Really? What vulnerabilties did you find?

Or are you talking about something completely unrelated?

It's probably way less true than it once was, because we used to build things with meaningful safety factors, and because all of these devices have flash storage in them now and it's subject to bitrot.

Bad for their customers, yes. Good for Sony, as long as they don't get busted for claiming to sell what they clearly were only renting out, and they clearly knew this if they didn't secure a perpetual license.

Anyone "buying" a digital good which doesn't come with the inherent ability to use it later (like a GOG download) isn't buying it. While it should be illegal to claim you're selling to those people instead of just renting, they are also being fools if they think they own that.

Who are you? Nobody? Oh, OK. Feel free.

They could instead be prohibited from operating in markets where that data would give them an unfair advantage.

Both corporations and intellectual property are legal fictions, they are not real property. They are supposed to exist only for the benefit of The People. Work it out.

It's not just capitalism at play. There's also nationalism.

China may invade Taiwan eventually. TSMC would be irresponsible not to hedge against that.

Sure, as long as we can all also admit that Clinton was a rapey piece of shit who did multiple absolutely fucking terrible things, like signing the CDA and PRWORA. Also, "got a blow job" is a gross misrepresentation. "Coerced an intern into a sexual act" is a better one.

Which is exactly why no one should ever trust a promise from the USA again. Until we get our legal documents into some semblance of order, it must be assumed that this will all happen repeatedly.

Yes, and it's wrong. And it's also exactly why congresscreeps shouldn't be allowed to trade stocks. It goes way beyond insider trading, straight to market manipulation.

Why would you stop a selective recount aimed at finding more votes in a specific set of counties that tended to lean toward one candidate? Hmm...

The above is a one-sided interpretation, but it's not an unreasonable one. The situation was that Florida had voted with punchcard ballots, and there were problems with a percentage of the ballots, both "overvotes", cases where more than one candidate was punched, and "undervotes", cases where no candidate was punched in a race. But it turns out that when you're talked about punched cards, "punched" is an ambiguous term. There were cases where chads (the little rectangular pieces of paper that get punched out) were left barely attached ("hanging chads") and cases where they were partially punched but still fully attached ("dimpled chads"). And everywhere in between.

Gore's team called for the targeted recount, arguing the theory that the targeted counties had more elderly populations who were more likely to have failed to fully punch their choices, resulting in "undervotes" when the scanning machines read them, i.e. the machine saw no holes for a race and decided that the ballot didn't vote for anyone. They argued that human examination of those ballots could clearly see in some cases that a position was punched and that a recount should be done to count those. The Florida State Supreme Court ordered a selective recount of the counties the Gore team thought should be recounted, to correct correctable undervotes.

Bush's team argued to SCOTUS that the selected counties were all Democrat-leaning (they were) which meant that the voters in the Republican-leaning counties that had not been selected were not receiving equal treatment under the law. The initial statewide count was done by machine, but the recount which would be more "permissive", finding votes where the machine wouldn't, was only being done in counties where the newly-found votes were more likely to be for Gore.

SCOTUS stayed the recount while they decided how to handle this, then ruled a few days later that the recount was unequal treatment, that a proper recount would need to be statewide and it would need clear rules for how to count ambiguous ballots, rather than each county defining its own rules. But by then the clock had run out anyway. The court's rationale for staying the count while they decided was that if the count proceeded counties would release updates that would likely show the vote totals shifting, which would make rejecting the recount look really corrupt if it went against Bush and if they decided that's what should be done. "Oh, the conservative court let the count go forward until they saw it wasn't going their way, then they rejected it" was worse than "The conservative court stopped the recount before it produced any results", was the theory.

You can certainly argue that these published positions by the court weren't the real reason, but they're not without merit.

In any event, as a careful, methodical, independent recount determined months later, the Gore-requested recount would still have shown Bush won. An incomplete recount which resulted in no win would have been a Bush win, because the state legislature was voting to send Bush votes for that case. An incomplete recount in which Florida failed to submit a slate would have been a Bush win, because the US House would have picked him. The only scenario in which Gore won was a statewide recount that also tried to tally "overvotes" -- having humans try to discern which of multiple punched chads was "most" punched, but no one at the time thought that would favor Gore, and it wasn't even being discussed.

Aside: "Corruption" is the wrong word. Corruption specifically refers to bribery and other compensation-related schemes (not necessarily monetary). "Partisanship" is a better word.

Indeed it does.

Yep. So all of the F-Droid-distributed apps will be associated with one account. Or maybe it'll be distributed across a handful of accounts.

For open source apps absolutely anyone can package and submit an app under their account.

You think Google is going to verify that an app was submitted by the author/developer rather than some F-Droid guy who submits all of the F-Droid apps?

They just require the code to have been submitted by a registered identity. They aren't going to check copyright ownership... and with open source apps that's rarely only one person anyway. The only risk is that if some of the F-Droid apps turn out to be malware, Google may revoke the permission of the person who submitted them to submit apps. And note that they don't insta-revoke. If it's a legitimate mistake (e.g. someone slipped some bad code in upstream), and it doesn't happen too often, it's fine. But whoever does the F-Droid submissions will want to take some care with what they submit.

That, BTW, is the actual reason for the registration requirement: Being able to block malware authors, at least to the extent of requiring them to find or create some government ID to create a new account. The way many malware authors operate, the $25 fee may actually also pose an obstacle for them.

Similar requirements on the Play store did wonders for reducing malware volume to a level where Google could stay ahead of it. Now they want to extend the same protection to the entire Android ecosystem. If you're curious how I know this: From 2014 to 2025 I was a senior member of the Android security team at Google. While I never worked on anti-malware efforts, I know the senior engineers who do and I chatted with them about stuff. The security engineers have been pushing for this change for years but it has been blocked by management because it was expected that it would generate exactly the sort of mis-perception that you have. Eventually, the engineers were able to prove their case with sufficient data that management let it happen (not without some pushback from the PR team, I expect).

It really, truly has nothing to do with killing F-Droid. No one in Google has any reason to want to kill F-Droid, and more than a few use it personally. NewPipe is a different story, though even there the Android team doesn't particularly care about it, except to the extent that the YouTube team can convince them to care.

In OSS there's a certain desperation for quality code where a lot of bullshit has historically been tolerated.