Oh my god you’ve literally just recommended me a dream app. PlexAmp has so many annoying usability issues and symfonium seems to have solved all of them, I can’t thank you enough.

Google has been begging Apple to implement RCS for well over a year now. They wouldn’t need to pull a beeper on Google since Google actively wants to help Apple implement their standard.

I’d agree if the ban extended to news articles online.

It doesn’t.

They don’t give you root access out of the box because the vast majority of users don’t want or care about it, whilst being a pretty wide open door for bad actors. As far as I know, pixels are the easiest android phone to flash stuff too. I’ve only heard of Samsung blowing e-fuses upon flashing custom ROMs.

The system works by having players vote on whether a clip is cheating or not - the guidance is to vote yes if the player is cheating “beyond a reasonable doubt”. Players are weighted with a trust score (how much the majority agrees with them), so you can’t just spam “innocent” on every clip and avoid bans that way, because the system will start ignoring your votes. You must first trip something in order to get into the overwatch queue anyway, which is what VACnet is about, increasing the amount of cheaters that end up in the overwatch system.

It is a genuine concern though. Certain Chinese laws do state that if the government wants, companies like tencent must hand over user data, including the data of foreign users outside their jurisdiction. Riot is owned by Tencent, with a CEO that is a card-carrying supporter of the CCP.

Personally, while I think the developers at Riot didn’t intend for it to be a data-collection tool, the level of access it has could certainly be used as such if they wanted.

For CSGO it’s trivial - the “Overwatch” system literally provided demos of players cheating that the AI could learn off of. I think Valve themselves were looking into something called VACnet that kinda did the same thing.

They did implement this from my knowledge. I think SomeOrdinaryGamers made a video where he showcases hardening a VM to beat the detection.

How else is the platform owner to prove that the account is linked to an actual person without defeating the check being trivial? They can’t without something being tied to you. An email address may have been a good one to use back when AOL gave out addresses as part of their subscription service, but the availability of free email has destroyed this possibility. Out of the many things that could be asked for you to provide, a phone number is the least nefarious.

You reserve the right to not give your phone number to Discord. You do not need to give Discord your number in order for you to be able to use it. Likewise, the server owner reserves the right to ask Discord to only allow accounts that have been verified to not be burner accounts. Email verification does not do this, and the time limits on membership only go as far as slowing down accounts used in bad faith in a server, whether that be scams, trolling or otherwise.

Like many things in life, it’s a trade-off. You value your right to privacy more than being granted access to this particular server. The server owner values the reduced ability of trolls and bad actors over the loss of membership from users like you. Unfortunately you cannot have your cake and eat it too.

The only alternative I can think of is just buying a pre-paid number and a cheap second hand phone and using that only to verify with services. It’s good for 2FA too as it makes you immune to SIM swap attacks.

That’s the thing, it’s not. Lots, and I mean lots of sites are plagued by bot activity. The ones hardest hit are the ones that only have email validation.

I could go to Google and create a new account right now, absolutely free.

Hell, I could write a script that creates a million for me for barely any money, just paying a CAPTCHA farm a nominal sum to solve the robot tests for me. This is why sites like discord are plagued with advertisement bots, the bar to entry is literally nothing.

Phone numbers cost money to create, and are in finite supply. Even PAYG (pre paid numbers for you Americans) numbers require you to go outside and purchase a SIM card from a store. They aren’t foolproof, but they stop the vast majority of fake accounts.

Sure, but at that point we’re getting into the weeds of fake webpages, which really isn’t anything apple could control anyway. Nothing’s to say that if sideloading didn’t exist, that page wouldn’t just direct them to a form to fill out your banking information. All it does is change the method. Apple could simply maintain a hash database of files that are known as dangerous and package it into a built-in AV for iOS (like most OSes do)

Nothing’s also to say that the page wouldn’t just abuse one of the hundreds of vulnerabilities that currently exist in WebKit currently.

For your average user, they’re probably only visiting legit sites on that browser anyway. My grandparents both have Android phones and to my knowledge have never been “tricked” into installing an APK. I can probably say the same for the vast majority of people.

I believe the benefits outweigh the costs here. Apple loses their grip on the walled garden which is punishing for developers and makes Apple judge, jury and executionor on not only what apps can run on iOS, but also how much developers have to give up to Apple (they could up their cut to 90% at anytime and currently developers can’t do shit about it).

But here’s the thing - side loading, even on android, is an opt-in feature. The user has to actively go out of their way to sideload an app. Even if an app tries to do it behind your back, you must first enable its ability to do so.

Yes, this doesn’t exist when ADB is involved, but in that case you have to go out of your way to enable USB debugging (and be stupid enough to plug your phone into someone else’s computer). The vast majority of iPhones will never have sideloading enabled by their users. The EU isn’t grabbing their balls and saying that all users must have it enabled by default, otherwise they’d be going after Android too.

It’s still an insult that it was only upheld by precedence and wasn’t enshrined into a federal law. This isn’t something that states should have the choice of deciding, as it massively affects the quality of healthcare across the country.

Brb let me completely rewrite all my unity projects and learn unreal in a single day

Don’t get me wrong it’s not perfect and I 100% agree with what you’re saying, but it is vastly better compared to some other OEMs (Samsung comes to mind) who uses shit like e-fuses to make sure your phone is never able to use a banking app again or the multiple companies that don’t let you unlock the bootloader at all.

You are allowed to unlock the bootloader and install a custom ROM though, so at least once my Pixel 6 Pro is out of support I can flash lineage or graphene onto my phone

Well you’d have to have gotten a lobotomy to want to buy beats in the first place.

Most mobile operators in the UK have stopped with SMS limits (unless you’re on the really really cheap plans or PAYG). Guess people just don’t use them enough to warrant caps on it.

I don’t think Intel is too worried about boycotts because a significant portion of their customer base is businesses.

The only real sector of their customer base that would even do a boycott is the independent PC builders, and I doubt even 5% of those customers would follow through.

Your average consumer doesn’t even know what the hell an “intel” is or why they should care, it’s just a sticker they see on their laptop/PC.

What no repairability, a huge walled garden and the conditioning of teens to bully others over bubble colours does to a stock price