Zak

Early Reddit had a recommended tab, but that didn't last long. The current recommendation features are relatively recent - this decade at least.

It would surprise me if the winner in that space didn't have a public voting mechanism. Digg, Reddit's early major competitor had one, and heavy-handed moderation surrounding the HD-DVD decryption key leak was one of the major inflection points that drove users from Digg to Reddit. Stricter moderation during that time period would have been a losing strategy.

What traits specific to Reddit as opposed to a hypothetical generic alternative forum platform do you think are major contributors to those social trends?

I think when making the claim a company is a net negative, it's necessary to explore what would have happened if the company hadn't been founded.

I find it unlikely, for example that there would not be a dominant centralized forum platform. People would have certainly started problematic communities on the dominant platform, and it's unlikely a platform with strict moderation would have gained dominance before 2015 or so. I do think a dominant player would have been established by 2015.

Do you think whatever you see as harmful about Reddit would not have occurred if the company didn't exist?

I think we're on the same side in principle. The ability for people to interact with the wider world using general purpose computers that they fully control should be sacrosanct, and attempts to interfere with that such as remote attestation, app store exclusivity, and developer verification are evil.

Sandboxing apps by default is not that. The principle of least privilege is good security. If I vibecode some quick and dirty hobby app and share it with the world, it's better if the robot's mistake can't `rm -rf ~/` or give some creep access to your webcam.

The user should be able to override that in any way they see fit of course.

Saying that computer/OS manufacturers should prevent malware is effectively equivalent to saying that they should not sell general purpose computers to the public. A general purpose computer is one that can run any program the users tells it to, which necessarily includes one that's malicious.

That doesn't necessarily preclude helping the user to notice when they're doing something dangerous, but a waiting period before the computer becomes general-purpose seems pretty extreme.

It's pretending to address a serious issue while giving Google significant power to limit distribution of apps Google doesn't like, which could sometimes include legal apps that certain governments don't like such as the recently famous ICEBlock.

Google says they don't intend to do that, but even if I believe that's their current intention, they have a strong incentive to do otherwise in the future. Incentives predict outcomes more reliably than intentions.

I say it's pretending because scammers are good at shifting tactics. If convincing users to install malware ceases to be the path of least resistance, they'll convince users to install legitimate remote access utilities, hand over credentials directly, or some other scheme I haven't thought up because I'm not a scammer.

Singapore is not big enough to dictate terms to Google. If Singapore wanted this change and Google didn't, Singapore's most extreme option would be to ban the import of standard Android phones to a market of a few million people.

It's a very small concession. The high initial friction still means when someone comes to me with a problem and I tell them the solution is in F-Droid, they have to wait a day. Most give up and pick a different, less trustworthy solution from Google Play.

It seems to me that "no and don't ask again" should be a possible outcome of a vote on proposed legislation.

Without going into full detail on the procedure I'm imagining, such an outcome would bar consideration of equivalent legislation for several years and require a supermajority at several stages of the legislative process to override.

The victim also can't be on the phone with the scammer using that device during the setup process. We're talking about a very high-friction scenario.

> I don’t know where this fascination with getting everyone to download your app comes from.

I do. I once read that app users are seven times more profitable than web users on average.

That number isn't current, and I don't know if it was ever broadly correct, but it's obvious that an installed app provides more opportunities to try to get the user to do something profitable, and it's harder to block ads in native apps. I would be surprised if convincing a user to install a native app doesn't reliably increase profits by a large amount for most kinds of business.

Some is, some is optional, some isn't.

I'm sure there's a hypothetical scenario where someone successfully runs a scam that way, but there's also a hypothetical scenario where a 24 hour wait doesn't succeed at interrupting the scam.

That wipes all the data on the device and requires logging back in to accounts. It seems to me that's high enough friction to resist most coercion.

Play Integrity and developer options are entirely separate as far as I know.

As I understand it, that would not bypass Google's requirement that the developer of each app be verified by Google.

What do scams have to do with having developer options enabled?

This isn't a rhetorical question. There's no big red warning on the developer options screen saying it's dangerous. I haven't heard about real-world attacks leveraging developer settings. I suppose granting USB debug to an infected PC is dangerous, but if you're in that situation, you're already pwned.

Is there a real vulnerability nobody talks about?

I don't think Google should be changing Android this way at all, and fear that it will later be used for evil. That said, I thought of an improvement:

Allow a toggle with no waiting period during initial device setup. The user is almost certainly not being guided by a scammer when they're first setting up their device, so this addresses the concern Google claims is driving the verification requirement. I'll be pretty angry if I have to wait a day to install F-Droid and finish setting up a new phone.

Evil, for the record would mean blocking developers of things that do not act against the user's wishes, but might offend governments or interfere with Google's business model, like the article's example of an alternative YouTube client that bypasses Google’s ads. Youtube is within its rights to try to block such clients, but preventing my device from installing them when that's what I want to do is itself a malicious act.

If your goal is to boycott Google, you're probably not trying to use Waymo. My suggestion was only about punishing the use of remote attestation in the small way most of us can.

I'm not convinced the author cares very much about this. He bought an iPhone. Based on his other blog posts, he knew what he was buying and what the alternatives are.

An Android phone, even with a stock OS would get him more of the capabilities one would expect from a desktop PC, but he chose an iPhone. Some Android phones let the user unlock the bootloader easily and gain root, but he chose an iPhone. With an unlocked bootloader and a well-supported device, it's possible to install a third-party Android distribution with even more freedom, but he chose an iPhone.

Maybe he likes the iOS UX or app selection better, but if that's the deciding factor then I don't think using the phone as a Real Computer (tm) is really all that important to him.

No they wouldn't. We don't have to speculate about that; Android already has a toggle to allow direct installation of apps, and most people don't turn it on.

Many Android devices allow unlocking the bootloader and gaining root or installing an alternate OS without exploits, and there are quite a few third-party Android builds for supported devices. The process is not beyond what a person of average intelligence and modest computer skills could pull off with some patience and a video guide. Only a handful of tech nerds actually do it.

> Even today there’s a culture of downloading Android builds from long forum threads on XDA developers

I did that this month. I wouldn't do that for a device I use for anything sensitive, but I have a niche use case for my old Nexus 5, and it needed to be running at least Android 8.

Be sure to give apps that behave that way one-star reviews.

I just tested Waymo and my usual solution of Magisk Play Integrity Fix was insufficient, suggesting hardware-backed attestation. This is the kind of crap Microsoft was doing that inspired Google to put "don't be evil" in its mission statement. We all know how that went.

Unless you're actually a spy, there's no reason to do this. Just use your secure solution all the time with those conversation partners who are willing to use it.

They don't understand anything, but they sure can repeat a pattern.

I'm using Claude Code to work on something involving a declarative UI DSL that wraps a very imperative API. Its first pass at adding a new component required imperative management of that component's state. Without that implementation in context, I told Claude the imperative pattern "sucks" and asked for an improvement just to see how far that would get me.

A human developer familiar with the codebase would easily understand the problem and add some basic state management to the DSL's support for that component. I won't pretend Claude understood, but it matched the pattern and generated the result I wanted.

This does suggest to me that a language spec and a handful of samples is enough to get it to produce useful results.

This comment seems to be saying you don't want most people to do blog-like things. Most social media from Facebook to Youtube is blog-like if you squint.

It does seem like fewer people are posting personal content that way lately. Perhaps most people are better off sharing things one to one, or in small groups that are meant to stay private. That doesn't make it bad for the more public formats to exist; they're just not for everyone.

You can save all of anything someone makes public with ATProto, ActivityPub, or RSS. You can do that with anything someone puts on a web page too, but those protocols simplify automation.

I understand why people want to be able to delete things from the internet, but it doesn't work that way. It has never worked that way. It can't work that way unless every computer is locked down to running remotely attested government-approved software, and that's obviously worse.

The Mastodon model does not offer much ability to delete. Well-behaved servers will honor delete requests, but the protocol doesn't mandate it. Additionally, a user cannot generate delete requests if they get banned from their server or the server shuts down. Users and server admins can't control whether another server permits archiving of their content. Mastodon and other fediverse software allows following public posts by RSS, and RSS clients might keep them forever.

The only reasonable understanding is that these protocols are for for publishing to the public. It is not possible to reliably retract anything published to thousands of other peoples' computers. We used to try to teach people that the internet is forever, and that's even more true with federated protocols. That doesn't make them a bad idea.

I had a camera with a field-sequential electronic viewfinder. Because it relies on persistence of vision to mix RGB colors, it could be pretty distracting if I moved my eye quickly, breaking the illusion, and I think it would be similarly annoying on a TV or computer display.

The problem there is that the primary security mechanism is enumerating badness by policing what apps users can install. That's not nearly as robust as designing the sandbox so apps can't do much harm. If toggling the setting is really dangerous, which it wasn't in this case, it should have been impossible for an app to do without some sort of special access.

I also think users should be in control of granting or denying that kind of special access, but that's a separate discussion.

That wasn't the standard on the Mac, and looks like it still isn't. That platform has a strong tradition of utility apps that add to or modify core OS functions, and when I looked up "essential mac utilities" today, I found recent listicles with items like Alt Tab (an app switcher), Magnet (window management shortcuts), and TinkerTool (change hidden system settings - exactly like emoji toggles for iPhone).

The iPhone was a big departure from that.