Ulrich @ Ulrich @feddit.org

Posts

9

Comments

3,454

Joined

7 mo. ago

It's insane that it's taken this long for these companies to stand up to Apple. But better late than never, I guess. Here are my notes:

Proton will donate any money we receive from the lawsuit to organizations fighting for democracy and human rights so that some portion of Apple’s profits made from countries with authoritarian regimes are redirected to freedom. These donations will be coordinated through the nonprofit Proton Foundation, which oversees Proton and ensures that our work always prioritizes the public good over financial gain.

That's cool but, are they donating to the Proton Foundation or From the Proton foundation?

Apple’s App Store policies disproportionately favor the surveillance capitalism business model employed by companies like Meta and Google...Companies that monetize user data in exchange for “free” services that abuse your privacy aren’t affected by this, as they don’t process payments through the App Store

Ehhh I dunno that I buy that one. Charge them 30% and they'll have no option but to pony up. They're not just going to close up shop. Also how would you even enforce such a charge? Just charge them 30% of all of their income?

There have been numerous incidents where Apple has removed or censored apps at the behest of authoritarian governments, in order to continue profiting from those markets.

Yeah, don't go throwing stones in glass houses there, Proton. It's not like you don't comply with authoritarian governments.

Not supporting Apple’s payment system is also considered a violation, which can lead to threats to remove your app, as happened to Proton.

Wow, now that I did not realize.

Proton cannot even link to FAQ or customer support pages from its apps, as Apple believes it’s possible that users will then navigate from the support page to a pricing page and upgrade their accounts without paying Apple its fee.

I didn't realize this either. It couldn't be more clear by this rule alone that these policies have absolutely nothing to do with "protecting consumers" and everything to do with being 100% sure they get their cut for the privilege of being used on Apple devices.

Apple claims this fee is necessary to pay for the maintenance of the App Store, but evidence presented in the Epic Games v. Apple case indicated that Apple makes a 78% profit on App Store fees

After looking into this claim, it seems to be provided by an "expert witness" hired by Epic, and his personal calculations based on files that aren't publicly available. Apple says “Epic’s experts calculations of the operating margins for the App Store are simply wrong and we look forward to refuting them in court.”. So while I would be unsurprised if they're accurate, I don't necessarily believe Epic either.

Sorry if this is a dumb question but how does offline lyrics work? Can you store them in the metadata?

Sometimes you just gotta ask yourself if the juice is worth the squeeze.

Reminds me of DogFart productions 😅 If you don't know what that is, don't look it up.

I'm sure they can but I think they also see the growth in the PC gaming industry as a potential opportunity to capitalize with "XBOX OS".

1 what?

Flipboard is it's own media platform that is embracing AP. So these are just mirrors from Flipboard publishers.

Because they were added by Flipboard.

What's "secret" about this?

Lots of VPNs do that.

it's likely that Microsoft will also attempt to move anti-cheat vendors out of kernel space

[Citation needed]

You can use topic B as an illustration for topic A

Sometimes yes. In this case, no.

Do you think it is absolutely infeasable to implement one that would detect adnauseum specifically?

I think the users of such products are extremely low (especially since they've been kicked from Google store) that it wouldn't be worth their time.

But no, I don't think they could either. It's just an automation script that runs actions the same way you would.

filtering out random false data seems trivial

As far as I know, none of them had random false data so I'm not sure why you would think that?

In comparison to that it seems extremely complicated to algorithmically figure out what exact customized lie you have to tell to every single inidividual to manipulate them into behaving a certain way. That probably needed a larger team of smart people working together for many years.

I feel like you're greatly exaggerating the level of intelligence at work here. It's not hard to figure out people's political affiliations with something as simple as their browsing history, and it's not hard to manipulate them with propaganda accordingly. They did not have an "exact customized lie" for every individual, they just grouped individuals into categories (AKA profiling) and showed them a select few forms of disinformation accordingly.

I'm not being a dick, I am trying to help you.

It's not a problem. It's fair to assume anything the Trump administration does is nefarious.

All of those forks get support from the primary source of development. Do you know what a fork is?

Okay at this point its pretty clear you have no intention of good faith discussion and want to constantly redirect the conversation to a strawman argument so I'm going to bail.

[other data] + clicks ALL the ads like all the other adnauseum people

adnauseum does not click "all the other ads", it just clicks some of them. Like normal people do. Only those ads are not relevant to your interests, they're just random, so it obscures your online profile by filling it with a bunch of random information.

Judging by incidents like the cambridge analytica scandal, the algorithms that analyze the data are sophisticated enough to differentiate your true interests

Huh? No one in the Cambridge Analytica scandal was poisoning their data with irrelevant information.

I have been a longtime advocate of data poisoning. Especially in the case of surveillance pricing. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be many tools for this outside of AdNauseum.

When it comes to AI models, China is streets ahead in openness.

No one was talking about openness, we were talking about data collection.

All openai data goes to the NSA

Online deepseek data goes to the CCP. Local models stay private.

You're comparing online models with local models. Local OpenAI models are also private.

The only people believing that Americans are superior in everything are Americans.

Good thing no one said that. It's not just America either. Most countries are significantly more free than China (and Russia and North Korea), and if you don't believe that, you need to open your eyes.