no long-term OS support
IMHO, we need well-enforced laws requiring manufacturers to do both of these things:
Some people have argued that the second point is impossible because phones are made with components that don’t come with specs or source code themselves. That might be true today, but if large economies start requiring it, then those component manufacturers will either fall into line or lose the market to competitors who do meet the requirements.
and not easy to load an alternative OS on.
This is another big one. We need to be able to unlock our bootloaders, install an OS of our choice, and re-lock our bootloaders. (Without permanently disabling any of the hardware features; there must be a way to fully revert to stock.) The only major brand smartphones I know of with a reputation for doing this right are from Google, which is kind of embarrassing.
A large part of the reason Mercedes and other German brands were considered high quality was that they were more reliable than a lot of other brands on the market, while being good to drive.
“Good to drive” is a bit of an understatement. German cars have enjoyed car enthusiasts’ favor for decades, despite often mediocre reliability, specifically because they were great to drive. There are multiple dimensions to that, ranging from the safety advantage (and fun) afforded by giving the driver a good feel for what’s going on between the tires and the road surface, to an excellent balance of responsiveness and comfort from well-designed suspension. VW even ran an ad campaign around it: Fahrvergnügen
Japanese and American cars generally could not compete in this area.
However, those same German cars also became famous for developing endless little problems over the course of ownership, from annoying rattles to failing parts that were either expensive to buy or difficult to reach (and therefore expensive to replace).
If there was a time when German cars were known for above average reliability, I think it must have preceded the more recent generations. Maybe back before Japan had started investing in this area?
The “especially in gaming” bit is encouraging. That might mean they are finally, after 26 years, addressing the demand for good quality, low latency, multichannel, full duplex audio…
…but I won’t hold my breath. They seem to think gaming means playing on hardware like this.
You can no longer loot the underwear of non-recruited companions when you knock them out.
I… um…
I love the attention to detail given by this game’s players, developers, and patch notes.
This version of the patch notes has spoiler tags:
https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=948592
That rudely condescending comment lends nothing useful to the discussion, and has just earned my only downvote of the day. Enjoy. Bye.
I appreciate that you’re articulating your thoughts pretty well without resorting to the adversarial nonsense I’ve received elsewhere in this thread, so thanks for that.
It’s still clear that I haven’t been understood, but I’m exhausted from trying. (Again, mostly not from you, so please don’t take it personally.) Time for me to put lemmy away for the day, I think. Take care.
All of those things are implemented in modern Android.
No, they are not all implemented on any version of Android that I’ve seen. I don’t know about iOS.
Well, almost.
Right. We don’t need just a few pieces of what I listed. We need them all.
an OS popup asks you if you want to give the app permission to use the feature.
That’s not a bad interface, but it doesn’t address what I wrote: Individual control.
Why should email address, sexual orientation, and home address be lumped all together into a single permission? Lumping installed apps and search history together isn’t much better. Why should a music player, which obviously needs access to music files, be also granted access to biometric data like voice recordings?
This is impossible? The OS can either let the app use the mic or not,
Of course it’s possible. The OS can record the file and then hand it off to the app. No microphone access required.
Android always shows a green indicator on screen (upper right corner) when any app is using the microphone
That alone is better than nothing, but not enough. How is a user to know if something was captured when the screen was off?
These things are indeed improving as new versions come out, but at a glacial pace. Heck, it was ages before Android stopped letting apps spy on each other’s log messages. It’s now at version 15 and still doesn’t have basic controls like restricting network access.
No snark intended. Do you run into that so often that you’ve come to expect it?
+1 for Brother laser printers, unless they have drastically changed in the past 5-10 years
If your app touches the camera and mic, it will show up on that screen that it does so.
Showing up on that screen is no substitute for what is actually needed:
Pretty sure that qualifies for that permission.
I don’t know what you mean. Existing behavior does not provide the control or visibility that I described.
One important difference is that the “permissions” in the screen shot are effectively all-or-nothing: if you don’t agree to all of them, then you don’t get to install the app. They’re not permissions so much as demands.
(Some OS do have settings that will let you turn them off individually after installation, but this is not universally available, is often buried in an advanced configuration panel, leaves a window of time where they are still allowed, and in some cases have been known to cause apps to crash. Things are improving on this front with new OS versions, but doing so in microscopic steps that move at a glacial pace.)
if you record a video with sound, then the FB app has to have permission to record your audio.
I can’t tell if you’re trying to explain how it currently works (which I know very well, thanks) or asserting that the current behavior is necessary in order to record with sound.
It really doesn’t have to be as it is. The OS can provide a record-video API, complete with a user-controlled kill switch and an activity indicator, and the app can call it. The app doesn’t need direct access to the microphone to allow the user to create a file with sound.
Edit to clarify: I’m not saying that the “permission” doesn’t work as advertised. I’m saying that recording an audio file doesn’t have to require a permission system as coarse and disempowering to users as it is today. I guess the people clicking the downvote button misunderstood.
This is business financial news, not technology.
Nobody said it was the same thing as listening in the background. It’s still relevant and important.
I trust that most adults understand the implications of an exploitable permission and a strong incentive to abuse it, as well as the track record of corporate denials.
If it will help us clean up our mess, then great.
But it’s not going to make it okay to continue churning out disposable plastics. We need the tech and we need to stop.
“Meta does not use your phone’s microphone for ads and we’ve been public about this for years,” the statement read.
Meanwhile:
Suggestion: Rather than using this text forum as a youtube click farm, include in your post an overview of your key points and a summary, as text. This would inform readers why they might (or might not) want to spend their time sitting through your video.
Whataboutism does not invalidate the problem, nor is it a good-faith argument in any discussion.