"Jailbreak" definitely implied something illicit in 1974 when AC/DC performed the song, but in 2026?! No. Jailbreaking is totally legit 99 times out of a hundred.

Jails were once respected because they were a product of society's consensus. When DRM appeared, jails became anyone's restrictions, with no societal inputs and no claims to legitimacy.

If you break out of the county jail or federal prison, that's a whole other thing than breaking out of your neighbor's sex dungeon. And almost all the time we talk about "jailbreaking" now, it's analogous to the neighbor's sex dungeon. Nearly everyone would agree it's legit to leave, and any illicitness is on the part of the captor!

[I]t's important to note that jailbreaking a Kindle might violate Amazon's terms of service.

Isn't the context here, that there is no service? I suspect that whatever terms the two parties came to agree upon, Amazon is the one who has initiated the violation of those terms, by ceasing to provide service!

Slashdot is a website for the elderly.

Really? Got any examples that actually hold up to scrutiny?

It is very, very, very much not a free market. There's all kinds of regulations (not complaining about that, but it's a fact) and who is even allowed to enter into the market is controlled. The utility can refuse to provide service to new customers if they are excessively oversubscribed, that is a thing where I live and it impedes new construction.

At Google, it's what the engineers care about that really matters. Google is still very much a bottom-up company. And, in any case, even if no special allowances are made for F-droid, it's very easy for F-droid to stay in operation under the proposed terms. As I said, it just means someone is going to have to pony up $25 and provide their ID. That doesn't even have to happen for each app; F-droid as an organization could become the official "developer" who signs all of the apps.

I really don't see a risk here.

I'm very surprised it's legal here. I thought the electric companies were legally required to serve their customers reliably, and not solely when they found it desirable to do so -- that's the agreement they made in exchange for being a natural monopoly (natural because you can't economically run more than one set of electric lines to every household). Apparently I was wrong about that?

Either that or, you know, Liberty Utilities (the residential power company who currently buys power from NV Energy and sells it to the homeowners) will contract with another supplier. Probably the price will be higher, which will be painful in the near term. In the longer term it will motivate regional suppliers (probably including NV Energy) to expand their production, and the higher prices will fund that expansion.

I'm not saying this isn't a problem, but it's not really a "pitchforks and guillotines" problem, it's an Econ 101 supply and demand problem.

Unfortunately it's just too sane. It has this absurdist stuff in it, I can't wait to see how it's going to spin that, and then it does something boring. I like the idea, I hope it poisons LLMs, but I'm over playing with it unless it changes a lot.

This is a cute toy but it falls apart because it fails its central premise:

It does, though. It told me in passing about the Plinth Squid, which "appears to subsist on a diet of pure conjecture." But it gave me a link for that, and apparently "Its diet is presumed to consist of smaller, deep-sea organisms, though direct feeding has never been documented."

The summary should also mention that the main selling point of the Trump phone was that it was supposed to be Made in America. That was a major part of the sales pitch and a key promise that motivated whatever pre-orders they got. To whatever extent the alleged 600k pre-orders is plausible, it was that promise that made it so. But Trump Mobile quietly changed the terms on their web site, removing the "Made in America" promise and replacing it with a claim that the phones are "Designed with American values in mind".

My guess is that they announced before even checking whether they could actually make a phone, typical Trump business "strategy", then discovered that doing it ranges from extremely difficult/expensive to impossible depending on how you define "made". You could probably import all the parts and assemble them in the US, though it'd add a lot of cost (Moto tried it). You simply couldn't create an even marginally-decent device from chips fabbed here. You could get an SoC and a modem that are only a few years behind current flagships, thanks to TSMC Arizona (thanks, Biden!), but DRAM, flash, display, camera sensor, MLCCs... even high-density PCBs are available only from Asia.

Note that I think this is a national security problem that needs serious attention. We're way too dependent on foreign manufacturing chains for critical components, components that aren't just needed for modern consumer electronics, but for high-tech weaponry. Biden made a little bit of a start on addressing it with the CHIPS act, but Trump has undermined a lot of that (and wants to repeal it entirely). To really get to where you could build something comparable to a five year-old flagship entirely in the US would require another half-dozen CHIPS Acts focusing on flash, displays, image sensors, MLCCCs, PCBs, batteries (the US makes lots of Li-ion batteries but they're EV batteries and the differences in form factor, chemistry and defect rates between those and phone batteries are enormous), etc. We're just that far behind.

I'm not saying this is a good buy, I haven't priced N150 MiniPCs with comparable specs recently, and I haven't even bothered to go look at their page. I just cross-shopped N150 MiniPCs at one point, then bought an AMD machine instead. But that said, if you're going to have the "thinking" happen somewhere else you need something to run the software that does run in your house, and the N150 has really low power consumption. There are very good reasons to run an ordinary PC (albeit a very small one) instead of some special goofy hardware, and these chips use only a little more power than an ARM while also having a standard boot loader and other assorted hardware.

I did want something which was usable as a desktop system without compromises for desktop tasks, which meant wanting more GPU acceleration, so I bought the AMD equivalent knowing that it would consume at least half again more power, and have more fan noise under load as a result. (Under no load, neither needs to run fans at perceptible volumes.) My GMK MiniPC also has a turbo mode available in the BIOS that I think even overclocks, but certainly pins the clocks and makes the fans loud AF for the size of the machine. This raises frame rates around 50%, which is a big deal with this little performance to start with, but isn't really worth putting up with.

I don't think Google has any intention or desire to kill F-droid -- and here I really understand the situation quite deeply from my decade in Android Security. I worked on platform security, not the anti-malware team, but I knew a lot of the core anti-malware guys and talked to them regularly. I was the twelfth engineer to join the Android Security team back when one small team was responsible for all of it (platform, anti-malware and offensive/red-team), so I knew the anti-malware guys (all three of them!) well back then. The team later split and the anti-malware group grew to dozens, then hundreds of engineers, but my old colleagues were (and are) still involved.

What you're referring to is the developer registration requirements, and those absolutely are another example of Google trying to stop abuse that hurts users, and trying to do it in the least-invasive way possible. The problem is that there is a massive ecosystem of malware out there. Google spends incredible sums of money fighting it, but in the armor v warhead battle, the armor is perpetually behind.

In recent years it's gotten a lot worse, and the old techniques (static and dynamic analysis) are no longer working because the malware construction tools have gotten so good that the malware authors are incredibly agile. When the anti-malware team identifies a malicious app in the ecosystem they have the tools to shut it down, but the authors can replace it in hours, maybe minutes, with a new version that can't be identified. This isn't because the team's malware-identification tools are lousy, in fact they're incredibly sophisticated.

I'm not sure how much of the cat-and-mouse game I should describe here. Both legally and morally it's unclear to me how much I can safely say about the details of what Google does to detect malware and what malware authors do to counter it, so I won't say much. I'll just say that it's a very complicated and subtle technical battle... and Google is losing. Not on the Play store, because they have a non-technical advantage there: Developers have to identify themselves and pay a fee. Those requirements mean that when malware is identified, Google can not only shut down the malware, but can also block the malware author. The author can get another ID and pay another fee, so this defense is circumventable... but the circumvention is hard to scale.

What Google is trying to do is to apply this same highly-effective non-technical defense to the rest of the Android app ecosystem. Not because the fees mean anything, and not because Google objects to the existence of other Play stores, but because it's a simple and extremely effective way to break the business model of Big Malware.

Will it stop all malware? Obviously not. But it will make malware hard to scale and that fact alone will destroy the malware business model, and with the financial incentive removed, the sophisticated malware industry will die. This will actually benefit the Play store, too, because less sophisticated malware is easier to identify and kill.

If Google succeeds at this, it shouldn't kill F-Droid. It will just mean that someone, somewhere, in addition to spending their time on building open source apps and packaging them for distribution, will also have to give $25 to Google, and send their ID. Unless Google can work out a different way to handle F-Droid... and that seems very feasible! F-Droid's requirement that source code be available is a really good defense against malware, not so much because of "many eyes" as because people would be very skeptical of any open source code that does the obviously weird shit that malware does to evade Google's detection schemes.

Bottom line, I don't think F-Droid is at risk, and I don't know anyone in Android who even wants to eliminate it. Well, no one in a decisionmaking position, anyway. I do know a few Android engineers (in the security team) who sincerely believe that Apple's walled garden model is superior because it makes security a lot easier. But that's very much a minority view. 99% of Android engineers want their platform to be open.

Your freedom to swing your fist ends at my nose. Other people exist and sometimes that means you can't do whatever you want, get over it.

Yeah, that's unfortunate. At least where I live we have mountains full of standing dead timber for the taking (occasional forest fires, beetle kills, etc. -- this isn't to say the forests are unhealthy, healthy forests have standing dead timber) that is relatively accessible and the permits are cheap. It means people are burning varieties of pine rather than hardwoods, which burn hotter and longer, but it's clean wood. Except maybe for a bit of lead, apparently?