I want to make a report to to US Department of Justice Antitrust Report Online and US Federal Trade Commission: Antitrust Complaint as suggested but I will appreciate some guidance on the wording. Could anyone share a sample?
It is similarly unsulting to read an ungrammatical blog post full of misspelings. So I do not subscribe to the part of your argument "No, don't use it to fix your grammar". Using AI to fix your grammar, if done right, is the part of the learning process.
A critical piece of this is to ensure it is just fixing the grammar and not rewriting it in its own AI voice is key. This is why I think tools like grammarly or similar still have a useful edge over just directly using an LLM as the UX let's you pick and choose which suggestions to adopt. And they also provide context on why they are making a given suggestion. It still often kills your "personal voice", so you need to be judicious with its use.
This is the right direction - the only way to go about fake images and video is digital signatures. Phone camera should be able to do this as well. Then we can have signatures of software used for processing them (on top) cerityfing what changes have been done: e.g. contract correction filter applied, signed by Adobe Photoshop.
it requiers subscripiton to Apple ecosystem: closed hardware iPhone, closed-source iOS, app store blessing to distribute. :)
Could you do an Android version to alleviate some of these hurdles?
P.S. Do not mean do diminish your achievement. I've tried many these apps which fed me ads or ask to subscribe, so a free alternative is very welcome! Thanks!
I use ChromaDoze from F-Droid when I am sleeping somewhere intermittently noisy and need some base noise to raise the floor. There's a couple of other ones, but I found this the most simple, you just draw a filter and click go.
OP makes an app for his own needs and his own phone and decides to share it for free, at considerable cost ($100/yr), and your response is to ask him to remake it for you, from scratch (in another language), for an OS that OP doesn't use? Holy shit
Locked app store was my primary reason staying away from iPhone.
Now, this is gone. It also open door for censorship, like disabling ICE-tracking or
other politically inconvenient apps. This is a terrible decision for Android and for our freedoms.
> prosecute Google for fraudulently marketing Android as open and force them to keep their promise.
Sorry man. The EU Cyber Resilience Act is forcing these changes. An operating system is a class 1 important product. A tamper-resistant microchip is a class 2 important product. A device with a secure element is a critical product. Your smartphone has all of these pieces. Manufactures must follow a list of best practices to enjoy a presumption of conformity. That list of best practices is being compiled and made ready for publication, with full effect in 2026/2027. Google knows what is coming. Everyone big knows what’s coming.
True open source with no monetization can get a pass. Everyone else has to do this.
Even if the idea originally came from the EU, the fact that Google is rolling it out worldwide would seem to indicate that they already wanted to do this, no? And regardless of whether they wanted to or not (inside the EU), it does not invalidate criticism of the move from outside of the EU.
If the only thing standing in the way of closed platforms is that they have to be marketed as closed, you're just going to get everyone marketing their software like Apple does and nothing else will change.
The only solution to this problem is new legislation. The case that Google fraduently marketed Android is flimsy at best.
People buying phones by and large do not care in the slightest about "openness". Whether or not their phone supports sideloading is completely and utterly irrelevant to them.
But aside from that, it would be enermously difficult to prove that Google made claims that were unequivocally false while advertising Android. Sure, they made some vague claims about Android being an "open" platform. But they had more than enough well-compensated lawyers on their side to avoid making specific promises about specific functionality that could eventually land them in court.
Finally, even if some of the claims Google made about Android in 2015 no longer hold up in 2025, that in and of itself is not illegal. Google is allowed to change and adapt Android over time as it sees fit. Though you and I may disagree with their findings, they have internally identified systemic security threats caused by unrestricted sideloading, and have created a solution to this real-world problem (however flawed it may be). There is no reason under the current laws of the United States that they should not be allowed to make those changes (aside from perhaps general antitrust law, but that is not enough in this instance as evidenced by the outcome of Epic Games' case against Google). Perhaps they will have to change their advertising going into the future, and they can definitely no longer reuse older advertising materials promoting Android's capability for unrestricted sideloading (if those exist). But just because they advertised Android as having feature X in the past does not mean that they would break the law if they were to remove feature X in the future after they stopped running those old ads.
(Yes, it gets a little blurry in the case of software because it often automatically updates and offers no option to downgrade. But phones don't last forever. In the worst case Google could just wait ~5 years from today to implement Developer Verification.)
Unfortunately sign on with social media improves engagement and conversions in apps. It's not about being lazy it's about doing what will bring more users.
Google only directly controls the Pixel line because of antitrust action from the EU.
Originally, device makers who used Android themselves were contractually prohibited from manufacturing devices for any company that forked Android, for instance.
And (present tense) forces OEMs to not ship with utilities that let users access their own data
Fairphone wanted to give users full access on the Fairphone 2, but were contractually disallowed if they wanted to also ship the Android Market, Google Maps, etc., which users can't otherwise install themselves so it was essential to pre-install for a normal user experience. That's why they made two OSes for that phone: a googleful one and a free OS based on AOSP that you can install if you don't want Google (https://code.fairphone.com/projects/fairphone-2/fairphone-op...). Nowadays they let the /e/ Foundation do that work with e/OS. They're supportive of it but apparently don't have the internal manpower to continue making and supporting an extra distribution
You're not going to be decapping and recapping SoCs at scale... Lots of eFuse implementations are just writable ROMs with erasing lines disabled, and people aren't taking out particle accelerators to wipe them.
Whatever silly OTP implementation is involved is 99.9% irrelevant to unlocking a phone, and OTP for root-of-trust has been in use in phones for 15+ years anyway.
Maybe we use some hardware-level trick to get to some protected firmware initially to reverse engineer it, but almost universally it's what reads the state of the fuses (or something after it) that actually gets exploited. That's changing, too, but in general very slowly and at at the pace of hardware manufacturers learning how to make software (aka, glacial with a few notable exceptions).
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