“Jailbroken” is a bit of an exaggeration. It is just a mod for the editor.
They didn’t put any technical hurdles in place to break out of in order to remove the restrictions. They used .NET which is easy to decompile and patch, as seen with all the unity mods out there. They could have used obfuscation, which would hinder the effort a bit, but didn’t.
“Jailbroken” is also the wrong word, their is no jail, when we already have full permissions to change whatever file we want.
There are two kinds of freedom, negative and positive liberty. US has a lot of negative liberties, they dictate little in what you can or cannot do, but is lacking in positive liberty, they don’t support you very well to do what you want to do.
While Europe might have less negative liberty, their generally better social welfare system grants people more positive freedom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithridatism
But I also suspect that there are poisons which are deadly when injected and more mildly toxic when ingested. But I am not a chemist.
In german there is only one word for it, which is a gift for german speakers.
What if I put poison on my teeth, bite someone and they die?
Sure it isn’t a good system, but it is the one we have. And if you have concrete improvement ideas, it would be interesting to hear.
I mean, where ever we set the age limit for instance voting to 14, some 10 or 9 year old will feel disenfranchised. We could remove it completely and let toddlers vote. What would the consequences of that be? I have no idea!
The reason is to protect the physically or mentally weak from the strong while also having rules that are easy to follow and to enforce, that don’t require psyche exams, which depend on the examiner.
Age might not be a good metric of evaluating maturity, but it is the best and most practically useful we have. (I use “maturity” here as having reached certain physically and mental level where they can operate, think and decide independent, and the risk of being manipulated is low.)
Because age is not a good metric, that means that we have false positives and false negatives on a maturity tests based on age, which we need to balance. And I would rather have more false negatives (wrongly ascertained immaturity) than false positives (wrongly ascertained maturity).
If someone comes up with a better and still practical maturity test, that would be interesting. “Solutions” like every citizen has to do a yearly physical and mental exam in order to keep their rights as an adult, seem much to harsh and easily manipulatable. Especially around blurry lines like disabilities.
Wherever certain thing needs a maturity test or not and where that should be, I cannot say. Just if the age limit is too high, then mental decline will raise the false positives, which would be bad as well.
Nobody? That was a general statement, sorry if that was unclear formulated. I just see many people that first set a label for themselves and then try to fit into it, instead of just doing what ever they want and just use them as a short hand to explain themselves.
Yes, and labels suck. Don’t limit your yourself involuntarily just to fit into one.
Personally, New Atlantis deserves a side-quest where you either start a revolt together with the people from the the well to take on the bourgeoisie government (which might end up creating a fascist state), or change the system electorally, establish unions, social security and public healthcare, with its own risks. Or even play the part of a populist, or help one to take over the government. The “liberal utopia” in New Atlantis is just not a stable system, there would be too much disgruntled people. Being part of change here, would be very interesting.
But that would take too much courage from Bethesda. No, I have to support my parents there, because the government doesn’t care for their people.
I do hope so. However that also means that the base game needs to have a good base experience for people like to get back into it.
Personally I really like Starfield for what it is. I think it is a unique mix of RPG and space sim. I am not a big fan of pure sandbox games, and other space sims with quests often felt doing impersonal jobs. In Starfield you meet people and learn their individual story and can help them, etc. Which is just not something I have seen before in a space game. (Mass Effect is maybe the closest, but that isn’t really a open world space sim game)
Of course the game could be better. One of their error was relying on procedural content generation, which is often bleak, uninteresting and unexpiring. Also the main city, New Atlantis, is just too clean, too huge and very bland. It doesn’t look like it was build for people. It got a very MMO feeling to it. It looks like megalomaniacs build it, but that isn’t really addressed in game. Other cities/locations are better. But the political of societal critique, which is normal for the Sci-Fi genre, is missing or not apparent enough. The devs where IMO not bold enough there, to make a clear statement.
So IMO there is a lot to do for modders, we will see if enough of them are interested in fixing that game.
Right, they saying “We are just following the law.” as if that was an apolitical statement. While they still get to choose whom laws to follow by deciding where to make business, which are political decisions.
As you see with Twitter or starlink, they decided to be do business in Brazil, but when the country actually have laws against uncontrolled mass propaganda and hate speech, they are suddenly against the law, and do not try to stop or limit doing their business there, when they do not want or can’t abide by these laws.
“Corporatism vs Capitalism” was invented by capitalists to create a strawman that they can blame instead of blaming capitalism for everything wrong with captitalism.
The rest of the world uses Corporatism for something else entirely, what you might mean is corpocracy or corporate capitalism, which are just manifestations of capitalism.
I started using Fedora Silverblue on a tablet, seems to work fine so far, but requiring a reboot in order to install new system packages is a bit cumbersome and the process itself takes a while, but ordinary Fedora also doesn’t win any races when asked to install a new package
I think switching to FCOS or Flatcar on servers that just use containers makes sense. Since it lessens the burden of administrating the base system itself. Using butan/ignition might be unusual at first, but it also allows to put the base system configuration into a git repo, and makes initial provisioning using ansible or similar unnecessary. The rest of the system and services can be managed via portainer or similar software.
I also do not have long term experience with FCOS, but the advertised features of auto-update, rolling-release, focus on security and stability makes it a good fit for container servers, IMO.
An alternative to Debian on servers might also be Apline Linux. Which also has more a focus on network devices, but some people use it on a desktop as well.
If you have many different systems, and just want to learn to operate them all, maybe NixOS might be interesting. Using flakes, you can configure multiple machines from just one repo, and share configurations between them. But getting up to speed on NixOS might not be so easy, it has a steep learning curve.
What’s ACC?
ACC - Advanced Charging Controller, which allows to set charge limits, thus extending the battery life, which should have been part of Android from the beginning,
Anyway I would strongly discourage using root under Android as it breaks the security model.
Security isn’t a binary, security works like an onion, you have multiple layers of security and multiple decisions to make on every level. Currently you might be right, that having root access to a device might compromise it in some ways, but that isn’t necessarily so and depends on how it is done.
You should find ways around using root and if you can’t you probably shouldn’t be doing on your phone anyway.
This kind of thinking is the ‘I know better than you’ mentality, that I sometimes see around people advertising GrapheneOS. Having ‘root’ permissions to the device is owing it, I want to decide what to do with it, not the vendor of the ROM, or who ever else. They aren’t me, they don’t know what I want to do with it.
The goal of security models is allowing me, the owner, to do what ever I want with my device, while preventing others, non-owners, un-trusted applications or the internet from doing what they want with my device. If the security model doesn’t allow me, the owner, to do what I want, then it failed its job at least partially.
Root is very dangerous as it can survive a factory reset.
Why is that dangerous? The first thing I do, when I get a new phone is boot into the boot loader, and overwrite the whole partition, then the system is trusted again, at least if I trust the vendor of the boot loader. When I want to do a factory reset, I do the same, overwrite the flash with a fresh OS image.
IMO, there are other reasons why the current implementation of root are dangerous: They currently considered binary and I think they could be implemented more gradually. Like one application having root over individual other applications, e.g. accessing their files. Allowing/Disallowing individual privileged system calls, or access to specific system files, etc. All of this could be hidden behind a switch in the developers menu. Maybe only allow applications to gain root access when using a registered hardware token, etc.
As for MicroG, it is sandboxed but it does require device admin for full functionality. It isn’t running as root but it requires a lot of device permissions. You can turn off the permissions you don’t need but that could break things.
In order for MicroG to work full, you need to fake the signature, which requires a patch to the system, or root privileges.
Like others already said, you can still root your GrapheneOS, there are two ways to do this:
Just unlock your bootloader, flash Magisk or whatever, done. Disadvantages, you cannot lock your bootloader again, thus creating a huge security gap where an attacker, when gained physical access to your phone, overwrites your boot partition and you boot your compromised system without noticing. Which is bad, IMO.
Recompile GrapheneOS with Magisk installed, signed it with that key and use this key in your bootloader to lock it. You essentially created a GrapheneOS fork, can no longer use their OTA update server and use the security updates, etc. You need to create this yourself.
Yeah, they don’t prevent you from doing it, the same as original ROMs don’t prevent you from doing it.
Exactly right. However all the downsides you have when doing that sort of defeats the purpose. So a GrapheneOS native way to control your device would be nice.
Well, I never really missed being able to pay via NFC on a phone, but I also never done it. My NFC chip in my card works fine.
When my baking app started detecting my rooted phone, I just switched to using their web-app via Firefox, which allows you to create a direct link to it as an “App”. Which is probably better anyway, than installing random proprietary apps on a phone. And logging into it every time is also easy with a password manager.
So I guess, as long as the banks still offer a website, I am good.
I am currently using a rooted LOS with MicroG. It certainly is not as secure as GrapheneOS in terms of app sandboxing, encryption, regular security updates, etc., but I have control of the system, in case I need it, for instance ACC, F-droid privilege extension (F-Droid auto updates), ReVanced Manager (not using it currently) etc.
I trust GrapheneOS much more than Apple, but both go into a similar direction with their understanding of security. IMO taking control away from the user might be a good option, if you are dealing with just regular consumers, but I don’t really like the “one-size-fits-all” approach of it. And it is my device, I should be allowed to decide what I want to do with it.
BTW, this is just a personal annoyance of mine. The GrapheneOS devs do a very good job.
I am not sure how much credit I want to give Larian here yet, because the editor for DOS2, under their IP, also had a somewhat locked down editor.
I really hope that it wasn’t just an accident on their side, but malicious compliance on how they ‘locked down’ their editor, and they will offer similar open mod tool in their future games.
We might see if they continue to release patches for the mod tools, while not patching that ‘mod’.