There already exists a “Google Play licence check” permission apps can use to verify whether or not the app has been bought on a Google account that’s present on the device.

If people can crack the app to remove this (which is a thing for some of the popular apps), they’ll also figure out how to patch this out. This is strictly useful for free apps, and only serves to make it unviable to distribute verifiably clean apk’s outside of Google Play (so rip APKMirror)

It isn’t. I’ve personally had it happen where a relative who went to some country that bans video calling and VoIP (except for the unencrypted/honey pots of course) and used Signal to call people back home (only because I told them it would be unblocked due to censorship circumvention). Despite everyone in my household being familiar with WhatsApp, I was the only who did video calls with them and had to share my device so others could also call them. Even when I’d set up Signal on one of their devices, they still complained it was to difficult to use, insisted I’d uninstall it when the trip was over and used it a grand total of once.

I honestly think it’s partly to do with the nerd factor. This same relative turned out to also have installed the backdoored unencrypted app to chat with others, but hid it from us due to me being vocal about not using that. These other households, also WhatsApp based, managed to install, sign up and use that just fine. They also couldn’t be bothered to set up Signal for some reason, yet gladly accepted the suggestion to use the honey pot.
I think that these people in my circle don’t care about security at all and only care about the platform. If it’s “secure”, “private” and “censorship resistant” and they haven’t heard of it until I, the “techie”, explain the technological benefits of it, they’ll think it’s a niche “techie” thing they’re not nerdy enough to understand. If I get them to use it, they’ll keep thinking this whenever something is slightly different than WhatsApp and be frustrated. Meanwhile they can get behind the honey pot because “WhatsApp doesn’t work there, this is just what people in that country use”. It appears normal because “normal people” use it all the time, and they’ll solve any inconvenience themselves because “normal people (can) use this, and I’m normal too”.

Any and all personal gain becomes mutual gain.

• If you don’t intend to cheat anyone, the party you’re interacting with gains in a similar “amount” as you
• If you achieve personal gain at the cost of someone else, their net gain will be even greater than yours
• In case there’s no direct party you’re interacting with while gaining (such as you running a red light when no one’s around to be inconvenienced), society as a whole gains

The Netherlands only remains “neutral” because of the clause that forces companies to detect unknown CSAM and/or “grooming” material (last time I checked). It’s only a matter of one or two countries that can make the difference, with most neutral countries probably having similarly “minor” objections.

It could’ve been. You and me probably would’ve blocked ads regardless of their content for various reasons, but I’d imagine that Google wouldn’t have reached this critical mass prompting this scheme if their ads were properly vetted.

The technologically literate capable of installing ad blockers are the minority, and those who’d do it out of principle are a smaller subset of those

Firefox is looking to implement Manifest V3 to keep extension feature parity with Chromium, but their version will not ban the one API that adblockers use. So Firefox will eventually be V3 compliant

Idk why, but this is the hardest I’ve laughed at an internet post in a long time

The app doesn’t even come with any removed channels?! What’s next, ban VLC because it can play illegal videos? Ban Windows because it can connect to the internet and play pirated streams? Ban eyesight because you can watch an unlicensed broadcast? Removed politicians

Deliberately broken by default?

Years ago I used to use an app called “AdSkip” or something along those lines that used the accessibility API to automatically mute and skip all YouTube ads. I’d imagine the screen black-out would be trivial to add on top

On my Android 13 device browsers save in sd card/Android/data/com.my.browser. This folder can only be accessed on the default, hidden file manager or on a PC. Not even read-only access, but straight up nothing. At this point I just don’t bother directly downloading to my sd card anymore, I just download to internal storage and move it all to sd card/Downloads every so often

It took me so long to figure out what you meant about accounts and stuff until I remembered you were talking about your own product. I get it now. Do you think it’s a similar situation here, where the site is reliant on these third-party cookies to function at all?

How would blocking the pop-up be violating the law, though? If the pop-up doesn’t show, you’re not able to agree to cookies. You don’t provide your explicit consent, therefore the website must assume you don’t want to be tracked. The presence of the pop-up shouldn’t be changing anything for people not willing to opt in, should it?

Or perhaps they’re self-aware and have set it up to only opt you out by filling out the form, which you can’t do if it isn’t there. Or they just want you to agree to those “required” cookies? I don’t know.

It does? That explains why in the video the person was able to play incomplete dumps after some tweaking. I know that on their website they recommend you create a full backup that includes multiple cartridge-specific identifiers if you want to use “online mode”. From my limited outsider perspective I’d always assumed these were required to be present for the Switch to even recognize something was in the slot, as the slot uses a seperate circuit and chip to ensure validity before passing it through to the Switch. I never thought of the possibility of them including a (currently) valid ID for you!

Unless the developers have managed to obtain an official private key from some publisher in order to digitally sign their certificates, this thing really isn’t gonna survive long, is it? Nintendo could ban the cert (or, if it’s bogus, enforce stricter verification) and/or flag everyone using it (maybe even retroactively?). Why would they even make it have an identifier in the first place, since they already want you to provide your own and all it does is give Nintendo something to ban?

Sorry for my rambling by the way

I’ve setup the original Tachiyomi with the third-party repo so I can add new sources to J2K for now. Screw Caca-o entertainment.

That said, I’ve never heard of manwa before. I’m torn between deliberately pirating their work just to spite them, and not ever wanting to do anything with any of their works in any capacity, ever. I want the most efficient way possible to make them cry so I can drink their salty tears

I already do this whenever I’m not on my phone. The problem is that Google has already started taking action against Invidious on Github and that they appear to be blocking and/or rate limiting Piped servers periodically. I don’t think they’ll just leave us be if we fully migrate over there

I always do this and your comment specifically made me realize how that could look to other people.

At least sometimes they get to see a flash of a Word document when I’m half a second too late

Previous version did. Converted a friend’s laptop from home (oem provided) to pro and my own from home (oem provided) to enterprise

Stable Diffusion when you ask it to generate a house: