The failure is the point. They are trying to work up to getting VPNs blocked. I suspect they will have shrunk our economy by 60% before we manage to stop them. I only hope that, at that point, I will be able to get a legalized lynch mob up for them. The chances are reasonably good.

A) your credit card was probably stored in your phone anyway, so you can't buy a burner phone B) An unverified backup solution doesn't exist. If you had tried a disaster recovery exercise whilst at home, you would have already realized that you need to pre-install all your apps on your recovery phone.

And yes, the normal consumer now has to have corporate level IT to be able to survive in the world reliably. How they achieve that I have no idea.

I like an optimist.

If you don't have that turned on (because you are a normal user) and you install a verified F-Droid app, then the F-Droid app should be able to install verified apps without you having to either work out how to turn on developer actions or wait 24 hours.

To verify, devs releasing apps outside of Google Play will have to provide identification, upload a copy of their signing keys, and pay a $25 fee. It all seems rather onerous for people who just want to make apps without Google's intervention.

That's the other case. Or to put it more simply "no". Google will treat an app installed from F-Droid like an app that's side loaded. If it's verified then fine - no problem. If it isn't verified then it won't install.

This basically forces F-Droid to mostly carry verified apps if they want to have an easy install process. That's doesn't have to be a bad thing. F-droid has a bunch of apps where there is no known source code and no way to fix them. It might be good if they were forced to cleanup, rebuild and only provide them in some kind of legacy mode. I know there's quite a bit of concern from the secure versions of Android like GrahphenOS about fdroid.

It's more traditional than that. "We must do something. This is something. Therefore we must do this.". Virtue signalling implies that they have some kind of understanding that what they are doing will have little effect. In fact, some of the people behind this are likely fully aware that they will be able to sell new systems and force costs on other people

So what we probably need, rather than AI warnings, is "non-AI" certified content. Something that's traceable to an original untampered clip from an untampered camera or an actual provable person and then all edits are recorded so that we can see exactly what has been changed, if anything.

I wonder if there's a practical way of doing this without getting into some kind of horrific DRM style content control systems?

Yes. Norway has made the taxation a bit more representative of the true costs they cause, but ICEs are in no way banned.

And also EVs are outselling ICEs overall in the whole of Europe. Yes, Norway and the UK are leading, but EVs are going up everywhere.

We're now clearly at the denial stage from the enemies of EVs.

Careful what you ask for because you may get it. There's no way to do this in video formats, so it has to be embedded into the application. If your application allows export / import, someone will be able to take the video out, remove the tagging and put it back in.

The only real way I can see to achieve this without controlling people's ability to edit and communicate with each other is from the other side - to have some kind of verifiable "certified original" media where the original recording device signs the file it first creates and then each edit is visible and recorded and can be referred back to the original source clip.

I've seen a presentation by a vibe coder where not only was there a presentation generated from his topic structure by AI, but also there was a speaking AI in the Zoom meeting. The best bit was the way that the AI was much more cynical about the risks and problems of AI than any of the other presenters.

The only problem is that the presentation was quite good and informative. I guess we're probably at least some months if not years away from being able to create truly information free presentations with AI. Probably the AI people have spent too much effort on getting the AI to give the right, rather than totally ambiguous and content free answers.

It's the first time I realized someone is an AI, not because they invented something that doesn't exist, nor because they showed a complete lack of understanding. No, this time it's because they are clearly working up to trying to kill me.

Unfortunately the sacking was done by AI, and it just automatically assumed that the responsible people were the senior developers and not the managers who bypassed them. No worries though, we got it to justify a big bonus for automating the HR AI anyway.

hate auto correct.

test all possible software states

Another comment asked for "strict, rigorous, in-depth testing,"; I think there's a big problem with this. The first thing to say is that you can in principle have strict rigorous proofs that software is "correct" ("Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." - Mr. K.) you cannot have strict rigorous tests because it is impossible to test all possible software stated.

The AI is absolutely brilliant at finding paths through tests. Mostly and often ones that make the software correct. It is also brilliant at finding paths through the tests that achieve the goal it thinks it's trying to achieve and which are wrong whist seeming correct to humans. I think the code review for AI should be something different. You don't care about the individual lines of code, which are an artifact that can be rewritten. My guess is that you should think of the AI as a North Korean programmer working in your company because the bosses decided she's cheaper than your old friend they fired. Unfortunately your wealth is in share options that are only going to vest if you and the company survive till next year. She's always trying to slip a new backdoor into the code or destroy the company, but you aren't allowed to admit that, so maybe each time you code review, try to work out what new tests should be being added to make sure that her backdoor and destructive scripts don't go through and demand that they get written and verified.