Apple's response to the UK gov asking to see users' iCloud data says enough about where their priorities lie [1]. They do something far worse in China [2].
Don't fool yourself into believing Apple cares about your privacy. They care about money.
The UK public can still vote for governments that don’t demand backdoors into citizens’ private data. Instead, over the past century they’ve turned their country into an ineffectual nanny state of shrinking global relevance, while a fading aristocratic and old money class desperately cling to influence over a population that no longer cares about the old titles and prestige of having attended some ‘old boys’ boarding school nobody outside of GB has ever heard of.
Signal is one example. Their values are simply not compatible with what the Chinese government wants (local data storage, key access, etc.). Instead of complying and putting their users' privacy at risk, they accepted the ban.
Google, out of all companies, also decided to partially walk away from the Chinese market in 2010 over censorship concerns [1].
Nobody is forcing Apple to do business in China, or the UK. They actively choose to do so, and because of that also put themselves in a position where they have to comply with these laws, presumably because it makes them more money.
Signal responds to warrants with all the the data they keep.
ProtonMail / ProtonVPN responds to the vast majority of warrants with the data they keep.
Apple iCloud always responded to iCloud warrants with whatever data they had (eg. If the user didn’t enable encryption). They shouldn’t have removed end-to-end encryption for the UK, but they have thousands of employees in that country and millions of customers.
Sometimes it’s not the company that is the problem, but the country / legislators.
> Im pretty sure Google wouldn’t intentionally cut marginalized people like this off from the entire internet, would they?
Why wouldn't they? Google is notorious for making marginalized people's lives harder if it can make them money. Some examples:
- Hosting Palantir's ImmigrationOS, used by ICE to track immigrants
- Actively removing tools marginalized people use to protect themselves against ICE, such as ICE-tracking apps on the play store
- Intentionally aided Israel in committing genocide as part of Project Nimbus
- LGBTQ creator censorship on YouTube
Cutting off a small group of people they've repeatedly shown not to care about in the first place is a small price to pay to further cement their position as gatekeeper of the internet.
You might want to campaign to get rid of the entire concept of citizenship then. Until you manage to get people onboard with that, the lawful thing to do is to support legal enforcement of the laws on the book, which most people also agree with in this case.
So it seems that you will need a modern Android device with Google Play Services installed or a modern iPhone/iPad to be allowed to browse the web in the future.
No mention of device integrity verification yet, but the writing is on the wall.
If Google Play services is listed as a requirement, that implies that a "certified Android" device capable of Play Integrity attestation is required, since that's the only officially supported way to obtain Google Play services. On consumer-facing support articles like this, they don't tend to get into the nitty gritty details like what APIs are being used. If MEETS_DEVICE_INTEGRITY is required, that would probably not be explicitly listed here.
(Yes, if you go deep into the FAQ at the end it eventually states that if you rooted your phone, you can't use tap to pay, but that requirement is implied by the certification requirement [1].)
In Google's eyes, and in the eyes of the law due to trademarks filed by Google, Android == Google Android.
This feature would make little sense if it's not using device attestation because otherwise it would be easy to spoof. I expect that it will initially not use it, and they will start A/B testing device attestation in the coming years.
it's boiling the frog method. Moving too fast means backlash, but a slow, step by step transition where each step seems reasonable, but ultimately end up with a locked down device, is how they aim to achieve it. And people would be too lazy to complain until the last few steps, by which time it would be too late.
Good metaphor. On the one hand, Google increasingly cooperates and makes deals with militaries and governments. On the other hand, it increasingly locks down its customers and eliminates their privacy and freedoms.
Google has just about got the pot boiling. They win, we lose.
Not really - i would prefer that any policy change that _could_ be utilized in the future to enable future draconian changes be killed before it takes root.
I want a system, like type safety, to guarantee that XYZ cannot be possible, rather than rely on civil jurisprudence and active opposition to prevent it. We don't have that today, but i like to have it.
>that implies that a "certified Android" device capable of Play Integrity attestation is required
No, it doesn't. It implies that the app for handling the deeplink lives within GMS as opposed to needing to manually install a separate app like you do on iOS. GMS does not have a hard dependency on device integrity APIs being supported.
They said "capable of Play Integrity attestation". It's a weasel statement. If you have GMS, you're capable of performing PIA attestation, you just might fail. So it's strictly true, but doesn't tell us anything about whether it requires PIA.
No, they were correct in their understanding of what I meant. I should've said "capable of passing Play Integrity's device attestation checks". I replied to them with more context.
It indeed runs on modified versions of Android, but this is not supported by Google and never has been.
When Apple says "Apple Pay is supported on iOS >= $VERSION" they don't explicitly mention that it won't work on jailbroken iPhones, because they don't expect you to make modifications to your device and then try and use their services as normal. This is unsupported and discouraged, just like trying to manually install Google Play services on an OS that didn't ship with it.
The only way to get Google Mobile Services officially is to buy an Android device with it pre-installed while leaving the stock OS untouched. And the only way for an OEM to ship GMS with their device is to certify it with Google. And one of the requirements for certification is to use device attestation keys signed by the Google Hardware Attestation Root certificate [1], thus Play Integrity will pass on all such devices.
I'd rather have to do ID verification at a government site that gives out blindable RSA signatures to browse the web with using open source software, than this overseas tech company needing to lock down the whole device and tech stack and not have to 'show ID' at all. One of these two holds elections...
Music/movie corporations and game developers must look forward to an age where people can't access the cache files or hook up a debugger to their apps anymore
I guess history made us different. Personally I have reasons to be equally distrustful to anyone who wants to know too much about me, but much more afraid of my gov't than overseas entities.
My government has already seen my government-issued ID. If my government hasn't worked out my phone number, they can always ask the phone company. My address is required for the ID, voting, and filing taxes. I don't see how the government learns anything from this?
Conversely, I would like to believe most companies do not have my government-issued ID, nor a lot of the information on it.
In this specific case your government can ban you from the web by refusing to verify. E.g. to punish dissidents abroad Belarusian dictatorship simply nullifies their IDs, and lists them as terrorists in public data. Apparently that's enough to ruin somebody's life worldwide. But at least they can use their browsers, which would be not that easy in a world where gov't-backed verification is norm on the net.
From an American perspective, i don't trust the government with the implementation details, nor do I trust our political climate, misaligned incentives, and general disinterest in good governance to implement something so sensitive.
If I lived in say, Sweden, I feel much more comfortable trusting their government to implement. In America, I feel I must always vote in a way that prevents giving any power to the government that I wouldn't want my political opponents to have over me.
In said US of America, when the government wants to know something about you, they will get everything they want from the companies - it's even written clearly in the US laws. So I'm not sure why (or where) you draw that line...
1. if they have to subpoena each site each time they need user data, it reduces mass surveillance risk. I'm okay with cops getting a warrant to access someone's gmail. I'm not okay requiring everyone to use email.gov.
2. I use a VPN and pseudonyms. they could unmask me if they cared to, but it'd be annoying. it'd be a lot more annoying if they wanted to unmask every VPN user all the time.
No, it's not rose-colored glasses. It's a position based on the level of trust certain societies have. As a person, i inherently distrust anyone who has state sanctioned authority over me and a monopoly on violence.
Compared to the US, nordic countries are more homogeneous and higher trust overall. If I was living in those countries, I'd defer more, due to it's culture and small size. By small size I mean population. Sweden is less than 11 million, smaller than the LA metro area.
My statement was not a ethical judgement that Sweden or Nordics are more trustworthy. Just that they are smaller with a more homogeneous, higher trust society. Thus if I were there I'd trust the government to more likely represent the will of the people broadly, as opposed to the US Congress.
> My government has already seen my government-issued ID.
If you have a government ID and all you use it for is voting and paying taxes, then they know that you vote and you pay taxes.
If you have to use it for accessing the internet then they know everything you do on the internet. What you read, who you talk to, what you post, when you sleep, where you are at any given time -- it's very much not the same thing as just having a picture of you and your name.
No they do not. A properly designed government app that uses cryptography to generate a deniable token that can't be cross-correlated but proves your humanity/age to a consuming site is manifestly different than Google adtech hoovering up as much of your activity as possible.
Oof, that's not a great premise to take as a requirement right out of the gate. More counterexamples than examples for that one.
> that uses cryptography to generate a deniable token that can't be cross-correlated but proves your humanity/age
If it's actually deniable/anonymous then how would it work for rate limiting? If you can't correlate their activity then you don't know if the million requests are a million people or one bot with a million connections. If you can correlate their activity then it's not anonymous.
Moreover, it's a false dichotomy that we should be doing either of these things. The better alternative to corporate surveillance isn't government IDs, it's no surveillance.
A site can still choose to have a login system if it wants to. Sites can still rate limit based on IP address or cookies or whatever they use today.
The idea would be to use ZK proofs to demonstrate that "yes, this anonymous request is from a client acting on behalf of an adult human EU citizen" - that's something that is not easy to do today.
> A site can still choose to have a login system if it wants to. Sites can still rate limit based on IP address or cookies or whatever they use today.
So then you don't need either attestation or government IDs, right?
> The idea would be to use ZK proofs to demonstrate that "yes, this anonymous request is from a client acting on behalf of an adult human EU citizen" - that's something that is not easy to do today.
But how is that even useful? Is it good to exclude real people from Korea or South America? Do we really expect criminal organizations or for that matter even children to be unable to find a single adult EU citizen willing to anonymously loan them an ID?
It's about as plausible as criminals being unable to run their code on a device that can pass attestation. They're both authoritarians with a conflict of interest trying to foist a hellscape on everyone under a pretext their proposal can't even really address.
> It's about as plausible as criminals being unable to run their code on a device that can pass attestation. They're both authoritarians with a conflict of interest trying to foist a hellscape on everyone under a pretext their proposal can't even really address.
How is the system proposed by GP authoritarian? It's not actually giving away any real PII.
We could just argue that it would make Internet less usable for "illegal" immigrants who don't have a Gov ID - whcih can be seen as a problem already in itself, but still doesn't make that solution "authoritarian".
> How is the system proposed by GP authoritarian? It's not actually giving away any real PII.
These proposals have two major flaws.
1) They're predicated on a secure implementation, but any government-mandated system is going to be instantaneously ossified. Everyone will have to interface with it and then lobby heavily to prevent it from changing and requiring them to do more work. The initial implementation therefore has to be perfect. Free of not just current but also future vulnerabilities. That has never happened before and isn't likely to. But then you're proposing something with an extremely high probability of permanently compromising everyone's security as required by law.
2) They're structurally authoritarian.
Suppose the initial implementation was actually secure. I can even propose one: Every adult ID has the same QR code on it which you have to scan to be let in. There is no way of distinguishing any of them since they're completely identical even between different IDs, but only the adult IDs have them.
Great, now you just have to scan your ID to be let in. Papers, please. Are ordinary people going to be able to distinguish this from what comes immediately after, when they say the anonymity is causing kids to be let in so they're going to make the QR codes unique, allowing them to track everyone and find out who is lending a kid their ID? Then the infrastructure is already in place. All they have to do is change the implementation out from under you and it's an instant panopticon. Turnkey mass surveillance is authoritarian even if you haven't turned it on yet.
> We could just argue that it would make Internet less usable for "illegal" immigrants who don't have a Gov ID
We're talking about the internet here. People are required to be neither immigrants nor illegal for them to be citizens of another country.
You're moving the goalposts. I was responding to your claim that any verification system involves the government getting a complete record of all online activity.
If you're willing to admit this is entirely possible from a technical standpoint, there's a separate question about how useful/valuable it is.
Making it harder for children to access extreme pornographic or violent content seems useful to me. Many advertisers want to be able to say they've shown ads to a human not a bot. Humans in WEIRD* countries have more valuable eyeballs than humans in the developing world.
If you don't solve for those use-cases in a privacy preserving way, adtech will do it in an intrusive way - which is what Google are doing in the OP.
*"Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic"
I have not seen any government adopt such a standard.
some EU countries claim to provide anonymous age verification services, but those only hide your identity from the relying party. the site you visited is logged to the government's database along with your identity, before you're redirected to the target site with an "anonymous" token.
In a general case, your own government can literally have a gun to your head if they happen to decide they don't like you. A foreign one needs some extra steps.
And governments change. Any one might look benign now, but one election away might be different.
one of these also rounds up people and sends them of to overseas concentration camps without due process. I think maybe white people still don't get what the rest of the world is living or experiencing.
There's more than two sides here. None of the 14 parties with >1 seat in parliament fully represents my best understanding of how to improve the country and world on any time scale (long or short), but quite a few of them come reasonably close and I would vote for them without much hesitation
(Heck, I wish there were fewer parties, like if five single-topic good parties (bij1 against racism, pirate party for internet freedoms, volt for international collaboration, party animals for environmental welfare, etc., plus greenworkersparty as the current overarching big boy) would band together, it'd be a much easier choice!)
That not every country is so lucky (not all of them have free elections, or elections at all) is a shame indeed, but at least for countries like mine I'd be much happier to have a government arrange a system than a tech corporation and foreign laws. Presuming that the 2-party system you speak of is the USA's, at least both corps are governed by your own laws, that's something!
Some Western European democracies have a well-functioning democracy. The people voting are still humans, a substantial portion votes for racist parties that economically only benefit big corporations and not them, but the damage is limited because there is no winner-takes-all. Everyone has to accept compromises.
Like, most that I'm aware of? I could start naming them all but like, is there a particular feature they all have in common that you take issue with or where should we start this conversation..?
I'm sure many are tempted to dismiss this comment, but I think it's actually great. It's incredibly easy to complain about the options out there, really easy to vilify any or all of the parties as controlled by satan/evil corporations/communists/fascists.
What's harder?
Convincing enough people to matter (in some kind of election-based system) to get behind your platform - either with you as a candidate, or working to promote a candidate or party or movement that you do believe in.
People talk like their changemaking ideas are very widely held - the way people talk it's like they believe 75%+ of the country must actually agree with them - but then they don't run for office on such a popular platform that it should be a sure election win, yes even with countervailing forces such as electoral college, Senate, etc.
It's not even Gerrymandering, a company you willingly bought stock from has always had this setup.
Contrast that to most American's experience of their vote just not mattering outside of a few swing states. Having to move across states is such a more drastic requirement than just not buying Google A stock.
Sorry, I trust Google more than my government for my data. I mean I trust photos, youtube, music, gmail, wallet, keep, etc. what is that I have left anyway? It's sad that we started from open web, but we ended up in the hands of few. Apple/Samsung, Google, Microsoft, Amazon decide basically how I live my life. I don't want to (and sometimes I try to hard), but I don't want to give up the convenience also, but not only mine, also for my family is in the same pot.
Given the chance, Google would kill you by accident.
"We're very sorry, your access to G-Pacemaker was accidentally revoked when your accounts were closed for suspicious behavior after watching a YouTube video without subtitles in a language we hadn't realized you were learning. Unfortunately, there no is appeals process as your heartbeat was terminated immediately."
I will be unable to solve the phone verification because I use LineageOS for microG, but any fraudster can just buy a bunch of $30 android phones. Many people have trouble using a smartphone, so they use dumbphones, but they will be locked out. Many people just don't have any mobile phone because they don't think that it is useful.
Google is interested in, like other tech companies, identifying users by tying them to their phones. Other ai defense companies are trying to get photos and IDs. This is just another take on the same subversive activity.
I frequently get flagged as suspicious activity and have to pass a captcha when trying to use the Google verbatim search function on a signed out Firefox browser on android.
I get this all the time with Brave, and especially in Private Windows. It's the number one reason I don't use Google Search anymore. I've used Brave search for a while, what do you use? Do you have a way to prevent the captchas?
I don't see any mention of that? Google Play services work fine without an account (although if you're the kind of person who doesn't sign in to a Google account on their Android phone, you're probably running a custom ROM or something)
Until now, I have never run "a custom ROM or something", but just the Android that came from the phone vendors and its updates.
Nevertheless, I do not have a Google account and I do not intend to have such an account.
Of course, this means that I cannot install any app from the official Google store, even if it is a free app. The requirement to login into your Google account should have existed only for payments, not for downloading a free app, but nonetheless Google does not work this way.
I already had problems with a bank that has terminated its Web-based online service, replacing it with an app that they refuse to provide for downloading, so that I could install it without having to open a Google account. Therefore I have also terminated my accounts with that bank.
I hope that this behavior will not spread to all remaining banks that still have Web-based online access.
Google Play services is an automatically updated API that Google distributes through the Play Store. It also encompasses some security updates, such as updates to the Bluetooth stack.
You do not need a Google account to update those. In fact, chances are you already got the update weeks ago without noticing.
You can also update pre-installed apps through the Play Store without an account (hold the Google Play icon and select "My apps").
You do not need to install an app. You do not need to make an account. All you need is a QR code scanner and an Android phone that had Google's stuff preinstalled.
I have plenty of issues with the Google Play Store as well, but they don't apply to this topic.
I’m already sick and tired of seeing cloudflares “making sure you aren’t a bot” checkbox everywhere. Sometimes it locks me out entirely and decides I don’t get to view pages.
I see recaptcha less frequently but it’s much more annoying, with all the clicking of crosswalks, or busses, or whatever. I am not looking forward to a web where google can not only lock me out of my email, but also large sections of the previously public internet. Occasionally google decides I don’t get to do searches, and that’s not too much of an inconvenience, there are other search engines.
That doesn't really help if the same Huawei bot keeps re-requesting a bunch of 600 KiB JPEG from 120 rotating IP addresses with random crap at the end of the URL, like what happened to one of my servers. Efficiency doesn't really matter if you're getting hammered by bots.
I ended up aggressively IP blocking all of China, Singapore, and a few other East-Asian countries once I noticed that blocking server IP addresses just made the botnet switch to residential IPs. I didn't switch over to Cloudflare, but now a couple billion people can't read my website, which is arguably worse (but cheaper).
Also, a handful of people seeing an annoying checkbox is hardly a reason to re-architect an entire website. I am as opposed to Cloudflare taking over the internet as any sane person, but the usability story isn't really an argument for that kind of time investment.
The alternative to Cloudflare isn't some magical system that works for everyone but bots, it's hard-blocking IP ranges on the network level for anyone who doesn't fit the "normal" user profile.
Anubis is trivially bypassed by anyone that cares to bypass it. All it does is inconvenience real users with niche/older/extended browsers or those who take basic precautions against tracking and malware.
Anubis won't work now that scrapers just allocate more CPU time to beat Anubis challenges. The default configuration also permits all bots, only catching bots pretending to be browsers.
You know that protection racket where the mobster came to my corner store and says if I don't pay him he will come later and rough me up? This is a worse deal than that.
That doesn't work for targeted bots. A major benfit of device attestation is to stop the hordes of custom bot creators who try all sorts of ways to make a buck off of your platform such as sms toll fraud, credit card testing, ad fraud, account takeovers, stolen card laundering, gift card laundering, botting for pay for platform / ecosystem benefits, paid harassment, the list just keeps going.
Some aps such as okta, banking, and others already check platform verfication. Websites can't currently until device attestation.
Personally, I hate the concept, but I also hate spending a large amount of time fighting mal-actors on my platform in a completely unbalanced fight. There are tons of them, and they have all the profit incentive. There's a few of us, we only take losses. They can lie all they want, we can't really trust any facts except kinda the credit card and the device attestation.
Like everything, it's a shitty compromise, but, as a platform runner, if I can leverage google's signal and cut 95% of my malicious botting users, guess what I'm going to do.
> A major benfit of device attestation is to stop the hordes of custom bot creators
Attestation is extremely ineffective at preventing this because it requires attackers be unable to compromise their own devices, even when they have permanent physical access to the hardware and can choose which model to buy and get devices known to be vulnerable.
For example, CVE-2026-31431 is from only a week ago. It's a major local privilege escalation vulnerability. If you can run unprivileged code you get root. How many people have Android phones that can pass attestation but will never see the patch because the OEM has already abandoned updating them? Tens of millions, hundreds of millions?
Attackers can trivially get root on a device that passes attestation. Many devices even have vulnerabilities that allow the private keys to be extracted.
The main thing attestation actually does is beset honest users who just want to use their non-Android/iOS device without getting a million captchas, because they chose the device they wanted to use as a real human person instead of doing as the attackers do and choosing a device for the purpose of defeating the attestation.
And it's easy to confuse this with real effectiveness because whenever you roll out any security change, the attacks may subside for a short period of time as the attackers adapt to it. But that's why it makes sense to avoid things that screw innocent people or entrench monopolies -- while the temporary effectiveness wears off, the screwing becomes permanent. Meanwhile spending the same resources on any other method of shuffling things around to make them adapt will give you the same temporary effectiveness without hurting your legitimate users.
People with rooted android phones are a drop in the bucket compared to people running botnets using programming languages. I'd be super happy if I could force people to use low end rooted android phones for botting. It'd massively decrease the problem versus a EC2 instance running at full tilt.
Getting and managing a fleet of rooted phones is not a trivial task.
But what's the alternative to shops strip searching you every time you want to buys something? Shops need a way to prevent looters overwhelming them, and there's no perfect way to distinguish real shoppers from looters.
One solution is to leave a deposit worth more than anything you could loot. What that means in the computing world is those silly browser-based crypto-solvers.
If I use Claude to gather and summarize information for me, is that a "bot"? Because I recently hit that wall and it wasn't great. Turns out in our quest to fight "bots" we also force humans to do the manual labor of copy/pasting information.
Why would bots "overwhelm" a site is another discussion — I find it really hard to create a website that would be "overwhelmed" by traffic these days, computers are stupidly fast.
> Why would bots "overwhelm" a site is another discussion — I find it really hard to create a website that would be "overwhelmed" by traffic these days, computers are stupidly fast.
are the cloudflare walls really about reducing load? I thought it's because bots are not profitable. They don't click on ads, don't buy, etc.
Do you think the introduction of Anubis on a lot of open source websites was a coincidence. The AI companies' crawling bots don't play by the regular crawling rules and not a good citizen and they are causing a lot of issues. If your Claude session is using the same user agent of their data crawling bot (most of the time it will just check for claude in the user agent) yes you will be classified as bot as well.
mCaptcha, ALTCHA, Cap, Friendly Captcha, Private Captcha, Procaptcha, Anubis... there are literally dozens of open source alternatives that aren't feeding the Do Be Evil company... not to mention all of the commercial alternatives - if for whatever reason, you do feel like paying for a service that costs nothing to offer
You mean a la Anubis? But people also seem unhappy with that; and in any case Anubis is designed to stop ai crawlers; it doesn't work against a targeted crawler or a targeted dos attack.
People are unhappy with Anubis because it's not designed to stop "AI crawlers", despite marketing as such. It's designed to stop DDoS attacks on layer 7. Anyone who pays the computing-fee gets to pass, regardless of species.
Maybe ai companies should have invested any of those billions of dollars into safe and equitable ways of rolling out their new surveillance machines. Oh right that was never the point and this only serves to further that. Got it.
I think they'd be OK w/o the surveillance machine part of it, but they have never seemed to care about anything besides advancement of the tech or its side projects.
I can imagine a world where they were fighting for displaced workers, for Altman/Elon-suggested UBI/universal "high" income plans, and where they'd compensated those in the training set, and cut deals with publishers & content creators instead of scraping anything they could get their hands on. Would they be unpopular?
im so sick of this bs, im not even going to use the internet nemore, theres plenty of better things i can do with my time, as you can see i dont post much, im primarily a web dev, so ya i know its a prob, but tbf i really do not care, quit hijacking 10 sec of my time with an ad for every website i visit. maybe if they clamped down on foriegen countries using us web space, this would be less of an issue.
reminder that any company which has a legal obligation towards you (GDPR requests, refunds, filling a complaint etc) can be contacted directly and forced to do it manually if you cannot use their web interface due to being blocked by Cloudflare & other captchas
"As part of our mission to enable a safe agentic web" drew an immediate swear from me.
What's happened here is yet another massive negative externality from AI. Because AI is such a fraud enabler, Google are now using that as an opportunity to end the open internet and competition in operating systems.
I'd much rather go the other way and make the AI wear identification. Crack down on both corporate and unlicensed AIs.
Edit: and of course it's also advertising killing the web, because the fraud in question is ad fraud. Need to force it into human eyeballs, not bots.
99.999% of people don't give a shit and don't even know what this means. They'll follow the instructions. These are the same 99.999% of people who press win+R ctrl+V enter when the captcha prompts them to. Because do this to see the dancing bunnies.
It’s a common thing for malware. But people are going to be more likely to fall for it when mainstream sites ask you to complete weird tasks with your phone to verify your identity.
People are constantly made to jump through strange hoops to do things on the internet. Unless you're really keyed in to what's going on, it's easy to fall for stuff like that.
They will do exactly as it says while also ceaselessly complaining, completely unable to connect their choice to use a website with the pain of using that website.
There's some sort of serious issue with learned helplessness or something
I have blocked it for years with ublock origin, if a site doesn't work, ctrl-w.
Nowadays i cannot even use google search because of this, any search will trigger a captcha, hilarious (atleast on chromium-based browsers, firefox lets me get a page or two).
Ditch Google Search as well then, use something like SearXNG or another meta-search engine. You'll get more representative results, no tracking and no captchas. Sometimes some of the engines may return captchas but they're kept from the search results, i.e. those engines don't get used for the query. You can run your own instance of SearXNG or one of the alternatives or use one of the available public instances, your choice. The fewer direct interactions with the likes of Google/Apple/Microsoft/etc. the better.
If it's just a contact form on some random site that isn't particularly valuable to spammers, a bespoke solution like hidden input fields, obfuscation, or some kind of token calculated client-side by JS will probably work just as well.
That used to be the case, unfortuantely today even bespoke solutions can be completed by automation - any anything that just requires running JS in a headless browser was ineffective for a long time already.
I've been saying for years that it does not make sense to browse the web on a smartphone. Eventually things will get bad enough that people will agree with me.
“On an infinite timescale, I’m eventually right, so it never makes sense to not heed my advice” is silly. We’re all going to die eventually so it’s not worth browsing the web on any device.
I’m familiar with projects like them. I just don’t think any of them are going to break through in a meaningful way anytime soon, if ever. They have very niche markets. I hope they are always an option though.
The prospects for growth are better than ever. GrapheneOS by installer download stats looks to have approximately a quarter of a million users, and the new Motorola partnership should cause that to increase significantly.
Graphene is still tied directly to Android and Pixel devices. It is always at risk. Good luck if Google decides they don’t like the project enough. I went through that nonsense with Canon and magic lantern years ago. Firmware 2.3 was specifically designed to break it on all DSLR’s
The Magic Lantern Canon thing was terrible. Although I heard it is back, for whatever that is worth.
But that is a fair concern. While GrapheneOS will continue to support Pixel devices as long as they can, they will not be beholden to Pixel devices once the Motorola partnership is up and running.
They will be beholden to Motorola, instead! But it is a non-exclusive partnership and it sounds like the intention is to move beyond a single OEM. I am hoping that within a few years we see a small number of OEMs all meeting the device requirements GrapheneOS has set, with real consumer choice and more room for the project to maneuver as it sees fit.
In terms of being tied to AOSP, that is a given for the near term. It is still the best option out there and offers the most robust existing ecosystem of apps that has both FOSS options and highly useful closed source options. Major banks are not going to tell Motorola that their customers can't use their banking apps, though I still use 4 or 5 major banking apps on my GrapheneOS devices without issue beyond one bug where it was quickly fixed.
That will probably happen before modern chipset makers open source their blobs (never?), so I view that as a great compromise that should result in devices that are even more secure, even more private, but still usable by people who live in a society. And it will reduce the dependency on Google significantly as it will give room to non-AOSP apps to run on contemporary hardware with contemporary security.
This is Walter Schulz, core team member of the Magic Lantern project and been there back then when Canon introduced firmware 1.3.6 for EOS 5D3. Not sure what you mean by "Firmware 2.3".
Let's clear this up:
- Canon came up with 1.3.3 to 1.3.5. This disabled in-cam downgrade via Canon Menu. But it was still possible to use EOS Utility's firmware update option to install 1.1.3 or 1.2.3 (or any other version up to 1.3.5).
- There were no additional locks installed. We always had the option to port ML to 1.3.3 or 1.3.5. We could but we don't wanted to and there was no need.
- Other cams didn't get this treatment.
Then came 1.3.6 which disabled the EOS Utility option, too.
Now it looked like Canon forced our hand and we were forced to port ML to 1.3.6.! Meh! But no additional locks either. Porting ML to 1.3.6 essentially was the same as for 1.2.3.
Some users got 1.3.6 installed during maintainance because Canon Support installed this version without asking.
Some (singel one or more, don't remember) went back and asked for downgrade in order to use ML again. And Canon Support did that. Not exactly the action you expect from a company with the intention to block ML, right? ;-)
It didn't take long and user Apollo7 came up with a method to bypass this downgrade lock.
Which came handy because of a publicity stunt by someone: https://research.checkpoint.com/2019/say-cheese-ransomware-i...
"Strange" attack vector for sure. Well, it made news and Canon reacted by patching several camera firmwares for ML-enabled cams (but not all of them!).
But again: There was no lock making ML development for patched firmware more difficult or even disabling it! It would still be possible to port ML to any new firmware. We just wanted to avoid the load of unwanted work. Porting is no joke and may result in headache. Lot of work.
But today Canon upped their game. They learnt how to use real security features and newer cams won't allow our old methods to work. True.
So ... can you please stop the nonsense "was specifally designed to break it on all DSLRs", please?
With all due respect, this event was literally over a decade ago so yes I apologize that I got some numbers/info wrong, but the light derision at the end is unnecessary. I distinctly remember the firmware update they did making it so you couldn’t boot magic lantern on the 5d3 which caused a problem for us on a shoot where we had the raw pipeline ready to go. I thought it was broader. Clearly my memory is mistaken, I was just using an example that I (apparently incorrectly) recalled. https://www.eoshd.com/news/canon-blocking-magic-lantern-late...
I was and still am a big fan of the project. I have a t3i still in service because of it. But it is disappointing to receive the tail end of that comment from your account you apparently made just because I gave a quick, flawed example to make a larger point that in no way reflected on your efforts or magic lantern. It was to illustrate how quickly things can go south if a company determines to make it so. Which it sounds like is currently the case with Canon.
Appreciate the clarification nonetheless and have a nice weekend. I know it wasn’t the rudest thing online but for some reason your tone there just kind of got to me. Apologies if it seems like an overreaction. I was a long time admirer of your work so that’s probably why
I researched a phone which should work with lineageOS.
When I received it, I had to find some archaic website and _ask permission_ from a vendor to have the phone unlocked.
From there, I tried to image it from adb and using "guides" (ie, forum posts) and nothing that worked for everyone else ever worked for me.
On paper, installing an aftermarket OS on a phone is not much more difficult than installing an aftermarket OS on a computer. In practice, it's incredibly frustrating and a bit of a crap shoot.
Do you have an alternate solution? When we hear so many stories from HN'ers of their websites being hammered by out-of-control crawling and fetching and new levels of AI slop spam?
This is something site owners choose to implement or not. They're the ones paying the extra hosting fees to handle potentially unwanted traffic, and dealing with spam that traditional CAPTCHA's are no longer effective against. Google's not forcing this on anyone else.
I believe you'll also need bluetooth enabled on both devices. At least you do for those "scan this QR code displayed on your computer to authenticate using the passkey on your phone" feature, which this seems analogous to. Bluetooth is used to ensure that the two devices are actually physically co-located.
2. If free markets did exist they would not conform to the theory that people are using when they think of what free markets are, since people do behave rationally, power dynamics are real, and no consumer can have all of the information needed to make rational decisions even if that information were available
3. The market is providing solutions to its own failures without fixing the underlying failures because it is more profitable this way. Is buying something from a company that mitigates a problem created by the same company actually a free market, or is it just extraction?
CTAP2 requires Bluetooth but I'm not seeing any mention of that protocol here? It wouldn't really solve the "are you a human" thing, because you can just implement your own CTAP2 protocol handler if you wanted to write a bot.
I think the phone will just do basic remote attestation and then do a POST request to Google. Still not exactly difficult to bypass for anyone with a dollar to throw at the click/ad fraud farms, though.
Sometimes, sort of. Most passkey usage doesn’t involve bluetooth. When it does, there’s no real data being sent over bluetooth, just a meaningless hash that can be confirmed using a secret inside the QR code.
So really, it’s like I said, Bluetooth is used to make sure that the device consuming the QR code is actually near the device that’s displaying the QR code.
https://beyondfossilfuels.org/europes-coal-exit/ keeps track of coal phase-out commitments. 24 European countries still use coal generators, and 6 have not even planned to phase them out (Serbia, Moldova, Turkey, Poland, Kosovo, Bosnia).
Never used coal power:
Albania, Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Switzerland, Norway
Phased out:
2016: Belgium
2020: Sweden, Austria
2021: Portugal
2024: United Kingdom
2025: Ireland
Phase-out planned:
2026: Slovakia, Greece
2027: France
2028: Italy, Denmark
2029: The Netherlands, Hungary, Finland
2030: Spain, North Macedonia
2032: Romania
2033: Slovenia, Czechia, Croatia
2035: Ukraine
2038: Germany
2040: Bulgaria
2041: Montenegro
"In 1979, a second oil crisis, this time due to the Iranian Revolution, again brought into question Malta’s energy policy and made the government seek alternatives. Between 1982 and 1987, four stream turbines were installed at the Marsa Power Station. This strategy could have worked if the environmental and human health impacts of the coal used at the power station had not caused the local population to protest. In 1987, construction of a new power plant, at Delimara, started; the plant was commissioned in 1994. In the meantime, the Marsa Power Station continued to be improved, with new turbines added to eliminate the use of coal. On January 12, 1995, Malta became independent of coal but consequently became fully dependent on oil."
You could disconnect from it. That's much easier said than done and probably very complicated by the occupation, but I would guess that disconnecting would reduce coal consumption and greenhouse gas emissions proportionally to power usage.
Moldova has not purchased any energy from it since 2024.
I should also note it is primarily a gas plant, fuelled by extremely cheap (nearly free) gas subsidised by Russia. It only falls back to coal when supply is disrupted, which happened when Ukraine stopped transiting Russian gas on its territory.
Greenhouse gas emissions are a larger existential threat than global war. A global nuclear war might be more catastrophic than unchecked climate change, but probably not by much.
Disconnect from it? If it's connected to some kind of grid then you'd have to disconnect from the whole grid, surely? And if being connected to a grid that contains a coal-fired power station counts as using coal then how many countries are really coal-free?
It is not actually recognised by Russia either. It is in their best interest to maintain control over it, but officially recognise it as part of Moldova, so they can blackmail the entire country.
For Sweden, the coal plants were exclusively for cogeneration (district heating with electricity as a byproduct) and only used as peaker plants in winter. Some of them still exist but have been converted to burn biofuels instead, mostly woodchips and other byproducts from the forestry industry.
For most practical purposes, Swedish electricity generation has been basically fossile free since the 1980's.
I may be wrong, but I believe the british experience with biofuels is that although you want to believe its surplus byproduct, the cheapest source is often grown to be fuel for a biofuel generator. It's like soy/corn for ethanol, it isn't sufficiently profitable to do this solely with waste product, you get better margins growing to fulfill the contract.
That may be true in many places, but the Swedish forestry industry is very big, and the district heating plants really do burn mostly forestry byproducts. Of all the biofuel used in Sweden (not just for energy generation), 75% comes from forestry products, and the vast majority of it is either unrefined wood products or byproducts from Kraft process paper manufacturing (like tall oil and turpentine etc).
Specifically in district heating, 87% of the forestry-sourced fuel is unrefined wood products. Almost half of it is just bark, branches and treetops. Of all the biomass in an average mature tree logged in Sweden, 43% ends up as pulpwood, 43% as saw timber, 8% gets burned for fuel and the remaining 6% is treetops and branches which also tend to end up burned for fuel.
There is definitely a lot of debate in Sweden about sustainable forestry practices, though. The industry really wants to clearcut everything for convenience, but it's really bad for biodiversity and the general public hates it.
Addendum: I believe there's also been some studies and experiments involving importing olive pits from the Mediterranean olive oil industry for burning in district heating plants, but I don't think it's been done at scale.
Depends on the input into growing the biomass. If you are using industrial fertilizers, it's very far from net-zero. Besides that, from my memory there are studies analyzing this and I think they found it's never net-zero.
> For most practical purposes, Swedish electricity generation has been basically fossile free since the 1980's.
I think "practical purposes" should include the fact that thanks to also shutting down a bunch of nuclear, Sweden regularly imports German/Polish coal power.
Sweden claiming fossile free is only technically true. Practically there's a mountain of greenwashing.
So no, I would not say what you just said. I find that greenwashing dishonest.
By being anti nuclear, the green parties around the world have caused more radiation[1] and climate changing co2 than any other movement in history.
[1]
An oft cited statistic is that coal causes more deaths every single year from radiation (excluding accidents) than nuclear has has caused in its entire history INCLUDING accidents.
I mean, you can call it a "mountain" of greenwashing but to me it looks more like a mole hill. Total Swedish electricity production is typically 160 to 165 TWh per year and total consumption is usually between 135 and 145 TWh.
In 2025, the net export was about 33 TWh. Gross import from Germany, Poland and Lithuania, including transit to other countries, was 1 TWh. So, imported power from countries with coal power plants was less than 1% of total consumption, and the amount of fossil free power exported was more than 30 times greater than the amount of (potentially) fossil power imported. 1-2% fossil energy in the mix is to me not really significant, and especially not considering how much fossil free power is exported.
I think it's huge greenwashing to claim to not have coal power, but just import it when needed. What practical difference is that to having coal power domestically? That's just saying you recycle all plastic, only to send it to the third world to dump in rivers.
So I think it's untrue to say that Sweden doesn't rely on coal power. Without coal power it'd have regular blackouts. I rely on being able to take a breath every couple of seconds. If I only get an annual average of a breath every few seconds, I'll die.
One could show great generation and net export statistics with a sufficiently large batteryless solar installation, and still import coal power every night and cloudy day.
What is true, but can easily imply an incorrect conclusion, is that Sweden's very good in being self sufficient in clean power generation statistically. Yes, very much true. But it's largely due to geography, and not merely something to replicate. Sweden has way more viable places where hydro could be installed, than most countries (though where economical and otherwise acceptable, it already has). And it's sparsely populated; Sweden is bigger than the UK, but with one seventh the population. So if the implication is that "if we can do it, so can you" then that's false.
Luckily the political wind (including population opinion) has started to turn in favor of nuclear power, again. Maybe everything can be solar in 100 years, but we can't have 100 more years of coal.
> So I think it's untrue to say that Sweden doesn't rely on coal power. Without coal power it'd have regular blackouts.
The european grid is interconnected so it's basically all fungible. But it's not the case that there would be blackouts, since the price mechanism is used to match production, demand and return on production investments. So policy decisions to ramp down fossil generation result in investment decisions to new non fossil generation capacity.
> The european grid is interconnected so it's basically all fungible.
This is the point I'm making. It's not a counter point, it's exactly the point I'm making. Sweden "has" a bunch of coal plants, just located in Germany and Poland. This allows Sweden to skip planning for exactly what renewable is bad at.
Otherwise this is like saying "antibiotics are completely unnecessary because 99.99% of the time you don't need them, and when I do need them I just get them from a pharmacy". Right… so you do need and rely on them.
But Sweden also has a geographic electricity transportation problem. Electricity generation exists where (most) consumers are not. And this is also due to the MUCH more limited flexibility of renewables, especially hydro. Could easily be cheaper to get coal power in the south instead of hydro "shipped" from way up north. Hell, sometimes electricity in the north has a negative price.
Sweden is a good local example of why we also can't just power all of Europe from some solar panels in Sahara. Except instead it's hydro way up north.
This is true. A nuance often missed. Different rock (that is considerably worse in several ways, needs heavy fuel oil to be added to actually burn and has I think even higher co2 output per unit of energy) but kinda the same.
> Albania, Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Switzerland, Norway
I very much doubt this is true for any of those countries. In fact, I know it is untrue for Switzerland, although they did stop using it long ago (mid 20th century).
Edit: Norway actually ran a coal power plant until 2023, on Spitsbergen
The US is in an excellent position to massively harness wind and solar and yet right now it's dialing up the coal usage. I am comfortable celebrating Iceland's decision to not be maliciously dependent on fossil fuels.
I consider minimizing a natural decline with artificial subsidies as ramping up - maybe a fairer phrase would be "dragging out production" but either way the administration is putting a thumb on their scale to counter natural market forces to perpetuate a dumb thing.
We've banned this account for continually posting comments like this that are unsubstantive and clearly in breach of the guidelines and HN's intended use.
I mean, the EIA says "U.S. generation fueled by coal increased by 13% in 2025 to 731 BkWh"
The article you linked is mostly about a model of 2026 and 2027 and sure, in the model coal goes away but that's not a fact about coal it's just a model.
Yes with the next sentence explaining why, and how future years are planned to decrease.
"Ramping up" means planned to increase.
Feel free to provide a reference that supports that it's "ramping up". I, and parent, couldn't find one. This is a super boring factual thing that I was curious about, where opinion has no place or purpose.
Sure, but increasing something like fucking coal power plants isn't some instantaneous event that could start and stop at any time, putting some ambiguity at the moment between "increased" and "increasing". If plants are or will be built, it's because it's planned for development. That '-ing' isn't just present tense, it's there for the continuous/progressive aspect of it.
If they produced 13% more energy from coal in 2025 than 2024, the latest point at which we have real numbers rather than projections, it's fair to say that production of energy from coal is increasing rather than decreasing.
Okay, but you're celebrating make-believe virtues. Iceland is also not destroying its tropical coral reefs. That sounds nice...but it has none. Nor any sort of tradition or incentive to try doing that.
The US coal thing is all about widespread memories (and myths) of sustained good economic times, in large areas of the country which now feel destitute. Millions of voters feeling that they have no future. If not that the elites want them to hurry up and die.
To paraphrase Munger - if you want different outcomes there, then you need to change the incentives.
The anti-nuclear position in Germany is very old, and core to the existence of Greenpeace and green parties on DACH region (down to firing RPGs at reactors).
Does Russia benefit and probably fund it? Sure.
But DACH environmentalism grew from antinuclear protests, not the other way around, and thus will boycott nuclear even when it goes against their modern stated goals.
This is now how we should be looking at the problem. It doesn't matter if you burn coal yourself or not. What matters is the source of your energy. Every single one of those countries imports energy from other markets which consume fossil fuels for production.
I know at least Sweden has been a net exporter for a long time. It's a little bit complicated (that's what happens in a market economy). Anyhow, we/EU should continue to strive to end coal as an energy source for all countries, be since we can do much better.
The unique geography of the Scandinavian peninsula combined with very low population density makes Sweden a bit less interesting in terms of achieving zero emissions in other geographies, and I doubt Swedes would be cool with expanding hydro and nuclear to the scale required by Germany.
But yeah, I mean, good job and all. The answer for the rest of the continent is going to be wind and solar in the medium term, and probably more nuclear in the long term.
Totally. Tech neutral state incentives is the way to go for sure, everybody has different environment and context to consider (same within Sweden). Southern Europe has very different opportunities (much better situation for solar for example).
Anyway, my comment was in response to the extreme comment (parent) about how all rich countries became rich using fossil fuels - implying that that's the more or less only way to transition from poor to rich. I think it's important to note that that's not necessarily the case. You don't need to destroy the environment to go from poor to rich, even though a lot of countries historically have done it that way (also noteworthy that they did it without knowing about the consequences for the environment).
first real comment, I thought that at first but this could lower the possible users that could be using chatGPT and that would be against us (shareholders)
* /e/OS sends user speech data to OpenAI without consent [1], and thought this was ok until they got caught [2].
* /e/OS massively delays security patches, and calls this a "standard industry practice" [3]. Meanwhile, GrapheneOS' opt-in security preview releases provide early access to security updates prior to official disclosure [4]. Also see [0] (Security update speed) and [7] (WebView being 40 security updates behind).
* microG downloads and executes proprietary Google binaries in a privileged environment [5] [6]. You can obviously not audit these, nor should this count as "degoogled".
* microG still phones home to Google by default (android.clients.google.com for device registration check-in, mtalk.google.com for FCM push, firebaseinstallations.googleapis.com for SIM activations) [7].
[0] has a comparison of popular privacy and security-focused Android-based OS, which paints the whole picture. Privacy-friendly does not necessarily mean secure, but in this case "privacy-friendly" is quite a stretch already.
Your speech data assertion looks to be inaccurate, the user does have to opt in. Nor does the response sound like a mea culpa. I wouldn't use it, but seems reasonable for people who might want to.
Yes, sent*, not sends. Before they got called out, it was opt-out. No consent dialog, warning, or any other sort of confirmation before sending audio to OpenAI. The keyboard is auto-enabled.
2. did not anonymise said voice messages, only their origin
3. did not ask the user for consent
4. ignored the user's consent after they started asking for it
That is not a good look for a privacy-focused OS. There is now a working consent dialog before using this feature, and audio is actually anonymised (random pitch shifting + filtering + noise), but it took them nearly 8 months to address all of this after getting called out.
> I wonder how this compares to GrapheneOS in practice.
https://eylenburg.github.io/android_comparison.htm is a fairly complete comparison. One of GrapheneOS' biggest features is that they sandbox Google services (if you choose to install them), whereas e/OS gives them privileged access by default (via microG). Calling it a "degoogled" OS while microG uses Google's proprietary blobs is... a choice.
By 'Rust compiler' and 'C++ compiler', they refer to the LibJS bytecode generator implemented in those languages. This is about the generated JS bytecode.
Don't fool yourself into believing Apple cares about your privacy. They care about money.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgj54eq4vejo
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/apple-moves-to-st...