Melody Fwygon

No.

It is hard to have both; but not impossible. You can still be privacy friendly without sacrificing necessary functionality.

It will require that the “provider” of such a dataset constantly scrub, sanitize and remove data that would cause privacy hazards as quickly as reasonably possible however. That in and of itself is a technical challenge; though not impossible.

Ideally there’s not a whole lot of data that needs to be kept.

Legitimately all that needs to be stored is a few things:

• Location (GPS)
• SSIDs (Wifi APs only)
• Cell ID & MCC/MNC (Cell Towers only)

and things they MUST NOT STORE OR SHARE like:

• IPs of contributors for longer than a few days
• un-hashed BSSIDs (Wifi/BT)
• MAC addresses (Wifi/BT)
• IMEI/IMSIs (or other cellular identifiers derived from them)
• APs that don’t exist in a fixed location (Think mobile hotspot SSIDs) for longer than a fixed amount of time.
• BT devices
• Non-unique SSIDs or IDs that may indicate no user config took place and manufacturer did not differentiate device ID. (Things like “SETUP” with no unique number (SSIDs like"SETUP-be3fd34d" would be valid) or “[ISP]@HOME” or “[ISP]Wifi” which provide no meaningful discriminators)

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/10397#issuecomment-2218346384

Looks like there’s several causes.

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/3766

I don’t know how soon Tubular or NewPipe can fix their app; but it seems like a few simple changes will do.

I should point out that this isn’t always “Google is trying to block adblockers” again!

Google can, will, and does simply change how the YouTube watch pages look, feel and operate behind the scenes quite regularly.

Thankfully we have people like those at the FreeTube, NewPipe and yt-dlp projects to sift through those changes and update the code to cope with the new output.

Freetube does work; it simply requires you switch to the Invidious API or have “Fallback to non-preferred API on Failure” enabled. (which honestly you always should have this setting ON).

Personally; I refuse to change my preferred API; so the “Fallback to non-preferred API on Failure” just works.

also yt-dlp does work but you need to upgrade to latest nightly/build.

yt-dlp version nightly@2024.07.09.232843 from yt-dlp/yt-dlp-nightly-builds [d2189d3d3]

YT-DLP fixed already; I use it locally in conjunction with MPC-HC.

yt-dlp -U or yt-dlp -U nightly

Or download latest nightly.

yt-dlp version nightly@2024.07.09.232843 from yt-dlp/yt-dlp-nightly-builds [d2189d3d3]

In general; I strongly don’t recommend anything on the Google Play Store except the Google Dialer.

If the Google Dialer is not to your liking; I strongly recommend only trying Dialers you will find on F-Droid.org

I like that he is being decisive about it. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the feature was only being delayed because of internal project politics or quirky policies that normally make sense, but don’t in this specific scenario.

I’m not being harsh; they bungled that initial transition badly too; despite it being a Google action.

Unfortunately they left a lot of users in the lurch when they left the Play Store as well and that too left a bad taste. It’s not exactly easy to migrate across versions and packages and software differ wildly as they allowed both versions to do their own thing without relabeling them so you could run them side-by-side.

I don’t blame them for Google’s actions; but I do blame them for how they handled it.

You might be confusing my transition into a rant against Google as blaming Termux.

They could certainly “clearly pass the cost” of this on to the user by not offering Audiobooks to users who didn’t pay for the “+ # of Audiobooks” tier of Spotify Premium; instead of this horrible enshittified crap where it cuts you off midsentence like a greedy telecomm provider would. Or perhaps their limitation should be on how many titles you can listen to concurrently in a certain time period. (So if you open X books; that’s it; you have to shelve one or wait it out)

It certainly means that Spotify did a bad job at negotiating their rights to these audiobooks as well. That matters too; because that makes the product worse; and that should never have been allowed to happen. If they couldn’t have offered it nicely, they could’ve just not offered it at all or added it to a higher service tier so that the cost is diverted better.

I stopped using Termux in general because of this inanity where they moved off and stopped supporting the Play Store Version; now this happens where they’re unable to keep things from conflicting across the different APK sources?

Yikes. Seems like a good time to continue staying away from Termux and not recommending it.

It’s a shame since I really love the concept of the app; but each increment of Android has been rough on it and I can’t imagine it being useful with Google being stupid about their policies.

…Unfortunately they’re often quick to blame apps they dislike for problems in the ecosystem, and they often directly attack them through nerfing APIs and system calls that the apps tend to use; which I think is absolutely a dogshit thing to do.

Please, stop enshittifying our phones Google.

It isn’t AI itself, it’s AI as a vector for corporate recklessness.

This. 1000% this. Many of Issac Asimov novels warned about this sort of thing too; as did any number of novels inspired by Asimov.

It’s not that we didn’t provide the AI with rules. It’s not that the AI isn’t trying not to harm people. It’s that humans, being the clever little things we are, are far more adept at deceiving and tricking AI into saying things and using that to justify actions to gain benefit.

…Understandably this is how that is being done. By selling AI that isn’t as intelligent as it is being trumpeted as. As long as these corporate shysters can organize a team to crap out a “Minimally Viable Product” they’re hailed as miracle workers and get paid fucking millions.

Ideally all of this should violate the many, many laws of many, many civilized nations…but they’ve done some black magic with that too; by attacking and weakening laws and institutions that can hold them liable for this and even completely ripping out or neutering laws that could cause them to be held accountable by misusing their influence.

13 billion Euro British Franc Moneys?

That’s pocket change to Google.

Note: the above message is satirical. Do not reply.

This is pretty clearly a company practiced at “riding the waves” of what’s popular to sell absolute bullshit.

They appear to raise millions, develop what looks like a minimally viable product for it’s development phase, then pull the rug out and exit with the bag of cash, quickly pivoting away from discovered scams and name changing to avoid too much consumer ire or regulator scrutiny.

It wouldn’t surprise me if the CEO or anyone else at the top levels of this company has an entire resume full of these sorts of ‘scam and run’ operations, the kinds that melt into the background and vanish the moment any real strong consumer or regulatory/legal scrutiny hits it.

Basically this is investment fraud 101; you find something you can trick people into investing into, then spend as little as possible to get a ‘minimally viable product’ that appears plausible enough to give you time to exit stage left with all the fat cash you can take. Because this sort of operation does produce something; oftentimes they get away cleanly; because they did do something and oftentimes they obscure or obfuscate and hide the evidence of any planned malfeasance; usually the only places with any record of it is in the mind of the CEO or other executive(s), if they’re in on the scam too.

Sometimes the CEO gets ‘caught’ intentionally and then fired…or they just run the company into the ground. That latter case can let them off the hook with a tidy golden parachute as well; depending on the circumstances and what they ‘negotiated’ when they were ‘hired’.

The shoe fits on the other foot as well. Both extreme communism and extreme capitalism have tendencies to turn into dystopian nightmares.

If ‘1984’ alarms you; so too should current works like ‘Ready, Player One’ or ‘Ender’s Game’ and it’s associated sequels.

Extremism in general tends to not work. I don’t pretend to know what the exact right balance is; but it does exist.

Censorship like this is one fast track to things like the French Revolution.

NOPE!

You cannot pay me to use Windows 11.

This kind of website sounds kind of problematic and useless. The ability to follow a specific person’s post is highly useful, and highly necessary oftentimes. If you want to reduce the friction that “Following” induces; you simply need to not disclose to the users how many people are following them, nor do you need to disclose how many followers a user has. Problems solved.

The same goes for Likes. Nobody but the sender of the like should know about that like. Instead of keeping counts for the recipients to obsess over; calculate a reasonable percentage of people who we can guess “like” the post algorithmically based on views of the post and clicked likes. I get that the feedback mechanism is necessary; but it should be a gentle one that simply encourages people to post what people like and will view. This percentage should not be used to rank a post above or below other posts, unless the user viewing the list asks for the list to be sorted or ranked as such.

Even a progression from “Closed Source” to “Source Available” is nice progress I think.

If we assume that the License is not restrictive we may be able to fork Winamp into a codebase that might actually be Fully Open Source Software and track changes of the upstream as we need.

Minimum SDK also does get bumped in Android in general at a snails pace. Given that we’re basically coming up on Android 15; it’s not unfair to assume that, eventually, we will simply see Android intentionally and permanently REFUSE to run the app because it’s Minimum SDK value is considered to be too low and thus Android must assume that the application is completely insecure.