Spyke

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Apple tells EU it has five different App Stores, not just one

  • App Store for iPhone
  • App Store for iPad
  • App Store for Apple Watch
  • App Store for Mac
  • App Store for Apple TV

I guess if this gets argued correctly it means Apple could technically get away with not opening up the iPad, Apple TV and Apple Watch to accept other stores (Mac already lets you install apps directly from developers). I can see this still letting Apple continue to have the stranglehold over their ecosystem.

I doubt this will change much though. We all know the EU were specifically thinking about the iPhone which needs opening up.

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Supermarket responds after Reddit user’s warning about self-checkout overcharge — ‘Was annoyed that the total amount due on my supermarket purchase did not equate to the individual items I purchased.’

I’ve come to realise at least half of the stuff posted on Reddit these days, especially more so on the popular subs, are all designed to make you angry.

It’s things like posting incorrect info in the title, posting a comic / image that’s been deliberately designed to get you angry, someone really wanting their 5 minutes of fame like this guy, or some post from some bigot.

It’s so tiring. Have started to notice it on Lemmy too.

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Google Messages just flicked the switch on end-to-end encryption for all RCS and group chats

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The one thing that feels off to me about Google’s implementation is that it’s not vendor agnostic and all comms would need to go through Google’s servers to work. The E2EE bit is an entirely Google specific extension to RCS, for example. The last thing we need is another chromium situation in a different area.

If it wasn’t a Google specific extension, phone networks around the world would need to pick up the pace and adopt RCS, but also they’d need to keep up to date with the latest version of the standard to ensure the functionality is supported. Now, looking at phone networks’ previous track record, they’re really not going to implement it unless they’re forced to and they’ll do so at a real snails pace.

At this point I’d agree that Apple not adopting RCS is really not helpful here.

I feel the EU’s Digital Market Act that’s forcing messenger applications to be interoperable with each other is going to be a much more viable option towards that perfect world scenario. The IETF is even fleshing out a common protocol for it, MIMI with MLS.

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It's really not that hard

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The way I understand it, it’s an automated job that sends the “trim” command to SSDs to discard all the blocks that have been marked as unused by the filesystem. My knowledge is a little patchy so I’m probably missing some important details…

When you go to delete something on an SSD, it’s simply just marked as being deleted. The file still technically occupies space on the SSD and the SSD will never simply overwrite space that has a deleted file on it.

So… by enabling the service, systemd will automatically send the trim command that tells the SSD to empty out all the space occupied by files marked as deleted which allows the SSD to reuse said space.

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Signal Facing Collapse After CIA Cuts Funding

This is certainly one way to spin this.

It doesn’t touch on all the other donations signal receives, including the major loan from Brian Acton. The OTF isn’t the only source of funding that signal has.

Signal will be fine. In fact now that the OTF have withdrawn funding it’ll probably shake off the weird take that Signal is CIA tech.

android

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Samsung shows system storage correctly in Android 14

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GB is metric and it’s easy for us to remember. E.g. 1000 bytes = 1 Kilobyte, 1000 kilobytes = megabyte and so on.

GiB is the binary value. In binary, you have to work in powers of 2. That is… the values double every time (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 and so on…). 1024 bytes = 1 KiB, 1024 KiB = 1 MiB

Since computers work in binary, and 1000 isn’t a number that’s easy to deal with in binary, we use the closest value available to us, 1024. In fact, back in the days when people were only concerned about KBs, they would say that 1000 KB = 1024 KiB.

Of course, we’re now working with TBs rather than KBs. Everything ramps up including the amount of “missing” space an OS reports on a hard drive.

I know windows tries to be helpful and shows you the value of a drive in GB, rather than its GiB value. Ever wonder why a 1TB hard drive appears as ~931GBs? This is why. Other OSes tend to show you the GiB value since that’s generally a lot more accurate.

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A simple guide

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Eh, WSL is still enough like Linux that it could be the best option for a lot of people. No risk to the computer being unable to boot whilst still giving you the ability to play with Linux tooling.

And credit where credit’s due: Microsoft details how to do a bare metal install, which is the most likely option to wipe Windows from your machine in the first place.

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Apple announces that RCS support is coming to iPhone next year

I think the phrasing is important here.

Later next year, we will be adding support for RCS Universal Profile, the standard as currently published by the GSM Association.

If Google’s & Samsungs implementations aren't compliant with the GSM associations’ standard then I don’t think this is going to work how people are expecting it to. The stuff Google has added to RCS messaging has all been their own implementation of it and not part of the standard, and as far as I’m aware android RCS gets routed through Google’s servers.

I wonder if RCS support is Apple trying to appease the EU with the DMA stuff forcing messaging apps to be interoperable with each other.

privacy

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Signal. Privacy.

In January 2021, after WhatsApp, the most popular messaging app in the world, became acquired by Facebook, and announced its sharing of data with its new parent, Signal became the top downloaded app in > 70 countries.

Errr…

WhatsApp was acquired by meta back in 2014.

2021 was when WhatsApp released updated terms of service that allowed them to connect to Facebook servers and share the data they needed/wanted to.

This article seems like the average low effort hit piece against signal that keeps on popping up.

I still think signal is the easiest messaging app out there for the average user to gain a little more privacy in their digital lives.