smeg

@[email protected]

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smeg,

I think it’s a different post linking a different article about the same story

smeg,

“Oh, sorry mate, this is just Speak With Dead, the ‘welcome back’ was just a pleasantry. You’ll be heading back where you belong once the paperwork’s done.”

smeg,

Don’t make me tap the sign!

You can create a free trial of prime, grab the games, then delete it if you don’t want to give any money to Amazon

smeg,

It’s not about what the service is trying to do, it’s just about whether or not there’s a full game you can get for free! I don’t like Amazon either but I’m not trying to change the world here, it’s just about games that people might not know they can get at no extra cost.

Marketing Company Claims That It Actually Is Listening to Your Phone and Smart Speakers to Target Ads (www.404media.co)

A marketing team within media giant Cox Media Group (CMG) claims it has the capability to listen to ambient conversations of consumers through embedded microphones in smartphones, smart TVs, and other devices to gather data and use it to target ads, according to a review of CMG marketing materials by 404 Media and details from a...

smeg,

This seems fishy. Beyond being illegal in a lot of places, if this was actually possible without people noticing (e.g. detecting massive data usage of audio being uploaded or native battery/CPU usage of it being processed locally) then we’d know about it!

My first thought is that this is the classic tech sales bullshit of claiming your product can do something impossible in order to sell it. What’s most confusing is the statement from the bottom of the article:

“CMG businesses do not listen to any conversations or have access to anything beyond a third-party aggregated, anonymized and fully encrypted data set that can be used for ad placement. We regret any confusion and we are committed to ensuring our marketing is clear and transparent,” the statement added.

So are they admitting it was bullshit or what?

smeg,
  1. Most people using a service don’t want it to suddenly explode with new users who might not behave in the way that old users like
  2. Facebook don’t want to just be another instance and have a lovely time with everyone, at best they want to seek profit, and based on every other way they seek profit it will be by tightly controlling the experience, filling it with ads, and selling off user data (i.e. all things that most of us came here to escape from)

In summary we know everything Facebook does is pretty evil, it’s “super obvious” that this will therefore be pretty evil too, right?

smeg,

One way I can think of is by being such a big player that they dominate and can thereby exert their will. For example, lemmy.world is the largest lemmy instance and we’ve seen a few communities on other instances dry up in favour of the ones on the big server. Now imagine that server is a hundred times bigger than the next largest and the people in charge have an active financial interest in moving people to their platform - if they play it carefully (and I’m sure they’ll be employing people to think about how to do this) they can shift the existing content into a place they can control it.

smeg,

I’m sure they have a plan (otherwise they wouldn’t be doing it!), maybe it relies on using their app which also has your real name and phone number, maybe it’s for some legal loophole which means all fediverse users technically agree to their terms just by federating. I don’t know what they’re up to, but given their previous behaviour I think it’s safer not to even let them try!

smeg,

That was just an analogy, I believe Threads is targeting federation with Mastodon rather than Lemmy

smeg,

Looks like it. The general consensus was that the Destiny one yesterday was basically a game, but I think this is pretty clearly not!

smeg,

Have a look at some of the threads on !privacyguides for comparisons, my read on it is that GrapheneOS is trying to be as secure as possible which brings a lot of privacy with it, and CalyxOS is a bit more permissive because they’re just trying to degoogle. What this means is that only Pixels meet GrapheneOS’s standards whereas CalyxOS will run on other devices, and CalyxOS uses MicroG to spoof Google Play Services while GrapheneOS comes without any but allows you to install a sandboxed version of GPS if you need it.

You can have a read though GrapheneOS’s website to get the pretty in-depth details on what it does, why it does it, and how to do it yourself. I’ve been using it for a couple of years now and I’d recommend it, happy to answer any questions if you need!

smeg,

I’ll throw out my usual plug for Cryptomator, lets me use Dropbox’s free offering and they can’t datamine a thing because it’s encrypted before they get their grubby mitts on it

smeg,

FYI the desktop version is completely free to use and relies on the desktop sync apps of the various cloud storage providers, the android version does cost about £8 but I believe it hooks directly into the providers’ APIs so you don’t need to install their apps. The free experience was good enough for me that I was willing to fork out for the app, much cheaper in the long run than paying a monthly sub!

smeg,

True, the safest data is the one that never goes online! But realistically it’s a tradeoff between risk and convenience - you can self host your own off-site backup but it’s a lot less effort to use a cloud storage provider, both are much less risky than having no backup and losing everything if your drive fails or your house burns down. At least this way I need the provider or my PC to be compromised and the encryption to be broken. TBH if quantum computing suddenly starts breaking encryption everywhere then we’ll all have bigger problems like the collapse of every bank in the world!

smeg,

Is this an expansion bundle, an actual game, some levels, some cosmetics, or what?

smeg,

OK, in that case I’ll take this down if it’s not actually a free game

smeg,

Free to play though, as in it’s always free so we don’t need a post here too grab it while you can, right?

smeg,

In-game items, cosmetics, expansions and the like aren’t really what this community is for, I’m trying to keep it to full games that you can claim. There are so many free to play games that give away extras and I don’t want that to drown out the full games. Are you alright if I remove this post?

smeg,

Oh interesting, so is this the full game then? Or is it just a little extra bit of demo?

smeg,

OK fair, well if people think it’s a proper game then happy to leave it up!

Is it worth playing casually on your own or is it one of those games where you need a group and to devote your life to it?

smeg,

I assume it’s not epic’s normal weekly giveaway as they usually do that on Thursday, but the consensus seems to be that this is basically a proper game so happy to leave it up

smeg,

If we only had a few more programmers

Poor, poor Epic, a tiny startup barely making it to the next month with their 3000 employees and $5B annual revenue

smeg,

Don’t besmirch the good name of Ling’s Cars like that, it’s like a lighthouse in a sea of corporate blandness!

smeg,

I picked up Red Steel on the Wii for £1. It has not aged well.

smeg,

It’s a group check and unless there are some wildly different modifiers between the PCs then it looks to me like at least half of the party passed, therefore the party passes, no worries.

smeg,

True, but OP’s other comments strongly imply that they’re playing 5e!

smeg,

People often post memes to discuss things that happened in their games and I see a lot of rules misunderstanding in the comments, I hope my comment helped some people out. As for the quality of image captioning? Reasonably good meme.

smeg,

Plenty of services still unfortunately rely on SMS for 2FA, so we’ll still need a client to receive them. Doesn’t really need to be able to send them though, I don’t think any human has sent an SMS message deliberately for about 12 years!

smeg,

My condolences. But seriously though, what if you want to have a group chat, or send a file?

smeg,

So how do you have group chats or send files with your non-Signal contacts?

smeg,

Blimey, you and I have wildly different use cases, I don’t think I’ve sent an email to someone who wasn’t a business for decades!

smeg,

SMS doesn’t have group chats does it? Unless your client is just sending the same message to everyone and grouping together the responses?

smeg,

SMS doesn’t have group chats does it? Unless your client is just sending the same message to everyone and grouping together the responses?

smeg,

They also make pacts with powerful evil beings to use their abilities for questionable goals (jobs) and have twisted the purity of magic into a foul and dark tongue (javascript)

smeg,

Snapchat is still a thing? The novelty wore off for me literally a decade ago!

smeg,

More info on Steam

smeg,

If you missed this late one then the prologue seems to always be available for free

smeg,

We’ve not really had key giveaways like this in this community before, the usual stuff is generally time-limited giveaways from providers rather than individual copies of games. Clearly this has gone down relatively well, are people happy about having this kind of post here, or should it go to one of the other gaming communities?

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