I don't think you can just do anything you want in the name of security and protecting users. This will make installing apps needlesly difficult. There is already a warning when enabling installation of apps from unknown sources. That should be enough. If users don't read that's on them.
The real problem here is not that Google is doing this bad thing. The real problem is that they can do this bad thing. They shouldn't have this power. Something needs to be done to rain in Google and take back Android as an open platform.
Nobody reads warnings or errors. StackOverflow is full of questions where someone pastes a clear error message and asks what they have to do when the very error message tells them the solution.
Also, scammers just tell people to ignore warnings and they do it. If someone is able to convince you that your child is in danger and that you have to bypass all warnings to help them, you _will_ do it.
Users don’t read warnings. Most scams capitalise on urgency. When given more time to stop and think something through, it often becomes obvious what’s happening.
Courts make you liable for results, not intentions, like the way Quad9 is now an illegal piracy operation in France because it doesn't block pirate sites.
First, courts do hold manufacturers responsible for manufacturing or design defects.
Then, generally, "software is just a tool like a knife" doesn't hold because software today is more a service than a tangible good. Companies continue to update the programs and things can happen in the cloud with limited user control.
If you had a big corpo being affected by every knife murder, you'd be sure that they would be liable. Since murders usually "only" affect an individual nothing is being done
To be fair, this likely only affects millions (if that many) devices -- most people don't sideload apps, and of those that do, most of those users are more than capable of reenabling it through developer tools. The vast majority of Android users don't want to sideload (and shouldn't sideload since they don't know how to validate the safety of the app and they'll sideload anything a website tells them to)
There is a very real usability issue that has to analysed when developing high risk products, and that's popup fatigue.
A huge number of people just click accept to any popup they get because they're so fed up with seeing them. It's something that is often analysed in design of medical products
I experienced this problem in semiconductor manufacturing.
It was really difficult to explain to Korea that the additional warnings they wanted me to put in front of the tool operators were actually causing more harm than good. The cultural divide made this really difficult to approach.
"What do you mean the American mfg staff don't actually read everything?!"
"Yeah... Especially at the ATX line. We kind of go off vague shapes around here"
You understand then that there is absolutely no possible fix for that right?
If your grandma will follow current instructions, she will follow these new instructions including a 24 hour wait.
Your grandma will follow instructions to walk down to walgreens and buy a brand new device if they tell her. The solution has nothing to do with the device and everything to do with you needing to be an adult and figure out how to get your grandma to not follow directions of scammers.
This isn't a tech problem and you cannot solve it with tech.
This is not true. Scams rely on continuous urgency and want the entire process completed without you ever hanging up the phone, and cooling-off periods routinely break the illusion.
I can think of 2 examples, in my personal life, in the last few years where a simple passing comment in conversation perked the ears of a more experienced person and kept a couple of young people from being scammed. The addition of time was key in both.
> That should be enough. If users don't read that's on them.
The phone scammers who are saying the FBI/NSA/IRS will arrest you unless you install sketchy remote access software or other malware are rather convincing to a certain demographic of people and no amount of text on the screen will stop that. It all comes down to whether or not you view the tradeoff being that vulnerable people are worth protecting with this measure worldwide or not.
Should Google be less than an asshole in all things? Yes.
I think there’s this like “something must be done now!” attitude of self-important, busybodies I can’t get behind… even if they’re right.
Why have people convinced themselves into thinking now is the most important thing in the world? That if it doesn’t happen now so that it makes me happy instantly it isn’t an option?
Evolution; social, tech, biological, legal, just fucking takes time, and that’s a feature.
There will be a period in which there’s a ton of food over there but your little fishy fins can’t get to it, and that sucks, but deal with it yourself, or just chill and let things happen. I promise if it’s important someone will solve it eventually and the scales do not need to be tipped for every little thing like phone app permissiveness.
In the meantime, you are free to not buy an android phone if you don’t like the system that Google has produced. You seem to think that because you can see its insides that it is collectively owned. It isn’t. Google owns it. Talk of talking it from its owners, is theft. In this case, justified entirely because you don’t like a process they decided on.
Don’t make me defend Google, I fucking hate Google.
I have huge incentives to have a phone. It means Android or Apple. not exactly a flourishing free market of choices. Banks, the government, places I want to go to all either force me to use an app, or create costs in money and time if I want to avoid using one.
In the summary at the top it says you used 0-10 but then for the prompt it says 1-10. I had assumed the summary was incorrect but I guess it's the prompt that's wrong?
Believe it or not this article does not cover everything. When you try to set Chrome (or any alternate browser) as default on Windows 10/11 a pop up appears suggesting you use Edge[1].
Today we have news for conservatives and different news for liberals. That's stupid. News doesn't need built in commentary. Now it seems like history is going the same way. We will have conservative history and liberal history. But I hope not.
It's not really news, though it calls itself that. It's entertainment, and it's written and dramaticized to get readers/viewers and ad views. This is true on both sides of the political spectrum. Strong opinions engage viewers, often even if they don't agree with them. Fox News or MSNBC don't care if people are watching them because they love them or hate them, as long as they are watching.
History is story telling about a period of time for which we do not have easy access to all the information, nor full access to the participants and their motivations and self-conceptions. In addition, even with the benefit of hindsight, it is common to be unable to identify conclusively which possible elements of the story are the most significant (and as a corollary, which are cotemporal but irrelevant). Consequently, there are different ways to tell the story, and no "objective" set of rules to decide which to choose. Like all human story telling, history must come with a point of view that is critical in framing the elements used in the telling.
Now repeat everything I've just said, but substitute "news" for "history".
I’ll do you you one better, replace everything with “bullshit”.
History is susceptible to narratives because anything that isn’t clear cut (slavery, holocaust, etc) is open to subjective interpretation.
It’s the conspiracy theorists that are the real wildcard in all of this. They will take the clear cut (slavery, holocaust) and make that open to subjective interpretation.
I tend to think of subjective interpretation as "That was good" or "This is bad".
But there's something required beforehand: definining what this or that is. It's not really a subjective process, but it certainly isn't objective either.
Before you can decide whether or not William the Conqueror's invasion of the British Isles was a good or a bad thing, you first need a description of how the invasion was carried out and "all" the consequences. But there is no "objective" or "clear cut" version of this. What do you include? What do you exclude?
Oh, I meant subjective in terms of your own perspective (informed by world view and life experiences). However you can fit the square pegs into your own round holes.
Regardless, I suppose the bigger point I want to make is the truth for non clear cut things is only as true as the number of people that co-sign it. If there’s simply more people on one side, welp, that’s that. That’s the truth, as far as we know.
Right or wrong or true or false are almost not even in the equation (enter the conspiracy theorist).
I don’t know, based on what I just said, what do you believe?
This reminds me of how historians trying to find out about the historical Jesus have come up with some (objective?) criteria about what to accept as true.
Examples:
* Multiple attestation. Do we have multiple independent sources telling us the same thing?
* Contextual credibility. Do people behave in a way that's plausible given their setting (the languages they spoke, what they knew at the time).
* Embarrassment. Is this detail actually inconvenient for the person relaying it (and not the sort of thing they'd make up)?
I just plucked it out of the air as a historical event that took place a long time ago and occured in a culture with written history. It has no particular importance in the abstract (though the British and French do still seem to talk about it more than one would expect).
It feels like you just described war propaganda. Americans lie one way, the Russians the other. The better question is why are we in a war over current events (to your point over the news). Left propaganda and Right propaganda, for some invisible war.
The low hanging fruit to me appears to be the fact that propaganda is profitable, ::shrugs::
Just one more war machine that got repurposed for civilian use.
While I don't doubt that some of it is, calling it propaganda implies a deliberateness to me.
Most of this stuff isn't lies. It's different groups of people focusing on different parts of the same events. Most of the time when you get two competing narratives for an event, neither are actually dishonest, they're just a collection of events that tell a particular story that is of particular concern to a group. Usually the events all actually happened but their importance and relatedness are re-arranged.
> Just one more war machine that got repurposed for civilian use.
Already in 1928, Edward Bernays' book on PR and marketing was named Propaganda.
Another interesting point is that the term propaganda comes from the Latin "propaganda fide" (propagation of faith). Nowadays it seems to just be called evangelization in the Vatican and elsewhere.
(b) “Online” means appearing on any public-facing Internet Web site, Web application, or digital application, including a social network or publication.
SMS could be a considered a "digital application", so it might apply. Agree that it could use clarification.
Everyone will be resurrected at the end of the world when Christ returns. I think I'll just wait for that. But it would still be cool if CRYO preservation could work. Medical technology exists today that would have been science fiction 100 years ago. It's definitely possible it could work in the future.
Another option to get a JavaScript console on Android is use Kiwi Browser[1]
Kiwi allows access to the full Chromium JavaScript console that you can open in a new tab.
Kiwi also allows usage of Chromium extensions.
I wanted full ad blocking but Kiwi only had rudimentary ad blocking that was disabled by default. No problem, I installed uBlock Origin!
This is really cool, thanks for pointing it out! I have used Eruda and keep it in Tampermonkey in Firefox for use in a pinch but it's hacky. It's impressive that it works at all, but it's very difficult to do any actual work.
I already had Kiwi installed and it's neat to pop it open and see this feature hiding in plain sight. I can definitely see myself using it regularly, although I won't use it as a daily driver since it selectively blocks adblockers on a hardcoded list of domains which is just untrustworthy. https://github.com/kiwibrowser/src/blob/master/extensions/re...
I’ll do a change in Kiwi edition 116 to make it selectable in the UI (it’s almost a full rewrite of Kiwi and it will go out in about 10 days).
Most likely to add a setting to make it optional.
The main issue we had was with search partners, if we allow adblocking by default, then search engines still pay for the request, and this means… we pay. And by we, I mean “I” pay :)
One solution that some competitors found is to integrate Adblock Plus (when you develop a browser they pay you for that) or AdGuard and let them do the whitelist (so in appearance the blame is on them, but I am fine to take the blame myself).
Some browsers don’t allow external adblockers so they don’t have this issue at all; you can’t block their ads anyway (not 100% sure but I think Google, DuckDuckGo, Brave, etc are like this).
Yandex who was the pioneer of Chromium extensions on mobile (before Kiwi) has similar mechanisms, except they fully block the extension, instead of whitelisting it on certain URLs.
It’s currently possible to go around the whitelist, just by loading manually an extension.
And yes it’s logic that Google Chrome doesn’t block Google search ads by default unless you load a workaround.
The same that Kiwi doesn’t block Microsoft search ads when our main funding is Microsoft Bing, and to be fair, getting funded by search is the cleanest business model a browser can have.
As a user of Kiwi Browser I find this to be a reasonable approach, and I understand the needs here. I would, however, think that it would have been nice to have a warning for users that are installing one of these extensions along the lines of "This extension might be restricted on certain URLs. Click to learn more". I would find that helpful, paired with the ability to disable it.
This is just because when people install a third party ad blocker, they are expecting a certain type of behaviour, and quietly changing expectations can have bad results for users who require specific functionality.
On an unrelated note, I would appreciate adding a toggle to disable the "Pull to refresh" gesture on Android. I find myself reloading accidentally during scrolling very often, which can result in data loss.
Wow are you the author of Kiwi? If so I want to say thank you for the great browser. Initially when I heard about a Chrome-like browser on Android with full extension support I was skeptical, it sounded too good to be true. But it turned out to be exactly that good.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought they walked back on that? And I think the source code repo is now : https://github.com/kiwibrowser/src.next ? Maybe that's just the chromium rebase repo though.
That is pretty sketchy. Thanks for pointing that out! I've started using Kiwi as my main mobile browser after I got fed up with some issues I was having with Brave.
If you are really really in a rare situation where you want to use Bing and block Bing search ads:
kiwi://extensions
Press: + (from zip)
Load uBlock Origin
Finished.
Not that dramatic + auto-update works.
It would be sketchy to offer an out-of-the-box experience that blocks the search pages of Microsoft and Yahoo (they pay us).
Remember the fact that if a browser has an established and visible business model is way better than a browser where you don’t know how they make money.
With Kiwi, if you use Bing or Yahoo, Microsoft and Yahoo share with us the costs and the revenues (both ways).
Simple model and no need to sell crypto, fake VPNs, user history or whatever some others do.
Would this still result in creating unnecessary costs for Kiwi Browser? Above I believe it was mentioned that the reason these extensions were disabled was to prevent users from racking up costs for requests to search engines (?) with adblocking enabled
The real problem here is not that Google is doing this bad thing. The real problem is that they can do this bad thing. They shouldn't have this power. Something needs to be done to rain in Google and take back Android as an open platform.