otter

Not from California, what happened? Why was the program implemented and then scrapped?

While digging through the new Android 14 QPR2 Beta 2 release, I managed to surface a hidden “scanning for deceptive apps” page under Settings → Security & privacy → More security & privacy. Once enabled, this feature will apparently check “app activity for phishing or other deceptive behavior.” This will apparently be done by scanning the app for certain signs of deceptive behavior. Google says that “scanning runs privately right on your device” and that if phishing or other deceptive behavior is found, “some app info is sent to Google Play Protect to confirm the threat and warn app users.”

Is that phishing? Sounds like a lot of work to make an entire phishing app when you could use a webpage

I haven't ever found Play Protect to be useful, but I'm fairly careful with what I download. Maybe others aren't that lucky

Maybe there's an inappropriate doodle on the window or something?

Same here, weird...

Maybe an OpenStreetMap app that supports WikiVoyage?

Yep, I also liked having the daily reminders because that's when I'd go and do them

2048 & Retro Stack are on fdroid, and there are other decent offline games on the playstore

The lemmy apps could probably implement something like Offline Reader for Reddit

Every country is dealing with this issue to some extent, and the same countries may also have state actors running their own fleet of sockpuppet accounts / astroturfing campaigns

Another downside to this (in addition to the sockpuppeting itself) is that populist leaders can accuse legitimate activists, journalists, and criticism as sockpuppeting/astroturfing.

Astroturfing: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

These experiments are pretty cool, and we can learn a lot about the animal's interactions without having to follow them around and hope they run into a scenario.

There's also this video by Tom Scott about "VR for locusts" which goes into why these experiments are cool

https://youtube.com/watch?v=KRIBVykhpC4

The downside is you need to be careful extrapolating since the VR setup might influence the results, but that's also true for most other observation methods in biological research

Very similar experience for me, I used to procrastinate a lot. I still do, but now it's less about not knowing how to approach the message.

I'd say I use it about 30% of the time, usually when the message or email is important or I want to make sure it won't be misinterpreted

Initially I used it a lot more, but after a while I got more confident that I could just do it myself. Often it would just say the same thing I said, but reworded in a more complicated way

Yep

It's better for privacy in that the platforms themselves collect only the information necessary for interactions to work, but 'worse' in that the information must be available openly.

Apps like Facebook and Tiktok request permissions to collect any data they can get their hands on, including sensors on your phone you might not have known about and extensive fingerprinting across the web browser. But they keep that data to use, abuse, and sell themselves. A random person on the internet can't access it, but powerful companies and government agencies get to do that instead.

Federated platforms only collect the data needed to function (ex. Upvotes, comments, and the accounts they're attached to), but then that data must be accessible to all instances in order for federation to work.

In my opinion it's still a lot better, but people should know how it works.

If you want to have a private conversation or group on the fediverse, there are separate platforms for those.

The specific breakdown was as follows

We recommend Mullvad Browser if you are focused on strong privacy protections and anti-fingerprinting out of the box, Firefox for casual internet browsers looking for a good alternative to Google Chrome, and Brave if you need Chromium browser compatibility.

So I think they only recommend Brave for those that need Chromium

For mobile browsers, I don't quite understand the differences between each. I personally use Mull when I need it, but Brave might be better on Mobile still?