Rumor has it they’re expensive to manufacture. Add to that a small market and some patents and you get elevated prices.

Amazon might sell Kindles below cost because it drives book sales on their platform, but it’s hard for anyone but Amazon to make that model work.

This exploit involved Meta and Yandex apps running servers on your phone which Javascript embedded in trackers would communicate with. You’d have to both allow their trackers and have their apps installed to be affected.

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.

You can editorialize in the body on Lemmy; there’s no need to use a title that obscures what the link is about.

It passed the house with a veto-proof majority and the senate unanimously. It is almost certain to become law whether the governor signs it or not.

Isn’t Microsoft Authenticator just a password manager and TOTP app? You can replace it with Bitwarden and Aegis (or a dozen alternatives).

It was (and maybe still is) trendy to avoid gluten without any medical reason so it doesn’t surprise me you would encounter a lot of people lying about having an allergy or intolerance. Of course people with celiac disease can have a severe reaction to it, so it has to be taken seriously.

It usually wasn’t conversations that were at issue. People would engage in criminals acts, such as trading child sexual abuse media in large unencrypted group chats. Law enforcement would find links to those chats, join them, and observe criminal acts, leading to court orders to Telegram to disclose whatever identifying information it had about the offenders, such as phone numbers and IP addresses.

Telegram intentionally split storage of that kind of information across jurisdictions that do not cooperate so that it was effectively impossible to obtain orders for all of them. They bragged their marketing materials that they have never complied with a court order for user information. Taken as a whole, I see that as intentionally facilitating child abuse.

Signal’s approach is pretty much the inverse; rather than hoard data about users and shield people they know have done evil, Signal has ensured that it does not know the contents of any conversation, nor anything about users other than when they created the account and most recently accessed it.

Collaborating with Xitter is not the most distasteful thing Telegram has done. Its marketing model has been to consistently lie to people about being encrypted when that’s only true in very limited cases. It has also catered to criminals by attempting to make it difficult to comply with legal demands for information, while holding that information for its own purposes.

Signal, on the other hand is always encrypted and does its best to hold as little information about users as possible.

Also I don’t think it’s worth the effort to teach my parents yet another messaging app, like signal.

What is there to learn? Every popular messaging app has pretty much the same UI.

Thanks for the (partial) citation. That’s enough for me to believe someone important outside Google actually believes there’s a security concern rather than Google just using it as an excuse to be controlling.

That doesn’t mean I actually accept the concern as legitimate. I’d find a postmortem of a real data breach where that was a factor at least a bit persuasive, and there are enough countries with disclosure laws I’m inclined to think there would be some if it was a problem in reality.

This is a battle big tech cannot afford to lose.

I don’t like this framing. This is about privacy for all of us, and some of the most important providers of encryption software and encrypted services are nonprofits and small companies.

Are two infamous grifters grifting?

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’s interesting the number of comments about parenting advice as opposed to technology suggestion.

Was this unexpected? It has been my experience online that people are more likely to tell you what they think you need to hear than what you asked for.

There’s a hardware device with a companion app that can do charge limiting for any Android or iOS device if you’re so inclined. I haven’t used it; I use ACCA.

They’re all essentially adults now, so we don’t enforce it anymore, but they sometimes still do it anyway.

I know adults old enough they didn’t grow up with smartphones who exclude devices from their bedrooms by choice to have a healthier relationship with technology.

I don’t know you, your daughters, or their friends so I can’t make specific recommendations. What I can say is that it’s really common for teenagers who are sheltered from the dangers of the world to make more and bigger mistakes once they’re unsupervised than those who get a gradual introduction.

The two main dangers of social media for most people are:

1. Encountering assholes. For girls and women, there’s a high probability assholes will try to sexually exploit them. Since there are minimal consequences most of the time for sending “show me your tits”, they’re going to encounter that behavior eventually, and it may be easier to deal with for the first time when they have parental support.
2. Algorithmic rabbit holes. These can create the perception that problematic attitudes and behaviors are common and widely accepted when they are not. Having an open dialog with parents about anything from eating laundry detergent to Jordan Peterson can be a strong stabilizing influence.

I don’t think a closed Fediverse server is likely to serve as a first step in a gentle introduction because it has neither danger and presumably no strangers to talk to. The full Fediverse might work better, as it does offer interaction with strangers. Encounters with assholes will be less frequent than on corporate social media, and any rabbit holes will be much more self-directed.

That said, when one of them is likely within a year or two of leaving home or at least having full control of her digital life, if she wants to use some corporate social media, she’s probably better off doing that with some parental supervision and support than jumping in completely unprepared when you’re no longer in a position to prevent it.

Her friend group has a group text and she wants to keep up with everyone but doesn’t want to get the ding notifications constantly.

This seems like a good opportunity to learn how the notification settings on her phone work.

The behavior you’re describing does not sound like addiction. People with an addiction to a drug feel compelled to use the drug and become distressed if the drug is unavailable.

This is also not binge drinking by any commonly-used definition. Two pints of beer a day is generally considered moderate drinking, and you’re not doing it every day, only when beer is on sale. Research does seem to be converging on drinking alcohol at all being bad for your health, however the effect size for occasional moderate drinking is small enough that it has been difficult to measure.

What you are describing is impulsive behavior. When you see beer on sale, you can’t resist taking advantage of the offer. When you have beer, you drink it faster than you meant to. If you think about other areas of your life, can you find more examples where you struggle with impulse control?

Mobile check deposit is a moderately important use case in the USA. It would be possible to do that via the web, but banks usually don’t.

Regardless, any apps refusing to run will annoy users, and they would likely blame the one brand of phone where that happens instead of the app developer or Google who actually deserve the blame.