Then why do you have to agree to Google’s ToS to use it if it’s local only?

Especially given how easy it is to bypass Bitlocker anyway: https://youtu.be/Cc6vrQSVMII

I bet they’ll eventually get caught using coffee shop cameras and conversations for AI training, say it’s for training a security product or something.

At this point I just net user /add it, which just creates the user manually and then you can reboot and just log into it.

It’s not like you need anything from the OOBE at all, so might as well just skip it entirely.

They said it would require network access and that they would have a handful of popular apps preloaded to avoid too much disruption so those can be installed offline. In practice that probably means Google apps, Meta apps and other big corp apps.

They also have you register package names with them, not just a certificate.

I was hoping it would be a certificate situation but we’re kind of past Google using the least intrusive and privacy preserving options.

Apps from outside the Play Store? No, because previously your phone had no reason to ask Google anything. You could always not sign in to Google and disable Play Protect and use F-Droid and Obtainium.

But now, it needs to check developer signatures to know if it’s a verified developer, and it obviously can’t cache all of them as the size would be insane.

And that in turn implies that your phone needs to reach out to Google and be like yo, is this app banned?

That query gives them at minimum the IP of the user, the package name, and the time at which it happened.

And thus they can effectively track anyone using say, privacy apps, making it that much riskier to use them in places where they’re not allowed.

For your “safety”.

That also means they now will know about every app installs, worldwide. So when the government comes in and ask who have installed this app they decided is bad, they can come get you.

Signal, VPNs, they’ll have a list of everyone opting out of government-mandated backdoors.

LineageOS so worth losing Play Integrity.

Arguably, if it was normal to sideload apps it wouldn’t be as much of a barrier to users, but they’ve been conditionned to think they need an app and the only place you can ever get them is the store.

It’s a technical hurdle only because Apple decided they want to control everything, and same on Android because of Google’s ever increasing war on sideloading. You used to download an APK from the browser and it would go like “This is an app! Install?”, but now you have to go enable third party installation and all that, and now the whole Play Protect forcing developer validation coming up.

At this point China doesn’t need propaganda, they just let the chinese users look at the US user’s misery by themselves and sit back.

When Rednote was first flooded by the first wave of TikTok refugees, the chinese users were baffled just how much worse it was than their propaganda said. Which is probably why they just let it go and didn’t immediately shut it down.

Rednote is pretty different vibes, I’m on it but not nearly as much as TikTok. It’s pretty interesting for what it is but it’s not a replacement and it’s not competing to be a replacement either.

I would guess they’ll probably move to Bytedance’s other app, Lemon8, or probably Skylight Social as Bluesky is generally pretty popular with the particular part of TikTok I’m on, so everyone already have ATproto accounts and follows.

At least a title would have been nice, at this point that’s just lazy to just paste the link of a repo and click post. Ok cool, but why are you sharing it, what’s cool about it, why should I click on this and spend time reading on it.

You can mostly backup everything but it’s impossible to make a perfect backup like the old days anymore because of the TEE. Flashing a new ROM will change the keys and permanently make the old data worthless. Stuff like Google Authenticator for example simply won’t backup even with a perfect bit copy.

Apps will restore okay but many will be logged out and have lost their permissions and push notification registration with Google.

You need to set up your PC to be on that IP address first, TFTP doesn’t magically listen to a particular IP, you need to configure the PC with that IP.

ip link set eth0 up
ip addr add 10.10.10.3/24 dev eth0
ip addr add 10.10.10.1/24 dev eth0

Then you can start the TFTP server on the interface:

dnsmasq -d --port=0 --enable-tftp --tftp-root=/path/to/tftp/root -i eth0

This is why when an app pops up that permission dialog, you always say no. The number of permissions Meta apps ask immediately upon startup is a red flag on its own.

Can’t collect and upload what it doesn’t have.

For all its flaws and mess, NFS is still pretty good and used in production.

I still use NFS to file share to my VMs because it still significantly outperforms virtiofs, and obviously network is a local bridge so latency is non-existent.

The thing with rsync is that it’s designed to quickly compute the least amount of data transfer to sync over a remote (possibly high latency) link. So when it comes to backups, it’s literally designed to do that easily.

The only cool new alternative I can think of is, use btrfs or ZFS and btrfs/zfs send | ssh backup btrfs/zfs recv which is the most efficient and reliable way to backup, because the filesystem is aware of exactly what changed and can send exactly that set of changes. And obviously all special attributes are carried over, hardlinks, ACLs, SELinux contexts, etc.

The problem with backups over any kind of network share is that if you’re gonna use rsync anyway, the latency will be horrible and take forever.

Of course you can also mix multiple things: rsync laptop to server periodically, then mount the server’s backup directory locally so you can easily browse and access older stuff.

The writing’s been on the wall since they swapped to ColorOS with Android 12 and the bootloader update that came with it that no longer supports relocking, along with the delayed/nonexistent source code releases for the kernel.

It’s very sad that basically the only real option is Google’s Pixels, and even there the tides are turning.

Technically it wasn’t really designed with megainstances in mind that swallows the entire fediverse.

My instance has no problem whatsoever keeping up and storage is well under control. But we’re few here subscribed to a subset of available communities so my instance isn’t 90% filled with content I don’t care about and will never look at. Also reduces the moderation burden because it’s slow enough I can actually mostly see everything that comes through.

Lemmy itself is also pretty inefficient in that regard, you can very much make software that pulls instead and backfill local cache as needed.

Even my Reddit subscriptions would be pretty easy on my instance.

Technically it wasn’t really designed with megainstances in mind that swallows the entire fediverse.

My instance has no problem whatsoever keeping up and storage is well under control. But we’re few here subscribed to a subset of available communities so my instance isn’t 90% filled with content I don’t care about and will never look at. Also reduces the moderation burden because it’s slow enough I can actually mostly see everything that comes through.

Lemmy itself is also pretty inefficient in that regard, you can very much make software that pulls instead and backfill local cache as needed.

One thing to keep in mind is ActivityPub isn’t exactly made for social media in the sense most people use it nowadays. It’s intended to be more like RSS feeds: you’re support to subscribe to stuff like news sites and be able to bring it all into a content aggregator. Seen that way, its design makes a lot of sense.

It kinda works well for public microblogging as well. It’s when you start involving moderation, voting, sharing, boosting that things get kinda weird.

I’ll add some of my comments to that discussion.

You guys have basically been describing Aether and Nostr