no long-term OS support

IMHO, we need well-enforced laws requiring manufacturers to do both of these things:

• Provide service manuals and reasonably priced parts for a sensible period, much like existing requirements for replacement car parts. (Perhaps 5 or 7 years minimum?)
• Put into escrow all the information needed for community support of these devices, to be publicly released when the official support period ends. (The easiest way to satisfy this might be in the form of source code, but data sheets and API documentation could suffice if they are reasonably complete.)

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.

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.

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:

• Individual control (an easy and obvious way to allow or deny each thing separately)
• Minimal access (a way to create a sound file without giving Facebook access to an open mic)
• Visibility (a clear indication by the OS when Facebook is capturing or has captured data)

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.

“Meta does not use your phone’s microphone for ads and we’ve been public about this for years,” the statement read.

Meanwhile:

My guess: A lot of people are fed up with late-stage capitalism reaching its tendrils into everything good and turning it into dystopian garbage, and are justifiably wary of monetization taking root in one of the few online spaces that they still enjoy.

the fact that many electric cars rely on cloud services

Terrible idea, predictable results.

It would be neat to compare these new reflective LCDs with the 25-year-old ones used in the Game Boy Color.

You literally said that.

I wrote several paragraphs in a conversation spanning multiple comments, and you picked out a tiny fragment of one sentence, stripped it of context, and somehow reinterpreted it into a suggestion that forums and wikis are a replacement for an OS “just working”. That’s your straw man, not mine.

Bye bye.

TechTechPotato: AnandTech has Closed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud6DWmWcHaY

Neither Tor nor end-to-end encrypted messengers will cover the endpoints. It’s possible that they caught him using good old fashioned detective work. You don’t need a software back door for that.