Depends on your definitions, I suppose. You could argue that engaging in blatant market manipulation and insider trading from the Oval Office for 16 months and only netting $750M in profits represents a failure. Someone more competent could have made a lot more.

As I wrote in 2001, with a plea digital public works -- like self-driving AI software funded by government dollars which I had seen in action at CMU around 1985 -- always stay open and free if funded by government or charitable dollars:
https://pdfernhout.net/on-fund...
        "As a software developer and content creator, I find it continually frustrating to visit web sites of projects funded directly or indirectly by government agencies or foundations, only to discover I can't easily improve on those projects because of licensing restrictions both on redistribution and on making derived works of their content and software. ...
        The non-profit collaborative communications ecosystem is polluted with endless anti-collaborative restrictive terms of use for charitably funded materials (both content and software) produced by a wide range of public organizations. These restrictions are in effect acting like "no trespassing -- toxic waste -- keep out -- this means you" signs by prohibiting making new derived works directly from pre-existing digital public works. The justification is usually that tight control of copyright and restricting communications of those materials will produce income for the non-profit, and while this is sometimes true, the cost to society in the internet age in terms of limiting cooperation is high, and in fact, I would argue, too high. ..."

Sad that is still an issue a quarter century later -- especially in the case of AI.

AI could bring so much abundance for all -- or it could be used to enforce artificial scarcity or all (or worse). Making any sort of AI in a for-profit competitive fashion is much more likely to produce the latter than the former, as implied in my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

Building AI in an open and socially-responsible as-safe-as-feasible way was essentially the whole original core thesis of the founding of OpenAI (as reflected in the name).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
        "OpenAI stated that "it's hard to fathom how much human-level AI could benefit society", and that it is equally difficult to comprehend "how much it could damage society if built or used incorrectly" ... In its founding charter, OpenAI defined its mission as ensuring that artificial general intelligence (AGI) "benefits all of humanity", and stated an intention to collaborate openly with other institutions by making certain patents and research publicly available, but later restricted access to its most capable models, citing competitive and safety concerns. ... OpenAI's potential and mission drew these researchers to the firm; a Google employee said he was willing to leave Google for OpenAI "partly because of the very strong group of people and, to a very large extent, because of its mission." ..."

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.

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.

The DOT, NTSB, or any one of a number of agencies CAN, however.
Give them 10 minutes, and they could come up with any number of claims that vehicles running non-certified software on public roads is a public safety issue.
If pressed by anyone, several Federal agencies could come up with justifications as why they have jurisdiction to get injunctions against or even seize these 'illegal' vehicles.

In the United States, simply keeping their cars running after the manufacturer died is a fairly substantial set of crimes.
Since they have admitted to conspiracy by forming an interstate group to do it, major Federal organized crime laws have been broken.
Land of the free and all that.

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.

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.

You wrote: "In my experience, most of the time, when a business says "we can't find qualified applicants" what they really mean is "we can't find *perfect* employees to hire, or the truth is we just don't want to hire at all right now"."

Two other interconnected things most such businesses may mean but are not saying out loud (related to your "perfect" point) are:
* we are not willing to pay enough for experienced talent (especially if we might be able to bring in H-1Bs or alternatively American W2s via big consulting shops who get paid at employee wages given IRS concerns due to tax laws lobbied for by big consulting shops to make it financially dangerous to hire individuals who are sole proprietors as 1099 consultants at double or triple employee wages), and
* we are not willing to pay to train someone who has the capacity to learn and grow over a year or two (especially because we are afraid they will then move on elsewhere for a pay bump we won't give them if they stay).

There's also often a subtext of age discrimination like with the computer field, and also a sense that all programmers are essentially interchangeable.

Companies may have good reasons for these reservations in given the changing nature of the competitive economic landscape and employees also no longer typically working at one big company for life as was more common in the 1960s. But, given a difference sense of company loyalty back then (going both ways), there was an expectation for significant on-the-job training in the 1950s and 1960s in the USA, where companies like GE in NY would even pay for employees to get college educations. Or IBM with its in-house training for technical managers especially.

Or for HP in Silicon Valley who also trained people:
https://livefromsiliconvalley....
"When people ask why Hewlett-Packard still matters, the answer is straightforward: HP established operating patterns that shaped generations of Valley companies. The "HP Way" emphasized respect for engineers, decentralized decision-making, close customer contact, and disciplined experimentation. Those principles influenced firms from Intel to Apple and continue to appear in management playbooks today. HP also trained talent that later founded or led other major businesses, making it both a company and an institutional source of Silicon Valley leadership."

I am obviously generalizing a lot here since some companies provide some degree of training, but in general, how many large companies does the USA still have that follow anything close to the "HP Way"? And especially how many will offer on-the-job training to anyone over 40-50?

Of course, there is a more local-to-the-USA part of the jobs story too (even as it is not as big a global issue as the one in my sig):
"Americans Don't Realize The Empire Is Already Falling Apart"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
        "Spain. Britain. The Soviet Union. Three of history's most powerful empires all destroyed by the same 7-stage pattern. Military overextension. Currency debasement. Debt spiral. Loss of productive capacity. Social decay. Reserve currency collapse. Sudden fall.
        Historians and economists have identified this sequence repeating across centuries with alarming consistency. And in 2026, the United States shows every measurable sign of Stage 5 right now.
        In this video, we break down:
        * Why America's $36 trillion debt is past the point of no return;
        * How the U.S. lost its productive economy and replaced it with a financial casino;
        * Why the dollar's share of global reserves has dropped 12 points since 2000;
        * The consumer sentiment reading lower than ANY war, recession, or pandemic in 75 years;
        * What China, BRICS, and the Global South are quietly doing about it;
        This isn't politics. This isn't conspiracy. This is arithmetic."

Personally I don't feel the USA debt is "past the point of no return" theoretically even if it might be politically/practically. Restore tax rates from the 1970s, remove the cap on Social Security earnings tax but cap payouts at current max levels, and add a 0.1% tax on every stock sale -- and the US debt will be quickly reduced (plus there will be plenty of money for medicare-for-all, keeping Social Security solvent, and reinvesting in physical and social infrastructure). A day of legislative voting in Congress plus a quick signature by the president, and the USA would be on a sound economic footing again.

Whether there is the political will to do all that is a different story. It would require the GOP to move past the "Two Santa Clauses tactic" for winning elections:
https://www.salon.com/2018/02/...
"In fact, Republican strategist Jude Wanniski's 1974 "Two Santa Clauses Theory" has been the main reason why the GOP has succeeded in producing our last two Republican presidents, Bush and Trump (despite losing the popular vote both times). It's also why Reagan's economy seemed to be "good."
        Here's how it works, laid it out in simple summary:
        First, when Republicans control the federal government, and particularly the White House, spend money like a drunken sailor and run up the US debt as far and as fast as possible. This produces three results - it stimulates the economy thus making people think that the GOP can produce a good economy, it raises the debt dramatically, and it makes people think that Republicans are the "tax-cut Santa Claus."
        Second, when a Democrat is in the White House, scream about the national debt as loudly and frantically as possible, freaking out about how "our children will have to pay for it!" and "we have to cut spending to solve the crisis!" This will force the Democrats in power to cut their own social safety net programs, thus shooting their welfare-of-the-American-people Santa Claus. ..."

Like with modern monetary theory, governments who have a dominant world currently like the USA essentially print whatever money they want to pay their bills -- and they then can use taxes to manage the size of the available money supply to manage inflation. It's so weird that people (the Fed especially) act like the only way to reduce inflation is to increase interest rates to slow (damage) the economy when the other obvious solution is to raise taxes to take money out of circulation. Why don't we ever hear the Fed saying, "we only have to raise interest rates because politicians refuse to raise taxes"?
https://www.investopedia.com/m...

Fixing the US debt issue with higher taxes (allowing interest rates to stay lower) might not fix all the jobs issues though as AI and robotics continue to accelerate exponentially. More ideas on dealing with that collected by me in 2010:
https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-...
        "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."

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.