Europe needs to elect socialist leaders to respond to this moment, or fall into the grips of fascism.

Now that Linux is cool I’m bored with it. They should swap to either GNU/Hurd or NetBSD. _/s

There is definitely a shift in how the US is acting. Donald Trump is persuing imperialist ambitions in a brazen, vulgar way, which has exposed those ambitions far more undeniably than ever. It has been a real wake up call for many people around the world.

In the past, US leaders have acted with a veneer of plausible deniability, but that is now completely out of the window. The propaganda machine of the US empire is now on full display for everyone to see, and with the surge of independent media coinciding with all of this, suddenly, all of the cards are revealed.

If the US government and mainstream media are so clearly and obviously lying now, people are more willing to seriously consider that they may have lied in the past. All it takes is for people like myself to point it out to them, and they don’t even argue much anymore.

It’s over. You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. The US empire’s collapse is now inevitable. Sit back, and enjoy the show.

Taking wealth through force is not necessarily an act of imperialism, and that is not how the term is commonly understood - the term for such an act is pillage.

Pillage is often a part of imperialist endeavors, but not necessarily so. Imperialism can take place without a single act of pillage.

I’m not “giving into” anything. I have been calling out and arguing against US imperialism for decades. Everyone else is catching up to me, finally, and thankfully.

If you want to continue to deny it, that is very much your prerogative, but again, I think you’ll find yourself on the losing side of that argument more and more as time goes on.

Probably more likely to go for SUSE, since it’s European but still Enterprisey.

C’est l’année de l’ordinateur Linux!

To send you a push notification, an app requires a special token specific to that app and your device, kinda like an API key, which can only be generated for a device using Google Play Services. Without that token, a push notification cannot be sent. These tokens expire, so if you used Google Play Services and just turned it off, push notifications will still get sent into the ether - but never delivered - until the token expires, at which point notifications can’t be sent anymore. Badly developed apps might still try to send push notifications with expired tokens, I have no idea what Google servers would do with that, but I’d guess they would just discard it immediately.

Edit: Sorry, I think I misunderstood your question. If you don’t have Google Play Services enabled but your friend does and messages you, no, a push notification won’t be sent, but if you message them, one will be sent to them.

I thought you were asking if you just disabled notifications on your phone if that would prevent push notifications from being sent. I’ll leave my original answer in case someone else has that question.

It depends on what exactly you mean, but usually not. If you mean in your phone’s notifications management settings, that does not affect the push notifications being sent to Google/Apple servers, that’s just a local setting to decide how your phone handles it.

Some apps, though rarely, allow you to disable push notifications from being sent. If it exists, this is inside a settings screen in the app itself or on the app provider’s website somewhere. Generally, only privacy-conscious apps provide such settings.

As I wrote elsewhere:

It depends on the app. Some apps do (or can be configured to) indeed send “empty”/blank notifications which just notify you that you’ve received a new message from an app, but not from whom, or what the message contains.

However most apps by default will contain more data, such as who the message is from, and some/all of the sent message body.

If you get a push notification on your phone, everything you see in that notification must by definition pass through the push notification service.

I’d disagree with “most messengers” doing that, in my experience, most don’t do it by default. Signal is a pretty rare exception to do so by default.

Yes, I know! Sorry for the confusion, I just wanted to take the opportunity to raise awareness about a privacy issue that lots of people aren’t aware of

I had guessed as much from your username! You don’t need to be American to struggle to come to terms with this stuff, I have conversations like these with people from all over the world, from Australia to Canada.

But you know yourself better than I know you, so of course I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt on that. I’m guessing you have a very specific definition of imperialism which I don’t share, and I’m guessing most others don’t share. That’s okay, at the end of the day, you’re entitled to that, but I think it’ll probably lead you into some rather unproductive conversations.

It’s not just about land acquisitions and colonialism, but also about hegemony. Again, you’ll get no argument from me that Europe hasn’t had a terrible history (and even present) of imperialism. The British Empire was unbelievably terrible, and France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, et al. all have (or had) their own imperialist interests. No argument from me there at all. I am anti-imperialist, not anti-American.

This all just feels like pure whataboutism because you’re uncomfortable confronting the fact that the United States has a long and sordid history of imperialism.

From Wikipedia’s article on Imperialism:

Imperialism is the maintaining and extending of power over foreign nations, particularly through expansionism, employing both hard power (military and economic power) and soft power (diplomatic power and cultural imperialism). Imperialism focuses on establishing or maintaining hegemony and a more formal empire.

I feel like that perfectly fits the behavior of the American Empire, not just in recent years, but going back decades. Hegemony is absolutely what they’ve always been trying to build. Don’t you feel like the Munroe doctrine is an imperialist endeavor? The US invasion of Vietnam? Venezuela? The Philippines? Hawaii? Afghanistan? Iraq? Iran? The ongoing blockade and years of terrorist attacks against Cuba?

The idea that America is heavily invested in being a “world police” has been a meme going back decades. What is that, if not the maintenance and extension of power over foreign nations?

Someone is still in denial, I think. For what it’s worth, I don’t judge you for that, I totally understand it, but I think you’re doing yourself a disservice here.

If you use GrapheneOS with push notifications, after enabling Google Play Services, those push notifications are relayed through Google servers. Most apps will include message sender and text in the push notification, meaning that data will pass through Google servers and they can read it.

If you are a GrapheneOS user and leave Google Play Services disabled - which they are by default - you have nothing to worry about, but notifications are generally delayed and use more battery as a downside.

So it’ll use TLS encryption, meaning that others on your network won’t be able to snoop it, but not end-to-end encryption, so Google/Apple servers will see the plaintext of the push notification content.

This is a limitation of the specific implementation of how push notifications work. End-to-end encrypted push notifications would be technically possible but it would require Apple/Google to make it possible. Developers can’t implement it without getting you to run some services yourself, either self-hosted or a long-running background process on your phone, which would be a battery drain.

The link you shared isn’t really relevant to push notifications specifically.

The best happy medium we can get is to send empty/blank push notifications, which some apps including Signal offer as an option, but you often need to set it that way in the settings. I think Signal does that by default, but very few apps do.

It depends on the app. Some apps do (or can be configured to) indeed send “empty”/blank notifications which just notify you that you’ve received a new message from an app, but not from whom, or what the message contains.

However most apps by default will contain more data, such as who the message is from, and some/all of the sent message body.

You might be getting pull notifications, that’s generally the workaround for push notifications being disabled - it generally increases battery usage because it forces the app to stay open in the background.

The message you send them would probably go through as a push notification to them, but the message they send you wouldn’t.

I’m actually talking about sensitive data on Google/Apple hosted servers, as well as on the phone itself!

If you don’t use Google Play Services, you don’t get push notifications, so yes. Libre reimplementations of Google Play Services such as Gapps etc. or alternative push notification providers do not circumvent this issue, except possibly self-hosted push notification providers. This approach is really rare though and limited generally to very few apps.