Interestingly, Afinum is also a German based private equity firm which owned majority shares of Threema since 2020.

Kind of strange to see the company bouncing around between owners, but hopefully it can remain a good product and not become enshittified.

https://www.startupticker.ch/en/news/threema-transfers-ownership-the-second-time

This is a private equity firm? Was Threema doing financially bad?

The article didn’t mention anything about credit unions and how they compare to private banks.

One would think with a credit union the extractive capitalist goals wouldn’t be the main focus.

I don’t think two separate forms are needed for GDPR consent and ATT. Apps I worked on took the result from ATT and used that as the user consenting to be tracked in the app for GDPR.

I guess companies want to make it cumbersome as possible so user gets fatigued and just clicked through it mindlessly like with cookies banners on every website.

How was there double consent required?

Without ATT companies use dark patterns, opt-out, and over burdensome Privacy Policies or Terms of Service to get what they claim is consent.

When users get a straightforward choice to allow tracking or not, like with ATT, most don’t allow it.

I actually only played the original Call of Duty and the sequel on PC when they released 🤣

Proton isn’t emulating Windows, it implements Windows APIs on Linux. The code still executes natively on the CPU.

Fair point about Alpine.

The below site discusses if Android is a Linux distro or not.

I think for me the bigger reason is that the end Android product people are running is completely controlled by Google and has a lot of proprietary software added on top of AOSP.

https://www.androidauthority.com/android-linux-784964/

Android is not a Linux distro, it uses the Linux kernel, but nothing else. Google specifically didn’t include all the GNU software normally found in a Linux distro.

The Substance is a critique on women being valued for their appearance/body/youth and how that value decreases over time, as they get older. It’s amazing Demi Moore played the lead role, as she experienced this directly with her own career.

Not for sure how this could be considered porn, pretty much the exact opposite.

It is a full blown Linux OS. You can switch out of the gaming specific mode/UI to a Linux desktop environment using KDE. There you can install your own software and use it like a normal computer.

The only limiting factor is that the root file system is read only by default (can be disabled). If you want to install system level packages, you can work around this by using something like distrobox.

Does it have any real chance of being voted into law? Who specifically will vote on the proposal?

I think most proprietary apps these days have frequent updates because they don’t actual have in house testing and use frequent updates to constantly roll out changes. They are also constantly changing the app with feature switches/AB testing to increase important business metrics.

This same strategy can be seen in the gaming industry with games being in an alpha/beta state for years, at least they are upfront here of the unfinished quality of the software.

None of this would be possible if software was still shipped on physical media. Companies would actually have to test and think through product functionality before releasing it.

One counter point is young people drive the technology trends. Look at how social media and the Internet in general took off in the early 2000-2010s, it was driven by younger generations using these technologies. Now everyone is on social media after the younger generations at the time pioneered it.

If younger generations do rejected apps, smart phones, and surveillance capitalism, maybe there could be change in the direction.

It is relatively easy to find an English speaking tech job in Germany. If you have a university degree, then you can get the EU Blue Card.

Imagine if consumers stopped buying newer hardware as increasing graphical realism doesn’t add much value to the gaming experience.

Honestly the graphics on the PS4 are fine for 1080p and I felt no need to buy a PS5.

Another big problem not mentioned in the article is companies refusing to hire QA engineers to do actual testing before releasing.

The last two American companies I worked for had fired all the QA engineers or refused to hire any. Engineers were supposed to “own” their features and test them themselves before release. It’s obvious that this can’t provide the same level of testing and the software gets released full of bugs and only the happy path works.

What if there were only two car companies?

Will there be a fixed supply or will the ECB be able to creat more like with fiat and devalue everyone’s money?

I think Apple is responsible by releasing new APIs that are only available on the specific iOS version. Rarely have they back ported functionality to older iOS versions. Apple draggles shinny new APIs in front of developers causing them to update the minimum version.

Yeah Apple rapidly dropping support with Intel Macs is really terrible. I have a 2018 Mac mini that is already obsolete, what a joke. That was the last Mac I buy.