Old but still trendy
Next month, Microsoft forced Mojang to comply with the UK government Online Safety Act. All users must upload Digital ID or some other form of Age Verification to a third party company called Yoti. Or else they won’t get to use the chat, friends list, and other social features. All users are affected for now it seems. Yoti claim they will delete the data right away and not store it. This means that even in single player we can’t use commands and see achievements and stuff like that. Really annoying. EDIT: Turns out this is on both Java and Bedrock and probably all platforms such as mobile! Not sure how or when it will happen though.
I would have assumed this would apply to Bedrock and not Java since Bedrock is the one which uses Xbox live, whereas Java can be run completely offline.
What would happen if I ran Minecraft Java on my Linux computer with my internet disconnected?
It’s Java too! Unfortunately, we don’t know exactly how or when. For example, we don’t know if it will be in a certain update or all updates. Or if mods will get around it or not.
Abaurd laws aside, why is a third party involved? In my country we have a digital ID card with an open source governmental app that tells you exactly what data is given out to a service. Which in this example would only be “over 18 years yes/no”
Agreed, if it was Microsoft or Mojang I would trust them more. Though data breaches have occurred there of course. It’s not unheard of for Minecraft accounts to get hacked and stolen.
Surely this affects only some very new version rarely anyone plays, and not the good versions all the modpacks are built upon?
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Unfortunately, we don’t know exactly how it will work. It turns out actually both Bedrock and Java will have to do age verification. We don’t know if they will let you use mods or earlier versions. Probably not cause then what’s the point? I don’t know how they will do it because they haven’t explained that part yet.
Hold on a minute.
You can’t play Minecraft on windows without verification???.
Or any OS since the verification is for the java version?
But how would that work for single player?
I should be able to run anything on my fucking pc. Everyone who tells me otherwise is a fucking asshole.
You can still play single player but there will be restrictions such as not being able to use the chat (even for commands and coords) or your friends list. You likely won’t be able to access servers or realms. It is unclear if you can use modded versions or older versions to get around this new law. It is unclear how and when they will update this. You won’t have to use Digital ID only but the other methods are just as invasive. I believe this will be mandatory on all versions whether PC or otherwise. Yeah it is really dumb and annoying.
Google with Android: Amateurs!
i like the meme, but here is the real version
The mail (a web service), the calendar (a web service), YouTube (web videos), YouTube Music (web music), Google Maps (a web based mapping service)…
You get the picture.
Android spies on you when you’re doing things locally on the device. But, the rest of these are web-based services.
Don’t forget ChromeOS!
Google spies through its OS too.
Meta Is Recruiting Former Pentagon Officials As It Ramps Up Military Ambitions
Reading that headline is crazy, why would Meta have any military ambitions. And then in the first sentence of the text they mention AI. I guess they need to use AI for any possible application to show that they get value from their large investments.
Google spies through androidOS
Time for our sponsor for today’s episode, GrapheneOS. I don’t need tell you what it does because y’all on Lemmy anyways. Honestly it was the most simple setup, you plug your phone into the computer you don’t need to download the software installer locally, its all distributed on their website and it take 2 clicks of the mouse to get a privacy focused OS.
If you have a pixel at least
This was really helpful. I know about GrapheneOS, but I didn’t know install was this easy
It really is. Took me a year to finalls go ahead with it and about half an hour from trying to find the correctly gendered usb cables to figuring out my favourit background image. It was really just go to website -> install graphene.
the closest thing Linux has to spying is the strictly opt-in Debian package popularity contest lol
…or installing Red Star OS. There are Linux distros with built-in spying, they just aren’t very popular.
Unless you install Firefox, that is.
Also, MSTeams.
Other people have already mentioned this, but Google absolutely spies on the whole OS when it makes the OS, either Android or Chrome OS, Google Play Services are spyware and also required for full Android functionality
And Apple aren’t that much better. They make a lot of privacy claims, but are still pushing hard for their online services like iCloud, and their hardware is designed to hide what it’s doing from the user. Apple is still collecting user data. They might be sharing less with third parties, but they are still collecting it.
GrapheneOS my beloved
Should I pull the trigger on the Pixel 8 listing I’ve got up on eBay right now? My level of tech savvy is ‘I installed Bazzite on my gaming laptop and it’s mostly just worked’, I think I should be fine with Graphene but…
(Also, anyone know if Tuta is good? I’m looking for a replacement for Google calendar and Gmail and that seems to fit the bill.)
If you were able to install Bazzite then installing graphene shouldn’t be any harder than that. It has a web-based installer that was pretty easy to use as long as you follow the instructions.
The pixel 8 will be supported through the end of 2030 (graphene support follows the same timeline as Google because of firmware-level updates that are still needed from them) so you could still get a lot of use out of it.
Tuta sucks, they deleted an acct of mine for inactivity, then when I went to replace it they flagged the new one for manual review and said “this addr cannot send mail until the review clears, please reach out to our support team using the email we just said can’t send email for some reason.” I went with Disroot.
GrapheneOS is super easy to install, they have a walkthrough on their site.
Tuta has been fine, for me.
As someone said, they cleanup free accounts without remorse, a don’t move your life into it before moving to a paid account.
Edit: And GrapheneOS is lovely. I frequently forget that is isn’t stock Android, and ask colleagues why they don’t use the obvious quality of life features (that are apparently too privacy friendly for Google to allow into stock Android?)
My credit union app worked fine until I got in the habit of keeping location tracking disabled. Now I use their mobile website, which works fine. I am shopping for a new credit union, but not just over their invasive app.
Tuta is good as long as you’re aware that you’re bound to their client and that they treat usable search as a paid feature.
The Pixel 8 is great with GrapheneOS! You don’t need to be very tech savvy to use it.
Just keep in mind that Tuta does not support PGP or S/MIME.
Do banking apps work well? I used to be pretty into custom OSes on my phone (it was the cyanogen mod at the time, I believe?). But banking apps are notoriously bad with anything they deem non-“standard”…
I am considering switching phones (or rather, my phone is considering dying anytime soon and so I want to get ahead of it) and if any custom rom works well with banking apps and whatnot, how easy it would be to flash a new rom would definitely factor into my decision
It can be hit or miss, really depends on the bank. I’m in the US and mine worked fine after I enabled a compatibility setting in the app list, but that’s kind of anecdotal. I think there is a community compatibility list somewhere of banking apps that work/don’t work on GrapheneOS.
I can’t answer the banking app question, but in regards to ease of installation, i’d recommend checking out the web installation guide beforehand so you can estimate how comfortable you’d be following it.
Flashing GrapheneOS is pretty easy. On Linux you may have few complications: you must install Chromium or Chrome in order for the USB flashing to work (feature not available with Firefox). You may have to also manually set some permissions for the device in order for it to be detected in Chromium/Chrome.
Biased answer but:
- Tuta is good, free plan to try, 3 euros a month for the cheapest paid plan, they are supposedly adding a “cloud drive” to store some files
- GrapheneOS is amazing, easy to install, you control all the permissions if you want, and it’s the most plain and basic Android out there (they don’t make decisions for you out of the box, it’s the realest Android)
Your tech level is more than sufficient. Just follow the install instructions on the official site.
Tuta is alright. One of many good alternatives. Just try it out in parallel.
We need to support Ubuntu Touch. It’s such a promising alternative and it would be a dream to have it at same level and app support as current major platforms.
Only Apple users think Apple isn’t spying on them.
And Apple users are about to realize with the new Apple AI aka Google Gemini that they ARE spying on them.
Everyone who believes their big tech software doesnt spy as much as possible are naive fools
But its almost impossible to avoid anyway
So i can understand that a lot of people just dont care
Myself included, though i do use linux, its not for privacy reasons. I just like linux better thqn windows.
Work requires a mac, and github by microsoft. What you want me to do?
No they won’t. Apple users are either tech illiterate or sycophantic. They won’t realize that the “year in review” is actually just a showcase of how much info they have on you.
Used to know an apple fan in college, he almost screamed at me for buying a wired mouse with a good sensor rather than a wireless one with a bad one, because according to Apple, I would benefit more from the latter, and otherwise I’m setting back “wireless mains power tech”, which I showed a disinterest in by buying the wired mouse. He also called me a child when I bought a graphics card.
TIL that as a software engineer I must be tech illiterate as I’m no sycophant. How shocking that I use an Apple phone as it just works for what I want. I’d be in the same boat if I used Android and I choose convenience when choosing a phone, gone are my days of geeking out for a month trying to get my banking app to work.
One might argue you’re a little dense if you think the world is this black and white.
Anecdotes always disprove statistics!
You’re the exception among Apple users.
I say this with nearly 4 decades in IT. Most Apple users are even more clueless than a typical Windows users, which is saying something.
I work in an office with 5 other software engineers all of them smarter than me. Out of those 5 4 have iPhone and the 1 has some cheap android.
Sometimes people just want to choose a phone and nothing more. It’s not that deep bro and it’s stupid to label all x is y.
You’re most definitely not an engineer if you could not figure out how to install a banking app on Android phone. Rest of the humanity already figured that out.
I wasn’t talking about stock Android. I was thinking more that if I switch from iOS then I’m not going to Android (Google) so I’d have to use GrapheneOS where those kind of apps are not really simple to get running if you can at all.
That’s not really an Android problem, that’s rooting (or on iphones - jailbreaking) problem. Stock android, just like your stock iPhone, should not have such problems, so it’s very disingenuous for you to not mention anything about you rooting/hacking/modifying your device and just saying “android bad, iPhone good”, not very engineer-like of you. Be more objective next time and skip the narrative-bending
After reading it back I’ll cede that it does read that way.
My intention, admittedly not well executed, was to say that it’s either iOS or Android and they both have pros and cons. Other that those choices it’s to use GrapheneOS where you find it harder to install things.
The reason I think was because this place is very pro GrapheneOS or similar ones so figured that would be a given. Otherwise Apple or Google it’s like the choice between being shot in the head or having you neck snapped, neither is ideal but you have to choose one.
Everything is just black and white…
Excuse me, tech illiterate and sycophantic are clearly shades of grey.
Oh is Apple finally releasing different colors again? :p
“The new Mac: Now in tech illiterate white/greyish and sycophantic gray/blackish.”
I’d respect Apple more if they kept the fun colors of the old iMacs.
I am switching to a typewriter and physical mail 😐
As if physical mail hasn’t been spied on for the last two centuries as well.
Use Homing Pigeons. They won’t expose your darkest secrets.
We all should. Even go a bit further and write things by hand!
My mother got me a notebook for Christmas. May go ahead and do that
Google doesn’t spy only the web. There are some pretty common and completely legal devices, that Google takes advantage of to spy in people’s everyday life. Those devices are called Android phones.
I mean spy only on the web? Android Google is like the most important piece of project in corporate surveillance and don’t get me started on A-GPS
Also acceptable:
Linux: You guys have users?
linux to apple: you think yours don’t?
I’ve seen a lot of people defend apple. I lowkey thing me talking bad about apple (and provide sources) on a privacy subreddit triggered someone enough to get my reddit account banned. That or badtalking apple is against reddit TOS.
Saying Luigi was right will get you shadow banned. No doubt mods have a hard on for Apple, even tho Apple has been recording people’s conversations before it was cool.
Linux picks a random user out of the hat to prove it - gets someone using android with play services. erm . . . ignore them . . . that doesn’t count.
That really loops back to Google more than a function of linux.
Just because it uses the Linux kernel doesn’t mean it’s real Linux. Google took everything that made Linux good - customisation, root access, privacy, freedom - out of Linux to make Android
Akshually, . . . copypaste . . . mostly google removed the GNU Scotsman.
That is the same kind of pedantry as claiming that ketchup is a smoothie because the tomato is a fruit.
