I don't accept that premise. If there were, methods would have been open to discussion by the community and one of the actually privacy-preserving alternatives would have been chosen, such as having every website declare the age bracket in the HTTP header, legal determination it cannot be informed incorrectly, parenting tools within devices coming enabled by default and, if not opted-out, which only the adult buyer would be able to do after showing proof of purchase (no identity required), and browsers and the like only allowing connections to online services that matched the enabled configuration.

The way it's being implemented is the reverse of that and gives the government access to deanonimizable tracking. We know it's almost certainly deanonimizable because Snowden's files have shown how intelligence agencies deliberately include very subtle weaknesses in government-mandated cryptographic standards, protocols and methods, so any such must be assumed to contain one or more backdoors irrespective of them being seemingly impossible, as there's no feasible way to prove they don't other than blind trust.

The rule of thumb is that every single time politicians claim "think of the children!" without including in the proposed law objective measurable metrics the law is presumed to improve, plus requirements that if the improvement doesn't happen within a specific period of time the proposal must be cancelled, isn't about children, but it's rather levying popular emotional reactions to induce layers of false consciousness.

You're supposing the EU doesn't like the control this gives them. Consider how they're pushing privacy invasive age verification all around, and tying the process to people using verified iOS and Android devices. With ADC they'll be able to know exactly who made this or that app they dislike, and it will give them another means by which they can request specific apps providing features the EU doesn't approve of can be disabled.

Besides, if they prevent Google from limiting their system in a way similar to how Apple is limited, that argument might down the line be used to demand the same openness from apple, otherwise both platforms aren't competing on an equal footing.

The trick to understand how these things work is to think like a lawyer, not like an engineer.

The EU wouldn't care. Google's model as described is still way less restrictive than Apple's, and they've approved Apple's. If Apple's model was found to be acceptable, so will Google's.

Their answer to F-Droid will be quite simple: change how it works so it's compatible with how the ADC works by either registering for a single ADC key and being liable for all apps on the store, or by allowing every developer providing apps through F-Droid to have its own ADC and liability. And if F-Droid doesn't want to do either, there's always the alternative of becoming an ADB-based store that installs apps via USB cable or whatever after the user unlocks sideloading through the new process.

The EU will look at all this and answer "yeah, that's reasonable", and that'll be it.

That's the limited distribution version of the ADC. It has these limits:

So, not viable for the scale of F-Droid, or for any application that has more than 20 users, assuming each user would install it on a single device. And yes, they've figured quite well what they're going to do.

I found these ToS by searching. I'm not quite sure this is the most up-to-date version, as I don't have a Google developer account and don't want to create a new one to check, but it says these things:

Plenty of apps on F-Droid violate these. Several are illegal in different countries, while others directly violate the ToS of individual Google products. Since F-Droid would be the one signing on all of them, its own ADC use could be cut, and then trying to install apps signed with that terminated ADC key would fail.

The problem with that is that Google says it will ban developers whose apps signed this way violate its ToS, which can have anything they want on it, so F-Droid will have to policy apps uploaded to make sure they comply with their own and Google's ToS, and if some gets through that review and does violate Google's, since it'd be signed by F-Droid, that might mean that one account responsible for all F-Droid apps being banned out of a sudden, and with it all F-Droid-installed apps on a single go.

I imagine an alternative is for F-Droid to stop using its own signature and having developers sign their apps themselves. Reproducible builds would still exist to check whether the user-provided signed version matches the rebuilt version, or however that works, but the signatures would be individualized.

I only purchase phones I know I can install alternative OSes on. When one of my current ones is getting too old and in need of replacement, I research what the current alternative Android OSes are, chose a bunch I find are nice enough, then find the list of devices supported, the chose one from among those that's within my budget range. Those tend to be Motorola, whether officially or via some hack.

I don't buy a phone to play games, which means most any phone is performant enough for my needs, so I go with the cheapest option that does what I actually need. This also means that warranty is irrelevant: if the phone breaks for some weird reason, which is rate, getting it serviced by paying for the service, or buying a new one outright, aren't a big deal. Hence, the moment the new phone arrives I follow the procedure to get it unlocked, then the new ROM into. Sometimes with Google apps, sometimes without, depending on what I'm using it for.

As for bank apps and the like, I keep an old, tiny, cheap phone with stock, years-old Android that banks, due to mysteries of the universe, consider "secure" despite having hundreds of unpatched holes all the way down to the kernel. When I need to do banking I pick it from the docs drawer, turn it on, do what I need, turn it off, and back into the drawer it goes. For everyday use I have a debit/credit card, no app necessary with them.

Streaming is a loss, but eh, YouTube works well enough either with the official app, an alternative one, or a mobile browser, so good enough for watching something on the go. For me that suffices.

But yes, for those for whose use case is way more mainstream that's certainly not a good fit.

But he did deal with people like you, hence his essay.

No, you aren't. A centrist is someone located between Social-Democracy, meaning what's done in most of Europe, and Social-Liberalism, "worst known" to Americans as "Liberalism". AmiMojo positions are centrist. Yours, from the little I've seen, are quite explicitly right-wing.

You Keep Using That Word, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means.

For the record, I'm neither American nor British, so I'm talking badly about a foreign country. Is that allowed? But I can talk badly about my own country, which is currently run by the left (as in, actual left, not what Americans think that word means), and full of corruption. Can I criticize that, or should I praise them because it's my country and thus that'd count as "truth"?

AmiMojo: Defends one the hugest pro-free-market aliance of Capitalist countries in History.

Anonymous Coward: calls that Capitalist free-market alliance "far left".

AmiMojo: practices what G. K. Chesterton, one of the most well-regarded Conservative intellectuals of the late-19th and early-20th centuries, defended in his famous 1901 essay A Defence of Patriotism.

Anonymous Coward: likely believes Chesterton to be a Communist or whatever.

20 years, zero learning. Sad, so sad.

A major reason for that is the fact mainstream media is entirely owned by a tiny number of billionaires who actively use it to advance whatever narrative suits each one, to the point journalists wanting to keep their integrity must leave.

And a major way this might be solved would be by breaking these personal fiefdoms, forcing mainstream media to break into competing operations, as used to be the case before deregulation made consolidation possible, and then a certainty.

Quite the opposite. He hates Anthropic and keeps trying to find a way, any way, to damage them. Those attempts keep backfiring, though. It's the internal image of his international misadventures.

That's the thing: it isn't. Those are monetary movements that exist only on paper, not realized. Company A "invests" $x on company B, which invests $y and $z on companies C and D, with C then investing $p back into A and $q into D, with company D then investing $r back into A and $s on B, and B also investing $t on A, etc. It's a Ponzi scheme, but in the form of a maze rather than that of a pyramid.

The purpose of those movements is to leverage stock prices. A company valued at $hundreds of billions that gets re-evaluated at $trillions due to all this paper-shuffling sees its stock prices rise. Executives and shareholders profit by exchanging their overvalued portfolios for actual money, and whoever is left with those shares on hand when the bubble pops and the market crashes (read: pension funds) loses.

The last prediction I saw on this said people are likely going to see half their lifelong retirement savings disappear almost overnight when that hits, all the while the billionaires who sold at the right moment will see themselves catapulted into almost trillionaires, with a few becoming outright trillionaires.

Democrats wouldn't let those companies die either. Can you imagine all their hawks being content letting Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, and Nvidia cease to exist, and with them the global leverage those companies provide the US? No, they're all "too big to fail" no matter who's in charge. That's pretty much a bipartisan thing.

The problem for Russia is they're running out of money. Even with suicidal infantry being cheap, those still need lots of equipment and logistics to keep going, and there's nowhere else to source all of that from, whether from within or without. And it isn't like Russian pseudo-allies are really helping.

China, in particular, is double-dipping on them by demanding that oil and gas it purchases from Russia be sold at extraordinarily low prices, with the exact same heavily subsidised prices Russia sells them to its own population, while at the same time selling everything Russia needs for military use at the highest price it can charge. Russia cannot say no to either demand, so that's depleting Russian coffers even faster than they expected. And it isn't like China minds Russia becoming weaker due to this strategy. The more dependent Russia becomes on China, the easier it'll become for China to, someday, demand Russia give back all the Chinese territories the Russian Empire took from them when China itself was weakened during the 19th century.

Ukraine, on the other hand, has developed its military technology in-house, and with such a high level of competence, it's now exporting it and even building drone factories in other countries, countries that are in turn becoming heavy customers of Ukrainian tech and dependent on it for their own military uses, which in turn is paving the way for that technology, that doesn't depend of people on the ground walking toward the meat grinder while making it even more of a meat grinder, to advance at a faster and faster pace.

At this point, there's little Russia can do that'd turn things around other than going nuclear, and even that isn't guaranteed to go well for Russia, as Ukraine has very likely been preparing for that contingency for the last four years. If anything, going nuclear would precipitate the entire world attacking them.

And then to China taking back its former territories even earlier than they expected to.

Tyrants in general, from Putin to Trump, Xi to Kim, and everyone in between, practice seeding waves upon waves of contradictory lies mixed with a handful of truths with the very deliberate goal of causing exactly that emotional reaction: exhausted cynicism. They promote contradictory lies at home, so their people become accustomed to the notion that factual truth is hard or even impossible to achieve, and then convince their populations to generalize that cynicism so that they also start believing it's the same everywhere. That generates apathy toward politics in general, and by extension mistrust of those who are genuine in their activism, the latter being "felt" as nothing but agents of so many hidden interests, actors faking conviction in exchange for under-the-table benefits. People tune out and, as the saying goes, if one opts for neutrality in a dispute where one side is more powerful than the other, then one's siding with the powerful against the weak. And tyrants absolutely love that attitude: it's a huge factor in them maintaining their power unchallenged.

There are ways out of that. The heuristic I personally follow is to side with the weak side in any direct dispute with the powerful unless I have access to extremely trustworthy information showing that specific case is one of the very, very rare instances in which that doesn't apply due to extreme circumstances.

Hence, in Ukraine vs Russia I'm with Ukraine, because Ukraine is the weak against the strong and Russia is the attacker. Were it NATO attacking Russia, or China attacking Russia, I'd be with Russia. Were it the US attacking China, I'd be with China. Were it China attacking India, I'd be with India. India attacking Pakistan, I'd be with Pakistan. And so on.

Ditto for internal contexts. A Christian government in a Christian-majority country against small religions of minority groups, or against LGBT+ people? I'm with these. Muslim fanatics in Islamic-majority countries attacking Christian minorities? I'm with the Christians. Chinese attacking Falun Gong cultists or Vatican-loyal Catholics? I'm with both of these. Etc.

Take the side of the immediately weak against an attacking directly immediately strong, and you will rarely be on the wrong side of that specific dispute.

You're welcome. I only act aggressively in discussions when I'm attacked first, or the other deliberately acts with intellectual dishonesty. If that isn't the case, then my rhetoric may be at times ironic and even sarcastic, but it's always serious and on topic.

That's impossible. Narcissistic egos cannot understand the meaning of "no".

If Russia wins? Yes, since it'll be the same dictator governing both countries.

Yep! Chaos, followed by a unified Empire (the Roman one), followed by chaos, followed by another unified Empire (Christendom in its different imperial incarnations), followed by chaos, followed by the currently newly forming unified Empire, followed by chaos, followed...

The current incarnation is following the "perpetual peace" playbook as devised by Kant. 300 years to start reaching fruition, but such things take time.

The key sentence being "for the time being". In your list I'd only kind of agree with Iran not being expansionist. Putin has declared many times he wants conquest, having followed closely Dugin's "foundations" outline. China indeed isn't expansionist in the same sense, but in classic Chinese fashion it wants to be surrounded by wholly vassal states.

That means little. Russia, Belarus and Ukraine all claim descent from Kievan Rus, but they've culturally diverged within that common ancestral origin. And yes, as a good Russian propagandist I know you toe the (Duginian) line that Ukraine doesn't have its own distinctive culture because ${mythopolitical_nonsense} and therefore "should be" this and that and the other thing, whether willingly or by force. Ukrainians clearly disagree, so more power to them.