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milosmns

46 karma · joined February 6, 2022

@milosmns
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milosmns··on F-Droid version of KDEConnect uninstalled by PlayProtect
Can you share some examples?

It's very interesting because 1/4 of Pixel 6a would be around 80 EUR... so I wonder about your environment and what workarounds you have for these problems.

milosmns··on Some Pixel owners still can't dial 911 during an emergency
Interesting. This might not be a bug in Google's dialer (or the OS, or hardware). Based on my past experience building B2B SIP clients, I remember that there are ways to intercept many of the Android system broadcasts. I'd bet on that being the root cause. Intercepting would look like the app is crashing, when instead it would be attempting to re-route requests to a different app; someone else mentioned they detected Microsoft Teams doing that. I remember Skype also had this feature, so it sounds plausible.

In the B2B world, we often had weird requests e.g. to take over the whole phone experience and do something different – this was made possible by the same core Android SDKs that they ship both to business devices and personal devices.

For example, we were required to move each 911 call to our app first, then check if we can route it quicker through the internal PBXs, and if not – send it back to the native/built-in dialer. This was possible a couple of years ago, we built it. I assume it's still possible because it's really rare that you need this kind of functionality... releasing such an app also requires a special review from Google. Maybe Google sees it as a low risk to the user experience and allows some apps to still do it, at least until something like this issue happes.

milosmns··on Some Pixel owners still can't dial 911 during an emergency
It is possible to intercept a lot of Android system broadcasts. In the B2B world, we often had weird requests to take over the whole phone experience and do something different – made possible by the same core Android APIs that they ship both to business devices and personal devices.

I'm also not surprised to read that Teams was to blame, because Skype had the same functionality back in the days.

milosmns··on Some Pixel owners still can't dial 911 during an emergency
Another anecdotal example here:

Nexus 4, Pixel 2 XL, Pixel 4 XL, Pixel 6 Pro – never had any issues whatsoever, all phones still alive and kicking at my grandparents' places. Yes, most of them tied to the wall now... but hey, they're fine for showing some photos and displaying current time or setting alarms.

Interestingly, I also used Samsung's Note 9 and 10+, iPhone 12, iPhone 14 Pro Max – daily, also with no issues... other than disliking Samsung's software.

(I was/am doing a lot of mobile work so I test a lot of phones)

After years of doing this kind of testing, it's hard for me to believe that the entire batches of phones are so fundamentally broken... I'd rather bet on software issues, but who knows.

milosmns··on Some Pixel owners still can't dial 911 during an emergency
I remember from my days building SIP clients that a lot of carriers support 933, which is exactly what you're asking about. You can try googling a bit to see if your carrier supports it.
milosmns··on How mobile apps illegally share personal data
I'm well aware, hacked that stuff for years. :)

But overall, nowadays it's at least possible to limit the impact – compared to Lollipop era for example, when everything suddenly started to look modern, unified and nice, but still full of the same old holes.

milosmns··on Java 21 makes me like Java again
> Kotlin as a platform is not mature enough to deserve the same qualification. With (1) a lot of Java backend projects migrating to Kotlin (let's be negative and assume 20%); (2) all of Android running Kotlin, which is around 80% of the world's mobile phones; (3) the world's best IDE authors building features and improving Kotlin; (4) the language being almost 13 years old at this point; and (5) Kotlin being 100% compatible with Java in both directions, I wonder what additional maturity would you be looking for. Can you point to a specific problem?

I mean, of course, Java has been here since forever and we've made careers out of programming for JVM. I'm wondering if you are referring to a specific maturity issue, or just want to highlight that Java was here for longer... if it's the latter, I don't think it can be a valid argument against Kotlin or in favor of Java.

milosmns··on How mobile apps illegally share personal data
Sorry, not anymore. This was years ago and today I don't use any of the two products anymore...
milosmns··on How mobile apps illegally share personal data
What can I do as a developer to offer that choice to the user, before it loads? What can I do about the transitive dependencies that my dependencies load?
milosmns··on How mobile apps illegally share personal data
That research was conducted on the 2018 version of the OS, and also at a time when Google Play's distribution agreement was much more relaxed (close to zero app checks).

As far as I know, most (if not all) of the concerns shared have been addressed in the following 2 years, so I would assume that this is not an issue anymore in 2023 - or at least not as severe. I believe that new loopholes exist, but this one seems outdated to me.

milosmns··on How mobile apps illegally share personal data
I uninstalled that malware a long time ago despite everyone around me using it. Years ago when I still had it, I found that they've been transmitting all my data - including messages apparently - to Facebook. I found this in the FB privacy console, as Viber would have never told me explicitly. To your second concern... can't you now disable all those permissions individually? Not allowing you to then proceed with using the app would break their Google Play developers agreement, I assume. I hope.
milosmns··on I bought back my acquihired startup
That's a good tip because it is in fact the same language with various dialect and naming differences, similar to the many flavors of English we have today or different variants of German. Montenegrian is the latest addition to the family.

However, everyone I know has a common understanding about this, so I'm not sure who would be reluctant to admit that it is the same language... outside of the very few extremist groups of course :)

milosmns··on Bard and new AI features in Search
Isn't ChatGPT still like super expensive to use and run? At least compared to Google queries, but maybe in general too? While Google still pays Apple a ton od money to remain the default search engine... which is close to zero work on Apple's side.

Microsoft would then need to pay for ChatGPT computation, model retraining, maybe testing of deployments/upgrades, maybe sponsor Apple's initial development efforts, plus pay for the expensive deal to be Apple's default choice.

Am I understanding the problem correctly? It looks like a lot of work and very expensive if I'm getting it right.

milosmns··on Pi-hole: Network-wide ad blocking
I tried this a couple of times and I was never able to completely turn off YouTube ads on my LG TV, no matter how many blocklists I pulled. I wonder... is there's a special setting for DNS routing inside of the TV that allows YT to bypass pi-hole?
milosmns··on The quest for a family-friendly password manager
BitWarden was a breeze for my parents, there's no difference between the OS autofill and BW... on both iOS and Android, and Chrome for my dad. :shrug:
milosmns··on The quest for a family-friendly password manager
To forward your secrets to your family (shared vaults) you need a remote vault that both sides connect to. That's their implementation choice... but given that BW is OSS, you could theoretically change that behavior if you know how.
milosmns··on The quest for a family-friendly password manager
I've never heard of mobile OS being THE barrier for using password managers. It's usually a ton of other things... after all, both of our favorite OSs use autofill from the keyboard bar, so it should be straightforward. But hey, I have a similar parent. I just installed it for him and told him this is the new way... "computer programmers made it this way now".
milosmns··on Curvature consistency in Apple hardware and software products (2017)
Even though I knew this, the video is so good that I watched the whole thing in a single sitting. Thanks for sharing.
milosmns··on Curvature consistency in Apple hardware and software products (2017)
Thank you.
milosmns··on Lastpass Security Incident
Used BitWarden for years, happy with it. Recently switched to Nord Pass, also happy with it. Not sure about feature disparity though, just mentioning some ideas in case you're researching alternatives.
milosmns··on Meta lays off 11,000 people
> > The primary goal of A/B testing is to see what's more profitable.

Well, I think I'll provide a disagreeing opinion. :)

I assume this opinion probably comes from your past experiences, and I believe it is true in many cases. Since I'm not American and have never worked in an American corporate environment, I can't say what is true over there... but my experience in EU and Canada with A/A/B, A/B/C and typical A/B testing (as well as building such testing tools for others) was not like that.

For example, when building tutorials for users, profitability is far from being the primary objective. Same goes for building documentation, programming languages, open-source software, internal tooling and other such things.

Of course, I get that in the end, profitability is the primary goal of the company (with some exceptions). But I maintain that not all A/B tests have profitability as their primary goal, which makes the previous statement an incorrect generalization IMO.

milosmns··on Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun
I see the username, but I still want to ask... how would your ideal company deal with a situation where all employees want to run the business in the ground?
milosmns··on Grafana Faro: An open source project for front end application observability
Maybe you can check out Sentry
milosmns··on Show HN: Encrypt and hide files inside images
They do, you can choose a level but they still do. Document sending is uncompressed though, but won't generate a thumbnail in the chat
milosmns··on Low Earth Orbit Visualization
Is it related to Android though? I read somewhere/thought that it is primarily the Google Maps cars recording WiFi data and not phones). Europe wouldn't be covered at all if it was coming from the phones, right? (GDPR)

I mean, you can have a street full of iPhones - which I assume is a regular occurrence in USA, where people trust Apple - and still Google Maps on iPhone would guess well enough where you are. For example, I'm far away from the street and Google hasn't passed here recently, so my WiFi-based location is always way off (using Android). In my other home (and vacation home in another country) it's the opposite, because the cars have passed quite recently.

The story checks out so far for me... but I am kinda lazy to search for the source on this right now, so pls share if you have it.

milosmns··on 12,000 Facebook employees, 15% of its workforce, may lose jobs amid quiet layoff
You've mostly explained backend-related issues, no?
milosmns··on Users reporting artifacts appearing in old images stored in Google Photos
It's naive and/or biased to think that. Everyone makes mistakes, everywhere, all the time.
milosmns··on LastPass says hackers had internal access for four days
Did you mean BitWarden? Or really VaultWarden?
milosmns··on A development process to ship features fast
Wait why N² and not 2.pow(n)?
milosmns··on Show HN: MiniMail – Disposable Email Service for Everyone
Yes, that's precisely why I'm querying more often than bookmarking sites. They "expire" soon so I kinda have to find replacements. Apple's situation is interesting, I don't think sites can ban Apple's iCloud completely. It may also be an opportunity for Gmail to copy the feature..
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