This wasn't about consumers, it was about developers you mid-wits. This is nothing more than an attempt from Apple to gaslight the EU by somehow claiming that something that worked exactly as intended, wasn't working.

The EU generally concerns itself with more than just consumers when it looks at market power. Virtually none of the anti-trust related rulings in the past decade have been because of consumers, they've all targeted developers and B2B restrictions.

Google Play lists all the permissions:

Device & app history
        retrieve running apps

Location
        approximate location (network-based)
        precise location (GPS and network-based)

Phone
        read phone status and identity

Photos / Media / Files
        read the contents of your USB storage
        modify or delete the contents of your USB storage

Storage
        read the contents of your USB storage
        modify or delete the contents of your USB storage

Camera
        take pictures and videos

Wi-Fi connection information
        view Wi-Fi connections

Device ID & call information
        read phone status and identity

Other
        receive data from Internet
        view network connections
        pair with Bluetooth devices
        access Bluetooth settings
        connect and disconnect from Wi-Fi
        full network access
        control Near-Field Communication
        run at startup
        reorder running apps
        control vibration
        prevent device from sleeping
        read Google service configuration

You can refuse some of those permissions, but it's still a hell of a lot.

That's the key point that people always forget, or simply don't know. Most Chinese people are happy with how things are going. Life is getting better every year. They feel like they are involved in local decisions, and that the government is looking out for them.

I asked a guy about all the CCTV cameras on roads. I noticed them because, unlike the ones in the UK that are hidden and quietly record number plates in a central police database all over the country, the ones in China have a flash so you can't miss them. As well as the licence plate, they get a photo of the driver, hence the need for the flash. I was a bit alarmed, but he said they keep everyone safe and help the police catch criminals. Exactly the same justification used in the UK, only with better PR.

I do 99% of my coding in C these days. I used to do some C# stuff, but it's been a while.

So for me a decent IDE is very very helpful.

That was my other thought, why don't they submit a patch fixing it? Or maybe they did and it just needed review.

Ryanair have two motivations here.

1. Steal your private data, spam you with notifications, the usual app stuff.
2. Make more people pay the check-in fee.

They are always up to stuff like this. The other very common one is rejecting bags that are within their size limits. They have special devices that the bag must fit in, but the dimensions are not the same as the ones in their Terms & Conditions. The device has rounded corners that reduce the volume a little, for example.

Is that a surprise? If you don't know what I'm talking about open a private browsing window and go hit the Sign-Up button and see what happens.

We've been a closed club for years.

Apparently you can create an AI to get rid of these popups. I've heard this tool MongoDB may be useful for this.

That's a strawman argument. We're not talking about Curl. Curl's dev's took a different approach to what was going on and specifically determined they aren't legitimate and took no action. On the other hand FFMPEG devs looked at it and ... fixed the bugs.

So by what metric do you determine that this isn't legitimate and quality? The FFMPEG devs seemingly deemed it worth their time to take action after analysing the case.

Again, whoever read this "slop" decided that there was sufficient reason to then proceed to fix the bug. Why call it "slop"? If you felt the need to fix something then by definition it provided you with valuable information.

I agree Google should invest more in open source and that AI tools are creating newer and higher workloads, but right now it doesn't look like the work is worthless - based on the actions of the very team complaining about it.

Except that's the case for many bugs across many pieces of software. That doesn't make the bug less severe, it just makes the likelihood of being affected lower.

It's also one of the cases for depreciating and removing old code, precisely because someone somewhere will be running with it on by default. You say "included by default" and I ask "by whom"? I must have some 20 copies of the FFMPEG libs on my computer with all the different software packages that include them using compiler flags unknown to me and out of my control.

The problem is not Gema, it's that the legal system is stuck in the 50s and 60s and doesn't have written logical precedent for the kind of thing AI does. Gema are just a bunch of dicks, but the problem is currently the legal system *sometimes* agrees with them. That's the thing that needs to be addressed.

Can you use MongoDB to create an AI App that removes a shitty pop-over cancer which should never be a thing on a desktop browser? I'm not using the Slashdot mobile site.

While you're absolutely right, the current state of copyright law and technology is at a disconnect. We're in a world where we need to convince people of such analogies (and even here on Slashdot the idea of hearing and memorizing isn't clear (I'm in the AI doesn't memorize department, it doesn't store an original copy), so that analogies start applying in a legal context.

What we need is for laws to actually exists which address this curious situation of a computer "learning" from what it sees or hears. Currently we don't have any which is producing wildly inconsistent outcomes across the legal field.

Capitalists are always looking for ways to make sure you don't have a choice, or at least not a real choice.

That's why companies often find that the kind of consumer lock-in they do in the US doesn't fly in the EU. Just because a consumer has a choice not to buy an Apple phone, doesn't mean that Apple can't remove choices from them about where to buy apps from, or to switch to Android and lose all their purchased apps and accessories.