Cool, its never been like that and you kept buying Android devices anyway?

I’d like that too. In what way does “things should be better” counter argument “this update changes nothing”? EDIT: No really, if you have either of these hypothetical phones, what can you not install after this update that you could before? I got shit I want to install but cant because of restrictions to root made in Android 4+. Haven’t been to able to run a OS outside of Android since the Pixel 3 era. Am I supposed to reach peak anger over Android being a shitty platform with every change they make? Is that useful or helpful to you? Was I supposed to start my comment with an entire history of Googles anti user behavior so you understand I am not defending them?

I’m gonna stop commenting honestly. Y’all just wanna be mad. Tried to dispel a rage bait article and ended up wasting my time. You already knew what the article was about and wanted to get mad again anyway. There is more useful stuff to do than get mad at someone who agrees with everything you said. Please work on your reading comprehension.

I specifically said publishing. Publishers/developers are not the average person. And the people installing third party apps on the user hostile platform of Android are also already dealing with friction. I’m more concerned with developers giving up because they need to do unacceptable ID verification, or are outright banned from development APKs entirely, than users giving up because “this takes too long…” Frankly, you ignoring the context of my post comes off as you just wanting to be angry.

I read the headline, I read the article, and I answered the rage bait presented in said headline. The impact of this change is “fuck all and nothing”. I’ve got plenty of web sites that are inaccessible without getting around geoblocks with a VPN. Been in communities shut down by corporate media throwing money and legal teams at denying their right to exist. Feels like everyone wants a federal ID to use an online service these days, and Google wont be that far behind doing their own version of it. But this update changes literally nothing for power users right now. Sorry that I’m not as upset because the slippery slope isn’t as steep as everyone else says it is.

If you really want something worth being mad at, get mad at the hardware manufactures who release hardware with proprietary firmware that only runs on Android. Wouldn’t be having this discussion at all if users were allowed to run completely custom software from boot. If there was an open standard for a battery powered device that could run a modern compliant web browser, and take SMS/phone calls, we could tell Google to kick sand. Instead we have an ocean of built-to-expire mobile phones that end up being “obsolete” within 2 years. I’m pretty sure the mobile carriers/ISPs have more control over what hardware is allowed to exist though. I should probably do more research on that.

I agree. I do not want to come off as defending Google here. Things will get worse as they always have, and the sooner we got off Googles corporate platform, the better. Google has no business forcing themselves as a “trusted central source”, especially with all the evidence showing that the Play Store is a more common and successful attack vector than third party apks. Third party offerings should be as easy and accessible as Googles.

I guess I’m just really annoyed at the public response because it continues to be doom and gloom; as if open source app development was going to die overnight due to this one change. I’m pointing out that there is already more restrictive things on the Android platform, and big projects still exist despite that. As hostile as a development platform Android has been, a new one time, 24 hour scare screen is likely not going to be the final straw for developers.

Saving you a click:

Read the fine print carefully, and Google’s new app-loading processes aren’t as invasive as they could have been. For many users, nothing will change. Even for users exploring apps outside Google’s walled garden, the process is usually a one-time setup with a few simple steps and a short wait, keeping the experience virtually the same as it is today.

We have phone manufacturers who offer unlocked boot loaders as a feature, but require two weeks or more of device ownership, registration using personally identifiable info for an online account, and many times don’t even allow you to relock the boot loader. Despite all this hassle, these devices still get updated third party OS’s with Lineage and eOS.

Anyone who was publishing to FDroid already is not going to be annoyed give up over the 24 hour scare screen for users. The most inconvenient aspect is that they can’t use the same signing keys as a Google Play release, which they should never have been doing anyway. Its absurd that developers were using the same signing keys across all different distribution methods in the first place.

EDIT: Phrasing. Everything about Android is annoying.

Wanna give a source for that? Everything I read said that after the 24 hour scare screen, you could optionally enable third party installation permanently. Literally nothing about certificates expiring. Where are you even getting this from?

It was also an option to not make a useless field. Not like this self reported dob is going to cut it for the existing age verification laws as is exists now. But I can be mad at people in a position of community production for not having a spine, too.

How is this supposed to be making the best of the situation anyway? It accomplished nothing but piss off the community and signify to authoritarians that open source developers are ready to bend over for them. Simply threaten unenforceable fines across the world and suddenly everything is hopeless. Better get ready to comply, its inevitable! Its pathetic. Ageless Linux might be performative bs, but at least its critical of this over reach instead of intentionally signalling compliance in advance.

Good system design doesn’t do things without me asking it to. I’ll gladly manually re enter my birth date for an external service if its required, which to be clear, should be as close to 0 times as possible. What, should I keep all my job application info in the initialization system too? Because a website I’m on might ask for it at some point? Don’t want to be too redundant.

Literally this field serves no purpose other than to build compliance with the surveillance state. No end user asked for this. Like I said, can’t imagine any end user making use of the existing systemd fields either. But those also didn’t get any attention because they weren’t made as a reaction to threats by a malicious regime.

it’s in one place that any third party can reference.

But why would I want that?

Even if you ignore the whole “this doesn’t verify anything” discussion, why would I want to give third parties easy access to personal and potentially sensitive information? I personally am not interested in simplifying data collection for corporate entities who definitely do not give a shit about the safety of my personal data, let alone hypothetical children. I do not know why this data collection needs or would be desired to be implemented within systemd, besides being a direct response to age verification laws saying its an OS providers responsibility to collect it. Arbitrary data collection by private entities is not “useful”. My personal data has no business being referenced by random asshats that ask for it. There are so few things in the world that “justify” needing my age that I would suggest it would be easier to make my birth date a permanent data point on my PC. Same goes for the other personal details that systemd already supports. Crazy to imagine anyone actually using those on a personal machine.

I don’t like this theory because they have already had access to this information with social media. Individuals willingly volunteer this information about themselves and their friends, and data brokers would collect and centralize it from multiple sources. This is why some platforms were trying out AI age verification in countries that hadn’t officially mandated ID verification yet. They were confident enough, with all the info they had already collected, to assume someone’s age. They would hope that the people who fail the check would be few enough to not cause an immediate uproar(“just verify with ID, what’s the big deal?”)

This is most certainly more of an authoritarian power grab to prevent any anonymous criticism what so ever. Id verification will allow them to target any application that does not comply and preserves user privacy. Anyone who does not comply will be implied to be a criminal or enemy of the state. They want to make a system where corporate surveillance cannot be avoided.

The corporations lobbying for this want to benefit from being a part of the fascist state, but don’t want to handle any legal obligation or public scrutiny from the obvious damages that will come from collecting this information. That’s why you have different companies lobbying for different “solutions”; whatever keeps them from facing repercussions but still makes them money for being a part of the surveillance state is what they will support.

They likely don’t want to let people down by dropping the project entirely.

I wouldn’t assume a person who actively taunts their critics with hidden AI contributions in their code would give any amount of shit what the community thinks, actually. Very clear sign of “I do what I want to, anyone who disagrees can get bent”. Clearly doesn’t mind letting down the majority with AI slop.

What a crazy hypothetical you made up, “left of center”, considering the Republican party was pushing for federal ID verification for online services years before Democrats caught up to speed. Red states brought this up first and resulted in multiple porn sites banning users in those states.

But yes, online censorship and corporate surveillance is a bipartisan issue in the two party system of fascists. You will not be able to “vote” these issues away.

Teamspeak 6 self hosted servers are in open beta, and is a comparable experience in quality/features to people looking for a Discord replacement. All the open source Discord clones don’t have group screen sharing available yet.

This AMA is about the new ownership, and they talk about allowing online services as a form of DRM in it. So at least that policy is staying in place.

I’ve got “Good Old Games” that are more than 20 years old with self hostable online multiplayer. No accounts, no CD keys, nothing. Make a random plain text display name, forward some ports or use a community/proxy server, and you can play with whoever you like. GOG can make excuses as much as they want to try to appeal to publishers, but they are by definition hosting games with DRM.

I will admit that I foolishly believed someone else’s summation on the situation; that sourced report, assuming the emails are real, is pretty damning. Notably the email correspondence between publishers/developers and Valve does not mention any official policy, but without additional context comes off as threatening… multiple examples of punishment and out right removal from the store, wow.

And incidents as recent as 2022. I would have figured the older examples would be there because Valve was a lot more blatantly corrupt when they were first forcing the Steam client on consumers. People tend not to bring up when Valve was buying exclusivity of already released retail CD games and taking them off shelves to force Steam exclusivity. Wonder why its taken this long to come out in a court case? Its not like there isn’t a long, recent history of indie devs yelling publicly on the internet about the dumb shit Valve puts them through.

Thats part of the problem though. Supposedly catfriend1 gave researchxxl their signing keys, and researchxxl used these on their new github account. No one was aware that catfriend1 was not maintaining the repo anymore until users saw unexpected/unannounced updates and looked into the matter. This sparked a short lived discussion on F-Droid forums about what should be done when maintainer transfers are handled poorly like this. F-Droid admins decided that it wasn’t that big of an issue, which is problematic… this supposedly happened between two people meeting each other online and discussing it with each other. But its possible that catfriend1 is being blackmailed or otherwise coerced into handing off this data. This type of credential attack could happen with a compromised machine, without the victim ever realizing it in time. The fact that F-Droid treats this so casually is upsetting. Signed developer certificates protect you from MITM attacks, it does not protect you from the sources themselves being compromised.

Years ago, official development of an android app of syncthing was abandoned by the official developers. Most android users migrated to an already existing fork by a github maintainer catfriend1.

Catfriend1 unceremoniously disappeared, with their github repositories being taken over by a new user researchxxl. This was entirely unannounced and wasn’t really discovered until people with automatic updates enabled on *Obtanium noticed it.

researchxxl is not a known community member, and is being very reclusive when interacting with the syncthing community. Their github account was made specifically for the repository transfer, and their method of handling existing credentials is suspicious; looking no different than a hostile take over.

At this point in time, they are collaborating with Nexon, a user who worked with catfriend to publish syncthing fork builds to Google Play. They are more well known and trusted. If you can trust Nexon, and trust that end users in general are putting more scrutiny on the github source code after this whole situation, you can probably trust the recent releases for now.

Sorry for any details I may have gotten wrong. AFAIK, no one has taken the time to document all the things that have gone down. I would have linked to such a document otherwise. A lot of the discussion on this is happening in separate discussion threads, one of them being researchxxl’s github issue page, which they are censoring/deleting discussions from with(till recently) no oversight.

*Edit: this is also a poor summary. There is a lot of additional context that I don’t feel comfortable trying to encompass. Like why the official syncthing developers stopped their official android app, or catfriend1’s forum account coming back for a short time to try to explain their side of the story. Frankly, for how many people are using syncthing, I don’t think this story is getting enough attention.

**Telling developers that they can’t have bigger discounts on other store fronts is an unsubstantiated claim by one developer. The official policy has to do with discounting Steam keys, ie selling a Steam game for less than on the Steam store, while keeping all profits and taking advantage of Steams features.

If general sales were actually being restricted by Steam, it would have been made immediately obvious with sites like isthereanydeal. Such a site would have no reason to exist if the Steam store would always have the best discounts due to forced store policy.

*EDIT: Was gonna strike through this text, can’t get formatting to work. See below comment by Rose@lemmy.zip

“Overwhelmingly positive” please spend at least 5 minutes reading the GOG general discussion forums and get back to me. GOG is constantly being criticized by their main user base for how poorly they run their store and their nonsensical business decisions. I don’t think this is a bad thing tbh; its a better situation than the Steam fanboys being creepy boot lickers. But I would not describe GOGs most adamant supports being universally “positive” about the state of the store and company.

The general customer base of GOG does not care about the Galaxy 2.0 client, or GOGs collaboration with Amazon Luna for streaming owned titles. I don’t know what other “good features” you could be referring to. GOG is barebones, but competent, in the world of digital store fronts/game launchers. But obviously being competent is not enough when dealing with an entrenched monopoly.

Most gamers do not care about DRM. This is the same market that is suffering from enshittification at an abnormal rate. This market has already long normalized things like gambling mechanics advertised towards children, or installing spyware for the sole purpose of stopping cheaters. Outside of the bubble of online discussions, the target audience does not think about these things and will buy whatever slop is put in front of them. Clearly the people who buy Denuvo releases at launch on Steam do not feel any reason to buy games on GOG specifically. And judging by public sales/player data, that’s a lot of people.

They aren’t even reliably committed to no DRM. They frequently sell games that require GOG Galaxy accounts to access certain content(online/multiplayer functionality, DLC packs). GOG has explicitly gone on record saying that these forms of DRM are acceptable, despite running a store for years without them.

And preservation of old games(at least how they are doing it) is an inherently unprofitable service. Them preserving games that they don’t even have the licensed right to sell is one of the dumbest decisions they have made so far. Most of their older releases have just been grabbing a bunch of existing fan patches into a more polished installer; these sorts of tasks will always end up in the hands of hobbyists who would do this work without being paid.

I feel like at this point, you have to focus on individual developers/publishers if you want to properly support DRM free releases. Having brand loyalty to GOG will get you nothing.

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I don’t see anyone mentioning Fooyin, which seems to be an attempt at being an open source clone of Foobar2000, right down to its plug in system.

Its making me feel concerned. Is there a reason foobar fans aren’t using it? Do they just not know about it? Its missing a few features here and there, but the UI is so 1 to 1 that I can’t imagine trying to use anything else as a replacement.