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Unofficial F(x)tec Discord


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Hi, all.

This was mentioned in passing in another thread about the forum, but it seemed easy to miss, especially if you're here due to recent IFA coverage. One of the members set up a discord channel in lieu of the current speed of the forum. It's essentially just a place for chatting while waiting for the device. I do wanna make clear that this is an unofficial channel set up by members of the community. There will be no info there that isn't already known, and F(x)tec staff are not involved with it in any way. Despite all that, we do hope you stop in to say hi and share our excitement for the Pro1's coming release.

Invite link: https://discord.gg/pfUkxQ9

 

 

 

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Well, yes. It holds on to messages and logs your ip, stores pictures you send though the service, ect. You use it at your own discretion, but it doens't do anything different then, say, facebook messenger or any number of the programs on your phone. If you use an email service like gmail, anything that passes through their servers are saved and can be reviewed at a later date. Even if you use your own private mail server, emails sent to others with gmail accounts will still be held on to. Your data is already out there, it's just a matter of who has it at this point. If you don't want discord holding on to your data, that's fine, but it's important to put things into perspective instead of just going after everything with data collection. You can also request to see all the data discord has on you, and delete your account if you think it's taking too much. (Not trying to get you to try it, that's more aimed at the people who already signed up but didn't know what exactly was logged)

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You can also request to see all the data discord has on you, and delete your account if you think it’s taking too much.

 

You cannot know if they tell the whole truth though. If privacy is a serious concern one could run it sandboxed and through a VPN or TOR and avoid the need for blind trust. The windows program does check what other programs are running (to do fancy features like silence notifications when screen recording software runs to make ppl who stream games happy) which is a scary proposition to some, the web-chat is probably not nearly as bad.

 

On the other hand the main issue told on that page is that messages are kept on the server centrally etc... This all is so for the forum, and any forum, too.

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Interesting none the less.

 

Makes me wonder how Telegram-desktop compares for privacy/security issues? It seems they only keep chat history for a couple weeks by default (unlike discord which seems like forever), and I believe their source is available.

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Most of these Discord privacy concerns are a little bit over the top. They are obviously required to deliver the current feature set of the application.

There are still some things that got me stumped though. Like recently with the addition of streaming, it always scans and displays the current game in the application, even with overlay and game status disabled. There's no way to disable the streaming detection.

What's also important to me is that they have this Nitro subscription. Now, I don't use it since I hate subscriptions, but at least they got some stream of money coming, so they shouldn't have to rely on selling all your data. Doesn't guarantee anything of course.

 

Discord might not be the safest choice, but sometimes one has to weight convenience and total privacy. On Discord I have the convenience to access all my account data, logs, etc., from any device, search through old conversations and whatnot. Silly banter about phone won't be the worst thing to be stolen, if it happens.

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Oh there are actually good alternatives privacy-wise. Hint: Telegram surely not. (per default nothing is incrypted, so it's just marketing BS that they care about your privacy.)

For team/company chats it's Riot/Matrix, they are open source, everything end-to-end encrypted, you can run your own server.

 

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One of things I'm most happy about in my future use of this phone is that it's use will be associated with sensible people like you.

 

Interesting none the less.

 

Makes me wonder how Telegram-desktop compares for privacy/security issues? It seems they only keep chat history for a couple weeks by default (unlike discord which seems like forever), and I believe their source is available.

Telegram is a LOT better than Discord. It isn't great, but it isn't spawn of Mephistopheles like Discord is either. Basically, the only big privacy issue with Telegram is its requirement of a phone number. But, anyone with a 3 digit IQ knows giving up there phone number like that compromises privacy somehow, and are doing it for a greater convenience. I guess my point is that Telegram doesn't practice nearly the same amount of slimy, under-the-hood nastiness that Discord does.

 

 

Oh there are actually good alternatives privacy-wise. Hint: Telegram surely not. (per default nothing is incrypted, so it’s just marketing BS that they care about your privacy.)

 

For team/company chats it’s Riot/Matrix, they are open source, everything end-to-end encrypted, you can run your own server.

I'm rather upset Riot/Matrix hasn't taken off to the degree I want it to yet. The mental set fixation of the masses truly reveals itself when Riot offers nearly everything Discord does and more as far as convenient enough features, yet people will still turn a blind eye. Not because Riot is less convenient, but because it's not what they're used to. The only glaring issue I see with Riot compared to Discord (that most who would willingly choose Discord over Riot will never see) is that Discord uses the opus audio codec for calls and Riot doesn't. Opus is stupidly superior to basically every lossy audio codec and has been for years. It frustrates me when obsolete options are used in its stead.

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For those of us who don't like Discord, I've set up an unofficial IRC channel on FreeNode. #fxtec.

 

You can install an IRC client such as xChat, or use a webIRC such as https://webchat.freenode.net/#fxtec .

 

Unlike Discord, users who are not present when you send a message will not get the message. You can mask your IP from other users using something called a "cloak" (or TOR, or a VPN) but FreeNode still gets all messages and only their policy prevents them from logging.

 

The channel currently does not require users to be registered, but if there is another spam problem I may have to change that occasionally.

 

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I guess I'm one of those who used discord cuz I'm 'used to it'. Although I'd only ever used it on my linux-distro's support server before fxtec.

I'm way more familiar with irc, 25+ years experience using ircii. I haven't bothered to figure out any modern clients and only use it occasionally these days, but now that I've tried discord/telegram I see some advantages or at least things different. For example both saving history even when not logged in (albiet different periods) & being able to post pictures.

 

That being said, I just installed riot-web and created #fxtec:matrix.org. If anyone wants to try it, official download links for the client:

 

windows/macos/debian/ubuntu https://riot.im/download/desktop/

fedora/centos/redhat: https://github.com/taw00/riot-rpm/ https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/taw/Riot/

 

Maybe I'll like it even better, I have no loyalty whatsoever to discord/telegram or even irc, although I am not abandoning the discord server with 100+ users or even the rarely-active telegram channel.

 

 

 

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No thanks, fuarrrk discord:

That “source” in your post looks everything but trustworthy

 

rms approved it,so it's gotta be ligit

 

And I'm not being sarcastic. The guy may have is issues (recently brought to light), but he's serious about open-sourceness and privacy stuff.

 

 

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After using Riot a few days, seems its chat ux is very similar to telegram. Haven't found it lacking in features or anything, so I give it my seal of approval too :) The thing I like about discord over telegram/riot is the mutiple chatrooms under one heading. (or channels per server as discord calls it), but I like telegram/riot's way of quoting people in replies, which discord lacks.

 

Re discord privacy, another thing I've noticed (that I've never bothered to look into) is that it sometimes shows people playing games in the users list. does that mean discord is monitoring my processes, seeing what I'm running and sending that back to discord server for them to match up with games? Prolly not, and hopefully not by default, but...

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After using Riot a few days, seems its chat ux is very similar to telegram. Haven’t found it lacking in features or anything, so I give it my seal of approval too :) The thing I like about discord over telegram/riot is the mutiple chatrooms under one heading. (or channels per server as discord calls it), but I like telegram/riot’s way of quoting people in replies, which discord lacks.

 

Re discord privacy, another thing I’ve noticed (that I’ve never bothered to look into) is that it sometimes shows people playing games in the users list. does that mean discord is monitoring my processes, seeing what I’m running and sending that back to discord server for them to match up with games? Prolly not, and hopefully not by default, but…

 

I did use OBS studio for recording screen while discord was open at one point and it automagically noticed and went into silence the notifications mode, so it does monitor what runs. Also it has insane defaults like allowing everyone to /tts, so i would not be surprised if it defaulted for other things to some mad settings.

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Looks like there is a web-version of the riot app at https://riot.im/app for those that want to try it w/o install, and there's android/ios clients available too.

 

I think I figured out how to create an invite link to the fxtec room, although since I made it public searching for fxtec finds it right away also.

https://matrix.to/#/!iEBGYJcPyuidgsPkYN:matrix.org?via=matrix.org

 

 

 

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Re discord privacy, another thing I’ve noticed (that I’ve never bothered to look into) is that it sometimes shows people playing games in the users list. does that mean discord is monitoring my processes, seeing what I’m running and sending that back to discord server for them to match up with games? Prolly not, and hopefully not by default, but…

 

Yes it does that if you install it. How else would it know what games you were running?

 

Obviously there's no way for it to do that if you use the web client.

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Re discord privacy, another thing I’ve noticed (that I’ve never bothered to look into) is that it sometimes shows people playing games in the users list. does that mean discord is monitoring my processes, seeing what I’m running and sending that back to discord server for them to match up with games? Prolly not, and hopefully not by default, but…

Yes it does that if you install it. How else would it know what games you were running?

 

Obviously there’s no way for it to do that if you use the web client.

 

It could be checking the processes locally (against a list provided by server), not sending complete process list to the server to be checked. And it could be that it required an add-on or at least opt-in. But I dunno, hadn't looked into it, but you asked...

 

 

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  • 1 month later...
  • 4 weeks later...

Have noticed some new users active on the forum, figured it was time to bump this.   36 users online and 104 offline right now.  There is a chat room that welcomes random chat on any topic (including pro1), plus other rooms dedicated to just pro1 topics.   Occasionally a useful or interesting message is 'pinned' in these rooms, so others can see what they might have missed.  You can run it straight from a web browser, or get a dedicated app/client for many OS/devices. 

 

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