Wise words. Another one for the block list.

Can pagers receive text messages? I thought they are closed ecosystems, basically?

Quark is a uniquely German thing that I’m having trouble replicating ever since I moved abroad.

It’s extremely thick, much more solid than yoghurt, and completely unsweetened. Mixing a box of unflavored cream cheese with a shot of milk and a pinch of salt is what I’ve been using instead, which gets close enough.

It’s Instagram with no content or algorithm. To me it’s an empty page, because I have no idea how to subscribe to things that I would like.

I tried keywords like fun, sketch, photography etc etc, but those are catch-all phrases that get too much shit, and narrow keywords are so specific, I see next to nothing.

Not if you’re a company, since in order for it to remain free you need to disable certain telemetry files, and in some office there’s bound to be a person fucking things up, and then you’re on the hook big time.

So the ban is reaching exactly the people it was set out to reach. Good.

Reads more like the investment tanked and he’s hoping for a recovery.

Shorting sounds nice though, long term.

Yeah that’s what I’m used to from Germany as well, but seems like they either never implemented it in Asia, or got rid of it a long time ago.

Do they still exist? In China and Malaysia where I’ve been living for the last 10 years there are only QR codes at the items that you can scan with the IKEA app.

If you don’t want to install the app, all you can do is take photos of the labels, or bring your own pens.

I do the same with youtube and adblock, so I guess that qualifies.

Yeah I’m done with spotify.

Back when it was a fiver, I could get the appeal and had a subscription myself.

At 11 bucks it comes at the price of a CD per month, every month. I didn’t buy that much music annually, ever. So right now we are entering a territory where streaming is exceeding the price of my regular music consumption patterns. I’ll go back to buying physical media and torrenting whatever old stuff is no longer available and can’t be found on ebay.

Fuck 'em with a cactus.

Whatsapp uses end to end encryption and is far from as intrusive as wechat.

I’m in China and have to use that piece of crap. So here’s how I locked it down:

1. Root your phone with Magisk. There’s no way around it.
2. Install Storage Isolation (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=moe.shizuku.redirectstorage) and deny access to all folders.
3. Install ApOps (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=rikka.appops) and set pretty much everything to deny or ignore (ignore means the app receives the information “permission granted”, but no data is provided, in case some permissions are “mandatory”). If you intend to use wechat to exchange voice messages or make video calls/send photos, the “use microphone” and “use camera” functions would be required. In a similar fashion the location access if you intend to use the location sharing feature.
4. Be acutely aware that wechat is not encrypting messages, neither end to end nor in the server communicaton. Everything you say can (and probably will) be read and archived. Don’t say anything confidential or critical there.

And yeah really, try to convince your wife girlfriend to use signal instead. Or hell, even whatsapp is miles ahead.

My wife is Chinese as well, so even after we leave here she’ll be using wechat to stay in touch with family, no way around it, but using messengers more commonplace in other countries is definitely better. Personally I will move wechat to another phone once we’re out. For now that’s not feasible as it’s too much integrated into every function of life here.

Terrible, of course. Especially since they are aiming the service to improve sign-up reliability in countries that block telegram, acting as a relay exposes yourself. Carriers in China (where I live) and other questionable countries are actively snooping around, and since SMS are generally unencrypted, the simplest heuristic would figure out what you’re involved in and start a very serious investigation.

On top of that, phone numbers in many countries are also unique logins to a number of services (again, here in China you need it for literally everything, it’s THE number one digital footprint), and attackers could use the information for bruteforce/wordlist attacks on known services, or use them for social engineering.

As much as I like the idea of helping others sign up who don’t have the means to acquire a foreign phone number, I would never willingly commit to that.

No, but you better ditch brave and set up Firefox. They did some shady shit in the past and tried to deny or cover it up.

https://lemmy.world/post/2846523