Unlocking the Pixel 9 bootloader breaks some Pixel AI apps
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I'm guessing this is Google similarly trying to stop people extracting their local models by not letting unlocked devices access them. I wonder if they'll also crack down on porting the Pixel Camera app to non-Pixel devices, people have been doing that forever because the processing is better than many devices native camera apps.
I’m not saying it’s right, but what would the law look like making it illegal and what would the impact be positive and negative?
The fact that this question even needs to be asked at all shows just how dire the state of consumer rights in tech is.
If there's a difference in this context, please clarify.
I was hoping for a discussion about exactly what I said. The basis for such a law and its impacts.
I guess the shouldn't have used the word "full" but that's pretty picky.
It looks like a pretty reasonable argument to me. They didn't discuss the basis but "consumer protection" seems to me to be sufficient basis. For impacts, I'm not sure what you're looking for; without being an expert it's hard to go beyond "companies stop doing that". But either way, replies don't have to answer every question you asked.
How about "you can't sell a tool that actively works against the interests of the customer"?
I'm sure some more targeted path could be taken. Like outlawing selling non-OSS. That sure would be nice...
One could argue that using copyright and eulas to bypass first sale is a misuse of copyright (the standard penalty for that is “you lose your copyright”, which seems completely reasonable and proportional to me).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Fran....
> The district court found in favor of Franklin. However, Apple appealed the ruling to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit which, in a separate case decided three days after Franklin won at the lower level, had determined that both a program existing only in a written form unreadable to humans (e.g. object code) and one embedded on a ROM were protected by copyright. (See Williams Elec., Inc., v. Artic Int'l, Inc., 685 F.2d 870 (1982)). The Court of Appeals overturned the district court's ruling in Franklin by applying its holdings in Williams and going further to hold that operating systems were also copyrightable.
Yes, that was the premise of the complaint.
> Citation
I don't see anything here that resembles first sale, just a ruling that copyright applies to compiled code. The concept of first sale doctrine is that despite the presence of the seller's ip the seller loses control over most uses. Nobody is arguing against the existence of the copyright.
It seems like it's not even that thought out. Google allows the devices to fully download the models...just not run them?
If you want the models, here ya go: https://pastebin.com/jh4YG5jX
That's every file the app downloads on launch.
EDIT: Seemingly I'm wrong. Someone below in another comment stated that they are not allowing the device to download the Gemini Nano model and that's what the failure is from.
But the files seemingly all have headers. Maybe TF offers an encrypted "inside the file" while having the headers not encrypted, but unless they do it doesn't look like it.
I haven't gotten further in it to figure out what it's bailing out on, aside from the request going to google using the trusted dl service and failing. It could be the same model call and they are being oddly protective over gemini nano.
Someone looks like they extracted it and uploaded to HF.
https://huggingface.co/wave-on-discord/gemini-nano/tree/main
Until last year, it was possible to spoof the second level (though not the third), with an unlocked bootloader, but Google started cracking down on that hard and it's essentially a game of whack-a-mole. Because the spoofing requires finding the fingerprint for a supported device that hasn't yet been banned (of which there are a finite number), it's a losing battle.
That said, unlocking the bootloader on Pixel devices is less useful than it used to be, because of an expansion between what the base device already does and a degradation of what an unlocked and/or rooted device can do. There are fewer custom ROMs than there were a decade ago, and (unlocked) Pixel devices get rapid updates with long official support.
Rooting the device used to give you the ability to install custom adblockers and bypass screenshot restrictions, but Android now has better support for DNS-based adblocking built in, and they've now cut off the main loopholes that allowed people to screenshot apps that block access. I think it's now impossible to screenshot an app if the app has blocked screenshots[0]. Ironically, it's easier to screenshot or get videos of apps on iOS than of those same apps on Android - I don't know if that's because developers don't bother to implement the blocking APIs on iOS or some other reason, but more than once I've ended up having to pull out a backup iPhone in order to screenshot/record something I couldn't on a Pixel device.
Pixel phones already don't include most of the bloatware that comes with other devices, and the remaining stuff is built in and can't really be removed without impacting the core functionality of the device. So root access gets you a lot less than it used to, for Pixel devices.
[0] In the spirit of classic bash, I am asserting that it's impossible, half hoping that someone will take that as an opportunity to correct me: https://web.archive.org/web/20230711000352/bash.org/?152037
Does that include any of the apps that block screenshots? If not, this again becomes a more complex version of "don't use such apps".
EDIT: Ah missed the comment below which explains that already.
So you can either have no banking app, lose all your data when your Pixel glitches out, or (recommended option) upload all your data to the cloud for the voyeurs at Google to perv at.
Well, you can use another pixel to take a photo of the screen...
If I'm forced to live in a walled garden, might as well go with the well maintained one that isnt run by a monopolistic surveillance/advertising company.
Various apps from minor banks in my country don't work (even with compatibility features enabled), although all the major ones do thankfully.
Uber was also doing A/B testing earlier in the year where they would disable a lot of features if you had an untrusted device for some users.
Are you saying that iOS is immune to the enshittification? Why not invest in true alternatives (GNU/Linux smartphones)?
Sounds like a benefit, to be honest. I take a lot of screenshots. It's never occurred to me to "ask Google" about something I screenshotted. I don't hoard screenshots, they're actively used for something, maybe an idea for a creative project, or a quote I liked. Once they're logged somewhere, I delete the screenshot, as it's no longer necessary.
This feature also sounds suspiciously similar to Windows Recall.
It appears that they are doing server side verification of the devices TEE[1] keys plus bootloader checks, either of which will trip it.
This can be spoofed using leaked keys (that get revoked fairly quick), but in this case it seems they are also verifying that the keys are the keys for their Pixel 9 devices.
[1]: https://source.android.com/docs/security/features/trusty
I'm not sure why they do that, tbh, since Gemini Nano is now part of Chrome, and you can download it without remote attestation. If you were dedicated enough, you could probably force the AICore system app on a rooted device into using the Gemini Nano model you downloaded from Chrome. I briefly attempted this but it proved too annoying so I gave up.
Edit: It appears Pixel Screenshots works differently than Pixel Recorder, which is what I was looking into.
* re-locking wipes your device to a factory state
https://github.com/google/private-compute-services/tree/mast...
I don't give a shit about Ai slop.
https://puri.sm/posts/the-danger-of-focusing-on-specs/
> but it would be difficult to give up the stability that comes with Android
This is true: Android had a decade of development with a huge team. However, depending on your usage patterns, it can be good enough today. It works as my daily driver. See also:
I find it encouraging to hear that it's working for you. I'll probably take another look at making the switch when I have a moment. I'd much rather support an alternative platform if possible.