Yes, but Trump's will go in 3 years by itself. The IRGC regime will not.

It really should matter. If we can just decide the text means whatever we want it to mean, what's the point in writing it down?

Yes! This is the way. Unfortunately, our system is so dysfunctional we can't even pass normal laws now, much less enact and ratify constitutional amendments.

Surely not that. That would be dumb. And awful. And utterly corrupt.

Sigh.

The point is that they live there, where it hardly freezes. It's not like they are driving them in the cold.

Um, you do know where Norway is, right? You know they've held the Winter Olympics there twice, right?

Will it catch the president, who has been on a rampant insider trading and market manipulation spree for his whole second term?

What about congress?

What will the SEC do when it flags top politicians? I think all of us know the answer to that question.

Is it? What crimes, exactly? They might be defeating some copy protection, but the entity that owned the software is defunct, so no one has standing to sue.

> How can it be abused? I don't get it.

Really? You can't imagine a single way that a corporation or the government could abuse the ability to identify, track, and instantly locate any person at any time for any reason? Nothing at all, huh?

> yet I never heard of one case of a street camera being used to hurt someone let alone end lives

https://www.businessinsider.co...

https://www.yahoo.com/news/cou...

https://coloradosun.com/2025/1...

https://www.dailyjournal.com/a...

https://www.americanpartisan.o...

Those examples took basically no effort to find; now imagine if they want to target someone ON PURPOSE, like a civil rights leader, or to harass/round up people who participated in a protest.

Or just be a creep and stalk their ex or random women;

https://www.theguardian.com/co...

Oh, also the system is hilariously insecure, so it's not just cops, corps, and spooks who can use it.

https://stateofsurveillance.or...

=Smidge=

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

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.

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.

OpenLibre already had grammar checking. It was free, didn't require a lot of hard drive space (a few MB at most?), and ran locally and almost instantly without needing a high price graphics card.

In fact we've had that ability for over a decade now.

> Let's make LibreOffice and the free desktop AI-native!

Fuck you, Keith.

=Smidge=
/TexMaths is also an existing LibreOffice extension

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 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?