As a temporarily embarrassed future billionaire, I understood that reference.

Thanks for the link. That reporter is who I want to be when I grow up.

The real issue to tophat man is that pulling the switch to rescue the workers might be seen as weakness and lead to having to negotiate with a union representative.

History tells us tophat man will kill them, instead, to prevent the risk of a union forming.

Alternatively, red is glad the system doesn’t unfairly influence green’s actions.

Haha. Now this drawing is going to pop into my head next time a friend is praising extreme Libertarian philosophy.

Right. Captain. Thanks.

Andre Braugher was a comedic genius.

Relevant XKCD - Stove Ownership

Please give us permission to share your data with the following 465 companies

Those are amateur numbers. No wonder BONTO is getting aquired and restructured. They need to get those privacy invasion numbers up!

As long as I keep my printer ink subscription current, this works great.

I feel like Brooklyn 99 did this well. The chief Captain Holt is a really interesting nuanced character who happens to be gay.

The US was actually headed this way, starting with spam phone centers… Then the head of the FCC was replaced.

Could be a coincidence. Could be open naked class warfare by billionaires against the rest of us. Hard to say which, for sure.

That hasn’t been my experience. My portion of the settlement is usually about $100.00. it’s insulting, but it still spends.

Oh yes. If any of my friends or colleagues ever emails me “Hi (name)!” they’re going to be very confused, because I habitually block all incoming e-mail that starts that way.

Otherwise it’s off to the shitty website.

I’ve been promised that AI will fix all the shitty websites, soon.

To answer your top level question:

If it’s not Linux from Scratch, then we don’t know exactly what is running, and we need to consider that.

We made rocks think. There’s some trust decisions involved.

Should I blindly trust every app I find on F-Droid? No. The article correctly lays out reasons why.

Most of them also apply to Google Play and to Aurora.

Your decision which to trust depends which threat protections you need the most:

• Google Play provides stronger protections against people who are trying to run up your credit card through Google Play purchases. Many of the protections cited in the article were developed for this reason. Google Play store apps can fraudulently charge your credit card. But Google works hard to prevent this, with mixed results.

• Aurora serves the same apps as Google Play and effectively benefits from the same protections.

• In addition, Aurora adds additional context about malicious corporate behavior. Google has slowly added some, but not all, of these to Google Play. But at the end of the day, Google is being payed to look the other way by some corporations.

• Like Aurora, F-Droid includes details meant to protect you from abuses by corporations. I would argue that F-Droid’s protections are stronger than even Auroras.

• F-Droid does not include a method to charge your credit card. This makes a number of security differences in the article much less important, to most people. Of course, there’s more harm that an app can do than credit card charges.

Because I am aware of many harms caused by individual bad actors and corporations, my preference order goes:

• F-Droid - Preferred. I find the arguments in the article weak, and a bit out of date. I also feel that F-Droid had dramatically less need for the protections discussed, because there’s no mechanism available to F-Droid apps to run up my debi lt card.
• Aurora Store - Acceptable. Some useful apps aren’t of F-Droid.
• Google Play Store - Unacceptable to me. Aurora provides the same apps, but gives me better insights into the privacy impact of each app. Google Play is getting better over time, but the Google team has financial incentives to present trading my privacy for convenience as a good idea.

ring ring: This is your upcoming Steam Deck purchase calling from the near future.

:)

Over on programmer.dev, we’re allowed to use AI, as long as we occasionally complain about how bad it still is.

It counts.

“It’s an older Star Trek meme, but it checks out.”

• Admiral Adama

“Three.”

Yes. I have various ways I check, including reading the source code, looking for open known vulnerabilities, and reviewing recent commit history to see if it’s still actively maintained.

And…Looking at the other replies here - you’re all welcome, I guess. Yes. I am that part of the community. We exist. There may be dozens of usm…

Anyway. Thank you all for all you do in the community, too. High fives all around.