I only sold them the wood for the gallows.

See? I don't set policy. I just follow orders.

Are you trying to establish a false dichotomy?

Aren't both things true?

An AI bot that will report you to the Mounties if you ask it why your hip replacement will take 15 months or your neighborhood is suddenly full of Congoloids.

An idea so great, it must be made illegal not to finance it.

Looks like America's Hat has decided to be even more Marxist. Color me unsurprised.

I would be willing to consider an EV if EVs weren't nagware spies with wheels and in-game rentalware.

Of course, because enshittification seems to be the default these days, the same diabolical curse is now affecting regular motor vehicles that sound like actual cars.

I've half-considered purchasing a modern car, but I'm not going to do it until I know for sure I can (and how to) snip all antennae that communicate to home base. I can use GPS on my phone, and my phone can dial 911 in case of an accident — I don't need yet another snitch watching me and my every move.

Remember: only the little people go to prison or pay a fine for downloading vidya.

If the Free Software Foundation wins this lawsuit, it would be cataclysmically game-changing for open artificial intelligence.

Of course, what is the likelihood that the license (that the lawsuit brings as a cause for dispute) prevails in court, when so many people with so much power and clout *want* copyright not to "be true" when it does not serve them? Another commenter rightfully pointed out that Facebook and Anthropic both committed blatant copyright infringement, but surprise surprise, when THEY do it... suddenly the court looks the other way.

(As a reminder: copyright protects creators of derivative works, but also affords protection to the authors whose works were the basis for said derivative works. It is perfectly arguable that an LLM is a derivative work of the training data — we'll see what happens in this trial.)

This does not screw GrapheneOS users too much *for now*, because GrapheneOS will not require you to install the Play Store — you can install Obtainium or F-Droid, and get many apps this way — and GrapheneOS is also very unlikely to include in its Android fork the code that forces the system to check that apps came signed by Google. Therefore, GrapheneOS users who don't install the Play Store will not see any impact due to OSS and privacy-minded developers ceasing to publish on the Play Store.

But there is a much worse problem that hasn't been discussed very much — the Play Protect API: yet *another* monopolistic attempt by Google to lead apps (and their developers) to *outright refuse to run* on Android forks. This one dropped about the same time as the Play Store Self-Doxxing program being discussed in OP; already quite a few apps (chiefly banking apps) use it, leading to the apps simply not functioning on GrapheneOS (and, of course, other ROMs). It's being heavily promoted by Google as a mechanism for app developers to have confidence that their apps "aren't running on rooted phones", a situation which we know as "owning your phone that you paid for" but Google has been keen on promoting as "dangerous".

The point is to leave you, the owner of the phone, with zero option but to install the Google version of Android, lest the phone in your pocket become essentially useful at many tasks — some even mandatory these days.

You'll learn more details about this Play Protect API monopoly power grab here: https://grapheneos.org/article...