I stick to F-droid android app store. it asks developer to submit their code which gets compiled by the F-Droid team. apps with proprietary codes are flagged.
Open source apps can absolutely have trackers in them. F-Droid isn't a security solution by any measure. I have inspected code of at least one popular "privacy" app that absolutely tracks its users out in the open (I mean, the code is right there on GitHub), yet I see repeatedly that app (and F-Droid) being touted as some elixir that fixes security and privacy for one and all. It doesn't. Don't place your trust on F-Droid apps blindly, and more importantly, refrain from blanket advocating F-Droid apps as a security / privacy panacea.
What I do instead is monitor Android's traffic with a LittleSnitch-esque firewall and block all apps I don't use. Also, I've disabled auto-updates on non-essential apps. Only Photos, Maps, Chrome, and Firefox are allowed to auto update on my Android.
Were the trackers already labeled in F-droid? They maintain a list of these anti features for all apps. If not, when you reported your findings to F-Droid, did they flag the app as having trackers at that time?
Nobody said blanket trust anything. F-Droid is a community project with a framework that allows for disclosing user hostile behavior in apps. By using it and paying attention, we can all make it even better - the exact opposite of Google, whose incentives do not align at all with these goals.
(F)OSS by itself is not a security solution. Largely because you can't "solve" security.
There are plenty of insecure open source apps. To deny that would be to deny tons of security-related CVEs.
Yes, open source software is easier to audit, but does nothing to a) make those audits actually happen (frequently enough), nor b) improves the quality of those audits.
i.e. just because I have access to information does not validate that information. Work still has to be done.
FLOSS may have security vulnerabilities, just like any other software. An OSS android app which has no anti-feature flags on f-droid with intrusive advertisements or malware behavior, deliberately implemented by its own developer, is something I have never heard about.
The same can't be said about 'free' (or sometimes even paid) proprietary apps from play store.
It's manually curated and generally flags such things as anti-features if found, and I'd believe them more than some tensorflow_script_to_detect_malware.py
I wouldn't depend on F-Droid or FOSS as a measure of security. Of course, I get that F-Droid is run by volunteers, but I hope no one is spreading the notion that the F-Droid apps are magically uber secure and private or anything.
What open source gives you is an audit trail, which is helpful but not sufficient. You still need to be able to trace malicious code to actual individuals. Then you need the ability to punish those individuals, ideally through criminal prosecution.
I once tried to get my app in F-Droid, but they refused, because they did not want to install the dependencies because the dependencies were too big. Turns out you cannot compile something without dependencies. I wrote my app in FPC/Lazarus to make a truly cross platform app that runs natively on anything from a Raspberry PI to Windows 2000, and they did not like that tech stack.
Both recommended apps use the ZXing library. So it is a small world, and if someone overtakes ZXing (assuming that it is not malicious right now), then all apps become infected.
Otherwise no security and bugfixes, no improvements, no version upgrades... who knows how long this library will work?
Eurocentric biases are dominate across various academic disciplines. they either deny the attribution to our culture or call it plain superstitious belief.
enlightening article on devastating effect of it by śri lankan biologist:
then the onus of proof lies with us to prove suśruta was indeed a great surgeon, whereas we never see Europeans giving evidence to establish that Euclid was a real man.
Following book by prof. CK Raju on Euclid is a worthy read for anyone who wish to learn how Academic Imperialism works to perpetuate the aforementioned biases.
Euclid and Jesus: How and why the church changed mathematics and Christianity across two religious wars
Thanks for the sources. I'll be sure to go through them.
I am quite familiar with how Western history tends to misrepresent contributions of the East. It is rather unfortunate, and certainly extends beyond the realm of science.
In simple terms, colonial hangover is still there despite countless discourses over racism. Anyway, enjoy reading Prof. Raju. He has dobe a conference on the issue of Academic Imperialism, which is worth a watch on youtube.
The amount of people living in tier 1,2,3 cities should still be less than people living in villages I think. Anyways my village still continues to get abysmal electricity.
Get 24/7 electricity from what source? The state run power producers don’t provide this in many tier 2 cities (pick some names and check). I strongly doubt if all tier 1 cities (except probably Mumbai) get power 24/7 either.
Power is cut during summers, during rains, and at other times very regularly. There are plenty of reasons and excuses for that to be happening.
I am not sure about airplane, but I have references for discovery gravitational laws in India. These are non-Indian references, so I suppose my point of view will be respected.
Given India school of mathematics already was advanced in trigonometry, calculus & astronomy according to following references:
+ Prior to discovery of infinite series and calculus by Newton and Leibniz, the Kerala School of Mathematics had already developed calculus and some historians suggest that this and advanced astronomical knowledge from Kerala went abroad via the Jesuits and provided the spark for its further development in Europe.
+ It is very much possbile for Indians to have independently discover law of gravitation. Following paper establishes that Indians knew about Newton 'discovery' by 250 years.
I cannot discount usage/knowledge of Airplane, battery, magnet, electricity, in India, unless it is firmly established they didnt had the technology. I choose to maintain status quo.
In my personal opinion, I would never help ANY army in building AI enabled drone, Tanks etc. I am in favor of US making peace & dialog with Russia & China. SILICON VALLEY MUST NOT BECOME PART OF AI ENABLED ARM RACE. If Pentagon has extra money then it can give that to homeless people of its country.
"kinetic energy" is such a euphemism for killing people. I think a lot of people just have a problem with the military deciding who is innocent and who isn't and killing people of other countries without a declaration of war & without a trial.
It's really not, as people by themselves don't pose much of a military threat. What you really want to do is break all the stuff that lets those people actually threaten you.
Granted, much of that stuff is arranged in the form of compounds that contain people, or is stored on such compounds.
There are a few steps to "deciding who is innocent", but the big steps are Step 1: the President decides that the military can start making spot decisions like "that guy just shot me" within a specific set of circumstances. Step 2: "that guy just shot me! I'm shooting back!"
Better military technology improves step #2. It also improves subtler cases like "can I shoot this guy" / "does he have a weapon?" / "yes he totally does [false]" / "ok shoot him" -- by allowing the supervisor in this case to confirm what he's being told, before he gives the go-ahead.
But step #1 is the biggie. As soon as the President says that the military can go to a place and kill people, it gets very dangerous for the people there. Apart from turning the entire planet into a panopticon, I don't think technology can change this much.
Let's imagine a future where fully autonomous weapons exist. Advanced AI is driving them, and technological advances have enabled the weapons to have better sight (wide spectrum sensors), better range and faster reaction time than humans. They can go where humans can't and endure in environments where humans can't live even for a couple of minutes. Perhaps initially the weapons are simple, kind of like the "sword" from Second Variety (P. K. Dick), using radio emitters to identify friend from foe. They would also need a power supply, and because you can't put an advanced brain of huge computing power on a small platform (laws of physics still apply), the "brain" would be located somewhere shielded, deep underground, perhaps near a volcano to use the thermal energy, but also near water, because of cooling requirements. The brain would use a large capacity datalink to communicate with the weapons. Humans are still in the loop, of course, because the adversary is unfortunately quite adaptable and you need programmers to change the software as battle requirements demand. However, humans have this pesky thing called conscience, and sooner or later, if you make them fight, they will refuse to pull the trigger. So they need to be removed as far as possible from the decision to kill, left to the AI. So a team (quite large in fact) of programmers are working on small, disparate features (image recogniton, data communication, weapons delivery) but they never quite see the big picture themselves. Since what they do is quite important, they are well paid and enjoy a nice lifestyle. There are of course downsides. Refusing to do the work anymore or even talking about it could bring repercussions. So the best strategy is to keep quiet and mind your own business paycheck to paycheck. Meanwhile, old school soldiers become obsolete and the AI does all the messy work.
Targeted killings don’t work, they only “help” replace some leaders with other (often times even more radical) people. This is not just an issue of “maybe we will get better at killing people up from the air soon” because the US has been at this game for almost 20 years now and we are still having the same conversation. War has been and it will always be about politics (meaning how people live and interact with each other, even with their enemies) no technological “breakthrough” is going to change that.
Do you think it is fair for a multinational company to ally with an army? What will be the limits?
Besides realpolotik, one also has to. answer such questions.
If Google helps Pentagon, then it no moral right to expand in Russia & China (I know about censored google search prpject), unless there are agreements.
I say it again if Silicon valley wants to be called a place where talented individuals of any nationality can stay & work for advancement of technology, then it must not help Pentagon.
In the history of the world violence never really solved any problem, it is moronic to believe that killing people by "sending kinetic energy down range" is a solution to any perceived problems highlights the a huge problem in the military industrial complex.
Violence is an action used when all other actions have failed and your life is directly and imminently threaten by someone else, That is the ONLY ethical use of violence.
It is not ethical "in pursuit of the international agenda" and it certainty not anything I or the vast majority of Americans actually vote for.
Americans vote for elected officials primary on the domestic policies, not on their "international agenda" this is the problem with having only 2 choices at the voting booth.
> Violence is an action used when all other actions have failed and your life is directly and imminently threaten by someone else, That is the ONLY ethical use of violence.
Look up jus ad bellum. I think if you look at past wars in which the US was the aggressor, and stack them up against the principles of just war, you'll find they often meet more criteria than a lot of people care to believe. Regardless, the military is an instrument of the people. If the military does things you disagree with, vote. Campaign. Lobby. Spend your time and money influencing other people to get off their asses and vote.
I'm frankly a little weary of fighting for a country of overweight non-voters.
>If the military does things you disagree with, vote.
Shall I show you the countless studies that prove that voting in a First past the post election system is pointless and does not, in fact, change any policy?
For example the study Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens.
>I'm frankly a little weary of fighting for a country of overweight non-voters.
the act of non-voting is itself an action, it is a statement of distrust, disillusion and or disenfranchisement from the system
You believe it is laziness or some other reason people do not vote when in reality they have correctly assessed that voting is pointless in the modern system.
Study after Study shows this to be true. The government does what people with political influence want, not what the citizens wants
Good points, At the same time, reducing the cost of killing people and destroying things (which is a military's legitimate job) makes it more likely those actions will be ordered by political leaders.
Let's say a technology could be developed that allowed your government (wherever you are) to kill any person with almost zero cost and no chance of detection. Would it be moral to aid in its development?
If it wasn't for WWII or the risk of falling behind competitors, should those scientists and engineers have developed the atomic bomb?
> Let's say a technology could be developed that allowed your government (wherever you are) to kill any person with almost zero cost and no chance of detection.
oh yeah, I remember that Hitman mission.
"Would it be morally justified for an assassin to kill me?" is a good question to add to the project-acceptance checklist.
https://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-tv-benchmark-cheati...