And you didn't understand what I said. While you can not monitor closed source at the code level bjt you definetly can monitor their behavior. Even the automatic threat protection from the playstore protect function is worth more than the measly amount of people looking through smaller projects codebases.

I hate Google with a passion, but with all their control over android devices, they are more than capable of scanning apps for malicious behaviour and automatically remove them. These few apps in the article are the 0.01% of malicious apps that their algorithm didn't detect.

If we are talking about bigger projects with hundreds of thousands or millions of downloads, than this may be true. But smal scale projects have so few people actively looking through them that even to automatic scan done by the playstore has a higher chance of catching malware. It doesn't even have to be bad intent, two years ago there was a virus propagating trough the Java class files in minecraft mods which reached the PCs of quite a few devs before it was caught.

I don't dislike FOSS, a lot of the apps I use come straight from github, but all this talk about them beeing constantly monitored by third parties is just wishful thinking.

Zero effect on you but not the person sitting next to you or the one behind you.

This sounds like you think you could convince anyone of your cause by doing this, but that's just wishfull thinking. The only favor you gain is from people already supporting said cause, everyone else is somewhere in the range of mildly annoyed to absolutely fuming.

Vanadium is purposefully made this way. It tries to minimise profiling by making your actions noise in a big mass of users. That only works if you use the standard config without anything to discern you.

Mull is the other extreme of this. They try to eliminate fingerprinting by reducing the amount of trackable things in your browser.

It's hard to say what really is the better option. You can't completely eliminate fingerprinting, and the more you try, the more you will stick out of the masses.

How is that even supposed to work? These search engines need per definition massive databanks to search through. Either you need your own crawler and indexer which is more than just inefficient, or you are limited to a relatively short list of curated static results.

If the game is DRM free on GOG it usually only has the Steamworks DRM on steam. That one is so easy to remove that you might aswell call it DRM free since its only use is to make publishers think their game is protected.

There is nothing that Valve could change about this with the current way games are licensed.

All your Steam account is is a collection of lifetime leasing contracts between you and the seller. Steam already forces third parties to give you liftime access even if the game is pulled from the store page, but that contract gets voided once one of the two parties ceases to exist, be it the buyer or the studio that sells the game.

Legally binding the games to your account instead of you also isn't possible since in most countries you either have to be a real person or a registered entity to form contracts.

Have they really managed to make an app now? I'll have to look it up if so.

Do you use the VPN on your ipad or the graphenos phone with the Hotspot? Hotspot is pretty much never routed through any VPN since no app on your phone is allowed to intercept the traffic.

Afaik it's possible to set up with root permissions, but you will need third party software to do so.

It works as advertised, I'd say. The Email service works fine, no issue to date.

The VPN has the same issues as others, meaning some sites block some servers entirely, and others force captcha after captcha at you. There also was the problem with missing portforwarding options in the app (at least on Linux), but that is fixed now. Overall it works fine, never had too much of a problem with it, at most had to switch servers if my connection got blocked from the site.

The calendar is a calendar, end of sentence.

Proton pass is a bit weird. They don't offer any desktop app, you can only use the website or the browser plugin. There is no benefit I could think of over bitwarden and I'd even recommend bitwarden more than proton for password management. But it does work without problems.

No idea about proton drive. Last time I used it you had to manually upload each item into the online safe. But from a quick look it seems like there is a desktop app now that offers automatic backups/uploads.

For me it's worth it since even the recent news articles show that they keep their privacy promises. But I also got the money to spare for it. You could get all functionalities for less money and to about the same level of privacy, but it takes more effort and time. It's for you to decide if the convenience is worth it.

Yeah, but it lies.

No it doesn't, at least not if the update isn't already a month overdue

But a future Windows update will reset them without informing the user.

I've done 3 years worth of updates in one day cause I needed too. Pretty much everything was reset including registry edits, but the privacy toggles were one of the few things that stayed persistent. Maybe it's a EU special feature (wouldn't be the first), but at least here they won't change back silently.

Not really, it still doesn't answer the question as the main thing is still unclear.

Is the first chicken egg the one the chicken hatched from or the first egg a chicken laid.

Both can be argued as correct.

I've spent ways less time editing the windows registry than I've spent trying to fix all the dual monitor bugs with linux.

Windows issues/changes are a 30 second google search away, linux issues often enough require a 1 hour deep dive into multiple forums.

Proton upheld their claim of privacy, no Emails were disclosed. But they never promised anonymity cause that's something they simply can't do under the Swiss law. If you willingly give them your other mail addresses or contact details, they have to comply. Sure they could have denied the Spanish authorities, but it takes less than a week to get a court order for things like this.

It's the implementation that will probably annoy me the most. If the ingame radio station in GTA tried to sell me coke or Pepsi I probably wouldn't even notice since it fits in with the world. But knowing EA they will probably put them in as additional loading screen that you can't skip.

I agree with the first part (not that it should mean they can just extract more money out of us), but the second part is something I simply don't believe.

Don't get me wrong, I know budgets have increased, but the dev cost definitely didn't by remotely the same amount. Devs wages are pretty stagnant since the initial silicon Valley boom and new tools at our disposal have made it a lot easier to create games, be it for indi devs or the corporate giants. Sure, graphics got fancier, but so did the readily aviable stock assets. High end work stations cost maybe a bit more, but they are a drop in the bucket in the 100+ million budgets of today.

What has increased on the other hand is the amount of executives/managers and their wages. In addition to that marketing has gone up a lot, probably over half of most budgets go there. The growing corporate overhead with its archaic structures also eats up a lot.

If we go purely by dev cost, prices should go down since the overall profit would increase with the greater amount of players. Everything else is corporate overlords throwing shitloads of money at a mediocre game to make it seem worth something.

I'd be somewhat ok with Kernel anticheat if they would work, but the simple truth is that they do nothing of value. COD has Kernel anticheat with Riccochet and is flooded with cheaters. Valorant has only slightly less cause riot updates Vanguard more often.

But guess what, it usually takes 1-2 days for new cheats to reach the relevant forums, maybe a few days more until they are more widely aviable. At most cheaters have to spend another 5€ every 6 months, but that's it. They don't care, the amount of money spent on accounts every other month is already way higher.

The only two things anticheat like vanguard protects you from is script kiddies that google "valorant cheat .exe" and Linux only players. And the former could just as well be filtered out without Kernel level.

Whoever developed the Gollum game?

It was Daedalic Entertainment and their older and more indi titles are fine. Since they closed down their dev team after gollum, I don't think you need to avoid them.

You can't, end of discussion.

The most that the city or the police can do is issuing them a small fine for the noise complaints. The only one with even an ounce of power here is their landlord, but then it depends heavily on your country/state.

Lemmy is a nice place if you share the same values, but once your opinion differs even somewhat, you won't have that good of a time.