9 ms·

While it is technically feasible, it is not a good idea to try and find a technical solution to a people/organisation problem. Do not accept the premise of ass

by asimops 11mo ago

While it is technically feasible, it is not a good idea to try and find a technical solution to a people/organisation problem. Do not accept the premise of assholes. I hope we can get the EU to fund a truly open Android Fork. Maybe under some organisation similar to NL Labs. --- edit --- Furthermore, the need for a trustworthy binary to be auditable to a certain hash or something would make banning this a simple task if Google would want to go that route.

closeparen 11mo ago
The same EU that's doing Chat Control?
- rf15 11mo ago
  The same EU of which parts are trying to make chat control work and are once again abandoning it. Politician get this particular fancy idea every other year in all kinds of countries, not just EU. Overreach out of desperation for a problem that cannot simply be solved is wrong but understandable.
  - igor_akhmetov 11mo ago
    Desperation for what exactly? More control?
    - ForHackernews 11mo ago
      They are trying to stop crime, including sex/drug trafficking and child exploitation. If you want to have an intellectually honest debate, you need to be clear that private communication apps do make it more difficult for police to conduct legitimate investigations. You do yourself no favours painting all politicians as power-hungry caricatures.
      - ipaddr 11mo ago
        So do private in person conversations. Going the route of North Korea putting two way speakers in each house would help make those conversations available to the government. Think of all of the child exploitation you could stop by removing any sense of privacy. Of course they would figure a way around this and everyday citizens would have to deal with the lack of privacy but at least they thought of the children so we should keep voting them in.
      - 0xDEAFBEAD 11mo ago
        If chat control is a good-faith effort to stop crime, why can't Android developer verification be a good-faith effort to stop cybercrime? If politicians are not all power-hungry caricatures, is it possible that the same is true for businesses? Android has millions of users worldwide, many of whom are far less computer-literate than HN users. I think it's very reasonable for Google to put speed bumps in front of malware developers trying to distribute through the Play Store. If you're a half-decent dev, $25 is nothing compared to the opportunity cost of your time in developing your app. This whole thing seems to be a fairly recent announcement on Google's part, so it's unsurprising they're still hammering out details for hobbyist devs? How about making constructive suggestions for ways that Google can protect ordinary people without stopping power users?
        ForHackernews 11mo ago
        I think the issue is not about distribution in the Play Store (I don't actually have any problem with that: their playground, their rules) but the fact that they are going to break sideloading and alternative app sources like F-Droid. I struggle to see any good-faith need to erect additional barriers to protect users from running the programs they want on devices they own, when you already have to be fairly expert to enable developer mode, install via adb, etc.
        0xDEAFBEAD 11mo ago
        That's fair.
- deaux 11mo ago
  The same EU that's doing NL Labs, the org mentioned in the comment you're replying to.
- exe34 11mo ago
  The EU is a big place, run by a lot of different people, with true separation of powers. They don't have a president-king who can just ignore court decisions.
  - jmnicolas 11mo ago
    So we're gonna get access to Von Der Layen Pfizer sms right? Were you offered to vote for Von Der Layen by the way?
    - StopDisinfo910 11mo ago
      For all the disdain I have for her, Von Der Layen is the candidate put forward by the PPE, the majoritarian party in the EU parliament. So, yes, people were indeed allowed to vote.
      - wqaatwt 11mo ago
        She was primarily nominated by the EU council. The parliament would have picked Weber, but nobody cared since its just there to rubber stamp predetermined decisions. He was the leader of the party which won the plurality in the elections and had its support. EU had a real chance to move towards becoming a real parliamentary democracy if it went that way.
        StopDisinfo910 11mo ago
        That was the election before the current one. She was the one out forward by the PPE this time and even then she was the second candidate put forward by the PPE after Weber was vetoed by France the previous time. That’s the new Spitzenkandidate system. The council is supposed to pick the candidate put forward by the main political force in the parliament. The EU is a real democracy anyway. All the members of the council are themselves democratically elected. It has a weird three parts political system but everyone in it is elected or appointed by people elected.
    - Certhas 11mo ago
- saubeidl 11mo ago
  The same EU that shut down another attempt at Chat Control. Bad legislation gets written everywhere, the difference is, in the EU it doesn't pass.
- supermatt 11mo ago
  It appears that you are an American who has conveniently forgotten about FISA, EARN IT, CLOUD act, PATRIOT act, LAED, etc, etc, and wants to take a dig at the EU for what, exactly? NOT passing Chat Control? Seriously..
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  - 0xDEAFBEAD 11mo ago
    It's interesting how so many online discussions of internet privacy devolve into nationalist chest-beating. I'm beginning to suspect that people don't inherently value privacy all that much -- they just want to brag about how their country is the most private. Recall that the premise of this thread is that the EU should sponsor an alternative to Android. The EU vs US question isn't really topical, since no one suggested that the US government should sponsor an alternative to Android instead.
  - closeparen 11mo ago
    I do not think it is righteous or enlightened when the American government flexes control over the tech sector. I can see how Europeans might have thought this about the EU when it was just GDPR, but subsequent developments have recast all of this as being about government control and keeping the tech industry “in its place” rather than a commitment to privacy and freedom in and of themselves. I think that ought to temper the righteousness.
    - supermatt 11mo ago
      What subsequent developments? It sounds like you are alluding to the DMA. The DMA is an attempt to reclassify what “market” means in the modern age where we have a global tech oligopoly. This is because a simple “test” for monopolism doesn’t work in this world of multinational megacorps. Again, your complaint is a double standard. You are doing similar in the USA - albeit without an actual structured act - as per the recent rulings on the Google Play store. The EU has simply codified the rules for their vision of the future where people aren’t beholden to a handful of tech overlords, whereas the USA is making similar incremental “changes” through case-law. I’m not saying either way is correct, but it seems like they are both headed in the same direction.
thaumasiotes 11mo ago
> I hope we can get the EU to fund a truly open Android Fork. How are things in the EU on whether it's legal to buy a SIM card without showing ID?
- jraph 11mo ago
  I'm confused, how are those two things related?
  - peterhadlaw 11mo ago
    Nanny state
    - vik0 11mo ago
      More like surveillance state
      - ulfw 11mo ago
        Which states aren't? And for the love of god do not write US now
  - semolino 11mo ago
    The commenter you replied to was implying that the EU does not respect the privacy/freedom of mobile device users.
    - jraph 11mo ago
      Okay, thanks. I was confused bexause anonymity against the state is hardly the only, or even a main point of android forks. Privacy usually is, but against big tech typically.
- remix2000 11mo ago
  It is neither illegal nor hard to obtain such a prepaid SIM card.
singpolyma3 11mo ago
What's wrong with lineage?
- hilbert42 11mo ago
  You have to get some of the big names to unlock the bootloader first. The trend towards locking it off permanently is alarming. Edit: Google could ultimately use that as a lever in licensing deals with manufacturers. It'd marginalize everything.
- IlikeKitties 11mo ago
  It's not a good, secure project by a longshot. There's a good comparison floating around: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f1421e1afcf4074ea10a67/ed88f9c7-f623-44e6-8ad2-614200e9e277/comparison-of-custom-alternative-android-os-roms-grapheneos-divestos-calyxos-iodeos-eos-lineageos-stock-android-aosp-threecats-australia.png https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f1421e1afcf4...
  - AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
    That looks like someone made a list of mostly features specific to GrapheneOS so they could make a chart where all of the other alternatives (including stock Android) are full of red boxes. Several of those are the opposite of security features, like SafetyNet support, which might be a convenience in some cases but it mostly makes it so you can't upgrade certain parts of the system to newer versions even when the old versions have security vulnerabilities.
    - IlikeKitties 11mo ago
      >That looks like someone made a list of mostly features specific to GrapheneOS so they could make a chart where all of the other alternatives (including stock Android) are full of red boxes. No one else even bothered to make a list. >Several of those are the opposite of security features, like SafetyNet support, which might be a convenience in some cases but it mostly makes it so you can't upgrade certain parts of the system to newer versions even when the old versions have security vulnerabilities. Citation needed
AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
> Furthermore, the need for a trustworthy binary to be auditable to a certain hash or something would make banning this a simple task if Google would want to go that route. This is actually the advantage of doing it. You make the thing (call it a "personal app loader" or something rather than a "circumvention tool"), they ban it, now you campaign against them or make antitrust arguments presenting the ban as an anti-competitive practice or use the ban to refute claims that they're not inhibiting third party app distribution. Even if you know they're going to be the villains, you still want to make them actually do it so that everyone can see them doing it.
- chii 11mo ago
  They (google) could cite the loader being "exploited" to run "dangerous" apps like viruses/malware, and bypass the monopoly issue. I do think having a technical bypass is good - it isn't mutually exclusive with also having a legal bypass. I just hope that the gov'ts are smart enough, and agile enough, to make this happen before it becomes too late (aka, once the gates close, it will never open again, like apple's ecosystem).
ekianjo 11mo ago
> hope we can get the EU to fund a truly open Android Fork The same EU that keeps pushing for breaking encryption and chatcontrol? No thank you
- TeMPOraL 11mo ago
  > breaking encryption and chatcontrol The two are not equivalent issues; the first one is ill-formed as stated. Cryptography is a tool of control. It's "dual-use", in the same sense like a knife or nuclear fission is - its moral valence depends on who is wielding it, and to what end. In the context we're discussing, encryption is being used against the people. Working encryption is in fact needed to make chat control work - it's fundamental to it, the same way it is to Developer Verification and Safetynet/Remote Attestation. It would be great if EU decided to break that set of encryption applications. Alas, chat control only wants to break E2EE on messages, and uses encryption elsewhere to guarantee E2EE stays broken. A more general comment about this thread, and related ones in the past: people really need to stop thinking about "encryption" and "security" as inherently good. They're not. Most of the social problems with computing, the attempts at user disempowerment and disenfranchisement, persist because they apply cybersecurity solutions. The core question of security is always: who exactly is being secured, and from who.
StopDisinfo910 11mo ago
I hope the EU actually enforces the DMA and forces Google and Apple to stop their non sense.
- jezek2 11mo ago
  Unfortunatelly DMA is the reason Google is doing this. It allowed Apple to require notarization for "security". Google is just copying the same approach as it's now clear what the requirements by the governments are. Before it was unclear so it was better to allow installation of apps without any verification to appear as more open. Remember any regulation/law has unintended consequences. At one point Apple decided that PWAs would no longer be supported in EU so they don't have to provide equal capabilities to implement them in alternative web browsers, fortunatelly they changed their mind by obtaining an exception. PWAs is the only alternative choice for making "proper" apps on iOS (no hacky sideloading methods). I think overally DMA is more a loss than a win (good on paper, terrible in practice). It codified worse things. The EU app stores are still fully controlled by Apple (harder to install, they can just decline or drag notarization of any apps or revoke your license to dev tools, you need to still pay them, etc.). For various apps the EU market is too small (esp. for things that need to be global) to invest into the development so while you can for example theoretically develop a real alternative web browser to Safari/WebKit (forbidden by App Store rules) nobody is willing to do it.
immibis 11mo ago
Technical things can affect people. Adversarial interoperability. They're using a technical thing to cause a social thing anyway, and fighting back with the same tactics is at least not surrendering.
Lindby 11mo ago
It would be hard to find manufacturers to use it. None of the existing Android phone manufacturers would be able to release phones with this fork without also abandoning the official Android platform on all markets. Google are very strict with this in their tos. You cannot release devices using non official Android builds without losing your right to use GMS and Android Brandice on your other Android devices.
- solarkraft 11mo ago
  This can also easily be framed as anticompetitive.

by asimops 11mo ago

closeparen 11mo ago

The same EU that's doing Chat Control?

rf15 11mo ago
The same EU of which parts are trying to make chat control work and are once again abandoning it. Politician get this particular fancy idea every other year in all kinds of countries, not just EU. Overreach out of desperation for a problem that cannot simply be solved is wrong but understandable.
- igor_akhmetov 11mo ago
  Desperation for what exactly? More control?
  - ForHackernews 11mo ago
    They are trying to stop crime, including sex/drug trafficking and child exploitation. If you want to have an intellectually honest debate, you need to be clear that private communication apps do make it more difficult for police to conduct legitimate investigations. You do yourself no favours painting all politicians as power-hungry caricatures.
    - ipaddr 11mo ago
      So do private in person conversations. Going the route of North Korea putting two way speakers in each house would help make those conversations available to the government. Think of all of the child exploitation you could stop by removing any sense of privacy. Of course they would figure a way around this and everyday citizens would have to deal with the lack of privacy but at least they thought of the children so we should keep voting them in.
    - 0xDEAFBEAD 11mo ago
      If chat control is a good-faith effort to stop crime, why can't Android developer verification be a good-faith effort to stop cybercrime? If politicians are not all power-hungry caricatures, is it possible that the same is true for businesses? Android has millions of users worldwide, many of whom are far less computer-literate than HN users. I think it's very reasonable for Google to put speed bumps in front of malware developers trying to distribute through the Play Store. If you're a half-decent dev, $25 is nothing compared to the opportunity cost of your time in developing your app. This whole thing seems to be a fairly recent announcement on Google's part, so it's unsurprising they're still hammering out details for hobbyist devs? How about making constructive suggestions for ways that Google can protect ordinary people without stopping power users?
      - ForHackernews 11mo ago
        I think the issue is not about distribution in the Play Store (I don't actually have any problem with that: their playground, their rules) but the fact that they are going to break sideloading and alternative app sources like F-Droid. I struggle to see any good-faith need to erect additional barriers to protect users from running the programs they want on devices they own, when you already have to be fairly expert to enable developer mode, install via adb, etc.
        0xDEAFBEAD 11mo ago
        That's fair.
deaux 11mo ago
The same EU that's doing NL Labs, the org mentioned in the comment you're replying to.
exe34 11mo ago
The EU is a big place, run by a lot of different people, with true separation of powers. They don't have a president-king who can just ignore court decisions.
- jmnicolas 11mo ago
  So we're gonna get access to Von Der Layen Pfizer sms right? Were you offered to vote for Von Der Layen by the way?
  - StopDisinfo910 11mo ago
    For all the disdain I have for her, Von Der Layen is the candidate put forward by the PPE, the majoritarian party in the EU parliament. So, yes, people were indeed allowed to vote.
    - wqaatwt 11mo ago
      She was primarily nominated by the EU council. The parliament would have picked Weber, but nobody cared since its just there to rubber stamp predetermined decisions. He was the leader of the party which won the plurality in the elections and had its support. EU had a real chance to move towards becoming a real parliamentary democracy if it went that way.
      - StopDisinfo910 11mo ago
        That was the election before the current one. She was the one out forward by the PPE this time and even then she was the second candidate put forward by the PPE after Weber was vetoed by France the previous time. That’s the new Spitzenkandidate system. The council is supposed to pick the candidate put forward by the main political force in the parliament. The EU is a real democracy anyway. All the members of the council are themselves democratically elected. It has a weird three parts political system but everyone in it is elected or appointed by people elected.
  - Certhas 11mo ago
saubeidl 11mo ago
The same EU that shut down another attempt at Chat Control. Bad legislation gets written everywhere, the difference is, in the EU it doesn't pass.
supermatt 11mo ago
It appears that you are an American who has conveniently forgotten about FISA, EARN IT, CLOUD act, PATRIOT act, LAED, etc, etc, and wants to take a dig at the EU for what, exactly? NOT passing Chat Control? Seriously..
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- 0xDEAFBEAD 11mo ago
  It's interesting how so many online discussions of internet privacy devolve into nationalist chest-beating. I'm beginning to suspect that people don't inherently value privacy all that much -- they just want to brag about how their country is the most private. Recall that the premise of this thread is that the EU should sponsor an alternative to Android. The EU vs US question isn't really topical, since no one suggested that the US government should sponsor an alternative to Android instead.
- closeparen 11mo ago
  I do not think it is righteous or enlightened when the American government flexes control over the tech sector. I can see how Europeans might have thought this about the EU when it was just GDPR, but subsequent developments have recast all of this as being about government control and keeping the tech industry “in its place” rather than a commitment to privacy and freedom in and of themselves. I think that ought to temper the righteousness.
  - supermatt 11mo ago
    What subsequent developments? It sounds like you are alluding to the DMA. The DMA is an attempt to reclassify what “market” means in the modern age where we have a global tech oligopoly. This is because a simple “test” for monopolism doesn’t work in this world of multinational megacorps. Again, your complaint is a double standard. You are doing similar in the USA - albeit without an actual structured act - as per the recent rulings on the Google Play store. The EU has simply codified the rules for their vision of the future where people aren’t beholden to a handful of tech overlords, whereas the USA is making similar incremental “changes” through case-law. I’m not saying either way is correct, but it seems like they are both headed in the same direction.

thaumasiotes 11mo ago

> I hope we can get the EU to fund a truly open Android Fork. How are things in the EU on whether it's legal to buy a SIM card without showing ID?

jraph 11mo ago
I'm confused, how are those two things related?
- peterhadlaw 11mo ago
  Nanny state
  - vik0 11mo ago
    More like surveillance state
    - ulfw 11mo ago
      Which states aren't? And for the love of god do not write US now
- semolino 11mo ago
  The commenter you replied to was implying that the EU does not respect the privacy/freedom of mobile device users.
  - jraph 11mo ago
    Okay, thanks. I was confused bexause anonymity against the state is hardly the only, or even a main point of android forks. Privacy usually is, but against big tech typically.
remix2000 11mo ago
It is neither illegal nor hard to obtain such a prepaid SIM card.

singpolyma3 11mo ago

What's wrong with lineage?

hilbert42 11mo ago
You have to get some of the big names to unlock the bootloader first. The trend towards locking it off permanently is alarming. Edit: Google could ultimately use that as a lever in licensing deals with manufacturers. It'd marginalize everything.
IlikeKitties 11mo ago
It's not a good, secure project by a longshot. There's a good comparison floating around: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f1421e1afcf4074ea10a67/ed88f9c7-f623-44e6-8ad2-614200e9e277/comparison-of-custom-alternative-android-os-roms-grapheneos-divestos-calyxos-iodeos-eos-lineageos-stock-android-aosp-threecats-australia.png https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f1421e1afcf4...
- AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
  That looks like someone made a list of mostly features specific to GrapheneOS so they could make a chart where all of the other alternatives (including stock Android) are full of red boxes. Several of those are the opposite of security features, like SafetyNet support, which might be a convenience in some cases but it mostly makes it so you can't upgrade certain parts of the system to newer versions even when the old versions have security vulnerabilities.
  - IlikeKitties 11mo ago
    >That looks like someone made a list of mostly features specific to GrapheneOS so they could make a chart where all of the other alternatives (including stock Android) are full of red boxes. No one else even bothered to make a list. >Several of those are the opposite of security features, like SafetyNet support, which might be a convenience in some cases but it mostly makes it so you can't upgrade certain parts of the system to newer versions even when the old versions have security vulnerabilities. Citation needed

AnthonyMouse 11mo ago

> Furthermore, the need for a trustworthy binary to be auditable to a certain hash or something would make banning this a simple task if Google would want to go that route. This is actually the advantage of doing it. You make the thing (call it a "personal app loader" or something rather than a "circumvention tool"), they ban it, now you campaign against them or make antitrust arguments presenting the ban as an anti-competitive practice or use the ban to refute claims that they're not inhibiting third party app distribution. Even if you know they're going to be the villains, you still want to make them actually do it so that everyone can see them doing it.

chii 11mo ago
They (google) could cite the loader being "exploited" to run "dangerous" apps like viruses/malware, and bypass the monopoly issue. I do think having a technical bypass is good - it isn't mutually exclusive with also having a legal bypass. I just hope that the gov'ts are smart enough, and agile enough, to make this happen before it becomes too late (aka, once the gates close, it will never open again, like apple's ecosystem).

ekianjo 11mo ago

> hope we can get the EU to fund a truly open Android Fork The same EU that keeps pushing for breaking encryption and chatcontrol? No thank you

TeMPOraL 11mo ago
> breaking encryption and chatcontrol The two are not equivalent issues; the first one is ill-formed as stated. Cryptography is a tool of control. It's "dual-use", in the same sense like a knife or nuclear fission is - its moral valence depends on who is wielding it, and to what end. In the context we're discussing, encryption is being used against the people. Working encryption is in fact needed to make chat control work - it's fundamental to it, the same way it is to Developer Verification and Safetynet/Remote Attestation. It would be great if EU decided to break that set of encryption applications. Alas, chat control only wants to break E2EE on messages, and uses encryption elsewhere to guarantee E2EE stays broken. A more general comment about this thread, and related ones in the past: people really need to stop thinking about "encryption" and "security" as inherently good. They're not. Most of the social problems with computing, the attempts at user disempowerment and disenfranchisement, persist because they apply cybersecurity solutions. The core question of security is always: who exactly is being secured, and from who.

StopDisinfo910 11mo ago

I hope the EU actually enforces the DMA and forces Google and Apple to stop their non sense.

jezek2 11mo ago
Unfortunatelly DMA is the reason Google is doing this. It allowed Apple to require notarization for "security". Google is just copying the same approach as it's now clear what the requirements by the governments are. Before it was unclear so it was better to allow installation of apps without any verification to appear as more open. Remember any regulation/law has unintended consequences. At one point Apple decided that PWAs would no longer be supported in EU so they don't have to provide equal capabilities to implement them in alternative web browsers, fortunatelly they changed their mind by obtaining an exception. PWAs is the only alternative choice for making "proper" apps on iOS (no hacky sideloading methods). I think overally DMA is more a loss than a win (good on paper, terrible in practice). It codified worse things. The EU app stores are still fully controlled by Apple (harder to install, they can just decline or drag notarization of any apps or revoke your license to dev tools, you need to still pay them, etc.). For various apps the EU market is too small (esp. for things that need to be global) to invest into the development so while you can for example theoretically develop a real alternative web browser to Safari/WebKit (forbidden by App Store rules) nobody is willing to do it.

immibis 11mo ago

Technical things can affect people. Adversarial interoperability. They're using a technical thing to cause a social thing anyway, and fighting back with the same tactics is at least not surrendering.

Lindby 11mo ago

It would be hard to find manufacturers to use it. None of the existing Android phone manufacturers would be able to release phones with this fork without also abandoning the official Android platform on all markets. Google are very strict with this in their tos. You cannot release devices using non official Android builds without losing your right to use GMS and Android Brandice on your other Android devices.

solarkraft 11mo ago
This can also easily be framed as anticompetitive.