You can order things from Shops within the application. I am not an Instagram user so whether this is the only feature that records your address or not, I can't say.

Searching for "site:punkt.ch grapheneos" returns results that don't exist anymore. Articles are linked in the thread which supports this as well.

> They repeatedly said they forked it from GrapheneOS in their media interviews and marketing. They didn't keep following along with our improvements and have shifted away from presenting it that way, partly because we requested it.

And that also matches what is claimed here, they used to market based on this, they don't anymore.

> produced by the Heritage Foundation

> Twelve are the factors related to four key aspects of the economic environment that are graded from 0 to 100 and averaged to determine a country’s score: rule of law (and related sub-categories: property rights, government integrity, judicial effectiveness); government size (government spending, tax burden, fiscal health); regulatory efficiency (business, labor and monetary freedom); open markets (trade, investment and financial freedom).

Quite the definition they made up.

> produced by the Heritage Foundation

why bother to read past that? save yourself some time.

People pirate Steam Games anyway. Stating that people pirate too much to make it viable is purely opinion and not based on numbers. Sure, for AAA games you get 2 to 3 months without a cracked version, but this stops afterward. For non-AAA games, the steam version is usually crackable from day-1.

Seriously, for cracking steam games, all it takes is to drop a single DLL inside the game's folder. It can't get simpler than that.

Yes, that obviously only works for offline games, but yeah, cracking Steaam games is as easy as cracking any other game, maybe even easier

That is cracking, but one still has to download the files from somewhere before they can crack it. Finding legitimate files is still time consuming.

Yeah, but you just need anyone who bought the game on Steam, a friend or co-worker for example, not some shady website.

You want to avoid shady websites for the game download, and shady websites for the crack download. You can do both of this with Steam

And yet if you want applications to work on your phone, many times you'll need approval from either Apple or Google. Google can effectively ban manufacturers (like they did with Huawei) from using "Android" by blacklisting them from Play Services. Apple owns the entire ecosystem and prevents third-party from having access to the same feature set.

Look up Play Integrity, it's the remote attestation framework Google uses to ensure apps only run on Google-blessed hardware and software. Apps that use it verify that both hardware and software are unmodified and blessed by Google before apps are allowed to run. Banking apps use it, the fucking McDonald's app uses it, public transit pass apps use it, etc.

If you want to use your phone like normal people do in 2025, and not relegate yourself to being a second-class citizen when it comes to simple things like paying for stuff, riding the subway, etc, your phone is either an iPhone or something that plays nicely with Play Services.

And that's just the remote attestation side. Many apps rely on Play Services themselves, and without access to them, will not work. Google gates access to Play Services through contracts, it is not open source or part of Android.

You need to allow Play the play store and it's services and those will wall you in. Many times discussed here: many banking, gov, health apps around the world are banning anything not blessed by Google or Apple and installing on a non blessed system will not allow you to use them. My bank allows a modern and supported android or ios phone or a Windows laptop with a biometric card reader. Pretty much locked in and all banks are following.

From the article cons section:

> It only works where OpenType is supported. Fortunately, that's all major browsers and most modern programs. However, something like PowerPoint doesn't support OpenType.

Thank you, I missed that third sentence.

UUIDs are usually the go-to solution to enumeration problems. The space is large enough that an attacker cannot guess how many X you have (invoices, users, accounts, organizations, ...). When people replace the ints by UUIDv4, they keep them as primary keys.

I'd add that it's also used when data is created in multiple places.

Consider say weather hardware. 5 stations all feeding into a central database. They're all creating rows and uploading them. Using sequential integers for that is unnecessarily complex (if even possible.)

Given the amount of data created on phones and tablets, this affects more situations than first assumed.

It's also very helpful in export / edit / update situations. If I export a subset of the data (let's say to Excel), the user can edit all the other columns and I can safely import the result. With integer they might change the ID field (which would be bad). With uuid they can change it, but I can ignore that row (or the whole file) because what they changed it to will be invalid.

Yes and the DB might be columnular or a distributed KV, sidestepping the index problem.

It's unique but changes on each reload. While the details are interesting, the fingerprint itself is not useful.

Both Apple (WPS?) and Android (Location Accuracy) support improving location through WiFi access points and cellular network discovery. That's usually why you are able to get a lock onto your position even while underground.

GKE uses Spanner as an etcd replacement.

But, and I'm honestly asking, you as a GKE user don't have to manage that spanner instance, right? So, you should in theory be able to just throw higher loads at it and spanner should be autoscaling?

Yes, from the article:

> To support the cluster’s massive scale, we relied on a proprietary key-value store based on Google’s Spanner distributed database... We didn’t witness any bottlenecks with respect to the new storage system and it showed no signs of it not being able to support higher scales.

Yeah, I guess my question was a bit more nuanced. What I was curious about was if they were fully relying on normal autoscaling that any customer would get or were they manually scaling the spanner instance in anticipation of the load? I guess it's unlikely we're going to get that level of detailed info from this article though.