As He died to make men holy
Let us die to make things cheap

  • 11 Posts
  • 547 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 8th, 2024

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  • I would be very happy if anyone could explain to me in a simple and coherent way why I, as a normal user who am aware of what I am doing on my device and am not targeted by any group that’s out to get me, would need a “hardened malloc”, “secure app spawning”, “vanadium browser and webview”, or a “hardened PDF viewer”. The last of these four is the only thing that means anything to me, and it sounds dumb. Yeah, I know PDFs can be dangerous if you open random shit, but come on.

    If I run Waydroid it’s only to get my banking app (trusted source) and Whatsapp (not a trusted source but not directly malware either) working. I hardly need their hardened PDF reader.


  • I guess if Google closes down AOSP it would get forked, and the fork would probably be a separate thing from the current Android distributions. So that the landscape would continue to look a bit like today, except that AOSP would be an independent thing.

    Then I guess it’s possible that Google would seek to make android apps incompatible, gradually making the whole thing kinda pointless. I can’t say I’m using Android for the great UX - I’m using it because it supports a few apps I continue to be forced to use. If I can’t use them on Android any more I’m switching to Ubuntu Touch or PostmarketOS in a heartbeat.






  • Everything takes a long time, but things are happening. If you search for the terms “fine apple EU” or “fine apple EU” in your search engine of choice you’ll see there’s quite a lot going on.

    I have some personal friends who are working with this stuff for the European Commission. It basically takes a long time to build a case against tech giants, and then once the Commission fines them these fines will be appealed in the EU court system, which will take even more years to process.

    It’s annoying that there’s not a magic switch to flick to make Google and Apple comply with EU law, but that’s the world we live in. If the EU just banned Google and/or Apple it would probably backlash tremendously (never mind that I doubt they have the authority to do so even if they wanted), so they have to move a bit slowly. :)


  • You can’t make laws for every single possible future reality. We need courts that uphold laws even when billionaires try to dodge them using shady techniques. The problem is that big tech often gets away with murder because they can afford expensive lawyers. Especially in the US laws are essentially meaningless for the rich. This is not so much the case in Europe.

    I have heard some positive signals from the European Court of Justice that they are taking the challenge from big tech seriously and that they are going the extra miles to understand these issues. If you’re particularly interested, many judges talk about this in the Borderlines podcast series by Berkley law. But it gets really dry really fast haha.

    I don’t believe in signing authorities. It’s not effective - Google can’t even keep malware off the play store - and it’s an authoritarian move. Hell, most apps in the play store spy on their users, profiling usage to sell to advertisers along with ID codes that makes it possible to combine data between apps and build detailed profiles of individuals. The problem is not apps that are not signed - the problem is the whole economy of apps that work as Google intend them to.

    Also, it’s a basic question of rights. It’s my phone, I bought the hardware, I own it, I install whatever the fuck I want on it.