irotsoma

It definitely depends on the application. But when you’re installing it, it should yell you if it’s installing other things. Otherwise you’ll have to look at the actual files it installed. There should ne documentation you can read on the site or st least it should have given you a readme to look at when you install it that has the info or links to a website with the info. There also should be a privacy policy in the application or on its site that describes what info it collects and tracks assuming this is from a reputable company. I’m just not familiar with it.

Anti-cheat software in either testing or gaming as well as employee productivity monitoring software (which is similar) generally has wide ranging permissions to do its job. So without doing research to confirm, I’d assume it has full access to everything you do across all applications, including when it’s not running in the foreground if it has background services running.

Personally, I never install that stuff on my primary operating system. I either use a dedicated device, dual boot, or if it is less sophisticated, use a virtual machine with only Windows and the necessary software. Of course I don’t use Windows for any personal computers anyway, too inefficient, and these days, too unstable and too much spyware built-in. I only use Windows on my work laptop these days which spys on me constantly to the point of crashing a lot as it collects all of its info when I use development software at the same time as WebEx or other necessary software.

If you want to know details, you need to look at the software they had you install as well as the dependencies it might install.

Still pretty limited set of supported devices, but it’s not really mean to be a defensive tool. Would be nice if this results in a way to detect and prevent your device from connecting to them, someday.

https://efforg.github.io/rayhunter/

Because you trade privacy for convenience. You could have a totally private communication platform, but you’d need to trade current IP addresses of your devices if there’s no users and no centralized routing server or at least a list of what device is associated what person.

It’s secure because people can’t read the content of your message. It’s not private because people can find you with your phone number or username and associate encrypted message packages with the sender and receiver so they know who you called and when, but not what you said.

So if your contacts are tech savvy enough to call you to get your current unique IPv6 address, something that Android doesn’t really support out of the box, and IPv4 often won’t work due to layers of routing caused by the world running out of addresses, or some other unique network identifier, and there are no firewalls between you or they’ve all been configured appropriately to allow the particular message protocol then you could send simple IP Messages to each other.

But as long as you want to use a system that routes messages and has a user database, that central location will always be a privacy hole.

Still are, though most often it’s heat rather than photons from sunlight since it’s not really necessary to disassemble hardware to that extent these days. And there’s available processing power to retry or do other error handing for any interference. Like running an unshielded Ethernet cable through a wall next to a power cable or through a room with heavy machinery can definitely cause data corruption from EM interference, but it will likely manifest as slowness rather than crashing a whole system. But there are lots of things that still cause computers or applications to crash that are related to stray energy, we just are so used to buggy software now that it rarely is noticed. 😁

Problem is many Android apps require Google Services and none of these will have it. So things like banking apps, parking payment apps, RCS text messaging apps, and even dating apps these days are going to refuse to run. Grapheneos has the advantage of the Google services sandboxed to reduce the impact of having it if you understand the implications, as well as features keeping other apps from talking to each other like how Facebook was caught using their apps to identify you to your web browser to allow every site you visit to identify you that has Meta provided services, even in incognito mode or when you opt out of or block their or third-party cookies.

Local backup already exists, just sync it somewhere yourself. This new feature basically is just syncing the backup to their servers and limiting the amount for free because it costs money to store a lot if data.

Edit: not sure if iOS is the same since that’s more locked down of a platform than Android, but at least on Android this holds true.

Generally, the issue is that services want to blend the data into a single stream, otherwise you end up with having to make a separate connection to and from each client, each at full bandwidth called full mesh. It becomes easier to just have the encryption to the server, then decrypt all the streams from all the participating clients, and merge them into a single stream outbound. Adjust and re-encrypt that single stream and send it. That also allows for more control to make low bandwidth or dynamically changing bandwidth clients work better as you can adjust one stream rather than hundreds of outbound to each client. But that means the server has access to unencrypted streams to analyze and record. This is called server mixing.

Previous software generally only supported one or the other of those options. Signal is one of the few that have developed the technology to allow for selective forwarding which is the third option. Their website details how this works and it’s open source so some others have adopted it or have come up with similar approaches.

I also switched to the Transit app for public transit after google maps stopped showing the option to start navigation and only allows for searching for routes now. Not sure why it stopped working. Maybe because I use GrapheneOS, but it worked on Graphene before with no issue, so could be a combination of policy changes and using a non Google OS or something. It works fine with driving and walking still.

For driving, I still can’t find a comparable app that has both real-time traffic which is essential in my city to avoid constantly fluctuating bottlenecks due to construction, traffic pattern changes, and rush hour traffic. I found one at one point, but it didn’t read the names of streets, just said “turn right” instead of “turn right on first avenue”. This is confusing when streets are close together or it’s treating alleyways as streets, etc. CoMaps is the best I’ve found if it had traffic routing.

It’s more that shipping cost is baked in. When shipping isn’t shown until the last step, it allows for displaying a lower price.

So if you’re shopping on Amazon and it’s $20 and on another site without free shipping it’s $15, and the you get to the checkout and there’s $5 handling fee in addition to the $5 shipping fee, it wastes a lot of time. Sure most put that in fine print somewhere, but it’s just easier if it’s baked in. Just like many foreigners don’t hate how the sales tax is tacked on in most of the US and can vary by city as well as by state.

Sure you know it’s coming, but it’s easier to have a single price that is going to be what you pay, so you can shop around easier.

I see return policies as essential for certain items.

For example clothing sizing is extremely inconsistent and many sizing charts just are plain wrong, especially for women’s clothes, and for me anyway, shoes, since I have a high arch, so if I have to pay a restocking fee and/or shipping fees every time I get something that doesn’t fit just right, it is a significant cost. For example with shoes, I often have to try on 20-30 pairs at both local and online stores for every one that fits.

Just an example, but this also extends to shipping damaged products especially if a seller is not willing to deal with shipping companies for damaged products and shipping companies won’t honor insurance if you weren’t the one who paid for it directly. So you have to catch the delivery person before they leave the damaged package and ask them to return it to the sender and hope the sender will give you a refund without needing to reverse charges.

And then there’s defective products. Often manufacturers don’t exist anymore, so you end up stuck with paying for a defective product. Amazon often covers this whereas many sellers who sell overstock and outdated products without telling the buyer, do not.

These are just a few reasons that a good return policy is necessary. Now Amazon has a huge issue where they often send open box items that someone else probably returned (not usually an issue with clothing as long as it wasn’t damaged, but can be an issue with warrantee or licenses for some items or , and you have to then get a new one, but at least that’s free. Many others will just blame you for it if the outer packaging wasn’t damaged, so they can’t get shipping companies to cover it assuming they’ll even go that far.

Secure and private or anonymous are very different things and nearly impossible to do both at the same time and still make it user friendly. Signal is secure, not fully private or anonymous.

If you have sellers with electronic components and sensitive skin products that sell direct, charge less than amazon, have free exchange and return policies, and don’t ship direct from Asia meaning possibly several months to receive as well as fluctuating tariffs, please share. These are just two examples I’ve not been able to find.

OK so this is just the client and there’s another server doing Jellyfin server. That changes things. So on the client side yes if all clients support all major codecs then you’re good. Issue comes if one client like a smart TV, this device, or older android device doesn’t have it, then you have to transcode or the client has to software decode which something like a raspberry pi or smart TV is going to have trouble with.

I don’t see that as any better. It’s just shifting the profit to another giant company and even worse, there’s no ubiquitous return or exchange policy if you receive items that are defective, not as advertised, don’t fit, etc.

I hate Amazon as much as anyone. But you can’t live in a post capitalist wasteland without those kinds of things. There is no ethical consumption in such a world and avoiding using one toxic company just required using another.

I use tracking sites for things I can wait for and I shop around, but they almost inevitably have the best prices especially after considering shipping costs, exchange policies for defective or damaged goods, and especially for clothes and shoes, return policies.

Tell me the other choice and I’ll happily change. I could do without the fast shipping. That’s just a bonus. But how do I get products for sensitive skin that the drug stores and Walmart don’t carry, or electronics parts, or reasonably priced clothes in my styles. And local specialty shops are going to require an entire day of travel and shopping for a single product or two.

To get everything I use out of necessity or projects, I’d end up using up all of my weekends to find and travel to places that carry them and likely have to spend a lot more money on them. A few I could order direct from the manufacturer or from specialty shops online, but the manufacturer sites are likely to cost more, plus shipping costs for one off items. The specialty shops online are often just owned by another corporate blob and if I end up with a defective product I often have to pay to ship it back assuming they accept returns at all, which with cosmetic products they often don’t, even if it’s defective or opened. And if it’s damaged in shipping or stolen, the recipient can’t file a claim with the shipping company and getting many online shops to do it for you often requires hours on the phone to get through layers of escalations.

So, yes, it’s a choice. But the alternatives require a significant investment of time and money. Given my job requires around 10 hrs per day and being neurodivergent, I often don’t have time or energy, and then wouldn’t be able to do anything fun. Not to mention, I definitely don’t get paid enough. So, no not technically 100% necessary, but unfeasible not to, at least for many of us.

Do you need it to do realtime video transcoding of high resolution video (>1080p)? If so, you may need a video card to do it efficiently. Otherwise, that should be more than sufficient. I know others have recommended a raspberry pi, but I don’t think jellyfin supports arm CPUs, though I could be wrong. So you’d have to run it in a virtualization layer and that would increase the hardware resources and may or may not be OK on a pi, but likely would not be as energy efficient as a pi usually is and almost definitely will have trouble with realtime transcoding.

To get around the realtime transcoding you can either make sure your devices support the codecs of the videos you are playing, or you can use a separate device to do batch transcoding of the files before giving them to jellyfin. I haven’t implemented jellyfin yet, though it’s next on my list, so I’m not sure if there are ways to do background transcoding inside it.

If you’re not hung up on Jellyfin, check whatever streaming software for it’s hardware recommendations, but Jellyfin is pretty good overall from my playing with it. It’s not the lowest resource using system, though.

Amazon is pretty necessary in much of the US. Between big corporate stores like Walmart and Dollar General and online shopping it’s really difficult for smaller stores to exist anymore. If there’s any market, the big stores will come in, undercut whatever they sell, push the small stores out and then probably just go bankrupt and leave the area without anything. And the fact that much of the US is rural and our infrastructure, especially in rural areas, is old and/or underdeveloped means it could take hours to get to a store and back. And because the big stores only really carry the basics, it’s really difficult to get your hands on stuff that’s less common. That’s where online shopping fills the gap.

I live in a medium sized major city that doesn’t allow Walmart to get subsidies their business model relies on to buy up land and buildings on the cheap to help take over markets, and does at least try to keep space for small businesses, and I even have a hard time finding stuff. But doesn’t help that even in most of the major cities, transportation is crap because politicians are owned by the fossil fuel companies and so public transit can’t get much tax money and traffic is insane not to mention the gas prices are quite high here compared to much of the US even. And the property is super expensive primarily because so much prime real-estate is unoccupied by investors to keep the prices high. So its difficult to set up a specialty shop. I’m sure many other cities have similar issues, but I’m most familiar with this one.

As for Amazon in particular, I used them primarily because their return policy is the best and these days all of the online shops are as likely to send you a used or broken item as a new one and secondarily because at least in my city, the shipping is pretty quick. No other online stores can match it. But that said, they have started to move away from carrying quality brands and primarily sell cheap junk since that’s where the profit is especially with their ability to price based on data they’ve mined from data brokers about you. That’s why sites like Keepa and camelcamelcamel are essential to check and track actual prices they offer in addition to doing comparison shopping.

I don’t really get how that’s helpful for ICE. They don’t investigate crime really. Shouldn’t they know a person’s immigration status based on their public records? What do they need private communications for to prove a person is in the country illegally?

This is a rhetorical question. I know why they want it, just it doesn’t make sense for them to spend our money on for the things they’re supposed to be tasked with doing.