same experience.

Now vulnerable people are paying more than they can afford to finance the game for everyone, and still everone gets a limited experience.

Some of the games I enjoyed the most had terrible gacha mechanics. One of them had items and mounts with 1/500 chance per pull. Of course it is designed so that it appears as 1/10, but it is really 1/500. To justify this they had the PITY system. Yes, thats the actual name of it. The pity system makes it so that after buying 500 pulls ypu are guaranteed the mount.

The price for 500 pulls? 500$

After the free pulls you could play to get, about 480$.

So I actually can’t get the entire game for even 500$…

That was just one of many such instances. I could probably spend more than 10 000$ and still not unlock absolutely everything.

Was it purely cosmetic? Nope. It gave an advantage too.

Legislation that effectively adds an upper limit to unlock the entire game with a sensible maximum monthly cost for new content, is needed in my opinion.

Fantastic game, recommend all their Metro games.

Yep, I have the 2.4ghz dongle ones with hall effect sensors and charging stand. Its just better and cheaper. The dongle is so that I don’t have to sync, I kinda like the whole plug in and it just works.

This also seems nice. I’ll probably test this one as well. I like the lock after x amount of time feature. The pictures have max 15 minutes, so that might be too little, but maybe it’ll work

Great app, just installed it. The default amount of movement is perfect. Now it’s really easy to prevent being physically forced to unlock, and theft

Thats kinda interesting. If I use an unusual finger, and there is a limited amount of tries. I still get somewhat the convenience of biometrics, but can still massively increase the odds of too many attempts.

Of course I can do this, but that is a major inconvenience when I unlock my phone hundreds of times per day.

Thats a shame, I trust Samsung more than Google.

But I guess I’ll just wait until EU force interoperability and E2EE, I vaguely remember something about this 🤔

That kinda sucks, a lost opportunity. I really don’t want to use Google, and preferably not Samsung either.

So either: Network operator / Big tech 😑

I guess I trust the network operator more due to semi-strict laws in Norway on privacy.

Does it have noise supression features like Discord?

Yup, it’s overblown. Just wanted to give an explanation, you never know what level of awareness other strangers have online. Wish you the best, and see you around!