For those who haven’t been paying attention, it appears Amazon is trying to “disrupt” the grocery market. Anecdotally they have been selling shit for crazy low prices and they’ll make like 30 separate trips to your house all on the same day with lined/insulated packing for the perishable items and frozen water bottles (no extra charge to the customer) in each bag to keep the food cool in transit.

It seems like there is no way they can be making money on this process, which tells me they are speedrunning Walmarts strategy of operating at a loss to force other grocers out of the market.

Gob’s not on board.

My understanding is that, in broad strokes…

1. Aurora acts like a proxy or mirror that doesn’t require you to sign in to get Google Play Store apps. It doesn’t provide any other software besides what you specifically download from it, and it doesn’t include any telemetry/tracking like normal Google Play Store would.

2. microG is a reimplementation of Google Play services (the suite of proprietary background services that Google runs on normal Android phones). MicroG doesn’t have the bloat and tracking and other closed source functionality, but rather acts as a stand-in that other apps can talk to (when they’d normally be talking to Google Play services). This has to be installed and configured and I would refer to the microG github or other documentation.

3. GrapheneOS has its own sandboxed Google Play Services which is basically unmodified Google Play Services, crammed into its own sandbox with no special permissions, and a compatibility layer that retains some functionality while keeping it from being able to access app data with high level permissions like it would normally do on a vanilla Android phone.

If you want you can install Pixel Camera (official Google camera) from Aurora Store, and deny it Network permissions and any other permissions you want. It still works pretty well for point and shoot but I can’t speak for every single feature. Also you can install simulated services that the Gcam requires to function, without having to run Play Services.

To be fair, this federal program was a cluster eff since they started it in about 2010. It passed a bunch of grant money through to the states, which all did different “things” with it. Most held semi-public meetings and planning sessions for 5-10 years or wrote detailed planning documents but never delivered any physical infrastructure (actual results to the residents).

Maybe if they allow API access for alternative frontends that eliminate ads and block telemetry. Otherwise, not interested.

I explained it poorly but the other half of the threat is “we have complete air superiority so we can strike your leadership itself any time they stick their heads out of their bunkers” or “we can destroy your oil fields and tank your economy at any point” etc.

Iran has very few chips left to play with considering they have zero air defenses at the moment. I predict they will be forced to surrender their entire nuclear program or they will face a decapitation attack and destruction of their entire refinement capability and military apparatus.

Its possible a sleeper cell of terrorists could effectuate some small area drone strikes with commercial off the shelf drones and improvised explosives.

The large scale military drones you are envisioning that can do the same damage as military aerial bombardment, that is a much harder thing to “sneak” into the US at any kind of scale or to build in secret.

As for future state actor capabilities. It seems possible that China is working on drone tech deployed from submarines or other force-projection platforms. Yet another reason to avoid a hot war with near peer militaries in current year.

Armchair theory is that the US large platform bombers will be used to credibly threaten repeated bunker buster hits on Fordow nuclear site. This could pressure Iran to surrender its entire nuclear program including that site.

Currently Israel doesn’t have the capability by itself to destroy the site but US bombers possibly could.

Yeah I would also like a crystal ball here. I am somewhat interested in the 10 if I can run GrapheneOS. Otherwise I’m going to explore other custom ROMs with broader device support.

This is what boggles the mind for me. He has this miniscule unknowable opportunity to get the door open, and jump from the plane at just the right time.

He had to hit the sweetspot combo of low altitude and airspeed that doesn’t cause him to die upon hitting the ground, but results in him being far enough from the blast of the aircraft itself impacting the ground. Its gotta be a fraction of a second window of time. He is literally one of the luckiest people in aviation accident history.

I am running GOS on a Pixel 7, which means I’ve had this device for ~2.5 years at this point, and back when I transitioned to this setup I was aware they were talking about being beholden to Pixels due to the hardware security module not being available on other devices.

It has been a known issue. I understand it is a very difficult and costly undertaking to develop new hardware and new entrants would be competing against the big guys for fab space, manufacturing and assembly etc.

We need some kind of nonprofit or independently financed group to advance this cause. Could it be FUTO, Framework, or some other company/organization like this?

There would be market incentive to solve these problems - There has got to be a lot of demand for a neutral hardware platform that meets the hardware security module and other requirements for bootloader security, custom ROMs, etc.

They won’t ever say it out loud but they have always removed videos for mentioning alternative frontends or other technology they view as direct threats to their revenue stream.

No, it is Meta and these companies fault, but I focus on things I can actually control. Just spewing the party line default Lemmy opinion of “capitalism is the problem, blah” doesn’t do anything to solve the problem.

Educating people so they understand how the surveillance works, and explaining that there are alternatives, actually gets us closer to a solution.

Its reliant on running a normie phone and OS, and running the native FB, instagram, or other apps in the Meta constellation. These apps create persistent services that internally backchannel sensitive browser data back to them via internal ports. All browser traffic on devices running these apps should be considered compromised.

The solution is to run Graphene or other de-googled OS and avoid Meta apps like the plague.

Some have theorized the tires disrupt object recognition in aerial imagery analysis (and possibly munitions or drone targeting). Obviously that didn’t work here as the targets were already known and visually confirmed.

Dildo-as-a-Service

Side note -

I literally have the reader pictured in the thumbnail. It is a Kindle keyboard from 10+ years ago at this point. It still works fine. At one point the original battery went to shit, and it cost very little to get an aftermarket replacement and install it myself.

I keep it offline and read 100% sideloaded .epub books from various sources. The lockscreen ads don’t even try to display anymore.

Sure it isn’t backlit or waterproof but it still functions flawlessly as a generic reader. Old tech like this is awesome. Why not get a decade of use (or more) out of something that still works?

Practically not that much, but the point is to inflict huge monetary costs and erode public support among Russians to continue the conflict. So from that perspective this is a pretty good bargaining chip going into further negotiations.

Yeah I will be cautiously optimistic and definitely run GrapheneOS if I get one of these.