NGram

The author’s take is a bit baffling to me. Trying to apply the US constitutional amendments against a foreign government institution to protect a US company is dumb. Those amendments strictly apply to the US government. As long as the company provides services in the UK, they are subject to UK laws on those services. If I start shipping firearms from the US to the UK it’d be perfectly reasonable for the UK to stop those packages at the border and destroy them. Network packets don’t just magically transcend borders.

The reasonable consequence of noncompliance is to block the service. Yes, that’s essentially paving the way for a national internet filter like China’s Great Firewall, but that’s why we have to fight the entire law not just the enforcement of it.

The Online Safety Act is horrible and a nightmare for so many reasons, but arguing it’s unenforceable on the grounds of being in a different country is just blatantly wrong.

They do use handheld and never define it, but I can hold my laptop with my hand so I’m not sure that’s necessarily a good way of disqualifying laptops. That also seems to strictly apply to the operating system (“runs an operating system designed […] for software applications on handheld electronic devices”), which might be a fun legal quagmire as well since Linux is designed for all sorts of platforms. If I install Linux on my (formerly) Windows laptop does it suddenly become a mobile device?

It does bring up another interesting niche of computers: handheld PCs, especially handheld gaming PCs. Does this law apply to Steam Decks?

This whole thing screams “written by tech illiterates” since it seems to ignore regular computers and only focus on phones when it’s all just variations of the same thing – form factor and the software running on top isn’t very relevant to whatever goal I presume they’re trying to achieve. If they really want to collect everyone’s ID, age, and other privacy-violating information they’d be better off doing it everywhere. But maybe I shouldn’t give out advice for speed running fascism…

That was my interpretation too, except not restricted to “modern” websites. It sounds more like any website, modern or not, JS or not.

The part that is funny in that situation is that probably means web browsers are considered “app stores”. From a technical standpoint that’s actually pretty accurate (though they also handle running the “app”, unlike a regular app store), but has the fun consequence of making web browsers also “app store stores”. Most browsers can be used without an account though, so I look forward to the dumb antics companies with large legal departments come up with for this one.

I’ve got no clue about legal documents, especially how they work in Texas, but this seems weirdly broad and with a pretty glaring loophole.

The weirdly broad part:

(2) “App store” means a publicly available Internet website, software application, or other electronic service that distributes software applications from the owner or developer of a software application to the user of a mobile device.

This sounds like any website suddenly becomes an app store as soon as it starts distributing software for a mobile device. So (ignoring my following point), if I suddenly post my new APK on my personal site suddenly it’s an app store!? Also aren’t websites software applications? That’ll be a fun one to fight out with browsers…

(4) “Mobile device” means a portable, wireless electronic device, including a tablet or smartphone, capable of transmitting, receiving, processing, and storing information wirelessly that runs an operating system designed to manage hardware resources and perform common services for software applications on handheld electronic devices.

This sounds like it includes laptops but not desktop computers.

The glaring loophole:

(a) When an individual in this state creates an account with an app store, the owner of the app store shall use a commercially reasonable method of verification to verify the individual’s age category under Subsection (b).

So if your app store does not require an account, you do not need to verify anyone’s age!? I’m all for it but that doesn’t seem to be in the spirit of the law. F-droid and my (example) personal-site-turned-app-store rejoice!

More features that are preparing for full federation support! Exciting!

Unfortunately Nvidia is also big tech so starving out (sort of) competitors doesn’t help get rid of douchebags. It actually has the added risk of giving some of the douchebags a monopoly.

Buying one of those AMD Ryzen AI Max chips actually makes more sense now…

a joyful proof of concept

Wow that’s a sad thing to say about the second game in that (sub)series. Even the first should’ve been more than a proof of concept. It would be excusable for a $20 early access game on Steam to be a tech demo of this calibre, but not a $85 (CAD) game. It does interest me enough to consider eventually picking up a used copy do dump to my Steam Deck, which is about the highest complement I can offer a Nintendo game.

Yeah, so did I. I’ve got a Fairphone 4 which has midrange specs and a flagship price. But that wasn’t my point; the article is wrong, the specs are not flagship territory.

Paying more for less is stupid, but paying more for things that others don’t value so highly (e.g. a headphone jack, privacy, ethical production, durability, etc.) is actually smarter than buying the popular thing.

Hopefully it sells better than the other phones on the market with hardware switches (e.g. PinePhone).

the phone is powered by the MediaTek Dimensity 8300 SoC, paired with 16 GB of RAM and 512 GB of internal storage. These specs place it firmly in flagship territory

That’s not a flagship processor according to MediaTek; it’s in their “premium” category (8000 series) which is one step down from their “flagship” category (9000 series). The RAM and storage seems possible to get on decent midrange/high-end phones in the USD $600-700ish range too. I found the Vivo V60 and OnePlus Nord 4 with similar specs pretty quickly. The Hiroh phone is definitely priced like a flagship though.

Now, I’m not saying flagship specs are really worth it these days (except maybe camera stuff), but this is definitely not a flagship-specced phone.

That’s a very scummy move orchestrated by (at least) Shopify, but it doesn’t surprise me too much. Did you know that Shopify’s leadership are Trump/fascism sympathizers?

Alovoa works in web browsers too so it technically supports any device with one, including iOS. But yeah I get it; no dedicated iOS app. It does have an F-Droid version and I actually did use it a while ago, before I completely abandoned OLD altogether. Alovoa is unfortunately also not e2e encrypted (afaik, I haven’t looked into it recently) and there’s not a lot of active users on it either.

Personally I’m perfectly fine not dating and I realized a few years ago that I’d prefer to be single for the rest of my life over using “hot or not” dating apps. Duolicious seems to not be one, which gives me hope that that style will make a comeback and I can stop doing my in-person/online hybrid approach using Meetup to meet cool people irl (no intent for dating; Meetup is not and should not be used as a dating app).

Maybe I should write my own dating app… (instead of finishing all of my other coding projects lol)

Yes, it seems like all of their source code, including the apps, is open source under a good license. Open source is not necessarily related to privacy though. Being more privacy-respecting than Tinder is a very low bar.

Personally, I’d recommend steering clear of this until they stop using Big Tech. Dating apps can involve a lot of private data being exchanged so ideally this would be at least end-to-end encrypted (it’s not encrypting data at rest) and available on F-Droid. Sending data to OpenAI is completely unnecessary, but the e2e encryption and app build transparency would be good enough if they can’t leave Google and Amazon for server hosting. It also doesn’t help that the app is just a joke (or so it seems).

It’s in their privacy policy https://duolicious.app/privacy/ under “How We Share Data”. The first two make a bit of sense (assuming they don’t host their own servers, they’re likely running in Google’s and Amazon’s datacentres), but wtf is OpenAI doing there!?

I hope the Moscone Center didn’t have to ban all LGBTQ+ and/or 18+ events to get Visa to commit