If you mean things like Shizuku or local adb connection through Termux, it's quite an awkward process to set up even for someone like me who's been building Android apps since 2011. Like, you can do if you really really need it, but most people won't bother. You have to do it again after every reboot, too.
People who want your money always want to have really great UX. I remember how painless buying lottery tickets online was, it was the smoothest checkout experience in all of online shopping I have ever done.
At this point I'm convinced that there's something deeply wrong with how our society treats technology.
Ruining Android for everyone to try to maybe help some rather technologically-hopeless groups of people is the wrong solution. It's unsustainable in the long run. Also, the last thing this world needs right now is even more centralization of power. Especially around yet another US company.
People who are unwilling to figure out the risks just should not use smartphones and the internet. They should not use internet banking. They should probably not have a bank account at all and just stick to cash. And the society should be able to accommodate such people — which is not that hard, really. Just roll back some of the so-called innovations that happened over the last 15 years. Whether someone uses technology, and how much they do, should be a choice, not a burden.
> People who are unwilling to figure out the risks just should not use smartphones and the internet.
Sounds great in theory, but just today I was reminded how impossible this is when walking back from lunch, I noticed all the parking meters covered with a hood, labelled with instructions on how to pay with the app.
What do you mean by impossible in this case? Can't you just have the coin-operated parking meters back? Where I live, in EU, parking meters even take cards.
EDIT: I guess "just" is doing some heavy-lifting, so I won't argue this further, but "impossible" isn't the word I would use either. The city could revert this decision, definitely if enough people wanted them to (that's... I know, the hardest part). I just agree with the OP that we technically could go back to slightly less-digital society.
> Where I live, in EU, parking meters even take cards.
Unfortunately, a more accurate way of putting it is: stuff takes cards in lieu of coins. Like, where I live (also EU), ticket machines in buses and trams have gradually been upgraded over the past decade to accept cards, and then to accept only cards.
It's a ratchet. Hidden inflation striking again. Cashless is cheaper to maintain than cash-enabled, so it pretends to be a value-add at first, but quickly displaces the more expensive option. Same with apps, which again, are cheaper to maintain than actual payment-safe hardware.
It's near impossible to reverse this, because to do that, you have to successfully argue for increasing costs - especially that inflation quickly eats all the savings from the original change, so you'd be essentially arguing to make things more expensive than the baseline.
a few years ago the vending machines in my office building started accepting credit and debit cards for an extra fee of $0.35 per transaction. just recently they stopped accepting bills and coins leaving cards as the only option, but are still charging the extra fee.
Place where I park my car for work (Gosford, Australia) just got rid of cash payment, they now take card payment only (apparently there is also going to be an app, but they haven’t launched it yet). I think the number one reason is they are upgrading to a new system, and the parking technology vendor doesn’t provide cash payments as a standard option-probably they could implement a custom integration to enable it if they thought it was essential, but cash payments are so rare, it would be a difficult decision to justify. The carpark is owned and operated by the local government, so they need to justify their decisions, either as commercially viable, or else as producing substantial public benefit, but I think both arguments would be difficult to sustain in this case.
It’s kinda easy to justify though from a financial standpoint. If the parking meters take cash, you need all the hardware to accept and secure the cash. Then you need somebody to go around at some point and actually physically collect the cash. Then someone has to reconcile the cash, etc.
So at least from that angle I see it as an easy “government is actually trying to be more efficient” argument.
As a user cash is a pain in the ass. I have to count it out, keep it in my pockets, etc. So much easier to just tap my phone or my card. But yeah that’s a tradeoff in the classic “You’re trading X for convenience”.
Don't pay and when you get a fine take them to court and state you don't have a bank card. There's jo wat a council can legally require you to enter into an agreement with a bank to use council run facilities, it's likely nobody's challenged them on it though.
Every council I've lived in has still taken cash for every type of council fee, despite their "official" statement being they don't.
The next level of parking enshittification is pay-by-license-plate, which is starting to become widespread here in Perth, Australia, even for locations that are free parking, and locations that have parking machines. Surveillance just ratchets upwards.
There are places in EU too where parking meters have disappeared and payments are only done through apps. And I am talking about public space in the street, not private parkings.
I do believe that. Pointing out that I live in the EU was completely unnecessary, I meant that I live somewhere in the EU, I didn't really mean to compare it to the US.
The other problem, in the US at least, is that cash is very low value (inflation), and dollar coins never caught on. I'm not trying to carry around $6 in quarters to park for 2 hours. And that's a pretty inexpensive parking spot.
No, they're implying that you need a lot of coins to pay for parking.
If you need $6 to pay for parking, and the largest commonly available coin is a quarter, that means you need 24 coins to pay. If the value of currency was such that the parking only costed $3, or if dollar coins were more common, you'd need less coins to pay.
And maintain them, which I suspect costs even more. Parking meters do fiddly work, out in all weather, where people hate them and do all kinds of vandalism.
It doesn't surprise me that they want to make hardware maintenance your problem.
I parked in a garage in downtown Tacoma, Washington. The only option to pay was via an app. So I downloaded the app (by walking outside to where there was cell service, because I was, you know, underground in a garage) at which point it threw an internal server error when adding my card. There was no attendant on duty, and no way to pay with a credit card. So I left - just drove out of the garage. Then a few months later I got a fine for $75 for not paying. Then I called them to dispute it, and they offered to waive most of it, but it was still more than if I had been able to pay the fee initially.
I'm sure it was sold to the garage as a way to "maximize revenue and unlock operational efficiency". And sure enough, look, the revenue number is up and to the right. Working as designed.
Seriously, I don't understand why these stories have to so often end with someone just giving in and paying. Our society is so disenfranchised. I understand that doing it the right way by sending them written notice that it's an invalid debt takes time and effort, but there are options between that and just giving in and validating their nonsense.
>Regina city council made the decision to remove the coin option at downtown meters as part of the budget deliberation process, said Faisal Kalim, the City of Regina's director of community standards.
Yes, I read the linked article. Yes, the city made this decision. The decision could be reverted. I understand that this is a type of thing the OP (top-comment in the thread) is wishing for.
I don't see the "impossible" in my understanding of the linked article.
Coin-operated meters means someone have to come around checking the meter, collect coins, check the parking tickets. One person can only cover so many devices per day.
Then you have mechanical maintenance, with that comes disputes with "it was broken, it didn't accept the money" and so forth.
I've probably forgotten a number of other related things, but compare the above to digital solution.
Parking app, where the customer pays only for the parked time, no fiddling with money or keeping track of time. The parking attendant checks much quicker by just scanning the license plate while walking the rounds (could be done via car and a mounted camera even).
Analog just costs more, and citizens doesn't want taxes to go to things that are not strictly necessary.
It was possible for many decades already, budget and maintenance-wise. You can at least accept a credit card as an alternative. Yes, it's not perfect, but the fully digital alternatives also have drawbacks, as pointed by OP.
Things that were possible become impossible. Once Britain ruled the seas with wooden sailboats. Those boats are not perfect but could they win today’s naval battles? Also no.
"The decision could be reverted." Do you often buy a new car and revert that purchase to purchase a different new car? I guess you don't often use your own money so no big deal.
Why the snark? Did I misread? I don't often buy a new car, do you? I really don't understand what your last sentence means.
I don't even think this a fair comparison, it's more like keeping the old car just in case or for other family members. But I think I specified enough what I'm arguing already, yes this is unlikely, just not impossible.
I found one parking lot in the EU where there were only signs, and the signs not only pointed to an Android+iOS only, attestation-protected app, rather than a website, but an app that, at least on Android, was region-locked to only allow installations from people with the local country set correctly in Play Store (something completely different than the country Google sets for your account, for some reason).
It was a public lot, and the only lot in the town, as far as we could tell.
They are saying that things that have already been dumbed down can't go back. Obviously that's just their opinion, but I would guess that most people agree with them.
I'm reading this discussion, and allow me to give you my two cents. It's not a matter of being impossible, but rather how much the rest of society is willing to pay to maintain such infrastructure (either through higher taxes when dealing with the government, or through more expensive goods/services when dealing with corporations, since companies need to maintain old infrastructure that most people don't use).
For example, I read that Switzerland voted to guarantee the use of physical cash, even enshrining it in the constitution, which clearly points toward preserving older infrastructure. However, if you have cash but no one accepts it, it becomes useless. So it would probably require more—something like requiring businesses and the government to accept that form of payment.
As many things in life, not impossible: but is society willing to pay for that?
This cuts both ways. Since smartphones are becoming such an essential necessity, we should neverever remove the possibility to adjust these devices for our own requirements
You live in a bubble. The roles are inversed. This is "ruining" Android for the 0.001% of power users that install .apk files and improving it for the huge chunk of population that are still getting hit by malicious ads that try to push app installs onto you.
This has nothing to do with keeping people safe. If it did then power users could continue to install their own software by being given that ability as a developer setting. The fact that some people are gullible enough to go into a hidden setting on their phone and enable that in order to install an app from a random Chinese website is not a good reason to take away everyone's freedom. Consolidation of power is all this is about.
There is immense pressure to stop online scams which are draining old people of their life savings. The whole flow from the article seems entirely based around letting power users install what they want while being able to break the flow of a scammer guiding a clueless person in to installing malware.
It is promising that Google has avoided just turning off sideloading but still put measures in place to protect people.
I've never seen any news about such scams with actual malware that can break through Android's sandbox system - as we're still assuming a rootless systems. In most cases it's pig butchering, phishing, cold calls that make the person use the official app to transfer money to an account they're told to.
What can Bank X do to stop phone malware from scraping the user's session token from the Bank X app or website?
Yes, banks should (and sometimes do) double- and triple-check with you before allowing large transfers/withdrawals, but scammers know how to coach their victims past this. Speaking from experience.
(I also don't fully agree this is Google's responsibility, and I am not happy about this development. But there are legitimate points in favor of outsourcing the question of "will this software do nefarious things" to some kind of trusted signing authority.)
Don't do instant non-reversible transfers. Specially for a transaction that is highly likely to be fraud. I.e. person transfers to someone you haven't done business with before or foreign accounts. Also the fraud detection needs to go both ways.
Because they want to shake the image that the iPhone is for the average person while Android is for technical people who take the risk of malware and scams.
There are more grandmas who just want their banking secure than there are FOSS advocates wanting full system access.
>There is immense pressure to stop online scams which are draining old people of their life savings.
From who? I'd rather have this done by a regulated service like a bank than a private corporation with a perverse incentive. Frauds and scams are already illegal.
That't the similar narrative to "think of the children". They want to act as this middleman and secure their place, all while having unfettered access to people's data.
It also only solves that very specific problem. You don't need to side-load an app to scam someone. There's plenty of malware on the play store you can use. And, you don't need malware. There's plenty of legitimate apps you can use for scamming.
And, you don't need an app, I would imagine most scamming is done without an app.
So, really, we're solving a subset of a subset of a subset of a subset of the problem.
yes. Hence, "this isn't about keeping people safe".
The most effective means of hacking is social engineering. You can't solve that with any number of "security measures". If you require all the DNA sources in the world, a scammer will still charm a target into opening it up for them.
> Ruining Android for everyone to try to maybe help some rather technologically-hopeless groups of people is the wrong solution.
This isn't about how skilled a person is, it is about tackling social engineering. The article gave the example of someone posing as a relative, it could also be a blackmail scheme, but it could also be the carefully planned takeover of a respected open source project (ahem, xz).
What I am saying is this sort of crime affect anyone. We simply see more of it among the vulnerable because they are the low hanging fruit. Raising the bar will only change who is vulnerable. Society is simply too invested in technology to dissuade criminals. Which is why I don't think this will work, and why I think going nuclear on truly independent developers is going to do more damage than good.
There's quite a gap between this sort of opportunistic scamming that's happening all over the world and targeted multi-year campaigns that probably require the resources of a nation state.
One way to look at it: there are many open source projects targeting Android, projects that gain some sense of legitimacy over being open source yet have few (if any) eyes vetting them. Or, perhaps, the project is legitimate but people are getting third-party builds. That is what F-Droid does. That is what the developer of a third-party ROM does. It would not require the resources of a nation state to compromise them. I am not trying to cast a shadow on open source projects or F-Droid here. I am simply using them as an example because I use said software and am familiar with that ecosystem. The same goes for any software obtained outside of the Play Store, and it's likely worse since there is no transparency in those cases. Heck, the same goes for software obtained through the Play Store (but we're probably talking about nation state resources on that front).
Another way to look at it: we are only considering a specific avenue for exploitation here. If you close it off, the criminals will look for others. I would be surprised if they weren't looking for ways to bypass Google's checks. I would be surprised if they weren't looking for weaknesses in popular apps. Then there is social engineering. While convincing someone to install software is likely desirable, it certainly isn't the only approach.
Either way, I don't think Google's approach is solving the problem and I think it is going to do a huge amount of damage. Let's face it: major corporations aren't a paragon of goodness, yet Google's shift is handing them the market.
> targeted multi-year campaigns that probably require the resources of a nation state
Ha ha ha, "resources of a nation state"! One could run phishing campaigns at scale over many years without breaking the bank. This was true before LLMs, it's probably even cheaper now.
Sorry, I keep forgetting that LLMs are a thing. But I disagree because many people, especially tech-savvy people, can't possibly trust any communication that has the hallmarks of slop.
At this point it’s naive and perhaps a bit dangerous to assume that any of us can differentiate LLM from non-LLM text. I see less and less recognizable “slop” as time goes on, but I doubt the amount of content being generated has gone down.
I was always under the impression security was a red herring and the real reason was control. Google wants to own the device and rent it to users with revocable terms the same way SaaS subscription software works. Locking down what can run is a key step in that process
I worked at a bank on the backend for architecture and security.. and I've posted this attestation here before, but the sheer volume of fraud and fraud attempts in the whole network is astonishing. Our device fingerprinting and no-jailbreak-rules weren't even close to an attempt at control. It was defense, based on network volume and hard losses.
Should we ever suffer a significant loss of customer identity data and/or funds, that risk was considered an existential threat for our customers and our institution.
I'm not coming to Google's defense, but fraud is a big, heavy, violent force in critical infrastructure.
And our phones are a compelling surface area for attacks and identity thefts.
I wish we had technical solutions that offered both. For example, a kernel like SeL4, which could directly run sandboxed applications, like banking apps. Apps run in this way could prove they are running in a sandbox.
Then also allow the kernel to run linux as a process, and run whatever you like there, however you want.
Its technically possible at the device level. The hard part seems to be UX. Do you show trusted and untrusted apps alongside one another? How do you teach users the difference?
My piano teacher was recently scammed. The attackers took all the money in her bank account. As far as I could tell, they did it by convincing her to install some android app on her phone and then grant that app accessibility permissions. That let the app remotely control other apps. They they simply swapped over to her banking app and transferred all the money out. Its tricky, because obviously we want 3rd party accessibility applications. But if those permissions allow applications to escape their sandbox, and its trouble.
(She contacted the bank and the police, and they managed to reverse the transactions and get her her money back. But she was a mess for a few days.)
> (She contacted the bank and the police, and they managed to reverse the transactions and get her her money back. But she was a mess for a few days.)
And this almost certainly means that the bank took a fraud-related monetary loss, because the regulatory framework that governs banks makes it difficult for them to refuse to return their customer's money on the grounds that it was actually your piano teacher's fault for being stupid with her bank app on her smartphone (also, even if it were legal to do so, doing this regularly would create a lot of bad press for the bank). And they're unlikely to recover the losses from the actual scammers.
Fraud losses are something that banks track internally and attempt to minimize when possible and when it doesn't trade-off against other goals they have, such as maintaining regulatory compliance or costing more money than the fraud does. This means that banks - really, any regulated financial institution at all that has a smartphone app - have a financial incentive to encourage Apple and Google to build functionality into their mass-market smartphone OSs that locks them down and makes it harder for attackers to scam ordinary, unsophisticated customers in this way. They have zero incentive to lobby to make smartphone platforms more open. And there's a lot more technically-unsophisticated users like your piano teacher than there are free-software-enthusiasts who care about their smartphone OS provider not locking down the OS.
I think this is a bad thing, but then I'm personally a free-software-enthusiast, not a technically-unsophisticated smartphone user.
> And this almost certainly means that the bank took a fraud-related monetary loss, because the regulatory framework that governs banks makes it difficult for them to refuse to return their customer's money on the grounds that it was actually your piano teacher's fault for being stupid with her bank app on her smartphone
In which country? This happened in Australia. The rules are almost certainly different from the US.
For me the answer is separate devices. I have an iphone which is locked down and secure. I have my banking and ID apps on it but I can't mod it however I want. Then I have a steam deck and raspberry pi I have entertainment and whatever I want on. I can customise anything. And if it gets hacked, nothing of importance is exposed.
> . For example, a kernel like SeL4, which could directly run sandboxed applications, like banking apps. Apps run in this way could prove they are running in a sandbox. ... Then also allow the kernel to run linux as a process, and run whatever you like there, however you want.
This won't work. It's turtles all the way down and it will just end up back where we are now.
More software will demand installation in the sandboxed enclave. Outside the enclave the owner of the device would be able to exert control over the software. The software makers don't want the device owners exerting control of the software (for 'security', or anti-copyright infringement, or preventing advertising avoidance). The end user is the adversary as much as the scammer, if not more.
The problem at the root of this is the "right" some (entitled) developers / companies believe they have to control how end users run "their" software on devices that belongs to the end users. If a developer wants that kind of control of the "experience" the software should run on a computer they own, simply using the end user's device as "dumb terminal".
Those economics aren't as good, though. They'd have to pay for all their compute / storage / bandwidth, versus just using the end user's. So much cheaper to treat other people's devices like they're your own.
It's the same "privatize gains, socialize losses" story that's at the root of so many problems.
It may still be an improvement over the situation now though. At least something like this would let you run arbitrary software on the device. That software just wouldn't have "root", since whatever you run would be running in a separate container from the OS and banking apps and things.
It would also allow 3rd party app stores, since a 3rd party app store app could be a sandboxed application itself, and then it could in turn pass privileges to any applications it launches.
I can run an emulator in the browser my phone and run whatever software I want. The software inside that emulator doesn't get access to cool physical hardware features. It runs at a performance loss. It doesn't have direct network access. Second class software.
Its not what we have now, for the reasons you list. Web software runs slowly and doesn't have access to the hardware.
SeL4 and similar sandboxing mechanisms run programs at full, native speed. In a scheme like I'm proposing, all software would be sandboxed using the same mechanism, including banking apps and 3rd party software. Everything can run fast and take full advantage of the hardware and all exposed APIs. Apps just can't mess with one another. So random programs can't mess with the banking app.
Some people in this thread have proposed using separate devices for secure computing (eg banking) and "hacking". That's probably the right thing in practice. But you could - at least technically - build a device that let you do both on top of SeL4. Just have different sandboxed contexts for each type of software. (And the root kernel would have to be trusted).
I'm not familiar with SeL4 other than in the abstract sense that I know it's a verified kernel.
I interpreted your statement "Then also allow the kernel to run linux as a process, and run whatever you like there, however you want." as the Linux process being analogous to a VM. Invoking an emulator wasn't really the right analogy. Sorry about that.
For me it comes down to this:
As long as the root-of-trust in the device is controlled by the device owner the copyright cartels, control-freak developers, companies who profit end users viewing ads, and interests who would create "security" by removing user freedom (to get out of fraud liability) won't be satisfied.
Likewise, if that root-of-trust in the device isn't controlled by the device owner then they're not really the device owner.
Yes; I think that's the real impasse here. As I say, I think there is a middle ground where the device owners keep the keys, but programmers can run whatever software they want within sandboxes - including linux. And sandboxes aren't just "an app". They could also nest, and contain 3rd party app stores and whatever wild stuff people want to make.
But a design like this might please nobody. Apple doesn't want 3rd party app stores. Or really hackers to do anything they don't approve of. And hackers want actual root.
Yes, sandboxing is a technological protection, but once you have important data flowing we often don't have technological protections to prevent exfiltration and abuse. The global nature of the internet means that someone who publishes an app which abuses user expectations (e.g. uses accessibility to provide command and control to attackers) is often out of legal reach.
You also have so much grey area where things aren't actual illegal, such as gathering a massive amount of information on adults in the US via third party cookies and ubiquitous third party javascript.
Thats why platforms created in the internet age are much more opinionated on what API they provide to apps, much more stringent on sandboxing, and try to push software installation onto app stores which can restrict apps based on business policy, to go beyond technological and legal limitations.
The problem is it's quite easy to poke holes in a sandbox when you're outside the sandbox looking in, especially when the user is granting you special permissions they don't understand. These apps aren't doing things like manipulating the heap of the banking app, they are instead just taking advantage of useful but powerful features like screen mirroring to read what the app is rendering.
Don't know why this was downvoted. Some people prefer to access online services from the safety of a web browser sandbox than through an always-installed wrapper app.
You can even use the chip on the card together with some cheap HW device to authorize the transactions made with the app.
This actually exists [1] for quite some time but seems to be mostly limited to Germany. But this and the use of other HW tokens systems is on decline. Banks increasingly use apps now, increasingly without any meaningful second factor, not even offering better options. They want this and are fully to blame.
This 100%. I don't understand why everything needs to be an app nowadays. Some things are best done in person and without to technology. No, I won't install some shitty app that requests location and network access to order lunch. If a venue does not provide a paper menu and accept cash, they have just lost my custom.
Yeah, I worked at a bank once. I was told following policy and using dependencies with known vulnerabilities so my ass was covered was more important than actually making sure things were secure (it was someone else's problem to get that update through the layers of approval!). Needless to say, I didn't last long
What would happen to a normal person's phone when Google decided to revoke their Google account? Will the phone still function? Or is it "just" a matter of creating another Google account?
I “get” technology so I understand how you got here.
But this is the wrong take. I expect to go to a restaurant and not die from the food… and I want nothing to do with the inner workings of the kitchen. I just want to know any restaurant I go into will be safe. Society has made restaurants safe, either because of government pressure or it’s good for business.
How is that not a fair ask for technology, too? We all have things we know well, and then there’s reasons we’re alive that we don’t even know exist because someone took care of it.
It’s unreasonable to only allow people to participate in society once they understand every nuance.
You could torture the analogy more and say that this is more like saying "it is possible to make bad food and kill yourself at home, so we require everyone to go to a restaurant."
Well, I mean, do you know many houses burn down because someone fell asleep while frying a pork chop? We should just get rid of kitchens at home because it's just not safe.
Oil fires cause immense damage to property and life! I don’t know why stoves are allowed in homes at all. Worse yet, they don’t implement any age verification, so a child can just turn on the burner! It’s crazy!
Your analogy doesn't work here. Going to a restaurant is like using an app store. Installing apks is like cooking at home. Nothing stops you from cooking a meal that will get you sick.
Now imagine that every restaurant in your city is owned by one of two megacorporations and they really don't want you to have a microwave at home, let alone a stove. They expect that you will get all your food from them. This is where it's going with apps right now.
Because no amount of safeguards put up by the restaurant is going to protect you from getting sick of you decide to empty a bottle of bleach into your meal.
If you want to cook at home, there's no waiting list. There's no popup you have to confirm three times. You buy a stove, which likely lasts you half your life, a fridge, some dishes, pots, pans and so on.
I think it's fine to give people an easy mode. Not everyone cares about cooking (or tech). I just wish companies weren't trying to take the advanced features from the rest of us who do care.
I think it is different for some people because they are passionate and interested in tech.
I'd imagine someone who is passionate about cooking wouldn't be delighted if you cloudn't buy any ingredients in a store.
I see the value in precooked food and black-box working technology. But for me myself, as an enthusiast: I like being able to tinker and control my technology.
you expect a restaurant to be safe but there is no guarantee that it is. Many people have had food poisoning and I am sure some have died. It is obvious you don't "get" technology at all. You don't even "get" restaurants.
And I expect to be able to open a restauraunt without surrendering my identity and private information to a huge monopolistic company.
And I expect to buy food without that food being sanctioned by a huge, monopolistic company. Especially if said company has shown itself to be completely subservient to an overbearing, increasingly fascist government.
> People who are unwilling to figure out the risks just should not use smartphones and the internet.
That train has left the station decades ago. The internet has become an essential part of modern societies. People can't not use the internet (or smartphones), at least if they don't live in the woods.
No, why should I? I'm not proposing to "change society to 15 years ago", my idea is more selective. It's more like "do a thorough review and restore all the mechanisms that made the use of smartphones and internet optional".
It seems pretty optional in the US at least. My phone has been broken for extended periods of time before. But different story trying to use budget European airlines like Wizz that require an app to get a boarding pass.
It's also very much optional in Russia as well. Everywhere still takes cash, everything can be done on paper. And speaking of air travel, most airports actually require a printed boarding pass. IIRC you can use an electronic boarding pass in SVO since relatively recently, but I've never done that myself.
>"do a thorough review and restore all the mechanisms that made the use of smartphones and internet optional".
we should probably workshop ideas that are within reality.
downvoters are welcome to tell me how they would approach a worlwide review of everything that requires internet and un-internet it. i will wait.
some primer questions to get your brain turning: who organizes and conducts the review? who pays for the review? who pays for the implementations? whats the messaging and how do you convince people to go along with rethinking/re-implementing their entire already-working infrastructure that they have potentially spent millions to billions of dollars on? do you just dissolve all of the internet-only services, and tell the founders to suck it? who enforces it and how?
Consumer protection legislation would be a way to solve this:
If a business has more than X employees / does more than X amount of business per year / has more than X physical locations (pick one or more, make up some new criteria, tune to suit the needs of society) it must offer the same capabilities to interact with the business to those without smart phones as those with.
Small businesses wouldn't be radically impacted because they generally aren't "Internet only" anyway. The large business that are impacted have plenty of resources to handle compliance. If anything I'd argue it levels the playing field to an extent.
1) if you make it only applicable to smart phones, i just stop offering an uber smartphone app and now uber is website-only. if you apply it to "internet", as the original poster did, then:
2) companies like uber would be forced to shut down. you can say "cool, if they cant do it, their problem", which is fine, but a dozen of major issues pop up if something like 1/4 of the businesses currently propping up the stock market have to close doors or otherwise invest billions of dollars in phone centers or whatever they need.
it also raises questions about all sorts of businesses. another off the top of my head example: should 1password setup a call center where i can tell the operator what my new hackernews password is? is 1password exempt even if they have hundreds of employees and do millions per year? if yes, we have to come up with a bunch of murky criteria and definitions of what companies are exempt (across every industry, no less). which will, of course, cost a lot of time and money, just to surely be gamed. can we convince tax payers to foot that bill?
(this is also ignoring the approximately 0% chance that some sort of regulation of this sort gets pushed into law, against all of the extremely powerful tech lobbies. we dont even have ubiquitous right-to-repair!)
I'll fully admit that I'm "vibe commenting" here out of frustration with the direction society is going.
There won't ever be any consumer protection legislation like I suggested. I know that. It would make things better, but it'll never happen.
Things aren't going to get better for people who don't want to be forced to use new technology. (Eventually it'll be you being forced, too.)
I'm arguing, much in the way some techies bemoan removing malware from their parents' computer as an argument for why we shouldn't be allowed to use our mobile computers for what we want, for businesses to be required to offer ways of interacting to people who don't want to own smartphones. My argument isn't in the interests of powerful lobbies.
My wife and I have been helping her elderly aunt deal with a bank recently. I was shocked at the assumption her aunt would be able to receive SMS, use a smartphone with a camera to do "identity verification", etc. This lady has a flip phone, a land line, and no personal computer. Sure-- she could meet with someone at a branch to help her. Their first available meeting was a month away.
It's not going to get fixed. Nobody with the power to do anything about it cares.
>out of frustration with the direction society is going.
i am 100% with you.
>My wife and I have been helping her elderly aunt deal with a bank recently. I was shocked at the assumption her aunt would be able to receive SMS, use a smartphone with a camera to do "identity verification", etc. This lady has a flip phone, a land line, and no personal computer. Sure-- she could meet with someone at a branch to help her. Their first available meeting was a month away.
i have been there too, and it drives me mental.
i would love to work on realistic ways of addressing it, because it is a real issue. i am not denying that at all. my whole point, in my original comment, was that a plan of "un-internet the world" is, in my opinion, a complete waste of time and energy to seriously work on. the internet is here -- okay, lets figure it out from there. the genie isnt going back into the bottle. so lets spend our energy on ideas that acknowledge that fact, instead of trying to shove the genie back in.
Of course businesses that wouldn't make sense without technology, like Uber, food delivery, or anything else that is an app anyway, would be exempt.
I'm talking more about things that used to work without the internet for decades just fine but suddenly started requiring the use of the internet. Banks, government agencies, parking, event tickets, etc.
Oh, God... don't even get me started about fucking Ticketmaster and their goddamn app.
I've had multiple venues just straight-up tell me "no app, no entry" when I've contacted them pushing-back on installing Ticketmaster's drek.
For one I was able to play "confused old man" and get printed tickets, at least.
For another I just gave up, swallowed my morals, and loaded their app on my wife's iPhone.
There was one that I just didn't buy tickets for. The performer didn't really need my support, and I wasn't super broken up to not see them, but they lost a sale because of the stupid app requirement.
okay, well i appreciate the clarity. lets flesh it out some more.
how are you determining which businesses are affected? would you apply these regulations to entire industries (e.g. the entire finance industry) or would each business have to be reviewed independently?
if we run with the finance/bank example, what do you do about online-only banks (e.g. WealthSimple)? should they be forced to shut down?
My intuition is that it should only apply to businesses that have a physical presence, or need it to do their job. So, for banks, that would be only those with branches. We also have one of those online-only banks (T-Bank, ex Tinkoff), it's overwhelmingly popular among us millennials, but older people use something else.
that leaves a pretty big loophole, though. if i am a smaller bank that has 5-20 branches, it might just be in my best interest (profit) to just go online-only instead of implement whatever the regulations deem necessary.
(keeping in mind that this regulation applies to all industries, so the above example of closing all physical operations because the regulations make it more profitable to now be online-only, so that the regulations dont apply, repeats in all industries)
And that's fine I guess? It's important that there are banks that are too huge to go online-only.
It will be easier to comply for other industries. From my initial example, for event tickets, they wouldn't care much whether they scan a screen or a piece of paper when you enter, and they could let already-existing box offices sell the tickets. For government agencies, those already have offices, so nothing changes. For parking, just bring back the kiosks.
I had some thoughts on dynamic tax rates depending on how desirable a product or service is.
Then can do standard formulas like, will operations continue if the power is out, internet, smart phones, running water, phone lines, payment processing, etc, how long will service be down 1-3 days, weeks, months etc
If your store can't immediately switch to cash apply some modest tax increase. If people can't buy food for more than a week the extra tax is high. You might want to buy gas lamps and a "home" battery.
If we, the tech-savvy people, start pushing for it, it may have a chance of succeeding. On the other hand, if we take your defeatist approach, it's an absolute certainty that nothing will change.
Could the technophobes please just buy different smartphones? If certain people want to opt in to locked down devices, I think that's okay. But please give me a device that lets me do whatever I want. (And still lets me participate in modern society—I can't live with a Linux phone).
Apple's argument for locking down the iPhone but not the Mac has always been some variation of "Mac users are professionals and iPhones are for everyone." Fine! Where can I buy the unrestricted iPhone? As far as I'm concerned, basically every problem could be solved if Apple would put the Security Research Device on an unlisted page of their online store for the general public. Normies won't buy it, and I will.
You can do that, there are custom roms and open source phones. The problem is banks are legally obligated a lot of the time to pay out for fraud and scams. So in response they won't allow you to run their software unless they can verify the compute environment.
So why can I access my bank account just fine via the website on my phone, but shouldn't be able to do the same via the app? Can't they offer at least a PWA version of the website for custom ROM users?
People tend to distrust websites. URLs are also an immutable ledger that guarantees you’re in the right spot. The web is surprisingly robust for security.
What guarantees your banking app is the right one? A PNG and an app name with no security whatsoever.
How did the world come to this when the internet long predated smartphones and so many "apps" are little more than bookmarked wrappers around websites?
But that doesn't guarantee anything? Even if the official banking app requires tons of verification, that doesn't prevent me from modding their banking app and redistributing the modded version to up to 20 people.
We already have that. The market for the "technophobe" (e.g. above average and below levels of security awareness) phone is 100x larger.
That means the people who say "I can evaluate the intricacies and impacts of software authorization" have significantly fewer speciality devices to pick from, and those devices may not be worth developers (or regulators) making carve-outs to support.
> People who are unwilling to figure out the risks just should not use smartphones and the internet
People who aren't technically sophisticated should choose the smartphone ecosystem that was designed to offer the safety of a walled garden from the start.
Google sold Android as the ecosystem that gave users the freedom to do anything they like, including shooting themselves in the foot.
Google should not be allowed to fraudulently go back on their promise now that they have driven the other open ecosystems out of the marketplace.
Choosing an iPhone is not sufficient to avoid the risks of technology. The majority of online scams require nothing more than two pre-installed apps: Safari and Phone.
Before downvoting, consider providing evidence that sideloading comes anywhere close to being the root cause of most online scams.
Just yesterday I discovered that my grandmother had been receiving calls from "Google business support" on her iPhone. The fact that they can't get her to sideload some app doesn't seem to stop them.
People themselves will decide. Same way they decided whether they wanted to buy a computer in the 00s. It's just that those who decide to not have internet banking should not be disadvantaged by the society compared to those who have it.
Agreed. Businesses should not be permitted to follow a "technology only" business model (which usually means lower costs for the business) to discriminate against potential Customers who might not want to use that technology.
(some) people are starting to understand why cash is so important. It's the neutrality that it provides. The fact that it can't be programmatically limited or censored and you can't be excluded from the economy. Cash is inclusive.
Obviously cash becomes much harder to "use" online and in apps...
Activists and human rights lawyers are constantly getting their bank accounts closed or denied, even UN human rights council members, members of the ICC, journalists, pro-palestine activists or people in the BDS movement, it happens ALL the time now in europe, people have no idea how bad that has become, nobody in mass media is ever reporting on it.
I got personally de-banked from one bank and I'm nobody. I had other options, so it was only a minor issue, but I can't imagine what it's like for people when they run out of alternatives.
I'm not surprised - the Zionist lobby has basically criminalized all opposition to it.
Trump's "anti-DEI" geniuses ensured that any censure of Israel and its crimes would lead to the total destruction of one's life in the US (Gleen Greenwald talks about this on Tucker).
Given how this is going, I'd not be surprised if anti-semitism comes roaring back by the end of the decade.
Are they really though? does the average person really care about side loading? I think we are in an echo chamber. I can't picture any of the people in my life installing things from outside of an app store on their phone. However I realize that's purely anecdotal, it would be nice to see actual statistics on this to have a more informed decision.
When I point out that Apple listened to the Chinese government and removed apps that protestors were using to communicate during the Hong Kong protests, they seem to get it.
They removed VPNs at the request of the Russian government too (they have no operations in Russia). They are actively participating in government censorship.
If you phrase it as "sideloading" then probably not, since it doesn't sound like something they might want to do, it also sounds difficult and technical. If you phrase it as installing your own software then it might garner some interest from the general populace, as who wouldn't want the option to install their desired software.
A lot of people won't even understand the question, because they can install their apps from the app store, because that's where the apps come from, the app store has what phones crave.
Some of them will even be frightened by the question because they consider their devices scary and dangerous enough already.
I don't think it follows that the entire population of each of those countries automatically cares about this just because it's, ostensibly, being done to enforce sanctions against them.
Normies in sanctioned countries install banking apps by "sideloading" APK's downloaded from an official site. They all know exactly what "sideloading" is and why Google is banning it.
You said "hundreds of millions." If that's not "entire," it's pretty damn close.
> They all know [...] why Google is banning it.
Do they? I don't think most "normies" would come to the same conclusion you have. By definition, a "normie" seems much more likely to trust that this is being done for security rather than persecution. Especially when they learn that Americans can't easily sideload bank apps either.
> a "normie" seems much more likely to trust that this is being done for security rather than persecution
When USGov sanctions a NormieBank in a sanctioned country and its apps disappear from the Play Store and then Google announces that APK's cannot be installed anymore then even the dumbest sheeple can put two and two together.
Also, this isn't a Google issue, this is a USGov issue.
What is Google to do when people in suits ask why they provide a sanctions avoidance technology with a scary name like "sideloading"? (Sounds like something that terrorists and Iranians do, tbh.)
It sounds like you're not grasping the meaning of the linguistic construction being used by the person you're quoting. (Or you're being deliberately deceptive about your understanding of their intent. But it's probably just the former. I'm guessing you're ESL.)
"Ruining Android for everyone" ("to try to maybe help some") does not mean, "Android is now ruined for X, for all X." It means, perhaps confusingly, pretty much the opposite.
It means: "There exists some X for which Android is now ruined (because Google is trying to protect Y, for all Y)." (Yes, really. The way the other person phrased it is the right way way to phrase it—or, at least, it's a valid way to phrase it.)
open source alternative, at first it's going to suck. but over time it will win. imagine how miserable we would be if all we had was windows and osx. but we have linux. we are now at such crossroads were the choice is android and apple, we need a free alternative. much sooner than most realize the threat to freedom from big corps, govt and others will be so big that we would wish to have a free mobile OS. mobile is now the main computing platform and needs a free big corp alternative. it's true that some big corps would refuse to allow there apps to run on there like a bank, but that's okay! there will be alternatives ...
Yellowstone rangers taught us that building an effective anti-bear trash container is impossible because the top 10% of bears are smarter than the bottom 10% of tourists.
I like this idea. But last time I tried it the customer representative on the other line told me they were sorry but they could not accommodate my request at this time.
Android has about 2/3 worldwide market share and it hasn't had anything like this before. Many people, myself included, chose it exactly because it allows the installation of modded, pirated, or otherwise non-store-worthy apps.
The 2/3 marketshare must be almost entirely due to Android being cheap and accessible, not because those people need to install arbitrary software. A lot of mobile plans don't even give you GB/mo, they give WhatsApp messages/mo.
There two main mobile OS in the space, one moron-proof but limited, the other a bit more permissive, but slightly less secure for it.
The problem is that most apps target only those two, and the second is trying to moron-proof, loosing most of it value to part of its users, while the apps are still locked in.
> At this point I'm convinced that there's something deeply wrong with how our society treats technology.
The problem isnt with technology. The problem is with physical ownership versus copyright/trademark/patent ownership in abeyance of physical ownership.
I go to a store and buy a device. I have a receipt showing a legal and good sale. This device isnt mine, even if a receipt says so.
The software (and now theres ALWAYS software) isnt mine and can never be mine. My ownership is degraded because a company can claim that I didn't buy a copy of software, or that its only licensed, or they retain control remotely.
And the situation is even worse if the company claims its a "digital restriction", ala DMCA. Then even my 1st amendment speech rights are abrogated AND my ownership rights are ignored.
It would not be hard to right this sinking ship.
1. Abolish DMCA.
2. Establish that first sale doctrine is priority above copyright/patent/trademark
3. Tax these 'virtual property rights'
4. Have FTC find any remote control of sold goods be considered as fraudulently classified indefinite rental (want to rent? State it as such)
If you think about it for as long as I did, you will find that the moment everything went sideways is when general-purpose computing devices started having their initial bootloader in the mask ROM of the CPU/SoC. Outlaw just that, say, by requiring the first instruction the CPU executes to physically reside in a separate ROM/flash chip, and suddenly, everything is super hackable. But DMCA abolition would certainly be very helpful as well.
> to try to maybe help some rather technologically-hopeless groups of people
Even if they're the majority?
(Keep in mind that as average lifespan keeps getting longer while birth rates keep going lower, demographics will tend to skew older and older. Already happened in Japan; other developed countries will catch up soon.)
> They should probably not have a bank account at all and just stick to cash.
You know that these (mostly) don't fall into this category of being "hopeless with [modern] technology" because they're cognitively impaired, right?
Mostly, the people who most benefit by these protections, are just people 1. with full lives, who 2. are old enough that when they were first introduced to these kinds of technologies, it came at a time in their life when they already had too much to do and too many other things to think/care about, to have any time left over for adapting their thinking to a "new way of doing things."
This group of people still fully understands, and can make fluent use of, all the older technologies "from back in their day" that they did absorb and adapt to earlier in their lives, back when they had the time/motivation to do so. They can use a bank account; they can make phone calls and understand voicemail; they can print and fax and probably even email things. They can, just barely, use messaging apps. But truly modern inventions like "social media' confound them.
Old bigcorps with low churn rates are literally chock-full of this type of person, because they've worked there since they were young. That's why these companies themselves can sometimes come off as "out of touch", both in their communications and in their decision-making. But those companies don't often collapse from mismanagement. Things still get done just fine. Just using slower, older processes.
I fully agree. Similar to killing bacteria with antibiotics, Attempting to idiot-proof machinery only leads to the creation of idiot-proofing-resistant idiots.
We need to move back to putting users back into full control. Machines (including computers) should ALWAYS respect the input of the user, even if the user is wrong.
If a person shoots themself with a gun as a result of their incompetence, we don't fault the gun manufacturer for not designing the gun to prevent auto-execution. If you can't operate a firearm safely, you shouldn't attempt to operate a firearm.
Similarly, if a person deliberately points their car a solid object and accelerates into it, the actions of the operator shouldn't be the car manufacturer's responsibility. We need to get rid of ESC, ABS, AEB, etc. These features have created a whole slew of drivers who speed headfirst into the back of stationary drivers and expect their car to stop itself. This works right up until a sensor fails and the operator flies through the windshield (usually people like this don't wear seat-belts). If you can't drive, you shouldn't be driving until you rectify your incompetence.
Similarly, phones and computers should respect user input. If a users wants root access to their personal device, they should be able to get root access. If a user runs "rm -rf --no-preserve-root /" as root, the device should oblige and delete everything, since that is what the operator instructed it to do. If you can't be trusted to use a computer, you shouldn't be using a computer until you rectify your incompetence.
The lack of accountability in modern society is disgusting, and it leads to much deeper societal problems when people refuse to better themselves and instead expect the world to shield them from their willful ignorance.
I was with you right up until "We need to get rid of ESC, ABS, AEB, etc.".
That is unreasonable. ABS, ESC, and AEB all exist to interpret what the driver intends. The driver does not intend for their wheels to lock up, that's why ABS exists, nor does the driver intend to skid. You can argue that AEB does not reflect the will of the driver, but it can also be disabled.
Smartphones and the internet are really useful and convenient. Even if we could make it work, it seems quite rude to say that people should be excluded from it because we can't be bothered to make it safe.
Consider an older technology that became fundamental to much of daily life a century or two ago: writing. After a few millennia where literacy was a specialized skill, we pretty quickly transitioned to a society where it was essential for common activities. Rather than make sure everything had pictures and such to accommodate the illiterate, we tried to make it so that the entire population is literate, and came pretty close to succeeding. There are people who just outright can't read for whatever reason, but they're a very small minority and we aim to accommodate them by giving them assistance so they can get by in a literate world, rather than changing the world so you don't need to be able to read to live a normal life.
Rather than saying that half the population (a low estimate, I believe, for how many people will fall prey to malware in an anything-goes world) should abandon this technology, we should work to make it so they don't have to, with some combination of education and technological measures.
Some people don't want to be taught about some things because they don't care enough about them. I was told a story as a kid about a grandma that didn't want to learn to read and write. It's the same thing here — there are people who don't want a smartphone. They were just fine with an old cell phone that could only call and text, but then the society forced them to buy a smartphone, so they did, but they still don't really want it. It's still a burden to them. It still creates more problems for them than it solves. I know several people like that.
Is this even the reason? If Android phonemakers are simply concerned about tech-illiterate users switching to iPhone, they could sell a locked-down Android phone that requires some know-how to unlock.
> Ruining Android for everyone to try to maybe help some rather technologically-hopeless groups of people is the wrong solution.
Those groups of people are Google's paying customers. Google will, of course, defer to the ones who need more help to be safe online over the ones who don't. That's how you create a safe ecosystem.
What's then left as Google's advantage? I'm really not interested in buying myself a cage, but if Google will make me choose between two cages then Apple has nicer one.
you also don't need to pay apple for using xcode and building apps for ios either; the 99 dollars is for uploading to appstore or installing to devices for more than 7 days
I agree. In fact, one of the things I frequently propose is that we disallow the elderly and mentally disabled from using advanced technology without government proctor. In this way we can protect them. Everyone else can choose to turn off their scam protection.
People frequently talk about this with respect to AI and ads and how it’s bad for people to be use these things. I recommend we disallow the internet entirely for classes of people whose minds are not ready for the downsides of the tech.
With your Adderall prescription should come a phone number to sign up to the government proctoring service.
'Only the educated elite should be permitted to use technology' is a great take, but unfortunately the peons outvote and outspend you, so their opinions matter more than yours.
Your mistake is taking Google's argument at face value. Protecting users is an outright lie, this is purely about control.
Google doesn't give one single shit if users download malware from the Play Store, but hypothetical malware from third party sources is so much worse that we need to ruin the whole OS? That doesn't pass the sniff test.
Google wants to make sure you can only download malware from developers who give google a cut. They want to control the OS and remove user choice. That's all it is. That's what it's always been about.
"Protecting users" is a pretense and nothing more. Google does not care at all about user safety. They aren't even capable of caring at this point. There are far, far cheaper and more effective ways to actually protect users, and google isn't doing any of them.
I'm assuming good faith and giving them the benefit of the doubt.
Of course it might be that they want more control. In addition to controlling the world's most popular web browser and the world's most popular search engine and the world's most popular online advertising network and the world's most popular online video service.
It's really hard to when there's already technical solutions. They could require a process like bootloader unlocking that puts it in "dev" mode for instance
While signing is useful, leaving no escape hatch imo is blatantly predatory
These restrictions already don't apply to something you install over adb, so there's already that. But that still considerably raises the bar for things like apps made by sanctioned entities, for example, most Russian banks.
It's all part of the war on general computing. This dystopian nightmare is coming to desktop operating systems too. See the age verification stuff that's all of a sudden being pushed hard by countries all over the world.
As someone that was going to switch from iPhone to Android/Pixel later this year, at least now I know not to bother anymore, as the locking down of Android won't stop here.
It's crazy to me how technical people willfully disregard the coming end of individually-owned general purpose computers. I have a strange mix of nostalgia and crushing sadness knowing that I got to live through that time.
Illegal would by a hyperbole. But the noose is tightening a bit.
There are upcoming limits for cash transactions (10K, countries can opt to go lower), and strong requirements for identity verification at 3K or more euros in cash.
Also illegal in Denmark. You need a NemKonto by law. Also making cash payments over 15000 is illegal since 2024.
So you can't make a large purchase without a bank transfer.
Not illegal per se in Germany but you won't find a legal job that doesn't require you to have a bank account. Benefits will also only be paid electronically (exceptions for some asylum seekers apply).
You also cannot get a tax refund or pay taxes without a bank account.
Not sure how it works in countries that didn't go through 80 years of socialism, but I assume that you're saying that in those countries, your salary is required to go to your bank account and can't be paid in cash. Then you can still pretty much "stick to cash" by withdrawing the whole thing on your payday. But then idk, maybe everyone in those countries is aware of the risks related to keeping their money in a bank, it's just the internet banking that introduces the new ones for them.
No, you have that backwards. A society is judged by how it treats its least able members. Android devices are primarily for mainstream users, not us. Technically adept users are the minority and we can deal with a few hoops to customize our phones the way we like.
It's selfish to advocate against better protections for the least able people in the world just for our own convenience.
Also because they can spam you with notifications through the app and that surely makes some chart go up. As someone with meticulous notification hygiene, it's always surprising to me just how many people allow every app to send notifications when it asks, without thinking about it at all.
Some advice I follow, and give to others: Refuse notifications by default. Only enable them when you're getting paid to see them. (slack and work email, for example count as getting paid to see them)
My version of that is to ask yourself what this app could notify you about and decide based on that.
What could a game notify you about? Nothing, probably spam. Deny.
What could a social app notify you about? Interactions with your content and profile. These are useful, allow.
What could an instant messaging app notify you about? Messages, obviously. Allow.
What could a fast food establishment app notify your about? Probably your order status if you order from the app. But it might also spam you. Allow but be prepared to turn off categories that are spammy if spam does arrive.
It's well established that machine learning excels at solving classification problems, or those that can be reduced to one.
It saddens me that we're wasting so much of that potential on those stupid stochastic parrots that solve all those non-problems that no one has ever had. It saddens me even more that so many people are absolutely sure that LLMs are "smart", or that they can "think", or even that they're somewhat conscious. And that even if they're not quite that, one more order of magnitude of scale will definitely give us an AGI. Oh that didn't help? Then one more, that will definitely be it.
One real problem that LLMs have solved is that they made natural language processing as a discipline obsolete. They also usually don't suck at summarizing long texts, except when they sometimes do. But that's it, really.
I thought about that recently while researching how VCRs work before attempting to fix one. I didn't even think about seeing the actual video signal, I was just curious what the diagonal lines and control pulses on the tape look like. There are many other things as well that would be interesting to look at (all kinds of tapes, all kinds of floppies, hard drive platters, magstripe cards), but unfortunately I don't think there exists a technology capable of visualizing magnetic fields with enough precision.
This is 1970s tech, so of course there was no compression. It's basically a composite video signal etched into the medium. Every revolution of the disc is one full frame (or two fields). So when you look at it, the adjacent grooves represent the same lines of video in different frames.
Now imagine if you picked a Y coordinate and extracted the corresponding row of pixels from every frame of a video file, and stacked them vertically. If there was scrolling text, or if the camera moved vertically, you would see a meaningful image, the same way a scanner obtains a complete image by moving a single-row sensor across whatever you're scanning. This is the same effect, just arising from the way the video signal is laid out on the disc.
It blows my mind they used AI to generate a couple paragraphs worth of rather nonsensical text. It would've taken them about as much time to just write something sensible by hand.
For the Mastodon Android app, I also sometimes see crashes that make no sense. For example, how about native crashes, on a thread that is created and run by the system, that only contains system libraries in its stack trace, and that never ran any of my code because the app doesn't contain any native libraries to begin with?
Unfortunately I've never looked at crashes this way when I worked at VKontakte because there were just too many crashes overall. That app had tens of millions of users so it crashed a lot in absolute numbers no matter what I did.
Well, vendors' randomly modified android systems are chock full of bugs, so it could have easily been some fancy os-specific feature failing not just in your case, but probably plenty other apps.
Usually I'd just look at clusters of crashes (those that had similar stack traces) but sometimes when you're running a very small % experiment there's not enough signal so you end up looking at everything. And oh boy was there a lot of noise.
In an app with >billion users you get all kinds of wild stuff.
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