When Microsoft first proposed something like that a couple decades ago, it was widely seen as the nightmarish corporate power grab it was. Even mainstream, non-techy publications were critical.

I believe this is how the higher levels of Android’s Play Integrity system work.

It is.

How the fuck did this become acceptable?

I never said anything to that effect. The ancestor comment discussed running Signal for Android inside an Android emulator for account creation, after which it could be linked to Signal desktop.

Someone could presumably fork Signal desktop to allow the scenario you’re describing, but I’m not aware of any such efforts.

I imagine search of server backups would be pretty hard to do securely. Better management of locally stored media would be nice, but you can sort by size, export, and delete media from inside the settings.

If anyone is actually going to get that right in a mainstream product, it will probably be Signal.

A phone number that can receive SMS is required, but it doesn’t have to be associated with the device that’s running Signal last I checked.

It would be nice if the backups were split into time-indexed files so I could move the old parts to cheap external hard drives and only keep recent backups on my expensive phone storage.

I never set auto expiry and often search messages. Sometimes it’s because I want to find a specific fact or datum from two years ago; other times it’s just for a reminder of a memory. On occasion, if the history wasn’t there, people might remember something important differently.

There seem to be two main arguments put forth here:

1. F-Droid does not thoroughly audit the apps it distributes, so they might include bad behavior that is not initially obvious.
2. It is theoretically possible to provide a package to F-Droid that does not match the source code it claims to be based on.

To which I respond:

1. No app store thoroughly audits the apps they distribute. You must ultimately decide if you trust the developer enough to run their app, or audit the code and build it yourself.
2. This creates a theoretical opportunity for a developer or maintainer to upload a package that doesn’t match its purported source code, but it’s possible to check for this manually, and to automate that process. It’s likely anyone exploiting this would be caught and their reputation tarnished. It comes back to the first point: do you trust the developer or maintainer enough to run their app?

If you have average security needs, you probably don’t need to worry about this. If you have reason to believe someone well-resourced and dangerous wants to compromise your phone, you should probably be extremely selective about what apps you install and where you get them.

That’s a little less surprising to me. Organizations are likely to pick competing communication software if Teams is not available to everyone. Web browsers are generally interoperable after Microsoft lost the war to popularize one that wasn’t.

I’m pretty neutral about the mere existence of software I’m not interested in using.

Microsoft Edge was a recent surprise. It’s surprising both that Microsoft would create it and that any Linux users would run it. Since its Chromium based, there should be no need for developers to test Edge separately.

It is increasingly unrealistic to entirely prevent children from having unsupervised access to internet-connected devices from a young age, but attempts to make it impossible for anyone under 18 to access porn are equally unrealistic, and often far worse than the problem they purport to solve.

With good parenting, the possibility of accessing porn won’t harm most kids. It’s not just about keeping them away from it, but about teaching healthy and realistic attitudes toward sex.

I agree, and I think my solution in combination with some filter lists addresses that problem pretty well. Very few eight year olds will have the ability or desire to bypass restrictions like that to look at porn.

Kids can’t use computers, and that’s not good for the world. If teenagers figure out enough about how the computer works to get around the parental controls and watch porn, I consider that a net win.

I don’t actually care if teenagers sophisticated enough to do that see porn.

In a January blog post, it said age verification should take place on users’ devices, such as through their operating system, rather than on individual, age-restricted sites.

The details of this are potentially problematic, as they could preclude the use of open source browsers and operating systems.

It would be great to standardize an HTTP header that says the user is underage, which could be sent by any OS/browser combination that has suitable parental controls.

A phone is a computer. A smartwatch is a computer. The computers running a car’s infotainment and engine control systems are computers.

With all the ads that get shoved to our eyeballs, looking forward to the options.

Blocking ads on Youtube is fairly easy. uBlock Origin does it without any tinkering, for example.

There were also reduced fuel economy requirements for trucks and off-road vehicles, which contributed to the rise of SUVs.

You can’t. You can, however tell if a particular URL is believed to be dangerous by any of several organizations that track such things.

Your browser probably has something built in; Firefox and Chrome do, for example. If you attempt to visit a known-bad URL, the browser will warn you and make you click through the warning before you do. Some other comments in this thread suggest third-party services that will also do this, and may even attempt to check the content found at the URL for known malware.

If I do not have or cannot easily get root access to a computer, I don’t really own it.