Yes.

A nonprofit led by Google and IBM executives is working with Semptian, whose technology is monitoring the internet activity of 200 million people in China.

Here as well.

$1.2bn contract with the Israeli government. Known as Project Nimbus, the joint contract between Google and Amazon signed in 2021 aims to provide cloud computing infrastructure, artificial intelligence (AI) and other technology services to the Israeli government and its military

It was never off the menu, just rebranded a little bit.

Dark mode is supposed to be released this weekend! 50 weekends ago.

I stopped keeping up with him to save my sanity and excitement for when I can actually see for myself what has changed with an update.

Corpo marketing to obfuscate the idea of installing software and nurture dependency to pre-installed proprietary repositories for an entire crowd of dependent non-tech savvy users that doesn’t know what an apk is probably.

I avoid using the term unless I’m being cheeky about “sideloading” from Google Play.

McDonald’s wants your IQ too. Seriously, it’s in their privacy policy.

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It’s the details that make up the whole picture.

As an isolated situation, the renaming thing may be stupid and not worth giving any credence. Energy can be spent resisting elsewhere in more useful places. However along with the rest of the actions of billionare corpos that kissed the ring, it’s part of the overall trend with devastating consequences. Bullshit details shouldn’t be ignored, but acknowledged as “they’re fucking us from all directions right now and waging war on reality, and we really should stop letting them”.

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.world straight up blocks /c/piracy and “preemptively” blocked hexbear.

Anything that uses FCM doesn’t get push notifications. That’s most of them. Very few apps work fine, others I have set up to use UnifiedPush. Unfortunately Proton Mail requires manually checking. I’ve not had any issues with location.

I’ve had one app straight up refuse to work at all and others that throw up an “enable Google Play Services” at every launch (dismiss it and it still works), but it’s nothing critical so I don’t care. Most of my apps come from F-Droid anyway. I haven’t had enough time without the play store to see if other apps trip the play integrity api stuff. Even if it did I don’t care.

But apps can’t hijack my entire screen anymore, battery life is improved, naturally privacy and security as well. No more “update available” pop-ups on app launches or that pop-up to scan all apps that I kept having to decline. No more anxiety from waking up to a bunch of marketing notifications. There’s also just the plain satisfaction of being free.

Google has Android by the balls but I’m so jaded and done with this corpo hell world shit to put up with even their privileged system apps anymore, even if it’s less convenient. Maybe Linux phones will become viable.

It feels good to say that I’ve been rid of Google for a while. They can shove Play Serives and Store too.

Their business was to index the entire internet. Now they practically are the internet. Don’t be evil very much meant something beyond ads and imo it meant “don’t fucking become Sauron”

But it is open source. And there’s a fork of Signal available on F-Droid called Molly.

I’m just worried a lack of content discovery, (foss) algorithms, other features and consistent development will have an adverse effect on this new growth. I’m glad that Dan finally got the apps on the stores at a critical moment though or we wouldn’t even be here.

Your hubris is showing, Fuckerberg.

I hate forced 2FA that you can’t disable anyway. I don’t want to waste time waiting for an insecure text, I don’t want to input an unencrypted code you sent to my email, I don’t want to click your damn notification that runs through Play Services, and no I’m not enrolling in passwordless auth. I don’t need to be babied into securing my accounts. Any account I do actively and willingly secure is already using TOTP. Let me put in my username and password, then kindly fuck off.

I really hope this gets a proper foss “for you” algo. Personalized content and people discovery features are lacking on the fediverse.

Why not just disable the Ubuntu pro ads in the mean time?

An enshittified Lemmy alternative.

I’m only on the fediverse but I miss algorithms. Recommended accounts (which to be fair exists on a corner of Mastodon), similar accounts to one you just followed, custom home feed, suggested posts, etc. Discoverability sucks on fedi and the lack of interest from devs for some sort of private FOSS implementation is disappointing.

Loops was like let’s have a “For You” algo early this year but even that seems to be a dead idea.