exceptione

It seems like you have more freedom than you think you do. See this comment <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49594824> Packaging software shouldn't change the license of GOS as such. If you haven't had already, maybe the free software foundation could provide you with assurance?

I guess it will make your life much easier if you wouldn't have to restrict yourself that much.

Thanks for clarification. Anything first party from Big Tech is a lost cause privacy wise. At the same time, nobody uses it (maybe that is different in the USA, don't know). So for me this would be ultra-low prio as I (and I expect almost every other GOS user) will never use it. But I believe GOS knows what it is doing.

  > RCS isn't an open platform in practice. It isn't even as open as SMS/MMS. It heavily depends on proprietary Google and carrier infrastructure in practice. We can start by replicating Google's approach and then we can work on only using carrier services for carriers where it's actually supported.

What is the point of RCS though? It seems to be strictly inferior to Signal. It seems a Google product meant to serve Google. I wouldn't hate it if GrapheneOS would totally ignore RCS. I fail to see any value in it, but maybe I am lacking information(?)

[flagged]

I feel your pain, but what about "centralized but under control of a non-profit"? Could Wikipedia/Wikimedia serve as an example of such a model?

  > Google did something in the mid-2000s that nobody thought was possible: they created a browser and got mass adoption without having a platform. People willingly downloaded it

I have to say that things weren't so bright. You were correct that Google had no platform, but Google never had any qualms about doing illegal things. To start with, the average person had no idea what a browser is, they had 'the internet' installed on their computer. Someday 'the internet' had changed on their computer.

How? Well, remember that Windows had (or: has) no equivalent of Linux software repositories. People browsed the internet and downloaded software (including malware) from big download sites. Google sponsored those sites and had google chrome injected in every installer. Think about that when Google talks about 'sideloading Android apps'. People just had no idea, but all of a sudden their internet had changed.

Secondly, Google hijacked other browsers by urging people on the Google homepage to install Google Toolbar (if I remember the name correctly) This provided a different way to spy on user's browsing activity, plus it provided a springboard toward a full chrome install.

Thirdly, Google pushed users aggressively to download Chrome across all of their products. I remember Google telling me on every page that my browser was not Chrome.

Chrome was never an offer from a benevolent party, on the contrary. I have been talking against many a deaf ear that it isn't that smart to install an ad viewer from an ad company, even if the first page load feels more flashy in Chrome. I am glad that people finally are starting to wise up, better late than never. Especially the stupid excuses I heard from tech people that insisted Chrome is the only way has learnt me that tech people aren't as smart as we think they are. Don't take that personally.

We now have to free the internet for the average Joe. That won't be easy if we can't evade consequences from crime as Google can.

Besides the reasons listed by the others, this also a matter of relationships as there a deep ties between these nations and the Netherlands. Without the Dutch financing the Americans, America would not have been able to become independent from the English. The Dutch were also the first country on earth to acknowledge America's independence [1][2], costing them a war with the pissed England [3].

There are a lot of Dutch people living in Canada.[4]

  _____

1. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_de_Graaff>

2. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_First_Salute>

3. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Anglo-Dutch_War>

4. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Canadians>

This isn't abstraction though. Outsourcing is a better term. If things continue moving up that latter, you will see that your agent/agency will pass the buck too. But there should always be some last turtle. Maybe that turtle will be the human that thought he was climbing the latter, who knows.

  >  It would make more sense if the file picker was something the operating system ran when a program wants to edit a file, and what came back to the program after you selected was the accessor for that file (with read and/or write verbs).

You are describing the concept of XDG Desktop Portals [1] on Linux.

1. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/XDG_Desktop_Portal

  > As Tim Wu points out, the money Amazon makes from payola exceeds the advertising revenue received by all the newspapers in the world by 300%. Alongside that number and its implication for the news media, Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post and turning its editorial page into a sewer of shitty Ayn Rand fanfic barely registers.

These people are so far removed from reality that you could easily call these social circles a (more or less spontaneously organized) cult, and they have to warp the world around them to serve them even more. Buying twitter, buying newspapers. They are telling us that the "others" are brainwashing us.

  > This is pure enshittification. Of all the ingenious, innovative ways that Amazon came up with to make money, the most successful is a scam that makes everything you buy more expensive even as it reduces the profits of the companies you're buying from. It's another example of corruption: a system of concentrated gains and diffuse losses – and once again, it's the most profitable thing Amazon does.

Bezos isn't an entrepreneur, because an honest business owner wants to be proud about their own work.

The shit happens from how these funds are bound by their statutes to buy into index funds. A while back, there has been some insightful commentaries here on HN regarding the spacex IPO and the subversion of stock exchange.

We can't open x links as X is suing privacy respecting proxies, so I can't assess which David Sacks you are talking about, but if you mean this guy [1] orbiting the likes of Thiel, Trump and Kennedy jr, than that isn't quite the endorsement you should be looking for. Thiel thinks regulators are the anti-christ, doesn't believe in democracy and has surely not your or my interests in mind.

But yes, regulatory capture is surely a thing. At the same time, watch out for the siren songs from the overlords. If you come closer you'll hear their actual line: "rules for thee, not for me."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Sacks

  > but it is hard to cut your own lane when these mega groups control so many aspects of the stack and have such outsized capital and political influence

Are you able to shed some light on this? It would be interesting to hear what people like you come across.

  > And did you know pension funds invest in this stuff?(which is bad?)

Not if this were something healthy. This wouldn't be the first time joe average is holding the bag when the rich set the house on fire again. The USA economy is particularly brittle (as in: not diversified) in that regard.

I can understand how the article might conflict with personally held notions and thus might look odd, especially as the weird dealings of the tech accelerationists do not find much press coverage. The only thing I can do is recommending to keep your mind open for new info, the article mentions he will follow up on the bullet points. The author has another previous article [1] that references Paul Krugman's article "The rich are crazier than you and me"[2], that might be an interesting read alongside the other pointers. As an aside, I also recommend to watch the video at the end that goes into Andreessen hiring murderer Daniel Penny.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/06/opinion/robert-kennedy-jr... 2. https://www.anildash.com/2023/07/07/vc-qanon/

  > Since the Cancer Capital firms have become so powerful, the overall balance of power between founders and VCs has flipped; instead of founders having a company that VCs would try to fund, now VCs publish extremist political manifestos, and “founders” are just the people who are selected to carry out parts of those plans

  > The rest of the world doesn’t know: New founders and workers entering the tech industry are unaware that Cancer Capital has taken over, so many are still trying to play by the old rules, and can’t figure out why their ideas are being pushed into serving the goals of the Cancer Capital firms

  > These days, venture firms are increasingly getting their funds from pension funds and retail retirement accounts, meaning the public (you!) are increasingly holding the bag for the parts of their portfolios that actually have some risk, even if you never intentionally made that choice

  > Part of why this has gotten so corrupt is the way the Cancer Capital firms have transformed themselves into their post-VC forms. Because they’re not legally VC firms anymore, they’re free to buy shares directly from founders, or hold unlimited amounts of publicly-traded stock — exactly what they couldn’t do as regular VCs. They can even sell their investment in a company as an asset to another one of their own funds, and then book the increase in value as a profit, all without the company ever having made a penny. Another racket: a company that’s raised a bunch of cash in a funding round can buy out its early investors if they’re one of these post-VCs, so they can get paid off even if their portfolio company has never made a penny in profits or revenues.

Aka the classic dynamic of wealth concentration resulting in power concentration. Great article. One thing it does not mention is how much this small circle of people have gotten zero-sum leverage over the whole country, because when the surveillance economy collapses, America collapses. This wouldn't be the first time the oligarchy triggers a crisis with reckless financial games.

  > private intelligence companies use such tooling to gather information on individuals for business and private customers too.

Yes, that is a very scary. These weapons are being used against journalists and politicians threatening personal business interests.

  > It's actually really, really impressive what they've accomplished. You should be proud of it. 

No doubts about that, they are world class. But they are seeking to reduce oversight, and they succeed at that politically. The last government, a (far) right wing coalition of highly ineffective parties and personalities, with Schoof as so-called `neutral` prime minister had laid the ground work. Schoof had been director-general of the NCTV, in his roles he was connected to intelligence services. Unsurprisingly, in the short lifetime of his cabinet he managed to reduce oversight.

This is a moral hazard. Nations should implement a very clear rule: when you have served in the intelligence service community, you cannot partake in politics. The intel branch should be firewalled off from the democratic branches.

A good overview from a big dutch tech site: https://tweakers.net/reviews/15236/aivd-en-mivd-lijken-hun-z...

Yup, but here is the rub: you and me can't buy the real stuff. You have to be a professional law breaker, which means you are in organized crime (don't forget the white collar guys), or you are working for Intelligence, in whatever capacity, in whatever oversight. The problem is that for offensive surveillance organizations the line between crime and work gets blurred quickly. That is why I am not too enthusiastic that our Dutch intelligence agency will receive offensive capabilities as well. Information is power, and you will soon end up with an organization that feels limited by oversight, but that also can easily accumulate means to evade such oversight. Bonus points if people from those kinds of organizations find their way in legislative branches or overseeing powers.

This has been a process of decades. Also surveillance, cybercrime and business do connect. If you look at the history of capital flows in the US, you will see a massive shift of capital from military has been redirected to the surveillance industry. If you would cut out surveillance from the USA economy, things would look quite different. The stock market is heavily skewed towards companies with this business model. As food for thought, think about what the GDP looks like without Apple, Google, Anthropic, OpenAI etc. To give an example of just one facet, Meta alone makes billions on crime each year [1] and will fight toot and nail anyone who dares to threaten their business model of addiction and privacy violation. To continue down this path against the interests of the public, these companies feel confident enough to try their hands at dangerous games [2], of which history teaches us that will always end in tears, because zero-sum is in the end a hunger game.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...

[2] https://abc45.com/news/nation-world/big-tech-ceos-attend-tru...

  > Graphite belongs to the same category of commercial surveillance technology as Pegasus, the better-known spyware developed by NSO Group. Both are classified as mercenary spyware, meaning private companies develop and sell them to government intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

This buries the lede a bit. These companies play their part in trans-national organized crime networks, spanning countries like the USA, Russia and Israel. In Russia, it is often hard to delineate between organized crime and the FSB, because these networks overlap and they are often well established within the structures of the state. The same increasingly applies to the USA. ICE is becoming a paramilitary force, "immigration control" is clearly not its only purpose. I cannot unsee this from the massive purges in the military, rooting out the most competent leadership. The parallels with Russia can't be ignored.

Thank you for clarifying this.

Morocco is notorious for its nepotism though. The run on Ceutta can't be unseen from the problem that for many young Moroccans pursuing an education is almost useless, as the opportunities are exclusively for the political elite. A whole generation does not see any future for themselves in their own country, which is very sad from my pov.

In India, afaik, a well-educated Indian has fairer chances. I don't know how much the current unemployment situation is playing out though.

One reason is that this is mostly a brain firmware phenomenon. My personal observation is that some people are able to nail a domain with good conceptual integrity, but there are also many (clever) people that quickly reach to a mechanical implementation, often even unable to think on a conceptual level about the problem domain. Languages with proper sum types are really helpful here, but Haskell was 20 years ago already 16 years old.

Nonetheless, the language is not the real impediment, it is the way of approaching a problem. Also, the software we are talking about was a standalone application installed on laptops, they were not part of the airplane's board computer.

yes, but not on GOS.

  > The detailed software allowed them to enter various parameters including the weather, runway condition, and any systems failures, and then calculate whether it was possible to land. But when everything had been entered, the program spit out an unhelpful answer: “no result.”

 > When calculating the landing distance, the software applied a generic “operational coefficient” to account conservatively for variations in pilot techniques that could result in less efficient deceleration. The problem, as investigators would later discover, was that the software applied the coefficient again whenever another system failure was added. With so many system failures on the aircraft, the coefficient was applied a total of 9 times, resulting in a calculated landing distance considerably greater than the length of the available runway. However, Check Captain Evans was able to fix the problem by manually entering their actual landing weight, overriding the program’s assumption of a maximum landing weight. By specifying a landing weight in excess of the maximum, the system logic changed to apply the operational coefficient only once — for unrelated and obscure reasons — and lo and behold, when he ran the numbers this time, the computer said they could just barely land on any of the 4,000-meter runways at Singapore Changi Airport, with only 100 meters to spare.

This reeks so much of if-then-else programming as opposed to making a well-typed conceptual model computable.

  > They're packing lots of signal into fewer words 

FYI, these are so-called `load-bearing` words.

Fair point.

  > That's also incorrect, because the gmscompat app is just a helper app.

Hmm, ok. I was reasoning the helper app was needed to get around the default assumptions from Google Play Services.

  >  Those permissions are handled by the OS under the play services app

Yes, but I assume you don't mean that as that GOS makes special hard-coded provisions for the play services. GOS claims to run Play Services like any other unprivileged app, and so any additional permission it would want would have to be consented by the user and should be visible to the user. If not, then GOS wording would be quite a bit unfortunate at least.

EDIT: "GmsCompatConfig is the text-based configuration for the GrapheneOS sandboxed Google Play compatibility layer. It provides a large portion of the compatibility shims." [1] This seems to indicate that the permissions requested by Play Services are being honored with the shims from the helper app. That would alleviate the permission problem.

1. https://github.com/GrapheneOS/platform_packages_apps_GmsComp...

  >  Turning on automatic software updates from Google would make me vulnerable to that threat. Using MicroG instead of Google Play Services would make me less vulnerable to that threat

I would say that any auto-update mechanism is a threat, so in both cases you would disable auto-updates.

True. I think this one is closer to the truth: <https://github.com/GrapheneOS/platform_packages_apps_GmsComp...>

There is no READ_PRIVILEGED_PHONE_STATE mentioned there.

Are you talking about the US here? I am hoping this would be off-limits in Europe.