They got badly surprised by their own security warning.
They are lying about the situation while knowing we know they are lying.
No message control / (social) media control. Does Google even have a public relations teams? A press officer? Is anyone managing all of this? Hello? Is somebody home?
6 + 2 months without progress from a company with infinite money -what is going on at Google? Fits right in with what happened to Terraria.
Great reason to leave Google.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_17_...
For example, in iOS Safari the desktop version of youtube.com has a completely broken picture-in-picture feature on the video element.
But if you open exactly the same page in iOS Brave (just a skin over the same engine because Apple doesn't allow competing browser engines) you suddenly get working picture-in-picture playback.
The funny thing is: A website doesn't have to do anything special to support PIP (introduced in iOS 14). Every video element automatically received that button. Google had to go out of their way to break this feature in Safari. (I assume they don't want to allow it because it competes with YouTube Premium, which specifically advertises "background play" as one of the paid features).
Granted, feels more like a tech-demo than an actual product.
Now there is really no support from Google for their products.
But that's the nefarious and the hidden bit, and the biggest complaint is that there is no "motive", because people aren't involved at any stage. Every day bots and algorithms tend to YouTube's ToS violations and don't give enough feedback that explains to a human why they did what they don't, don't seem to be reviewed by a human anywhere in the process, and there seems to exist no real human oversight for appeals or post-mortem reviews. It's all very opaque to people, so yes it is hidden and seems nefarious. It especially seems nefarious that there is no real "motive" just machines eating each other endlessly with seemingly no human oversight. (And then that the YouTube account takedown also takes down most of the communications tools such as GMail along with it only furthers the nefarious and "post-mortem" feelings of such an "every day kind of ban".)
We know from centuries of human behavior that rules systems and governments syncretize until the average person just trusts them, assumes their outputs are "fair" when they can't see well enough inside the black box. I am under the impression that such a thing has happened at Google. Too much belief in the "impartiality of algorithms" (which has never been true) blinds a group to avoid questioning what the machines have already done because the machines wouldn't have done it if they didn't have a "good reason". Of course we all know that it is unlikely any of those machines actually reason at all ("have motive"), and instead reflect the biases of their programming, the lack of general oversight in their outliers and false positives/false negatives, the questions of ethics that would be asked of a human judge (and jury), etc.
I assume, because Google has given me no evidence to assume otherwise, if people examined and confirmed the result, they did so with a rubber stamp and presumption the machine is right unless proven otherwise. That's the nefarious thing: there's no motive here. The people aren't given motive to question the machine's decisions, because the machine's decisions are "fair", and the machines have no motive of their own to suggest the sorts of "fair" that include ethics and judicial process, just a bunch of dice rolled that landed with enough snake eyes to "convict". (It's a classic sci-fi dystopian tale, that Google has made an unfortunate part of so many lives.)
To return to the original post that started this conversation subthread:
> I don't believe no one has noticed at Google yet. There has to be something else at this point.
I think that's true, it's just that those of us on the outside will never find out the real reason because the decisionmakers within Google are deciding to stay silent about this for whatever reason.
Even if it goes to the highest levels in the company, they aren't playing the game "prove why the system was wrong", they are are playing the game "prove why the millions of dollars we poured into this system were right". Especially if they are at fairly high levels of the company removed from the day to day maintenance of the system, they have more personally invested in assuming the system works right, in believing the system to be an unbiased and "fair" black box (because their personal reputations get tied to the company's reputations get tied to the system's reputation).
I think the "something else" is just general mistrust in broken "guilty until proven innocent" systems. I believe people have noticed, but the system still wins because the system is usually "right". It's the "benign" AI bureaucracy "utopia" Google (and a lot of Silicon Valley) keeps saying they all want and keeps trying to build doing exactly what it was built to do, absolve humans of human decisions and blame it on the "fair" black box. But maybe I'm just a huge cynic about human nature.