kirk781

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago

Yes, 4 out of top 5 slots in India (in terms of market share) are taken by Chinese OEMs (other being Samsung). However, not all are equally unknown. Brands like Xiaomi have released international phones as well and are regularly reviewed by Western publications. Techno, meanwhile, is slightly more focused on emerging countries and is out of depth in developed economies.

 

The unknown phone is Techno

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

Wear OS is pitiable. My previous GW 4 40mm had 247 mAh battery and barely lasted a day with AOD on. Plus the charging was so slow. Even with Samsung's latest Galaxy Watch Ultra, it has lesser endurance that what Tizen based Frontier had.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Some internet banking sites give access after only asking for login password. They will only ask for transaction password and OTP (that will only come on phone) later on. Asking for two passwords isn't necessarily more secure since many people will just reuse their original one again. And OTP instead of offering something like hardware security key is insane.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

I also use Iceraven. I think, apart from Smart cookiewebpreview, it's the only one that allows for extension sideloading.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Sideloading xpi's is possible on Iceraven as well. I used Smart Cookie Web preview in the past but it was slightly lighter in terms of feature set then.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago

Huh, I am hearing this source for the first time. I mostly used Mobilism and most of the apps from there used to come clean on Virus Total as well.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (4 children)

I think these guys might be able to hack through the process and get stuff done and think getting other people to follow them will be trivial as well. But just because they didn't mess up, doesn't mean other people won't. A large majority might end up hurting themselves if they follow in their route.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Isn't medical tourism a thing in the US too; like you can fly to a developing country, get your treatment done by top specialists there and fly back to US and the cost would still be lower than what it would have taken to do in home country.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago

I just wrote it because it rhymed with the now memed 2004 anti piracy announcement You wouldn't download a car that was rightfully criticized.

 

You wouldn't pirate a medicine, would you?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

C++ was my second programming language after BASIC, if that still qualifies as a programming language these days.

[–] [email protected] 92 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)
31
submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

A decade old longread from Wired that also shines a light on how trivial it was to bypass mechanisms of some online services back in the day.

(I am not sure if Wired has this paywalled because I had the BPC extension installed but it opens properly with it).

 

It is at a slightly cheaper value than YouTube Premium in my country and offers multiple games and few apps. Though the quality of the games are sometimes poor (I think Apple Arcade has some exclusive games for itself something which Play Pass lacks) and apart from apps like Tasker or KWGT, one would be hard pressed to find a good dev offering for apps in general.

 

This was seen on two phones, one running near Stock Android 13(Nokia G20) and another on an usual OEM customized variant of Android 14. When I sideloaded two different apps on each phone and attempted to give them Read notification access in the settings, a message came that it was restricted for my security and no way to bypass it.

Is this by design? I don't think it improves security in any way except to restrict the user to Play Store apps. And when ironically, the latter is plagued with so much quality control issues.

 

I had a Youtube Subscription mainly for using Youtube Music since last year. I used to be on Newpipe before that. However, the mobile app always made be feel uneasy. From not being able to choose system wide video quality for all Youtube videos at once[ seriously, there is like 'High' or 'Data Saver' only and explicit options are available per videos only ] to Youtube nudging me to purchase/join a Youtuber's membership channel really irked me [I just paid you, Youtube ; why are you constantly asking me to pay more for something I don't want? Why can't I disable those notifications ?]

I have some time remaining on my subscription but converted to Tubular [Newpipe fork with Sponsorblock] simply because it doesn't treat it's end users like trash. Even for YTM, I switched to Revanced version which offered endless customization. I could hide useless stuff like cast, share buttons to even functions in the Account tab. The granular control was so much that I was able to get a simplistic neat looking UI setup.

In the transition, I understand, I lose some of my playlists [under a throwaway Google account since I don't wish to risk my main one getting banned] but I understand that the only true way anyone controls their music[or any form of data is by truly owning them and streaming services don't allow that]. It might sound stupid, but I have been downloading music from Soulseek for some time and now just plan to transfer some of my favorites over to the SD card.

It was never a money problem. It was an experience problem. I paid money to Google and all I got was Shorts, Games and other stuff I didn't wanted. I never got customization or fine grained controls. The open source community offers that. Sorry for the long rant.

117
DRM Hell (discuss.tchncs.de)
 

Amazon Prime, like many services, is a DRM hell. It won't go to over 480p on Firefox on Linux at my end. However, instead of a rant, I am interested in why this is happening. Say, I rented the same film from YouTube Movies(Yes, such a service exists) and the quality can toggle all the upto 1080p but the same title on Prime Video is stuck at 480p. Is it because both services use two DIFFERENT kinds of DRM?

 

What is exactly Google Play System Update buried deep in the settings that can be manually updated and usually has a date of say, eg, May 1. Is it part of Project Treble from Google to decouple parts of OS from full system upgrades and make more Modular updates possible?

 

I used to use NewPipe back in the days of yore. Then I got Youtube Premium since it bundled in Youtube Music as well which I used. But the former's app on mobile is a shit show. Even after paying, you are asked to tip random creators, purchase merchandise[ which are shown as actual ads below videos] and join channels to access exclusive videos for more money. Basically pay money once, and then pay more money for more content.

Okay, one could argue atleast the above goes to a channel's creators and helps them. How would one say then that the Youtube app still doesn't have a systemwide option to choose video quality for all videos. New Pipe had that option long ago, but Youtube thinks it's user base are immature who need to be coddled with only two options like "High" and "Data Saver".

Despite having a Premium thing, I finally crossed over to a Newpipe fork Tubular [available on F Droid] today simply because the paying experience on Youtube Mobile is so bad. I can't fathom how bad it would be for free customers using the official app.

view more: next ›