It’s because of corporate greed. Anticheat is basically totally achievable on the server side, but that requires much more computing power. The idea of client side anticheat is to reduce infrastructure cost.

Just the tip 😏

I see where you’re coming from, but my understanding is that the tracking cookies are already on your machine when the banner is presented, so they’ve already put in the proverbial tip.

Absolutely wild that they’re still allowed to call this “consent”

If we imagine the idea of sexual consent being given in the same circumstances, it sounds a lot like a fucking crime.

“Either you consent to having sex with me right now or you pay me a subscription fee in order to not consent. If you do that, I’ll still fuck you, but I’ll use protection”

Lmao even if you pay, you still see ads, they just won’t track you. What an insane monetization scheme

Person I’m responding to said this was common in continental Europe

Wouldn’t this be blatantly in conflict with the EU cookie law? Like I’m not from Europe but my understanding was that it needs to be equally easy to accept or reject all cookies. Dark patterns aren’t allowed

Unfortunately Lemmy is a lot more ephemeral than Reddit. If a post here gets deleted, it and the comment thread are basically gone. On Reddit deletion simply hides the post unless the post was of something illegal for Reddit to host. I really miss that behaviour.

As a result, I doubt Lemmy will ever become a valuable backlog of information like Reddit.

I’m not sure, I think it may use an FB account. But you could make one specifically for this one use-case and then nuke your IG account.

If the only thing you use it for is chat, I think you can chat with instagram users on FB messenger instead, which you can then heavily restrict in terms of the OS permissions you give to it.

Newpipe does this I think. Not sure if you can get it on your TV

Oh wow, I had no idea you could opt out. I flew to Paris recently and they were herding people like cattle through CDG and at no point was it clear that there was an opt out. Hell, it wasn’t even obvious I was about to have my face scanned until I stepped into a very claustrophobic chamber, the doors shut behind me, and it told me I needed to scan my face before I could walk out the other side of that chamber. In a moment like that, after being awake for 30 hours because some crotch goblins were screaming the entire flight, trapped in a pod the size of my closet, telling me to stand still and let the techbros steal your faceprint, my personal morals about facial rec were the last thing on my mind.

Disable javascript

This is like those people who say that the only form of safe sex is abstinence. Technically true, practically useless.

I think the philosophical concept of Open Source can’t really work in ML models unless the training data is open as well. As it stands, these “open source” models are still very much a black box. Nobody was really questioning the implementation of the GPT.

The funny thing is that the people who complain most about stuff like this, tend to be the people who contribute the least.

Why would I donate to them if they are going to advertise at me either way?

Conda environments can encapsulate more than just Python packages, it brings the pip/venv model to the ecosystems of many languages (R, Go, etc.), and does so at the user level rather than in a folder for one project. The other Anaconda stuff is pretty useless IMO, but Conda is exceptionally useful. Although I would echo what the other commentor said that the mambaforge version is even better than vanilla miniconda

Conda package manager is like pip on steroids. It’s great for science, especially when working on Linux servers where you don’t have root

I believe there is more functionality that is supposed to exist beyond just the cross platform search, but that functionality depends on the cross-platform identity thing I mentioned.

In theory yes, but in practice Grayjay doesn’t really work that way. I think for it to work as intended, the creators need to actually create a Grayjay identity and connect it to their accounts. Which literally none of them do.

Why do you carry a smartphone around? Surely you could get more computing power per dollar if you just carried an ATX board around with you.

That’s what I did a couple months ago and I regret not doing it sooner. I got a Beelink SER and loaded it with Endeavour OS, a web browser, torrent client, and VLC.

That worked for pirate bay because they were storing a miniscule amount of actual data. Torrents are really small. The actual data is stored in the peer to peer network. The torrents are just tracking where in the p2p stuff is.

IA isn’t like that. They probably store exabytes of data.

So it has nothing to do with the trees?

They go together though. Like what’s scary about the surveillance is how much censorship there is. Because it would be dead easy to arrest someone for thought crime if you are constantly surveiling them.

Touch grass /j

Yeah I ended up installing it in an Android work profile using Shelter, and it is a disaster of an app. I expected a lot more of a professional looking app given how popular the WeChat service is and how big of a company Tencent is, but it’s like a shittier WhatsApp. It’s not even localized properly, a bunch of strings in the app (like error screens and stuff) are in Chinese, and the English is poorly translated. The mechanism to reply to someone’s message is unclear (it’s not just long pressing or dragging on a message like in other apps), and you can’t send a reaction emoji to a message.

switch from that chinese spy tool or we better break up

“Hey babe, you know that app which is your only way of communicating with your family and friends back home? Yeah well I’m breaking up with you if you don’t ditch it.”

I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it. If I’m going to do that I might as well buy the burner phone once I’m actually in China rather than preemptively get one now. I like her a lot but I’d say we’re at least a year away from going to China together.

Yeah I was considering Waydroid but then I lose the ability to connect outside of my PC

We’ve only been dating for about 6 months, but I agree with the sentiment of what you’re saying. In any case, we care for each other a lot and want to see the relationship last a long time.

Relationships (of all kinds) are about compromise. You have to recognize that outside of the echo chambers in communities like this one, literally nobody cares about digital privacy to the extent that us nerds do. So you can choose to be dogmatic in your approach and alienate yourself from the >99% of people in the world who don’t care, or you can recognize that your own desires for digital privacy need to be weighed against your desires to form meaningful connections with other people.

Personally I prefer to be pragmatic in my approach. I do what I can to look after my privacy within the constraints of actually doing what I need to do to connect with other people. That’s why I made this post. My mind is made up that I’m going to at least try to use WeChat, but within that constraint, I want to do everything in my control to limit the app’s visibility into the rest of my system.

Was considering Waydroid, but ideally I want something that I can take with me on the go. Some folks have suggested the app Shelter on fdroid though and that seems like an ideal solution for the time being.

Maybe get a girlfriend that isn’t a brain washed spy? \s

Listen here, I like my qt tankie sleeper cell gf. As long as she doesn’t hear anyone say the activation phrase, she’s very sweet.

For real though, this app is pretty culturally ingrained over there and so I don’t really have the option of pushing something else (we all know how real messaging app fatigue has gotten these days). Especially when other apps will be restricted whenever she travels home, and we want something that can serve as a backup when other communication methods aren’t an option. I’m pretty sure WeChat will work through The Great Firewall, so it’s ideal for our purposes. I have no idea if the same can be said for WhatsApp or Signal.

Thank you! This is exactly the sort of thing I was looking for!

I’ve heard of matrix bridges before but I’m unfamiliar with how to actually set them up and use them. I understand the basic idea is that they relay messages out of matrix and into some other messaging service, but I don’t understand how to actually enact that onto the element client on my phone. Matrix is so complicated 😅

Yeah she’s an iPhone user. And she wants to use WeChat because it’s like second nature to Chinese people. It’s as normal to them as email is to us in the west. They are totally desensitized to the digital privacy concerns.

She has WhatsApp as well, but it’s not set up properly on her phone so she doesn’t get notifications for it. Plus I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t work if she traveled back to China.

I’m not in the US, but what is this Shelter you speak of?

She’s not very tech savvy at all. It would be asking a lot. I’d rather stick to something she is comfortable with.

That’s a great point, thanks! I will definitely be using the international one. I expect since I’m getting it through Google Play it’ll be constrained based on the OS permissions I give it. And I don’t intend to give it any permissions

To answer the question: GrapheneOS and a separate profile would be the safest

I appreciate the suggestion, but maybe I should add that I’d like to not have to change up my phone too much. It’s a Fairphone 4 running the OEM Android and my preference would be to keep it that way. Are separate profiles like that a thing on stock Android?

If you are both outside of china there really is zero reason (other than preference) to use that piece of spyware.

She travels back to China sometimes, uses it to contact friends and family back home, and uses it to chat with lots of mainlanders here in Canada. For her it’s not weird at all.

In fact, she expressed to me that she’s perfectly comfortable with the fact that they use WeChat combined facial recognition technology in China for payment processing. When you get on public transit, you can have them scan your face and it will automatically charge you the bus fare. It really skeeves me out, but it’s simply not the hill I want to die on in this relationship. I’m crazy about her in so many ways, it’s okay with me if we don’t see eye-to-eye on digital privacy.