Comment Dwarf planet no more (Score 1) 58
It's planet of short stature now
It's planet of short stature now
Interesting... I didn't consider that angle.
Thanks!
My opinion is that AI will kill Linux eventually. Not now, not when Linus uses it, because Linus knows how to code and is careful. But eventually the crappy vibe-coded junk will seep into the kernel. And then you'll get Microsoft-style code quality issues.
Russian sites like Yandex, Rutube, VKvideo... are great to find porn. But if they go down, I'll take the minor inconvenience for the sake of Ukraine.
More seriously, Yandex has been throttling queries rather aggressively lately, and I'm pretty sure it has something to do with their compute going up in smoke due to Ukrainian drones.
War department is Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth doing their fascist circle-jerk.
What can go wrong?
I wonder if the control room technicians will be allowed bathroom breaks...
...in the hands of a competent, careful and passionate programmer like Linux Torvalds.
What I worry about is when Bob in the junior software dev team, who does his job to put food on the table, and just good enough to keep his job, uses it to vibe-code company data as his day job.
He would be serving time.
Why hasn't Sam Altman been arrested yet?
Why is OpenAI allowed to continue to operate?
Clearly it's a criminal organization.
Honestly... Since when reshuffling in a company's upper management is of any interest to anybody other than the people working for that individual at that company?
What next? They're gonna replace Bob at accounting because he didn't use AI to format his Excel sheets?
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:
What can a limited distribution account do?
* Register apps
* Share apps with up to 20 devices that end-users have explicitly authorized.
How does app sharing work?
Sharing apps with a limited number of devices is achieved through a secure handshake process involving QR codes or links, user consent on the device, and registration using the Android Developer Console.
Check if this account type is right for you
The following are common use cases for a limited distribution account:
I am a(n): Hobbyist
I build apps to: Share with family and friends, or for personal use. My apps have no commercial intent.
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:
5. (...) You may not use the ADC:
* beyond the intended ADC functionality outlined in the Terms and other ADC documentation;
* to engage in, promote or encourage illegal activity or abusive behavior; (...)
* to access any other Google product or service in a manner that violates the terms of service of such other Google product or service.
6.3 Google may make changes to the Terms at any time with notice and the opportunity to decline further use of the ADC. (...)
6.4 If You do not agree with the modifications to the Terms, You may terminate Your use of the ADC, which will be Your sole and exclusive remedy. You agree that Your continued use of the ADC constitutes Your agreement to the modifications of the Terms.
6.5 If You violate any of the Terms or if You distribute malware or other harmful applications, Google may terminate Your access to the ADC.
7.2 You agree that if Google does not exercise or enforce any legal right or remedy contained in the Terms (or which Google has the benefit of under any applicable law), this will not be taken to be a formal waiver of Google's rights and that those rights or remedies will still be available to Google.
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.
someone will register and then sign F-Droid and all the apps offered on F-Droid
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.
You can observe a lot just by watching. -- Yogi Berra