Comment by Ms-J
20 days ago
This is the worst thing to happen to technology in recent times since there is only two major phone OS's.
It isn't possible to ban encryption, so the governments have to chip away at security and privacy using these techniques.
From: https://developer.android.com/developer-verification
"You may also need to upload official government ID."
This won't end well for Google or the governments involved when the people get so angry that they are forced to roll this back. Switch to an alternative phone OS.
> This won't end well for Google or the governments involved when the people get so angry
The amount of people this makes angry is so minuscule that it probably wouldn’t even pass one of those theatrical “sign this petition to get the government to discuss it” thingy. Mind you, the only reason the whole side-loading court cases were going forward is because a giganormous company (Epic) wanted to make more money instead of paying the Google/Apple tax. Not because some people were angry.
This is a lot more complicated than that. I'm not sure how I feel about the demand for government ID. The demand for money that comes with the app stores I find to be a problem and so does the EU, that was a big point of the DMA. It remains to be seen how those regulations play out. Maybe the DMA won't do what I want. But the DMA seems to be aimed at this sort of thing, even if it actually has the same sort of requirements around government ID, it does require openness.
In this instance, quantity isn’t as important. The people it upsets are a loud bunch of a great deal of influence.
They don't. There was a similar uproar when Apple forced developers to share their addresses on AppStore publicly in EU.
Recent precedent suggests it only takes one really angry person to get a company to reconsider its course of action. The problem is software devs are far too comfortable for such action.
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> the people get so angry that they are forced to roll this back.
This is political fantasy. There is no mechanism for "the people" to force anyone to roll this back. They can vote for the candidate owned by google, or the candidate owned by google. If they want to find another candidate, they'll have to use google to find one.
Agree and disagree: the pressure on unity worked, and Sonos and, IIRC on Google's "federated cohorts" idea.
But often people try to project their opinions onto "the people" and predict they will rise up, and there's probably 100 predictions in comment sections that are completely spurious to every one that actually happens
So I'm not sure, but if I had to guess this one is a rare case where there may be real prospect of backlash.
If enough people internal at Google get pissed off and raise this up enough it can legitimately get rolled back.
They will just get sacked for sycophants either here or abroad. For every principled worker there is, there is another person willing to eschew those principles for that paycheck. This is a desperate world by design to enable these tradeoffs by the very people who build, maintain, deploy, and ultimately control the worlds systems.
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You mean the people actively building this system? I have to assume it's decently far along for them to make this announcement.
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If a government was to plan something like that, there would be protest in front of the parliament. Were are the protest in front of Google main office? If there are a few hundreds of angry developers handing out flyers at Google employees on there way to the office, explaining how bad is Google, maybe Google will move, because they care about the bad publicity. Open source developers involved with Android and app in California should walk in front of Google offices to protest.
What's wrong with loading an alternate OS that isn't Play Protect certified?
Attestation & Play Integrity is having a good go at blocking this: lots of critical software (e.g. the app required to use your bank account) requires certified attested devices, and Google are pushing hard to get as many apps as possible to activate that for "security", making non-Google Android un fixably 2nd tier in functionality.
Doesn't GNU/Linux also have this problem with e.g. Netflix? If you don't pass their spyware, you get shitty streams from video apps and no access to financial accounts.
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>and Google are pushing hard to get as many apps as possible to activate that for "security"
I'd be interested in further reading on Google's outreach to big banks and major finance CO's ( or others) pushing for device attestation if you have any further reading.
And not just financial apps. Even TikTok, a platform which people around the world are using for various good activities that governments may not like, is using Play Integrity.
Most vendors, including the big ones, don't play well with that. Google just revoked open sourcing the Pixel as the reference design which was the strongest option for that. Things like newer Samsungs are black boxes and everyone is actively making it harder to do anything with devices you bought and paid for.
Soon you won't be able to do this either because most manufacturers are locking down the bootloader.
And Google stopped providing device trees and driver binaries... and stopped releasing AOSP as often, and, and...
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That would mean they are committing copyright violation of the Linux kernel. So they could be sued by Linux kernel folks, or by users of the devices.
https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/mar/25/install-gplv2/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/jul/23/tivoization-and-t... https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017...
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It's increasingly difficult to get current hardware for which an alternative OS is available, and which is not locked.
Right now, it seems to be fairphone or pixel, or old phones which are not easy to obtain. Samsung have announced they will lock their phones, and how long before google locks pixels?
The number of people able to do that is fewer than those willing to send in copies of overnment IDs. Phones compatible with AOSP builds are rare outside small bubbles of Pixel users as well.
Society deserves whatever's coming for it. Look how vain and stupid we've become.
> This won't end well for Google or the governments involved when the people get so angry that they are forced to roll this back.
This makes me quite angry, but I guarantee more than 90% of Android users will not be bothered too much about this. Many of them will actually like it, and most of those who don't will just shrug and go on with their day.
My estimate is less optimistic: 99% of users won't ever be bothered with this news nor notice that anything changed, and of those who will, 90% will like it, because 'less malware' is the only thing they can work with.
The weirdest thing to me is that those people who actually care about this are most likely the ones capable of implementing this shit: developers. Us. Who else but developers (OK, and maybe their enlightened spouses) cares about this? We are digging our own graves, basically.
So, Google devels: refuse this. And tell your willing colleague that they are not welcome at your birthday party if they do it.
> This is the worst thing to happen to technology in recent times since there is only two major phone OS's.
I don't think that's it. The desktop OS situation has historically be similar with 2 major large players and a bunch of insignificant ones.
This comes down to user expectation.
No, it's not similar.
There are two OS platforms for desktop/laptop usage: MacOS Windows
These both contain ways to run arbitrary compiled code from an arbitrary source -- like a computer should. Losing this feature of our smartphones should have everyone concerned.
> These both contain ways to run arbitrary compiled code from an arbitrary source
And they're both working towards taking that away.
For now we have Linux as a 3rd option, but that only exists so long as there's hardware available that'll let you run it. Can easily imagine a near-future where you can only get 'Windows hardware' or 'Apple hardware' and nothing modern that'll boot a 3rd-party OS.
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Right. The OP's point was that just having 2 major OSes is the problem but it's clearly not because we had that situation with desktops/laptops and they both allow arbitrary code.
I mean, you're pretty optimistic that the current fascism is going away any time soon.
Well it seems like the UK gave up their ridiculous "backdoor" fight with Apple, so maybe there's hope.
Then they rammed online safe space regs.
More people should've supported Mangione.
Over a billion people use iOS and more would have if they could afford it. These companies have big data and they know how many people it’ll affect/annoy. You are outnumbered.