It Takes Two is such a fun game to play with a friend. Highly recommended.

Google‘s or Apple‘s push notification servers turns out that doesn’t matter so much from what I undertstood.

Can you elaborate? It’s my understanding that push notifications are only used to trigger Signal to check if there are messages - the message data and who/what triggered it is not being sent to Google/Apple. If you don’t trust push notifications, you can always use a De-google’d phone and the Signal APK which will fallback to polling the server; this will obviously impact battery life as the app needs to constantly be checking for new messages.

OP has posted (and re-posted) about Bluesky about 40 times in the last 48 hours. I’m down voting every single one. Quit shilling for billionaires.

yes, lets further divide what’s left of the US. /s

You don’t have to make an informed decision.

Correct, but you are still presented with a decision that adds friction to the onboarding experience. I was aware of how Mastodon works and that I could migrate and it took me a while to create an account because I didn’t want to “waste my time”. I can’t imagine a regular user being prompted to “select an instance”, decide to go with the first one they see, and registration is either closed or invite only. That’s a huge barrier to entry compared to being forced into a single login that is always open.

Meanwhile, if you’re worried about something you don’t align with, then you don’t even get that choice with a centralized platform like Bluesky. For example, I don’t align with any of this shit https://toad.social/@davetroy/113476788536250587

100000% agree with you. I would never create a bluesky account because of that. Unfortunately people aren’t as informed and most really just don’t care.

Having to make an informed decision is a barrier to entry. it took me a while because I wanted to make sure I didn’t join (and waste time/effort) something I didn’t align with.

check out Give up Baby Go by Peach Pit - if you like it you’ll probably like their discography.

You do realise they’re trying to become the crypto WeChat?

Any evidence to support this claim?

Because I’m aware Signal introduced a beta crypto wallet 7 years ago, which was originally only available in select countries, and has had minimal resources allocated to its continued development since. They make zero mention of crypto/payment on their website, and best of all, the crypto wallet isn’t even enabled by default.

Shit app with horrible management.

And here you expose your personal emotional trauma by lashing at at the most inconsequential “nothing”: the development of a privacy preserving crypto wallet, “feature complete” half a decade ago, and disabled by default in a privacy preserving messenger.

Signal is the best free, open source, E2EE messenger that doesn’t leak metadata and has decent UX. Best of all, its completely free to use. Simplex is a good contender, but the UX is still lacking.

Its in a very alpha state, but check out Zen browser. Based on Firefox, incredibly fast and customizable. Their github page: https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop

Not the same scale but Signal has a rather new approach for a messaging client. Completely free and funded by user donations - at least that’s the direction they’re trying to head as their initial seed funding starts running low. I’ve doubled my donations for Signal because I’d like to help prove that its a working model and I encourage everyone who uses it to donate, even if it’s just once. I’d love to see Firefox head in that direction where funding goes directly to the browser’s development. If I donate to Firefox today it might go to one of their dozen or so other pet projects that are unrelated to the browser. I think their side projects are great and glad they were able to do them while they had the cash, but funding is clearly drying up and they need a whole restructure to keep the browser alive.

100% agree.

If its not open source 1) you can’t fully trust/audit. and 2) you’ll be left in the dust should the company cease to exist as nobody can continue development.

If Firefox is not private enough use Librewolf. If you’re interested in something new and exciting give Zen Browser or Floorp (both based on Firefox) a spin.

First I’ve heard of browseraudit, thanks for sharing!

EDIT: For comparison I got the same scores on Firefox (duh) and the following on Edge.

Score :

• Passed : 392
• Warning : 39
• Critical : 0
• Skipped : 0

Bonus! Browserbench.org speedometer 3.0 scores:

• Firefox; version 132.0.1 (64-bit)): 13.9
• Firefox nightly; version 134.0a1): 18.6
• Zen; version 1.0.1-a.17 (Firefox 132.0)): 17.6
• Edge; version 130.0.2849.68 (Official build) (64-bit): 19.8

Not offending anyone, just unintentionally misrepresenting reality.

oh okay it works for you, I guess the developer claiming it will not work as well on Chrome as on Firefox was complete BS 🤡

if it was pure theater my friends and family who pay for all their streaming services would be able to share the content without permission from Netflix, Hulu, etc. That this is not the case disproves your claim that it’s pure theater. It does exactly what it aims to do and that’s raising the barrier to entry for piracy.

It doesn’t meaningfully impact the rate of cheating at all

So EA and every other anti-cheat software is paying developers to make software that does nothing? I don’t follow.

I believe uBlock will continue to work, just not as well.

No, it doesn’t. Cheating is still incredibly common on games that install malware

I never claimed it’s flawless or that it works in all cases. Think of it like antivirus software. Does it catch every and any malware that has and will ever exist? No. Does it still work to minimize all kinds of “bad shit” for normal end users? Yes.

If people care enough to cheat, they will cheat whether you have kernel access or not.

Lets rephrase that: If people care enough to commit crimes, they will commit crimes whether you have cops in your city or not - Your statements logical conclusion would be to get rid of police and crime investigators. Does that sound reasonable? It shouldn’t, and it doesn’t make sense against anti-cheat software for the exact same reason.

They use it for the exact same reason they use DRM. Because they can.

They use it because it solves a real-world problem that’s unsolvable by other means. There’s no real alternative because you have to trust the end-user, who, although may not be very likely to cheat, makes it extremely easy for a bad person to spoil the fun for everyone else.

I would love to live in a fantasy world where we don’t need cops, a government, rules, regulations, and anti-cheat software, but there are bad apples that will spoil the fun for everyone.

It also can’t possibly theoretically “reduce harm” when every single installation on every individual computer is many orders of magnitude more harm than all cheating in every game ever made.

I mean “reduce harm” in the strict sense of spoiling the fun in gaming. vulnerabilities happen with all software, this isn’t unique to anti-cheat.

Client side validation cannot possibly provide any actual security

Except it already does.

but even if that wasn’t the case and it was actually flawless

Nobody is claiming its flawless. This is the same anti-seat belt, anti-air bag, anti-mask, anti-vax argument. It “DoEsn’T WoRk iN eVeRy CaSe!” - that was never the intent. It’s about harm reduction.

it would still be unconditionally unacceptable for a game to ever have kernel level access.

Anyone with a technical background would agree with you, as do I, but the reality is anti-cheat software with kernel level access already exists and it works specifically because it has kernel level access.

Right, but the server is still receiving data from the client. If the client sends a plausible head shot, even though it was actually a miss, how would the server know? You still need client-side “police”, AKA anti-cheat software to mitigate a significant type of software-based hacks.

Now that I’ve typed it out, cops are actually a great analogy to anti-cheat software. Cops play the exact same role. Nobody wants them around until a crime has been committed. Cops/anti-cheat software don’t catch everyone, but the threat of being caught mitigates some crime/hacks, and for the cases where criminals/hackers are caught, society/gamers are better off for it.

In closing ACAB - I completely understand why we don’t want anti-cheat software on our computers, but there really is no better way; or if there is, I still haven’t heard it.