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.
E.g. the consumer documentation for Google Pay just says you need a "certified" Android device and a screen lock set up: https://support.google.com/wallet/answer/12200245
(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.
[1] Expand "What to do if you see device is not certified" -> "Reset device to fix issue" https://support.google.com/android/answer/7165974
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.
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.
[1] https://developer.android.com/privacy-and-security/security-...
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.
Google has just about got the pot boiling. They win, we lose.
Your larger point still stands though of normalizing changing expectations by slow degrees
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.
It’s kind of self-defeating, isn’t it? Why would I adopt your standard when it limits what I can build?
Does the iPhone recaptcha app force you to login with a Google account? Seems we didn't need ID verification for the web to lose all anonymity.
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
(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!
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.
Which ones?
Say it out loud, don't be shy!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is that true, or are you spreading FUD? Because the system in question is not even live yet, it's only had experimental releases.
> Unlinkability is achieved by design through Zero-Knowledge Proof cryptography see the "Privacy by design" section below.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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"
And governments change. Any one might look benign now, but one election away might be different.
"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."
Does Play Integrity attestation require the user to be logged in? I wouldn't be surprised but technically it doesn't seem necessary.
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 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)
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 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.
In the olden 20th century, we had a term for that...
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?
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.
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.
I don't consider it a panacea.
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.
The HIBP hashes distribution is a great example.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I learned yesterday you can’t sign in to Cursor on Brave Browser. Had to switch to Safari. This is only going to become more and more common.
Only if politicians are still corrupt and law enforcement doesn't work.
Which means the writing is on the wall.
I know, people will slavishly knuckle under, but let me dream for a few minutes.
There's some sort of serious issue with learned helplessness or something
So does Binance.
Not about attesting to Google that you have a proper smartphone as a proxy for your humanity, like this thing.
LOL is this real?
I guess yes, because yesterday ReCaptcha asked me to screenshot a QR-code with the mobilephone :-D
If nothing else, it will be a major OEM shipping a non-customer-hostile mobile OS officially for the first time in ages, and Motorola's reach is significant: https://www.androidpolice.com/motorola-razr-drives-foldable-...
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.
Longer term, an open source hypervisor model sounds like the eventual goal: https://grapheneos.org/faq#roadmap
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?
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.
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.
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.
But then I learned that anyone can look up my name and home address from my call sign and decided not to publicly advertise when I'm not home.
If you don't like that provider, you are free to pick another.
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?
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.
You can relay bluetooth.