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Unless users take action, Android will let Gemini access third-party apps

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  • Google: Laughs in "Everybody else you communicate with who has that shit enabled"

    Sadly true in any situation that requires talking to anyone else.

  • Is it just me or does it seem slightly sus that GrapheneOS is only available for Google hardware...

    There are many technical reasons why: https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices

    Every Android phone (besides Pixel) fails to meet the high technical requirements of the project.

  • I mean there were no instructions up front because literally Google is refusing to give them, basically.
    No more choice just the company force feeding the user and saying it's good for them.

    Nowhere in the email or any of the Support pages did Google say how to remove all Gemini integrations from my phone.
    I then emailed Google PR and... I asked if someone could provide actionable guidance for my readers who want to ensure Gemini integrations are completely disabled. Instead of answering the question, the person responding to my email wrote, in part: “This update is good for users: they can now use Gemini to complete daily tasks on their mobile devices like send messages, initiate phone calls, and set timers while Gemini Apps Activity is turned off. With Gemini Apps Activity turned off, their Gemini chats are not being reviewed or used to improve our AI models.”

    Literally that reads like you can't turn it off and they just scrape less of your data on a technicality.

    I just spent half an hour yesterday uninstalling all apps, registry entries and in-program options for Copilot in Windows and MS Office... but I still can't get rid of the Copilot button in Outlook. Searching for answers I ended up at the Microsoft support forums and clicked a link to office dot com... and realized there that the entire ecosystem is now called MS365 Copilot App (formerly known as Office)... so I suspect there will be NO way to remove this stuff in the future, and probably that MS365 Copilot will eventually replace Windows itself.

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    Gemini? I don't have Gemini in my pixel 8a, stock

  • I don't get it.

    you're in a thread discussing the finer points of privacy concerns about a corporation snooping on your apps and your only example of a barrier to not use a privacy focused product is...your requirement for government backdoors and spyware?

    also SSO works just fine on eOS. unless you're talking about googles MFA. at that point why are you even concerned about privacy?

    The digital national ID is not corporate or government snooping. If you believe it is, I don't think this conversation can continue. What it is, is what's needed to log into your doctors system to schedule an appointment, or the schools system to read updates about your kids, or to log into your online banking. All of that, and more, in my country, is using the same ID system, which won't work on a rooted android phone (at least, I haven't been able to make it work for the past 3-4 major versions).

  • The digital national ID is not corporate or government snooping. If you believe it is, I don't think this conversation can continue. What it is, is what's needed to log into your doctors system to schedule an appointment, or the schools system to read updates about your kids, or to log into your online banking. All of that, and more, in my country, is using the same ID system, which won't work on a rooted android phone (at least, I haven't been able to make it work for the past 3-4 major versions).

    you must have a lot of trust in your government.

    giving examples of what it's used for doesn't make it any better that you're forced to install software on your personal device by your government for simply existing and is an invasion of privacy.

    in my country my government wanted to use facial recognition for online transactions that were previously accessible via government IDs. it was found that the facial recognition software was provided by a corporate identity provider that was then selling that same data to local police that then tracked people through local government surveillance.

    when it comes to technology, I have zero faith in every government in the world to have my best interests in mind. they are all guilty of either being complicit in eroding civil rights or negligent in upholding the protections built for civil liberties.

  • There are many technical reasons why: https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices

    Every Android phone (besides Pixel) fails to meet the high technical requirements of the project.

    Sounds like they're intentionally setting the barriers to entry too high for anyone other than Google...

  • Sounds like they're intentionally setting the barriers to entry too high for anyone other than Google...

    Ok. Which ones, and why?

    Edit: I can see the 5 and 7 year support, but what about the rest of the list?

  • Ok. Which ones, and why?

    Edit: I can see the 5 and 7 year support, but what about the rest of the list?

    Mainly just that one mean it will never be available on any other hardware...

    All the others seem like nice to haves rather than requirements to me(the first one is half required , half nice to have "...including full hardware security functionality"), but I guess I might change my mind when I get around to building a Linux phone when I have time to do that when I'm dead... 😅

  • Mainly just that one mean it will never be available on any other hardware...

    All the others seem like nice to haves rather than requirements to me(the first one is half required , half nice to have "...including full hardware security functionality"), but I guess I might change my mind when I get around to building a Linux phone when I have time to do that when I'm dead... 😅

    Building a linux phone: do you mean from scratch, or just installing one of the Linux phone OS's that already exist?

    I've been following Ubuntu Touch for several years now and, while they have made a lot of progress, its main hurdles have the same thing in common: mobile hardware is incredibly locked down. For example, Ubuntu Touch uses proprietary Android drivers for many low level functions. Even then, there's some features that aren't stable across all devices, like VOLTE.

    It sucks, I really want to use Ubuntu Touch (or any of the Linux alternatives) but I can't make phone calls or text in the US without VOLTE support. There are a few phones that support VOLTE, but the feature is either in beta, the phone is expensive, or the phone is not sold in the US.

    Anyways bringing that back to Graphene: In my case, I'm using this as a stopgap until Linux phones take off (assuming they ever do). For now I guess the best thing is to just be skeptic, keep things minimal, and bloat-free.

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    dyskolos@lemmy.zipD
    I'd sniff a line of that hopium too. I just don't see it being available in the foreseeable future. At least not for an affordable price
  • Jack Dorsey’s New App Just Hit a Very Embarrassing Security Snag

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    Briar is Android only. Bitchat is an iOS app (may have an Android port in the future though, I think).
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    We have batteries. But yeah, attacking the grid might be smart.
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    I played around the launch and didn't realize there were bots (outside of pve)... But I also assumed I was shooting a bunch of kids that barely understood the controls.
  • Apple acquires RAC7, its first-ever video game studio

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    I'm not questioning whether or not the game is good, just wondering why Apple would want to limit their customer base so much.
  • Catbox.moe got screwed 😿

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    archrecord@lemm.eeA
    I'll gladly give you a reason. I'm actually happy to articulate my stance on this, considering how much I tend to care about digital rights. Services that host files should not be held responsible for what users upload, unless: The service explicitly caters to illegal content by definition or practice (i.e. the if the website is literally titled uploadyourcsamhere[.]com then it's safe to assume they deliberately want to host illegal content) The service has a very easy mechanism to remove illegal content, either when asked, or through simple monitoring systems, but chooses not to do so (catbox does this, and quite quickly too) Because holding services responsible creates a whole host of negative effects. Here's some examples: Someone starts a CDN and some users upload CSAM. The creator of the CDN goes to jail now. Nobody ever wants to create a CDN because of the legal risk, and thus the only providers of CDNs become shady, expensive, anonymously-run services with no compliance mechanisms. You run a site that hosts images, and someone decides they want to harm you. They upload CSAM, then report the site to law enforcement. You go to jail. Anybody in the future who wants to run an image sharing site must now self-censor to try and not upset any human being that could be willing to harm them via their site. A social media site is hosting the posts and content of users. In order to be compliant and not go to jail, they must engage in extremely strict filtering, otherwise even one mistake could land them in jail. All users of the site are prohibited from posting any NSFW or even suggestive content, (including newsworthy media, such as an image of bodies in a warzone) and any violation leads to an instant ban, because any of those things could lead to a chance of actually illegal content being attached. This isn't just my opinion either. Digital rights organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation have talked at length about similar policies before. To quote them: "When social media platforms adopt heavy-handed moderation policies, the unintended consequences can be hard to predict. For example, Twitter’s policies on sexual material have resulted in posts on sexual health and condoms being taken down. YouTube’s bans on violent content have resulted in journalism on the Syrian war being pulled from the site. It can be tempting to attempt to “fix” certain attitudes and behaviors online by placing increased restrictions on users’ speech, but in practice, web platforms have had more success at silencing innocent people than at making online communities healthier." Now, to address the rest of your comment, since I don't just want to focus on the beginning: I think you have to actively moderate what is uploaded Catbox does, and as previously mentioned, often at a much higher rate than other services, and at a comparable rate to many services that have millions, if not billions of dollars in annual profits that could otherwise be spent on further moderation. there has to be swifter and stricter punishment for those that do upload things that are against TOS and/or illegal. The problem isn't necessarily the speed at which people can be reported and punished, but rather that the internet is fundamentally harder to track people on than real life. It's easy for cops to sit around at a spot they know someone will be physically distributing illegal content at in real life, but digitally, even if you can see the feed of all the information passing through the service, a VPN or Tor connection will anonymize your IP address in a manner that most police departments won't be able to track, and most three-letter agencies will simply have a relatively low success rate with. There's no good solution to this problem of identifying perpetrators, which is why platforms often focus on moderation over legal enforcement actions against users so frequently. It accomplishes the goal of preventing and removing the content without having to, for example, require every single user of the internet to scan an ID (and also magically prevent people from just stealing other people's access tokens and impersonating their ID) I do agree, however, that we should probably provide larger amounts of funding, training, and resources, to divisions who's sole goal is to go after online distribution of various illegal content, primarily that which harms children, because it's certainly still an issue of there being too many reports to go through, even if many of them will still lead to dead ends. I hope that explains why making file hosting services liable for user uploaded content probably isn't the best strategy. I hate to see people with good intentions support ideas that sound good in practice, but in the end just cause more untold harms, and I hope you can understand why I believe this to be the case.
  • AI model collapse is not what we paid for

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    I share your frustration. I went nuts about this the other day. It was in the context of searching on a discord server, rather than Google, but it was so aggravating because of the how the "I know better than you" is everywhere nowadays in tech. The discord server was a reading group, and I was searching for discussion regarding a recent book they'd studied, by someone named "Copi". At first, I didn't use quotation marks, and I found my results were swamped with messages that included the word "copy". At this point I was fairly chill and just added quotation marks to my query to emphasise that it definitely was "Copi" I wanted. I still was swamped with messages with "copy", and it drove me mad because there is literally no way to say "fucking use the terms I give you and not the ones you think I want". The software example you give is a great example of when it would be real great to be able to have this ability. TL;DR: Solidarity in rage
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    I made a PayPal account like 20 years ago in a third world country. The only thing you needed then is an email and password. I have no real name on there and no PII, technically my bank card is attached but on PP itself there's no KYC. I think you could probably use some types of prepaid cards with it if you want to avoid using a bank altogether but for me this wasn't an issue, I just didn't want my ID on any records, I don't have any serious OpSec concerns otherwise. I'm sure you could either buy PayPal accounts like this if you needed to, or make one in a country that doesn't have KYC laws somehow. From there I'd add money to my balance and send money as F&F. At no point did I need an ID so in that sense there's no KYC. Some sellers on localmarket were fancy enough to list that they wanted an ID for KYC, but I'm sure you could just send them any random ID you made in paint from the republic of dave and you'd be fine.