I haven't looked at the code but I would be surprised if the premium account "requirement" is anything more than an if statement that can be commented out.
What do you mean? You can still stream any song with a free account. It's just that there will be ads. Additionally, in mobile apps, there will be ridiculous artificial limitations to make sure your experience is as miserable as it could possibly be.
My understanding is that the premium requirement is there to avoid having the repo taken down.
My understanding, based on a related comment in this thread, was that premium accounts get higher quality; in that case, I figured any such checks would be server-side.
If you were referring to a separate check in the above repo's code, my mistake.
Hm, maybe. I don't remember whether they offer higher quality. If they do, it would make sense to have that check on the server side. It's been a while since I last used Spotify because they deleted my account in 2022 without warning when they left Russia.
But I was referring specifically to all third-party reverse-engineered Spotify players requiring premium accounts to function at all.
I feel like many commenters are misunderstanding what this is about. This is about apps that are distributed via Google Play. It's an exception to the long-standing rules that a) all monetary transactions for non-physical items must use IAPs, and b) a Google Play distributed app can't install or ask the user to install something from outside of Google Play.
As far as I can tell, none of this applies to apps installed from elsewhere, be that F-Droid, other stores like RuStore, or just a downloaded apk. As long as the alternative store itself wasn't installed from Google Play that is, but none of them work like that anyway.
I'm not defending Google of course. Their entitlement is still insane.
Since Google is making sure to use all its monopolistic power for keeping Google Play the "default" app store for 99% of users, I fail to see this distinction as particularly relevant. From an anticompetitiveness perspective, that is.
A common pattern in social networks with a political identity, is that bait news stories are less scrutinized for truthfulness and more baited into raging. E.g:
Political group:Right
Social media: twitter
Headline: "the police detained a 15 yo for posting on tiktok"
Reality: "15yo called for violence on a specific event and group of people"
Pol group: left
Social media: bluesky
Headline: "young mother of 2 gets detained by ICE for speaking in spanish"
Reality: "DUI, didn't speak english, translator was used, prior records"
Reminds me of how phishing attempts play to our political identities as well, recently there was a phishing attempt were the platform said that during pride month all uploaded content would have the pride flag added or something like that.
The common pattern is that some things are ridiculous, but people want to believe that "the enemy" is as ridiculous, it's an opportunity to be enraged and vindicated that the injustice is too obvious to hold on its own. That it will all come crumbling down, or at least that any insecurities in our political positioning are reduced, and our position becomes clearer and our certainty increased.
In our case, it seems to be something very specific about external links from the play store. I can't be sure but it seems as if this rule relates to apps distributed through the google play store that in turn can download other apps. This provides an alternative agreement to the rev share model, where app stores can pay per install rather than on all future revenue.
Let's try to understand news and be on the same page before analyzing implications.
Russia is definitely not the same. I suspect they are still largely using (pirated) Microsoft products but cloud services hosted abroad are a big no-no.
There's another inscrutable mystery in physics, the nature of consciousness. Time might as well be an artifact of that. I'm surprised this article doesn't mention this possibility.
The first problem with the nature of consciousness is describing what you mean by it. Try, and I guarantee you that someone will find a sponge, Apple product, or bathroom slipper that meets that definition.
Electro-magnetic radiation, on the other hands, is highly describable in precise, testable, repeatable terms.
When you can state Maxwell's Laws of Consciousness, we'll talk. And rename them "Grishka's".
It's "dark" in the sense that the (fabled) Dark Ages were dark. They didn't have more cloud cover then. And dark matter is 'dark' as in 'inobservable, except by gravitational attraction'. So we admit it might not even be "matter" by any definition we have; it's just what we're calling this invisible, untouchable, silent elephant in the room. That is very heavy. And might not be an elephant.
Honestly, "invisible matter" might have been a better term, but that too would have been misinterpreted.
Assuming the other commenter is correct and the mcu is a clone of an ST product, then it's possible that the protection are fuses that destroy the pathways to the memory. They're one-time writable and cannot be undone. At my work that is how we protect our firmware with a similar ST product.
I'm not sure how it works in-silicon. Would be interesting to know how... but it's sunday afternoon
> In the end it'll likely end with whitelists of allowed IP addresses
I already had this idea of tunneling traffic through the voice/video calls in the Max messenger app. No one has done it in practice, yet, but I see no reason why it should not be possible.
Обход блокировок, который ловит даже на парковке ;)
That does not seem like a good idea at all. Even if you are “not doing something stupid” the fact that you would be circumventing their app to bypass censorship they may deem you treasonous and a possible risk. Who knows what they could arrest you for.
Law enforcement in Russia works differently than in the US, especially in politically charged fields. An exapmel: in the US, one man was charged of breaking construction codes because he was doing chemical experiments in the basement of his single-family house, in a block zoned accordingly.
I understand this is extreme, but a good illustration. He was doing something on his own, and was charged. Such enforcement is extremely unlikely in Russia even in todays situation. For instance, a recent law explicitly banned _searching_ for extremists materials, e.g. Navalny's party website (they're labelled as extremists ex-court by the Interior or the Justice ministry, I don't remember). But there's been just 1 court case since then. You can search whatever you want as long as you're not public about it. As soon as you get enough publicity, you do get on the radar.
Same kinds of examples: in the 1950's USSR some musicians were shadow-banned (there was no legal ban on them), and not published. A man made a lathe and carved disks with their music on used x-ray films. He was arrested when he got enough publicity and sold good deal of copies. He was charged not for copying them -- there was no ban on this -- but for illicit enterpreneurship, or speculation as it was called back then. Had he been doing this alone, he'd probably have not got under arrest.
I actually, think it's roughly the same as dealing with Torrent and trackers in the Western world nowadays.
Technically, the act of bypassing censorship by itself is still not even illegal. They did make it recently such that writing about VPNs is grounds for blocking wherever you've written about it.
> Technically, the act of bypassing censorship by itself is still not even illegal
Seeking extremist materials is illegal as of September. If that is not "bypassing censorship" then what is?
By the way. Extremist materials is a big list of thousands of things that no one can always know. What it means for a normal person? If you use VPN you can be finding extremist materials, if you don't = then you don't (because they are all helpfully blocked)
I don't think they would care as long as you don't do something stupid that would show up on their dashboards. But if you're paranoid, you can use phone numbers from, for example, Armenia or Kazakhstan. There are 8 countries besides Russia whose numbers they allow.
Yes, we have to use censorship circumvention tools to make the internet usable. Especially when it's mobile data. About a year ago I got fed up enough that I bought an OpenWRT router and installed Zapret on it. Now, at least while at home, I can mostly forget that internet censorship is a thing.
if i remember right, to activate the security (touch id like) feature you need the phone to be on your account. there are more restrictions than just pure activation.
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