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Meaning to use your device you need to have a contractual relationship with a foreign (unless you are in the US) third party that decides what you can or cannot do with it. Plus using GrapheneOS is less of an option every day, since banks and other "regulated" sectors use Google Play Protect and similar DRMs to prevent you from connecting from whatever device you want. Client-side "trust" means the provider owning the device, not the user.

Android shouldn't be considered Open Source anymore, since source code is published in batches and only part of the system is open, with more and more apps going behind the Google ecosystem itself.

Maybe it's time for a third large phone OS, whether it comes from China getting fed up with the US and Google's shenanigans (Huawei has HarmonyOS but it's not open) or some "GNU/Linux" touch version that has a serious ecosystem. Especially when more and more apps and services are "mobile-first" or "mobile-only" like banking.

I think Play Integrity is the fundamental issue here, and needs to go. That's the crux of the issue.

Allowing apps to say "we only run on Google's officially certified unmodified Android devices" and tightly restricting which devices are certified is the part that makes changes like this deeply problematic. Without that, non-Google Android versions are on a fair playing field; if you don't like their rules, you can install Graphene or other alternatives with no downside. With Play Integrity & attestation though you're always living with the risk of being cut off from some essential app (like your bank) that suddenly becomes "Google-Android-Only".

If Play Integrity went away, I'd be much more OK with Google adding restrictions like this - opt in if you like, use alternatives if you don't, and let's see what the market actually wants.

Banks seem to actually "want" Play Integrity. At least they act like it. I bet they would like for normal online banking on user-controlled devices to completely go away.

Of course they do, and of course they would. Banks are in a crazy legal position where they are financially liable for user stupidity. If my bank account gets breached, it doesn't matter that I didn't take any reasonable security measures, the bank will still have to refund me. If the bank could say "you didn't follow our recommended security practices to use a PW manager and MFA or passkeys, so it's a FAFO situation for you," then they wouldn't be pushing for this stuff. But they can't do that because the government doesn't allow them to.

There is even government regulator pressure now for financial services to be liable for cases where the user legitimately authorizes a transaction to a party that turns out to be a scammer. Of course the banks want to watch your every move and control your devices. They would be stupid not to given the incentives.

In what country do you live? In America, users are liable for the banks stupidity. If they don’t verify credentials and give away all of my money, I do NOT get it refunded, they are NOT responsible, and I am the victim of “identity theft.”

I live in America. I have got back every single cent I have lost due to fraudulent charges on my account. Furthermore, I was refunded instantly by the bank pending investigation.

The bank you have did the right thing and I think most banks and credit unions will do this, as it’s bad for a lot of reasons not to.

That said, the legal obligations around how this works is very different. One of the reasons common advice is use a credit card for online purchases instead if a debit card or checking account link is because of the fact that they have different liability expectations around fraud[0]

[0]: there are of course a multitude of good reasons for this advice generally speaking, but this one is cited a lot

You are incorrect. This isn’t good will measures, these are required by law. The EFTA, for example, requires banks to make you whole against fraudulent ATM transactions. The CC recommendation is more about you having more time and flexibility to dispute the charge without risking access to cash; most Americans don’t even have a few thousand dollars in cash so a fraudulent ATM withdrawal is a major problem. But if you have a good chunk of cash the fraudulent ATM transaction will not really be felt by you provided you follow the requirements about notification (you have 2 days after noticing to report it to the bank).

The losses due to fraudulent CC activity are governed by the FCBA.

It’s shocking how people think companies do this kind of stuff out of good will rather than being forced by law.

On the flip side, banks have the worst fucking security outside of demanding you use an app. Let me use 2FA that isn't bespoke.

At least you have bespoke 2FA. All I have is SMS 2FA

I understand all that but I don't see how that's any less secure than a browser.

My bank doesn't allow access through a browser. It has to be the app or else you have to travel to their HQ in person (I guess) and close your account.

Can I ask what bank and why on Earth you continue to give them your business?

I guess I'm unusual in that I've been using an "online" only bank for 20 years (back then it wasn't so online... I had a stack of UPS overnight envelopes for check deposits), but I cannot imagine patronizing a bank that won't let me log in and do basically anything from a browser.

In quite a few Asian countries there are no banks left that don't force you to use their apps. There is not other option.

I have never seen a bank that allows mobile deposits from a browser. I have always seen it require an app.

What a terrible bank though.

do they still allow you to download your transactions to your phone and get them to your pc that way? just curious, I'd be screwed, I don't know how to install apps on my phone.

Only because it's there. I don't think the would demand it if it wasn't offered, but once it's there imagine being in a bank and saying to management "it recommend we don't enable this security feature that works on 99.99999% of phones".

As someone who used to work for a bank building applications I would say no. This is definitely a feature companies and organizations like banks would request if it wasn't available.

There are a lot of scams targeting vulnerable people and these days attacking the phone is a very "easy" way of doing this.

Now perhaps there is a more forgiving way of implementing it though. So your phone can switch between trusted and "open" mode. But realistically I don't think the demand is big enough for that to actually matter.

Play integrity does almost nothing to prevent malicious actors. In fact, id say overall it's probably more harmful because it gives actors like Banks false confidence.

Even with play integrity, you should not trust the client. Devices can still be compromised, there are still phony bank apps, there are still keyloggers, etc.

With the Web, things like banks are sort of forced to design apps that do not rely on client trust. With something like play integrity, they might not be. That's a big problem.

I've worked on such systems. Love it or hate it, remote attestation slaughters abuse. It is just much harder to scale up fraud schemes to profitable levels if you can't easily automate anything. That's why it exists and why banks use it.

Wouldn't device-bound keys for a set of trusted issuing secure elements (e.g. Yubikeys) work just as well but without locking down the whole goddamn software stack?

RA schemes don't lock down the whole software stack, just the parts that are needed to allow the server to reason about the behavior of the client. You can still install whatever apps you want, and those apps can do a lot of customization e.g. replace the homescreen, as indeed Android allows today.

You need to attest at least the kernel, firmware, graphics/input drivers, window management system etc because otherwise actions you think are being taken by the user might be issued by malware. You have to know that the app's onPayClicked() event handler is running because the human owner genuinely clicked it (or an app they authorized to automate for them like an a11y app). To get that assurance requires the OS to enforce app communication and isolation via secure boundaries.

That's waay too much locking down, and while it gives me some control, it does not give me real control. I cannot remove or modify software in the software stack whose behavior I disagree with (e.g. all of Play Services). I can't replace the OS with a more privacy and security focused OS like GrapheneOS.

Imagine if this was done for desktop computers before we had smartphones. That's just crazy.

Relying on hardware-bound keys is fine, but then the scope of the hardware and software stack that needs to be locked down should be severely limited to dedicated, external hardware tokens. Having to lock down the whole OS and service stack is just bad design, plain and simple, since it prioritizes control over freedom.

1. I don't believe you. This is a measurement problem - you eliminated an avenue to measure abuse, because you are now just assuming abuse doesn't happen because you trust the client.

2. It does not eliminate any meaningful types of fraud. Phishing still works, social engineering still works, stealing TOTP codes still works.

Ultimately I don't need to install a fake app on your phone to steal your money. The vast, vast majority of digital bank fraud is not done this way. The vast majority of fraud happens within real bank apps and real bank websites, in which an unauthorized user has gained account access.

I just steal your password or social engineer your funds or account information.

This also doesn't stop check fraud, wire fraud, or credit card fraud. Again - I don't need a fake bank app to steal your CC. I just send an email to a bad website and you put in your CC - phishing.

1. Well, going into denial about it is your prerogative. But then you shouldn't express bafflement about why this stuff is being used.

Nobody is making mistakes as dumb as "we fixed something we can measure so the problem is solved". Fraud and abuse have ground-truth signals in the form of customers getting upset at you because their account got hacked and something bad happened to them.

2. This stuff is also used to block phishing and it works well for that too. I'd explain how, but you wouldn't believe me.

You mention check fraud so maybe you're banking with some US bank that has terrible security. Anywhere outside the USA, using a minimally competent bank means:

• A password isn't enough to get into someone's bank account. Banks don't even use passwords at all. Users must auth by answering a smartcard challenge, or using a keypair stored in a secure element in a smartphone that's been paired with the account via a mailed setup code (usually either PIN or biometric protected).

• There is no such thing as check fraud.

• There is no such thing as credit card phishing either. All CC transactions are authorized in real time using push messaging to the paired mobile apps. To steal money from a credit card you have to confuse the user into authorizing the transaction on their phone, which is possible if they don't pay attention to the name of the merchant displayed on screen, but it's not phishing or credential theft.

> Nobody is making mistakes as dumb as "we fixed something we can measure so the problem is solved".

There is an entire name for this: dark pattern.

People make this mistake all the time. Its a very common measurement problem, because measuring is actually very hard.

Are we measuring the right thing? Does it mean what we think it means? Companies spend hundreds of billions trying to answer those questions.

2. Not it cannot block phishing because if I get your password, I can get in.

To your points:

- yes, banks in the US use one time codes too. Very smart of you, unfortunately not very creative. Trivial to circumvent in most cases. Email is the worst, SMS better, TOTP best.

TOTP doesn't matter if the user just takes their code and inputs it into whatever field.

- yes there is such a thing as check fraud, you not knowing what it is doesn't matter.

- if I had to authorize each CC transaction on my phone, I'd put a bullet in my head. That's shit.

Well it is still a phone after all, what with UMA and baseband processing. You don't need to spend much time at Blackhat/Defcon to realize any true attempts at sealing it up are akin to plugging leaks in a sieve with epoxy. Its far too porus.

Meanwhile if attestation does reduce fraud, the ownability (by the user) of the device is now forfeit due to chasing a dragon's tail.

That’s a “seatbelts so no good because people still die in car crashes” argument with a topping of “actually they’re bad because they give you a false sense of security”

Play integrity hugely reduces brute force and compromised device attacks. Yes, it does not eliminate either, but security is a game of statistics because there is rarely a verifiably perfect solution in complex systems.

For most large public apps, the vast majority of signin attempts are malicious. And the vast majority of successful attacks come from non-attested platforms like desktop web. Attestation is a valuable tool here.

How does device attestation reduce bruteforce? Does the backend not enforce the attempt limits per account? If so, that's would be considered a critical vulnerability. If not, then attestation doesn't serve that purpose.

As for compromised devices, assuming you mean an evil maid, Android already implements secure boot, forcing a complete data wipe when breaking the chain of trust. I think the number of scary warnings is already more than enough to deter a clueless "average user" and there are easier ways to fish the user.

And those apps use MEETS_DEVICE_INTEGRITY rather than MEETS_STRONG_INTEGRITY so a compromised device can absolutely be used to access critical services. (Usually because strong integrity is unsupported on old devices)

This reminds me of providers like Xiaomi making it harder to unlock the bootloader due to phones being sold as new but flashed with a compromised image.

Maybe a good compromise is to change the boot screen to have a label that the phone is running an unofficial ROM, just like it shows one for unlocked bootloaders? If the system can update that dynamically based on unlock state, why can't it do it based on public keys? Might also discourage vendors/ROM devs from using test keys like Fairphone once did.

Pixels with, for example, GrapheneOS already do exactly that:

"Your device is loading a different operating system."

I developed this stuff at Google (JS puzzles that "attest" web browsers), back in 2010 when nobody was working on it at all and the whole idea was viewed as obviously non-workable. But it did work.

Brute force attacks on passwords generally cannot be stopped by any kind of server-side logic anymore, and that became the case more than 15 years ago. Sophisticated server-side rate limiting is necessary in a modern login system but it's not sufficient. The reason is that there are attackers who come pre-armed with lists of hacked or phished passwords and botnets of >1M nodes. So from the server side an attack looks like this: an IP that doesn't appear anywhere in your logs suddenly submits two or three login attempts, against unique accounts that log in from the same region as that IP is in, and the password is correct maybe 25%-75% of the time. Then the IP goes dormant and you never hear from it again. You can't block such behavior without unworkable numbers of false positives, yet in aggregate the botnet can work through maybe a million accounts per day, every day, without end.

What does work is investigating the app doing the logging in. Attackers are often CPU and RAM constrained because the botnet is just a set of tiny HTTP proxies running on hacked IoT devices. The actual compute is happening elsewhere. The ideal situation from an attacker's perspective is a site that is only using server side rate limiting. They write a nice async bot that can have tens of thousands of HTTP requests in flight simultaneously on the developer's desktop which just POSTs some strings to the server to get what they want (money, sending emails, whatever).

Step up the level of device attestation and now it gets much, much harder for them. In the limit they cannot beat the remote attestation scheme, and are forced to buy and rack large numbers of genuine devices and program robotic fingers to poke the screens. As you can see, the step-up from "hacking a script in your apartment in Belarus" to "build a warehouse full of robots" is very large. And because they are using devices controlled by their adversaries at that point, there's lots of new signals available to catch them that they might not be able to fix or know about.

The browser sandbox means you can't push it that far on the web, which is why high value targets like banks require the web app to be paired with a mobile app to log in. But you can still do a lot. Google's websites generate millions of random encrypted programs per second that run inside a little virtual machine implemented in Javascript, which force attackers to use a browser and then look for signs of browser automation. I don't know how well it works these days, but they still use it, and back when I introduced it (20% time project) it worked very well because spammers had never seen anything like it. They didn't know how to beat it and mostly just went off to harass competitors instead.

I may be mis-understanding, but it sounds like this kind of widely distributed attack would also be stoppable by checking how often the account is attempting to log in? And if they're only testing two or three passwords _per account_, per day, then Google could further block them by forcing people not to use the top 10,000 popular passwords in any of the popular lists (including, over time, the passwords provided to Google)?

The attackers only try one or two passwords, that they hacked/phished. They aren't guessing popular passwords, usually they know the correct password for an account and would log in successfully on the first try. There are no server side signals that can be used to rate limit them, especially as the whole attack infrastructure is automated and they have unlimited patience.

Forgive me for being reductive, but aren't these leaked accounts a lost cause? The vulnerability in question is attackers being able to log into user accounts with leaked credentials. The only mitigation for this is to lock out users identified in other password breeches and reconfirm identity out-of-band, like through a local bank branch, add a second factor like a hardware token, or use restrictive heuristics like IP geolocation consistency between visits.

If 3 attempts per hour is enough to gain access, then it doesn't seem attestation can save you. I imagine a physical phone farm will still be economically viable in such case.

Yes that's what companies do. I worked on the system there that addressed this. If you can detect a botted login you can lock the account until the real user is able to get new credentials, or block activity in other ways. Not a lost cause at all.

It was very effective when this problem was new. Don't know about the current state of things.

> an IP that doesn't appear anywhere in your logs suddenly submits two or three login attempts

How is the attacker supposed to bruteforce anything with 2-3 login attempts?

Even if 1M node submitted 10 login attempts per hour, they would just be able to try 7 billion passwords per month per account, that's ridiculously low to bruteforce even moderately secure passwords (let alone that there's definitely something to do on the back end side of things if you see one particular account with 1 million login attempts in a hour from different IPs…).

So I must have misunderstood the threat model…

Brute force here can mean they try millions of accounts and get into maybe a quarter of them on their first try, not that they make millions of tries against a single account.

That's a very uncommon understanding of brute force, to be honest. Generally I see the term applied to cases where there's next to no prior knowledge, just enumeration.

Its not that type of argument, because seatbelts actually work - play integrity does not.

Play integrity is just DRM. DRM does not prevent the most common types of attack.

If I have your password, I can steal your money. If I have your CC, I can post unauthorized transactions.

Attestation does not prevent anything. How would attestation prevent malicious login attempts? Have you actually sat down and thought this through? It does not, because that is impossible.

The vast, vast VAST majority of exploits and fraud DO NOT come from compromised devices. They come from unauthorized access, which is only surface level naively prevented by DRM solutions.

For example, HBO Max will prevent unauthorized access for DRM purposes in the sense that I cannot watch a movie without logging in. It WILL NOT prevent access if I log in, or anyone else on Earth logs in. Are you seeing the problem?

Cool. So you run a baking website. You get several hundred thousand legit logins a day, maybe ten million that you block. Maybe a hundred million these days.

Now, you have a bucket of mobile users coming to you with attestation signals saying they’ve come from secure boot, and they are using the right credentials.

And you’ve got another bucket saying they’ve are Android but with no attestation, and also using the right credentials.

You know from past experience (very expensive experience) that fraud can happen from attested devices, but it’s about 10,000 times more common from rooted devices.

Do you treat the logins the same? Real customers HATES intrusive security like captchas?

Are you understanding the tech better now? The entire problem and solution space are different from what you think they are.

Who is responsible for fraud? If the user loses their password, that's their problem.

Great. Let's just require every single computing device to be verified, signed, and attested by a government agency. Just in case it is ever misused to attack a Google online service that cannot be possibly bothered to actually spend one nanosecond thinking on security.

What could possibly go wrong. It's not only morally questionable no matter what "advantages" it provides Google, but it's also technically ridiculous because _even if every single computing device was attested_, by construction I can still trivially find ways to use them to "brute force" Google logins. The technical "advantage" of attestation immediately drops to 0 once it is actually enforced (this is were the seatbelts analogy falls apart).

Next thing I suggest after forcing remote attestation on all devices is tying these device IDs to government-issued personal ID. Let's see how that goes over. And then for the government to send the killing squad once one of these devices is used to attack Google services. That should also improve security.

Here's the dystopian future we're building, folks. Take it or leave it. After all, it statistically improves security!

>After all, it statistically improves security!

Probably not even that, but it limits liability and that’s the only purpose, just like the manual in your car, nobody will ever read it but it contains a warning for every single thing that could happen.

You just proved the seatbelt analogy.

Yes, for SOME subset of attackers (car crashes), for SOME subset of targets (passengers), the mitigations don’t solve the problem.

This is not the anti-attestation / anti-seatbelt argument many think it is.

All security is mitigation. There is non perfection.

But it makes no sense to say that because a highly motivated attacker with a lot of money to spend can rig real attested devices to be malicious, there must be no benefit to a billion or so legit client devices being attested.

I think your enthusiasm for melodrama and snark may be clouding your judgment of the actual topic.

> Yes, for SOME subset of attackers (car crashes), for SOME subset of targets (passengers), the mitigations don’t solve the problem.

I won't solve the problem for _anyone_ once it is required, because it is trivial to bypass once the incentive is there. This is what kills this technically; it does not even go into the other cons (which really should not be ignored). Seatbelts absolutely do not have this problem.

> All security is mitigation. There is non perfection.

This is an absolutely meaningless tautology. It is perfectly true statement. It adds absolutely nothing to the discussion.

Say I argue in favor "putting a human to verify each and every banking transaction with a phone call to the source and the destination". And then you disagree, saying that there will be costs, waste of time for everyone, and that the security improvement will be minimal at best. And then I counter with "All security is mitigation, there is no perfection!".

Can you see what you're doing here? This is another textbook example of the politician's fallacy (something must be done; this is something; therefore we must do this).

It is trying to bypass the discussion on the actual merits of the proposal as well as its cons by saying "well it does something!" . True, it does something. So what? If the con is bad enough, or if the benefit too small, maybe it's best NOT to do it anyway!

> But it makes no sense to say that because a highly motivated attacker with a lot of money to spend can rig real attested devices to be malicious, there must be no benefit to a billion or so legit client devices being attested.

Not long we had right here in HN a discussion about the merits of remote attestion for anti-cheating: turns out the "lot of money" is a custom USB mouse (or addon to one) that costs cents to make. Sure, its not zero. You have to go more and more draconian in order to actually make it "a lot of money", but then you'll tell me I'm being melodramatic.

> That’s a “seatbelts so no good because people still die in car crashes”

Except it's not a seatbelt, it's straitjacket with a seatbelt pattern drawn on it: it restrain the user's freedom in exchange for the illusion of security.

And like a straightjacket, it's imposed without user consent.

The difference with a straightjacket is that there's no doctor involved to determine who really needs it for security against their own weakness and no due process to put boundaries on its use, it's applied to everyone by default.

> This is definitely a feature companies and organizations like banks would request if it wasn't available.

Really? Because they've been fine without this feature on desktop for literally decades.

On the other hand, it's not really up to the bank. It's my money, not theirs.

I really wish I wouldn't need to have my money managed by some corporate drones in suits but it's really hard these days to do without a bank account.

This is why I was really into crypto at the beginning; it envisioned giving us control abck over what's ours. But all the KYC crap and the wishes of the speculators for more oversight basically made crypto the same nasty deal as the public banking sector.

It is desired enough that plenty of developers license third party libraries that roll their own device attestation, instead of or in addition to Play Integrity.

What's absurd though is that they have never demanded it for browsers. I think there is a much higher risk of someone being tricked into downloading a compromised browser with a backdoor than someone being tricked into downloading a modified version of their particular banking app. It gives the attacker the same level of control though.

Is this not more or less what Manifest is attempting to do? The headline grabber is that it disables ad-blocking but it's essentially trying to establish the browser as a "trusted" (owned) platform, no?

You're thinking of Google's attempt to port Play Integrity/Safetynet to the Web [0]. Nothing to do with Manifest V3, IIUC.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity

Banks have never accepted browsers. They don't need to because they can require the web app be paired with a mobile app or SMS code to log in. Before they used mobile apps they issued smartcard readers (at least they did everywhere I lived). The smartcard readers were also used to digitally sign transactions.

In other words, there aren't many banks that let you take sensitive actions with just a browser and that's been true since the start of online banking.

These days they also apply differential risk analysis based on the device used to submit a transaction and do things to push people towards mobile. For instance in Switzerland there's now a whole standard for encoding invoices in QR codes. To pay those you must use the mobile apps.

Edit: people are getting hung up on the "never accepted browsers" part. It means they only use the browser for unimportant interactions. For important stuff like login or tx auth, they expect the use of separate hardware that's more controlled like a SIM card/mobile radio, smartcard or smartphone app. Yes some banks are more lax than others but in large parts of the world this was always true since the start of online banking.

Thats ... false. Every bank I have used in Denmark allows me to log in and do all operations without an app. They require authentication and authorization using the national digital identity (MitID) which comes as an app, but also as a TOTP token and a FIDO (or similar) chip. No apps needed.

I guess the smartcard reader is equivalent. But my point is that locking down the OS of the phone is sufficient to establish client trust but not necessary. You should always be allowed to run the app without strong Play Integrity verification but then just be required to scan your hardware token with NFC in every authentication and authorization flow.

That's mostly prevalent in third-world countries like Brazil. I work for a fintech-turned-bank here and the biggest problem we have to deal with is fraudulent actions made by scammers who got access to users' accounts via social engineering. Outsiders don't know how prevalent scamming is in Brazil and how much is spent/lost trying to fight them and how that shapes the security vs convenience landscape. For example:

- I can't transfer a single cent if I didn't had my face and documents scanned after installing the bank app.

- I can't have the same bank account logged in two of my devices at the same time, all banks require you to use an account on a "verified" device (previous point).

- If I want to use a desktop to access my bank account, I have to either install a desktop client provided by the bank or be limited to just checking my balance. Some banks doesn't even allow you to log in if you don't have a "verified" device for doing 2FA.

I am very sure my higher ups are cheering with these news, even though it solves none of the problems.

In the US too. I have never ran into a situation where I had to use the app instead of the browser. I don't know what that guy is talking about.

In my country almost all banks removed their web apps. They existed like 15 years ago, before smartphones became widespread, but nowadays very few banks offer web apps, only mobile apps.

My US bank removed check deposits from the browser about a decade ago, and I haven't met anyone who can use Zelle without an app.

That is a far cry from the original comment "banks have never accepted browsers".

I have used zelle many times from the browser. It's been a while, so maybe that has changed, though. I never even tried to deposit a check from the browser or an app, so you may be right on that point.

I have 3 different banks (well 2 banks and a credit union.) I can use Zelle in my browser from all 3. I don't even have the app installed for 2 of them.

Hmm...I wonder if it matters which browser is being used.

That's exactly what I'm saying. They don't let you take actions using only a web browser. If you don't use a mobile app they issue you with trusted hardware that performs a similar function (although usually less secure and not as convenient).

My bank does still allow login and txns to be authorized with a smart card reader. You have to type in fragments of the account number to authorize a new recipient. After that you can send additional transactions to that account without hardware auth.

Pure NFC tokens don't work because you need trusted IO.

Not necessarily. In Poland you can do banking with a web browser + SMS code or one-time code card, no special hardware needed.

An SMS code can only be received by a phone (special hardware, not a browser). An OTC smart card is likewise special hardware, not a browser.

Google voice is not special hardware. You’re confusing attestation with 2fa and that’s why you’re getting downvoted.

Yeah but Google Voice isn't something you're meant to use to receive SMS codes. That's very US specific, and if you go there you've undermined the security the bank was trying to provide.

The reason they used SMS codes for a while is because phones have always tried to block malware from reading your screen or SMS storage whereas PCs don't, and because phones can do remote attestation protocols to the network as part of their login sequence. The SIM card contains keys used to sign challenges, and the network only allows authorized radio firmwares to log on. So by sending a code to a phone you have some cryptographic assurance that it was received by the right user and viewed only by them.

2FA and RA are closely related for that reason. The second factor is dedicated hardware which enforces that only a human can interact with it, and which can prove its identity cryptographically to a remote server. The mobile switching center, in the case of SMS codes.

Obviously, this was a very crude system because malware on the PC could intercept the login after the user authorized, but at least it stopped usage of the account when the user wasn't around. Modern app based systems are much more secure.

The SMS stuff seems like theatre when SS7[1] has been known to need a nuclear-powered auto bailer for how porous it is.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_System_No._7

Alright, I think I misunderstood you. I know most banks allow alternatives other than the app.

But just the fact that there are options which have the side effect of making you choose between convenience and digital autonomy is wrong, and I don't think remote attestation should even exist in the toolbox. We should make dedicated hardware solutions work better instead.

Dedicated hardware solutions are remote attestation. The smartcard OTC readers are doing exactly that: you sign a challenge with a private key that never leaves the smartcard and is paired to the bank at the factory. This is what remote attestation is doing behind the scenes, the only difference is the smartcard user interaction is much more limited. It's of no use for protecting your financial privacy, for example, only for stopping a hacked display device authorizing transactions.

If you evolve the smartcard based systems with better I/O capabilities, then you end up with a modern smartphone. At which point you may as well let the user supply their own rather than charging them lots of money for a dedicated device that's not much different.

No, I reject the idea that general purpose computing devices should be locked down to satisfy a very narrow security use case. I really don't believe that you end up with a smartphone, and I don't think you give a very good argument for why.

I am fine with locking down devices that have very limited security purposes. I am fine with my passport containing locked down hardware if it makes it harder to forge. But I am also not browsing the web on my passport, and therefore its security requirements cannot prevent me from removing ads.

OK, use a browser that lets you remove ads then! Android isn't iOS, you can run browsers that aren't Chrome and nothing about this change would stop you installing a custom browser with whatever features you want. Your banking app doesn't care what browser you use.

You are fundamentally misunderstanding my point about freedom.

Yes, I can do it now, but this is only because Google allows me to do that on their approved Android distribution, not because they are unable to prevent me from doing it. I don't trust them to not take away that freedom from me as soon as they can be sure that they can afford the anti-trust lawsuit since their core business model is to show me ads.

I know that my bank doesn't care about my browser, but by relying on Play Integrity they are indirectly forcing me to operate in Google's control regime in every other aspect on my device.

I don't want them to control my software stack, period. I don't care if they act as the good guys right now, they have been steadily doing downhill in the moral department and I expect them to continue to do so.

I don't understand how you can act like there is no problem at all with technology like this.

> In other words, there aren't many banks that let you take sensitive actions with just a browser and that's been true since the start of online banking.

when I started online banking I used a browser and a TAN list for years. No apps required

"Browser and TAN list" is equivalent to "Browser and app". A browser can't be used in isolation, there is and was always some second factor required for online banking, but a banking app can be used in isolation.

No. The TAN list does not prevent you from removing Play Services from your device.

Granted.

I work in fintech, formerly as a contractor for some major banks, and absolutely nothing you say is true, generally.

This might be the case for a couple of banks - or maybe in one or two specific countries, but broadly, none of what you've said here applies to banks anywhere else in the world.

Which banks outside the US allow you to submit payments using only an arbitrary desktop browser, without any other device getting involved? No mobile phones to receive codes, no smartcard readers, no secure elements, nothing except a browser and a password? I have never encountered such a bank.

FWIW "SMS 2FA" or "email 2FA" can also be done from the same browser (google voice or similar, webmail) and I've used both with banks.

That said, there is one major bank I use that still allows password only.

I’m not sure why “outside the US” is a factor here, but nearly every bank in the world. Some only require email verification, some don’t even require that.

There are banking systems in some countries that do not even require an ATM/Debit card for automated withdrawals, just an account number and grouping code.

You are completely wrong

> Banks have never accepted browsers.

What are you talking about? My bank accepts browsers and is a major one.

Because it allows them to outsource "security", for "free".

If play integrity went away, all mainstream Android users would suddenly experience a huge increase in captchas and other security measures.

It’s funny to see the volume of comments on HN from folks who are outraged at how AI companies ferociously scrape websites, and the comments disliking device attestation, and few comments recognizing those are two sides of the same coin.

Play integrity (and Apple’s PAT) are what allow mobile users to have less headaches than desktops. Not saying it’s a morally good thing (tech is rarely moral one way or the rather) just that it’s a capability with both upsides and downsides for both typical and power users.

There is no logical inconsistency in disliking abusive scraping, remote attestation, malware, and CAPTCHAs at the same time. Of these, I merely dislike CAPTCHA while I make moral judgments about the other three.

I see creating a mechanism for remote attestation of consumer devices as morally bad because it's a massive transfer of power away from end users to corporations and governments. A scheme where only computers blessed by a handful of megacorporations can be used to interact with the wider world will be used for evil even if current applications are fairly benign.

Yeah, its like the world has been turned into one giant corporation, and the only computers you can use on it are corporate, botted, Active Directory joined, crap. All machines are belong to them.

It is not so simple!

Play Integrity's highest level of attestation features requires devices to be running a security update which is within a sliding window of 1 year.

LOTS of Android devices have not released a security update in many many years. This forces users to unnecessarily upgrade to higher end OEMs.

Google is effectively pushing out Xiaomi, Huawei, and many others that offer excellent budget options. Google is not just offering you the comfort of not having to fill out CAPTCHAs on your phone, most importantly they are playing monopoly.

Why can't "low end OEMs" release security updates?

They can, it would likely just increase the cost of cheap devices to end users, as the manufacturer now has to provide additional software support and does not want to lose money.

One could argue that those “cheap” devices are ewaste from the beginning, and customers needing lower cost mobile devices should be buying more expensive ones used or refurbished.

Id be more convinced that this was about malware and your security if you could turn it off.

I think this is mainly just an attempt to kill things like newpipe.

HarmonyOS is open source (according to Wikipedia) but some of the tooling does not appear to be. I.e. can only get the simulator from mainland China.

OpenHarmony and LiteOS are open source, Harmony OS is partly proprietary.

This is only allowed to exist because the justice system and politicians are mostly tech illiterate.

Play Integrity is not compliant with any antitrust legislation, that's painfully obvious. The sole and only purpose of this system is to remove non-Google Android forks.

As someone working on a product that relies on Play Integrity and PAT to give legit mobile users zero captchas while challenging non-attested clients, I promise you are quite wrong here.

The benefits may not be sufficient to offset the harms you see, but if you don’t understand how and why these capabilities are used by services, I’m also suspicious you understand the harms accurately.

Using your dominance in one market to secure the dominance in other market is illegal monopoly, no matter how convenient it might be for a third party.

> if you don’t understand how and why these capabilities are used by services, I’m also suspicious you understand the harms accurately

Yeah, I see this mentality a lot on HN (and kinda everywhere for that matter). "Anyone who disagrees with me is evil, and must therefore have evil motives for everything they're doing. The reasonable/innocent explanation they give for why they're doing this must actually be a front for this other shadowy, nefarious motivation that I just made up on the spot, because surely nobody ever does bad things for good reasons. Certainly not those evil people who disagree with me!"

I hate having to defend Google here, because I think this is genuinely a terrible, freedom-destroying move, but malware on Android is a real problem (especially in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand, where they're rolling this out initially) and this probably will do a lot to solve it. I'm just categorically against the whole idea of taking away the freedom of mentally sound adults "for their own good" regardless of whether it works or not, and this particular case is especially maddening because I'm one of those adults whose freedom is being destroyed.

I think everyone views themselves as a harmless smol bean, even as they wage war on general purpose computing and liberty in the name of safety. How could their actions have negative externalities, they're one of the good guys!

You’ve discovered local optimization / global reduction.

But how else should Google and their users react? Insist on offering a platform with far more abuse while subjecting users to worse user experiences and websites to more attacks… in the name of abstract freedom?

It's not a coincidence that this big push for Safetynet/Play Integrity happened after the pressure against Cyanogenmod and then Huawei.

If they really care about scams, they could remove all these casino-like games on the playstore. But they aren't going to do that because a huge chunk of the playstore revenue comes from those scam games.

This is textbook whataboutism. The type of device-pwning malware Google is concerned with here has very little in common with "casino-like games on the playstore".

Read yourself again my man jeez. And you are on HN of all places.

No it isn't. Both are sources of scam and I'd argue that the scam officially hosted on the store is orders of magnitude more widespread than anything using direct installs.

If it's really a problem they care about, here's some priorities. (And I'd personally happy if they cared as I have some family members who got scammed by those)

Using Play Integrity for captchas is completely useless, criminals are using unmodified devices farms on racks anyways. Why would they need to modify their device?

Betting on Play Integrity to solve that is betting that devices will become more expensive in the future, that's quite obvious that the opposite is happening, they are getting cheaper and cheaper.

> Maybe it's time for a third large phone OS

It's been that time for years. But it's easier said than done. The closest we've currently got are the various phone-targeted Linux distros out there. But they're not quite ready for serious usage for me; at least not on the Pinephone. Still, that's where to put your time & money if you're serious about wanting a change.

The thing is making a smart phone is hard. You need experienced and knowledgable embedded engineers to design every aspect of the phone. You need people who are knowledgable about RF and know how to go about regulations in various countries. You need software engineers to build up a whole operating system from scratch and probably do that multiple times as the available technology changes. Not to mention create an entire production line to fabricate the parts and assemble them.

And while efforts like Pinephone are good, they don't have the VC or talent to really make that a reality anytime soon on a massive scale. Most efforts in this space are open source which is great but doesn't really pay anything. People with these skills can easily work at any phone OEM and make good money. So I think it will take a massive company to do it. Maybe Microsoft wants to give it another go haha. Amazon has tried multiple times to make this a reality but it's just cost so much money and time that they keep shutting it down.

I don't have any answers, for something to become viable is has to appeal to the average consumer and getting to that point is like crossing a mountain.

> easier said than done

This is true for both the engineering and business sides. Cyanogen’s failure showed that it ultimately doesn’t matter how good your software product is if your business side of things is poorly run. Same with the Pebble smartwatch - amazing product, terrible back office.

There was Firefox OS, but they ended it too soon. Now, they’re just trying to make money from ads

Kai OS is a moderately successful continuation of Firefox OS.

Which isn't open source, unfortunately.

Mozilla if you're listening - now's your chance; please bring it back. We actually have a reason to switch now.

Is Pinephone still going? I was excited for it a few years ago, but I checked in recently and a lot of people are calling it dead. They discontinued to "pro" model and it doesn't sound like the software has much active development going on.

The phones still exist and work fine. I know it's fun to declare things "dead", but I don't think you can reasonably say it of pinephones.

Eh, that's a multi-faceted question. I personally am tired of Pine. They've made some questionable calls over the past couple years and their "make open hardware with almost nothing working software-wise and see what the community does" business plan has started feeling exploitative to me.

PPpro was mismanaged especially badly. Nothing against the amazing community- it's just there were some hardware/firmware decisions by pine that made it especially hard to develop for. Meanwhile, the non-pro version is handicapped by a very slow processor.

There's still some development happening, and the window managers like KDE are still improving stuff on the front end. But you're right, it has slowed down. That all said, this is still the only non-Google/Apple device you can get in the USA that actually kinda works. I used both the non-pro and pro versions for a few months a couple years ago as my daily driver. I could make calls, send texts, connect to matrix, etc. I wouldn't claim that "it just worked" but it did work.

> this is still the only non-Google/Apple device you can get in the USA that actually kinda works

You forgot Librem 5.

You can have Volla phone with Ubuntu Touch, Jolla C2 or Sony Xperia with Sailfish OS worldwide.

Problem is 99.99% of the population probably doesn't care (or even know about the issue). Companies respond to the market. If there is no demand or pressure for something more open, they won't make it.

realistically, the end point for moderately tech savvy folks is going to a be two-device setup. one cheap phone for basic communication , all the corpo stuff like banking and shirt-and-tie social media + a wifi hotspot. then a second "practical use" device that uses the hotspot, that you fully control and do your tinkering with.

edit: coming to think of it, teaching people to have a device for the "clean stuff" and separate one for the "stupid stuff" could even turn out to be a benefit.

You make it sound like a bad thing! That's pretty much already where I'm at, and is in fact exactly what I want. My smartphone is for messaging and a handful of apps from major vendors (Google Maps, Youtube, 1Password, etc.) It shouldn't ever crash, have nagging software updates, require tinkering, etc., just like my microwave and washing machine. And for tinkering, I've got my Mac, my little Linux NAS, a variety of Linux handheld devices, etc.

The end point is going to be you will only be able to connect to the Internet with a device that passes hardware attestation so people won't be able to tinker

This is already happening. It would be nice to have a purpose-built "clean"/”lame" device that not only did networking for you, but let you run whatever super special shit that garbage banking app needs attestation for while serving it over vnc or similar to your "dirty"/"cool" device. Then the lame device could be quite small, maybe even stuck on to the cool device as a dongle something.

Your heart is where your money. The device with the money would be the practical device for anybody except few RMS' followers.

And I'm happy to keep my heart/money away from the junk of social media and similar trivial shit. To give an example: I have two email ids, one for banking/government stuff and such and other for general purpose (sometimes I use those throwaway ones too for one-time things). If Google pulls this shit, I'm pretty much willing to go two-device - it would be actually more secure. I don't consider this some sort of RMS-idealogy, it is just the sensible next step.

This is really smart. It’s low friction. It’s a drag to need two devices, but it is a low compromise bridge to building up something like a pinephone/pinebook’s ecosystem without needing to keep swapping your sim card.

its how most home networks already work, when you think of it. you have a small locked down isp-provided technically-a-computer, that manages your connection, and behind that, you have all your own stuff on your home network.

if anything, it would be mobile computing "pulling the modem out of the computer", like home desktops did in the 90s. I probably still have that 14.4k pcmcia modem card laying around somewhere...

> Maybe it's time for a third large phone OS [...].

Apple and Google conspired to never allow that to happen. They've pushed Microsoft out of that sector. Microsoft! Name a bigger challenger.

Microsoft pushed itself out of the sector by having a lousy mobile platform.

Microsoft had a phenomenal mobile platform. The only problem they had was that they failed to convince anyone to build apps for it.

The minor issue of not having any developers, developers, developers

> Microsoft had a phenomenal mobile platform.

I went through 3 generations of Windows Phone devices for work. The only thing phenomenal about them was the Zune-style UI. They were buggy and unreliable, even for the few apps they had.

GNU/Linux phones already exist, although they're indeed being harmed by the duopoly.

That was before AI coding assistants.

A language model will create the market force to displace an oligopoly in the most influential sector of our society?

Hedge your bets.

Considering that Google and Apple can use them too, tt's unclear to me whether you think AI coding assistants will make it easier or harder for a third competitor to enter the field.

Lmao

> "GNU/Linux" touch version that has a serious ecosystem

That is a very hard problem, unless someone with serious name recognition like Linus Torvalds starts to lead that kind of effort, or a big company like Microsoft suddenly decides that putting 1 billion towards GNU/Linux would be in their interest. With small efforts, it will remain scattered.

Crowdfunding has a lot of power if there is name recognition behind the effort. Star Citizen has already gathered $800 million with mostly enthusiasm and a good start. Who is there to lead the effort for GNU/Linux phone development?

A GNU/Linux phone is dead on arrival unless it provides features that the masses consider a benefit. It's been attempted countless times, and every time it fails to gain adoption because the benefits rarely outweigh the downsides (yes, I know I will get at least one free software maximalist disagree, but in general, adoption rates support my point: these phones are used by such a small minority they're effectively a measurement error in the data).

If anyone wants to give it a shot again, don't start with a GNU/Linux phone, start with something the masses actually will care about. Reverse-engineered, adversarially-interoperable social media apps for all the mainstream networks with no ads/dark patterns? Cool. Adblocking by default? Sure thing. Built-in support for a wide range of cloud providers (including standard protocols such as SFTP/S3/etc). And so on.

Address actual pain points that people have. "GNU/Linux" by itself does not address anything. The non-technical majority don't even know what that is or means, and even for technical people it isn't a perk by itself - sure, you can run whatever software you want... but you (or someone else) still need to write said software to begin with... or you could just trade a bit of money and "freedom" and buy an iPhone which doesn't have any of those problems.

There were crowdfunding efforts like: Purism Librem, Liberux NEXX, /e/ foundation, eelo, Ubuntu Edge, Jolla phone. But none were really successful. The closest was probably Mozilla with Firefox OS, now Kai OS. I still own an Alcatel OT Fire phone, it's HTML5 all the way!

But I think Sailfish OS has a mature ecosystem, they are well recognized in the EU and based on GNU/Linux. I use it daily, after moving from UBports, and it serves me well. Hopefully SfOS gains more popularity.

You highlighted the problem I was stating: Effort is scattered among small players. I would love for SailfishOS to win, but crowdfunding is hard with random Thingamabob companies; it needs name recognition behind it.

For the new ecosystem to win, it needs to have its own user base for companies building apps to recognize it. Even with SailfishOS, the banking apps still require Android compatibility layer, which is slowly eroded with Play Services and Play integrity check disabling those one by one in the coming years.

> "banking apps still require Android compatibility layer"

I would say that this is really not the OS's problem, but the bank's problem. I find it absolutely intolerable that there are banks that force me to use a OS from one (or two) specific vendors.

Same goes for public transportation services (German Bahn Card is now only available in their app) or post mail services (German Post "Mobile Stamp" is only available in their official app).

"For the new ecosystem to win, it needs to have its own user base for companies building apps to recognize it."

…And strong and effective antitrust legislation in place to stop current monopolies like Google from crushing small startups.

Trouble is, despite governments paying lip service to wanting competition in this arena they really don't want competition at all, especially so from small startups.

Look at it this way, controlling and handling a few big companies is much easier for governments than having to deal with a plethora especially so when many are small startups; and second, it's also easier for them to extract user data from Big Tech's operations (as Big Tech is predictable and they've been doing so for a long time)—than it it would be from many small startups, especially so when the products they're planning to manufacture are aimed at improving privacy and adding encryption.

Think of the current UK and Apple debacle and governments' motives for not being proactive become abundantly clear.

Weren't Jolla (Sailfish OS), Canonical (Ubuntu Touch), HP/LG (webOS), Mozilla (Firefox OS), Samsung (Tizen) recognized companies? Yet they failed to break the duopoly. Even Facebook failed with their phone. Who would fight with Andoid/iOS then?

I have no answer, I'm asking the same question. Who can raise serious funds like 1 billion to do it? I'm guessing for FOSS/Linux crowd to get fully behind, it can't be a company, but a person like Linus Torvalds. Given that browsers are becoming a platform themselves for major apps, maybe it can lower the bar in the future for smaller vendors to create a feasible market.

I'm hoping that Linus "pulls a git" and suddenly announces that he got fed up with Android last week and created a new OS that solves everyone's problems.

A person can dream.

> created a new OS that solves everyone's problems.

Created a hobby OS, just a hobby, won't be big

Even Linus wouldn't be enough. If anybody could, it would be China and its conglomerates like Huawei, Xiaomi, Alibaba, Tencent.

All of those ran really slow compared to Android versions at the time, or their dev tooling sucked. The only one I really enjoyed using was Sailfish, and even they had to implement an APK compatibility layer. So for the average consumer, what’s the benefit to using that over straight Android?

> But none were really successful.

By which criterion? I'm happily using Librem 5 as a daily driver; wrote this reply from it.

I've been using a Librem 5 as a daily driver for years and before that I used a PinePhone for several years. It can work if you're willing to adjust to live with it's constraints (but then also enjoy the benefits).

By general adoption. It's great that Librem serves you well, just like SfOS for me, but sadly we're a tiny minority. I think KaiOS has the third place in popularity.

GNU/Linux is also not successful by such definition. It doesn't make it worse than Windows.

Linux is succesful, it is a base for Android and billions of network devices.

Did you notice I had written GNU/Linux?

> [...] someone with serious name recognition like Linus Torvalds starts to lead that kind of effort [...]

Linus is a kernel hacker, and already busy tending to his own project.

"GNU/Linux" is effectively a committee of communities, with sometimes conflicting goals. It took Canonical and Valve to put things into shape on the desktop, and that's mostly because desktop was becoming less relevant.

I see two ways for things to change here:

- A massive, for-profit corporation, someone willing and able to challenge Google and Apple on an even ground, is hell-bent on making a Linux-based phone (Microsoft failed even after acquiring Nokia);

- Another platform shift happens, making smartphones irrelevant in comparison (think: when smartphones displaced desktops).

Microsoft was stupid, in EU they were slowly reaching 10% when they decided to kill WP, it was getting momentum as the alternative for those that didn't want Android and weren't going to spend Apple money for a phone device.

And actually the development experience was much better than Android to this day.

But that isn't coming back, especially after they killed all developer good will on Windows OS for everyone that invested into WinRT as platform.

How much of that 10% was them basically paying OEM's and consumers to use Windows, which is what the Nokia deal amounted to? It wasn't sustainable.

Whatever benefit we'd have from a Windows Phone today, it's laughable to think that Microsoft wouldn't be doubling down on exactly the sort of locked-down devices Apple (and now Google) have or are moving towards.

Their only vaguely "open" platform (Windows) is like that because of legacy compatibility and customers, but for anything new Microsoft always wanted to sell you an Xbox that could make phonecalls. Try writing and deploying an app on that without a developer account.

I really would like to have been payed to use Windows phones, especially as former Nokia employee.

I was in Espoo, the week following the burning platforms memo.

However it represented a third option, to a percentage no Linux phone distribution has ever achieved since Open Moko.

Maybe Maemo could have been it, had not been for Nokia's board decision to bring in Elop.

> Android shouldn't be considered Open Source anymore

That idea died for me long ago, I had used Android since 2009 till 2020. I gave up on the dream of a Linux phone. Ubuntu had a nice sleek Phone UI they were working on. The issue is if nobody builds the phones and no carrier cares, nobody will pick it up. You need to push yourself into the market.

Microsoft could fill this weird gap if they wanted to the key things would be they would have to truly open source the OS. I could see Amazon trying again, but they'd need to invest a lot as well. It's an uphill battle needing a serious flagship phone. Your other problem is most apps need to be migrated.

Amazon was hopeless even with the apps, because they had their hooks into things even worse than google. They are shameless. Most other tech companies large enough to even try would be as bad or worse.

All that type of money went to llms, who is going to spend that on a phone os now? Not who should, but who actually would? They gave up on browsers, they gave up on mobile oses. There is a real risk that the next step is the US gov takes X% of google instead of enforcing antitrust in a year or two.

Linux phones will never take off because banking and media/drm apps, and by extension social media apps, will just boycott them and kill it off. The tone has been set, this comment applies to any major player trying to break into the mobile market moving forward.

This is honestly very bleak news.

Yeah, I'm disappointed in their efforts. I do like the Kindle tablet for my preschooler because its cheap and gets the job done, though we limit her screen time.

I'm just name dropping from the perspective of a big org that could fund such a thing correctly, but they would need to start over IMHO.

I'm not sure of another big player who could invest billions into such an endeavour.

I don’t even think Microsoft could. Google bullied them out last time with windows phone and the YouTube app debacle.

Until we have serious antitrust legislation against Google and Apple wielding their market power against any new entrants we are stuck with a duopoly.

At the very least, Google needs to lose Android, and probably YouTube as well.

"At the very least, Google needs to lose Android, and probably YouTube as well."

Wishful thinking department unfortunately. Modern US capitalism wouldn't allow that to happen—and a large majority of users are so addicted to the electronic heroin provided (seemingly for free but not) by the likes of Big Tech—Google et al—to care let alone do anything about the problem.

Given the state of the Kindle and Fire TV interfaces, I hope Amazon keeps far away.

I would strongly argue that they would have to start over completely.

Not sure porting the apps would be such a big problem.

You could probably get away with porting only a tiny fraction of all apps.

I only use ~10-20 apps. If I was sure those work reliably I'd not hesitate to move.

Here's a list for anyone who's interested:

* Firefox * Money / bank * Identity * Maps * Email / calendar * Public transport * Chat (Whatsapp, signal, telegram, Facebook messenger, hangout, slack, discord..) * Camera * Music * Podcasts * YouTube * Taxi * Renting bikes * Parking * Digital "postbox" (not email) * Gym * 2FA * Calculator * Phone/SMS * Google Drive

Everyone only uses ~10-20 apps, the problem is that no one uses the same ~10-20 apps.

But I think we mostly do use the same 10-20 apps!

This is the problem - many apps refusing to run on non-blesses platform.

Years ago I loved tinkering with the devices but then I wasn't able to use my bank and it was getting more and more annoying so at one point I just stopped...

The biggest problem are: 1) lack of drivers (so creating custom roms/OS for the devices is problematic), 2) locked bootloaders and 3) many apps requiring PlayServices and other stuff (mostly banks).

There is postmarketOS, it looks awesome but - device support is very lacking and there is no way to have bank and PopularApps (whatsapp/instagram/etc) running on it so it's popularity is microscopic…

Maybe another European Citizen Initiative to force makers to provide those things (bootloader and drivers)?

"Years ago I loved tinkering with the devices but then I wasn't able to use my bank and it was getting more and more annoying so at one point I just stopped..."

Until now I've steadfastly refused to use banking on my smartphones because of these problems (and I usually use rooted phones).

The trouble is it's becoming more and more difficult to avoid phone payments/banking. My solution is to get a small phone specifically dedicated for the purpose and use it for no other purpose (it's a pain but the best compromise). That way I don't have to worry about my main smartphone.

Of course, the best solution would be for governments to regulate for banks to accept multiple access/payment system of which there are a number. Standardized and regulated protocols would solve many of these problems but that's a too bigger subject to address here.

> My solution is to get a small phone specifically dedicated for the purpose and use it for no other purpose (it's a pain but the best compromise). That way I don't have to worry about my main smartphone.

This has been my solution as well and I can't help but wonder, given the recent push for digital ID, insurance, etc. if we will all eventually be carrying a separate data-only device for digital security/attestation purposes.

"…separate data-only device…"

Likely so, methinks. I can't see any other long-term solution that'd be workable and actually benefit users. Moreover, if implemented properly (sensibly) with the user in charge it would be useful for much more than just banking.

For example, it could incorporate a hierarchical key system with the user/owner having access to all data. Privacy would be assured as each entity you'd communicate or transact with would only have access to information on a need-to-know basis.

Your bank would only have access to your name and necessary authentication data; only you and your doctor would have access to your medical records; government/tax would have access to your financial records for tax purposes but not be able to access other data.

General shopping could be done anonymously—even without your bank being aware of what you were buying or from whom you were buying it (it'd be like a cash withdrawal to spend as you wish). The bank would issue you money as a cash advance which you'd add to a local pool of cash, you'd then withdraw funds to pay the vendor (this would likely involve crypto currency to isolate the payment from the bank). And so on, there'd be as many options to such a scheme as a user would need.

Such a system would not only give users almost complete control over their privacy but also give them autonomy. Of course, opposition to such a scheme would be absolutely fierce, governments would demand higher access levels for nefarious and or unnecessary reasons, the Googles of this world would be furious as they'd lose access to meaningful data—what'd be left would be anonymized junk data that'd be effectively worthless to advertisers and data brokers.

Clearly, something that powerful which would give users considerable control over their lives wouldn't be allowed to happen! As Rousseau said in the opening sentence of his Social Contract "Man was born free but everywhere he is in chains". That was in 1762, seems nothing much has changed, the citizenry is still well under the thumb, and the rich and powerful remain so.

Then we can can go back to treating phones as computers. Right?

And maybe one day there will be some convergent evolution and the attestation devices go back to being dedicated hardware. Like the card-reader I already have to to log into my online banking.

> Then we can can go back to treating phones as computers. Right?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19328085

Ends up on the car key chain

Everything coming from China is going to be closed source as well, and it's going to be pretty hard for banks to onboard themselves on open source solutions. I think the ultimate solution is: two phones, one shitty one just for banking/trading/whatever, which only stays at home most of the time, and one Linux phone that we more or less own, for calls/texts/web browsing, which stays with us.

It only matters if you treat phones as a development environment.

It's tempting to have full control over everything OSS style, but the reality is you can only tenably have that for very specific parts of life.

i wanted my phone to be more than just a kiosk though. thank fuck desktop never ended up in this mess

The irony is that our phones are unbelievably powerful and run laps around computers from just 5-10 years ago, but then we use them as locked-down glorified web views and advertisement deliverers.

Or, as you say, kiosks.

Not to mention all the functionality, sensors, etc that our laptops have never had.

advertisement deliverers and massive surveillance devices

Why? I have the freedom to fix or modify most things I own. What makes phones so special that it justifies licking the boot of some techbro billionaires?

OpenHarmony is open source. There are also: Ubuntu Touch and Sailfish OS being developed. Actually I am writing this from Sailfish OS. I can login to my bank using a web browser here in the EU. I have Telegram, Signal clients, maps, sideloaded packages, full terminal - I fully control the phone, in contrast to Android. I don't own and don't need Android phone at all. So definitely more people should usealternatives to closed Android/iOS.

Ah yes, sailfish is actually pretty usable. (Unlike Ubuntu Touch, tbh). I've used it in the past on my Nexus5 for some years. However, they are still not 100% open source and they're too much into the AI-Hype as of recently (Mind2). Also, I'd like to have more official ports. It's such a hassle to be dependent on that one guy who maintains that port for your device...

I somewhat agree with the protected systems part though. For example, handling payments. Now iOS and Android could both have 0-days that allow fraudulent payments to be made for all I know but there's a certain degree of trust there with 2 large companies.

But then again we still use visa/mastercard duopoly that allows you to make payments so long as your have their card number.

And then again x2; nothing will ever change, we live in a corporate hellscape where men in suits & ties make all the decisions, get themselves wealthier and the general public are too apathetic to band together on anything because they'd rather foot shoot than have someone not from their tribe receive a single cookie crumb.

> a contractual relationship with a foreign (unless you are in the US) third party that decides what you can or cannot do with it.

I see where you're coming from, but companies like Google have local legal representation (e.g. in Ireland for the EU), and have to operate under EU rules if they want to do business here (just like how a EU business has to operate under US rules). If the EU says that you should be allowed to do your own thing - and they have - then Google can either comply or leave.

Don't attribute more power to companies than they have - they want you to believe they can get away with this, but don't echo their rhetoric.

Ok, how do I as a developer from Croatia get in touch with a legal representative from Google? And I don't mean 5 layers of indirection through AI chatbots and chatbots, forms and canned responses?

As a single developer, you have very little weight against Google. The same is true of a single developer in the US.

What does have weight is the European Union, which Croatia is a member of. If the EU parliament makes a law that Google is not allowed to have these kinds of rules and do business in the EU, then Google will listen. Given the horrible state of the US government, the EU is just about the only force left in the world able and willing to stand up against these tech giants in a way that forces them to pay attention and act responsibly.

The chances are higher that the EU makes a law mandating this sort of thing than demanding dropping this requirement in the EU.

The only thing you can expect from the EU is that it requires that apps in the EU market are signed with keys signed by the EU which you will only be able to get if you provide your ID or business registration.

Between Google and the EU I think I would rather be governed by the devil.

https://support.google.com/faqs/answer/6151275

You don't. You'd have to sue them.

...that makes it worse though. It's just intrusion from more legacy states.

The whole point here is that this requirement is a vector by which states and state-like corporations can exert control over the internet. And the "inter" in internet is weakened by this.

The EU is planning to make Play Store de facto mandatory, so no more Graphene in the EU

https://www.androidheadlines.com/2025/07/eu-age-verification...

Only if you want to use the age verification app.

The EU has different parts. This probably violates a constraint imposed by a different part, which the part pushing this hasn't noticed yet.

It doesn't even matter if it's foreign or not, it's a matter of who owns the thing: you buy a smartphone or you buy a service that allows you some use of said smartphone? Fuck services.

We used to have a very nice option called Blackberry. Oh how I miss those phones.

> or some "GNU/Linux" touch version that has a serious ecosystem

How could this realistically happen? Developers of popular apps adore the control and illegitimate de-facto ownership that client side "trust" gives them, so they'll refuse to make apps for that platform. They'll also use said client side "trust" to block them. Thus, it can't reach critical mass to force adoption by these developers.

> Maybe it's time for a third large phone OS, whether it comes from China getting fed up with the US and Google's shenanigans (Huawei has HarmonyOS but it's not open) or some "GNU/Linux" touch version that has a serious ecosystem. Especially when more and more apps and services are "mobile-first" or "mobile-only" like banking.

This makes me laugh. Not at you, but at the cycle. This was the convo years ago when this was possible, but getting consumers to trust a 3rd party like PalmOS (which was actually pretty darn good compared to android) is practically not possible.

It's not about consumer trust, it's the chicken-and-egg problems of users and app devs.

App devs only care about platforms with enough users, users only care about platform with enough 3rd party devs support.

> banks and other "regulated" sectors use Google Play Protect and similar DRMs to prevent you from connecting from whatever device you want.

This totally sucks but is there anything preventing you from using your bank's website in-browser in your phone, other than the terrible UI, tiny text, and inability to select the correct checkbox?

I wouldn't use a bank that made it difficult for me to access my account. I don't know why most people do. I know why a few need to, but not most. There's a lot of unnecessary bedmaking going on in tech.

Because it's the only bank that doesn't require a mailing address and I don't have a mailing address.

How does one not have a mailing address in $current_year?

If one is a "digital nomad"

Maybe, although there are services that will accept your mail and then scan/email it to you. But I believe OP has stated that they live in Germany full-time.

I don't keep tabs on OP; I just provide hypothetical answers to literal interpretations of rhetorical questions.

Less and less of AOSP is being updated also, as Google rolls most of its new features and updates behind the Play Services system. Install Graphene and you will see what I am talking about - the SMS app for example hasn't been updated in probably a decade and looks and functions like it did back in Android 4 (KitKat). Same with the other built-in apps. While I used Graphene myself for a solid 6 months, the features you have to give up on using or find some obtuse workaround for aren't appealing to the "normies" who just want their phone to do what they want, no matter the unseen ethical cost (in this case, sacrificing the ability to freely install 3rd party apps). Someone on another forum said it very well - people like "us" were Google's foot in the door, now along with Apple they have such a stranglehold on the mobile OS space that a 3rd viable and comparable contestant becomes less and less likely by the day. Throw in how Google starting with Android 16 is not releasing updated drivers with AOSP and Graphene probably doesn't have much life left in it, either.

We're long, long overdue for a 3rd phone OS option. The bank thing has me wondering. Maybe getting a nice, local branch is one of the next sane privacy steps if it lets me escape this phone.

> the provider owning the device, not the user

That's been the case since they got rid of removable batteries. You don't own a device you can't reliably turn off.

It seems most banking apps do work: https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compa...

There will never be a third large OS unless Google Play Integrity is legislated out of existence. And it looks like governments like Google Play Integrity so that won't happen

I think that the answer are vendor-independent standards.

The main issue being solved here is that security relies heavily on those actors like Google and Apple. Banks, companies etc. have high security requirements (rightly so) and basically need to tick boxes. So if the only way to obtain, say, MFA, is through something only Goole/Apple provides, they will require Google or Apple devices.

If we had reasonable standards alternatives can become a reality.

That's not really going to fix anything here.

The reason a big company can do this is because they can absorb big liability risk and insure it appropriately.

A standard can't do that.

I wish Firefox OS had succeeded, my first ever app was for it, it was all so much simpler and so much more free than the locked down systems of both major mobile OSes.

Tizen already exists...where phone OS' fall down is that ALL of the cellular modems are extremely patent encumbered (althogh Hauwei has a large portion of the 5G ones) and there doesn't exist an open specification let alone open implementation of their interfaces.

What's even the point of all the bullshit with Google play protect if in the end I can access my bank from a web browser. That stupidity is protecting no one

> in the end I can access my bank from a web browser.

If your bank allows you to access all features from a browser, consider yourself lucky. Mine requires the app to authorize any online transaction.

Here in Poland most banks are usable via web browser + SMS for auth.

That's already pretty rare internationally and the odds of it still being the case in five years are zero.

I would argue that SMS is horribly insecure and should never be used for authentication.

https://workos.com/blog/why-sms-mfa-is-insecure

Poland also has the most competitive banking system in the entire Western sphere of influence. You can't compare it to the extremely oligarchic banking system in the United States.

My bank doesn't allow me to deposit checks digitally without the stupid app. Almost everything else is available on the website.

> access my bank from a web browser

Unless you get SMS or some normal TOTP app as 2FA, using the web page usually requires the bank's proprietary app to authorize. So you circle back to the the same issue.

this should be banned…

LineageOS still exists.

Other than depositing checks, I've always thought that phone bank apps are overrated. Banking is too serious for a phone- I'd rather do it on a real computer. I could fairly easily give up banking apps entirely.

In my case, the website is equal or superior to the app in every aspect except one: you cannot deposit scanned paper checks via the website, only via the app.

Web channel traffic is typically a tiny fraction of mobile traffic for banks. In some banks its like single digit share.

These control freaks will not control me. Banking on GrapheneOS? The web app works fine.

More and more people are starting to see how you really own nothing anymore.

Not merely a foreign third party: one operating fairly cozily within a country with a hostile and erratic government.

If Trump ordered Google, tomorrow, to put some egregious measure in place in Android (or Chrome, or Google Search), I, personally, would not want to bet that they would refuse him. And frankly, I don't know that I can even imagine the kinds of things he might try to get them to do.

We absolutely need better competition in smartphone OSes—we need it across the board in tech, really, from a wide array of countries.

Every day we stray farther from the premise that we should be allowed to install / modify software on the computers we own.

Will once again re-up the concept of a “right to root access”, to prevent big corps from pulling this bs over and over again: https://medhir.com/blog/right-to-root-access

In the meantime, corporate is thinking about locking browsers down. Remember this? https://chromestatus.com/feature/5796524191121408

They’ll try again, with big business and governments cheering on them.

> They’ll try again, with big business and governments cheering on them.

No doubt. They only have to win once. We have to keep defending our own freedoms against non-stop assault until the end of time.

I'm so tired and disillusioned.

> We have to keep defending our own freedoms

As always.

> I'm so

Shake it off, because, see point 1, the struggle is the same as it has been even decades ago. Nothing has changed: we fight for it. Only the battles have changed, not the war.

I'm not the person you replied to, but I am in their shoes. I'm tired, too. Trust me, I used to champion your sentiment, keep fighting/keep moving and all that jazz, but...at my age, this War of Attrition that is the fight for user data rights and privacy has gone on so long, against a foe that has a much large reach and seemingly infinite resources.

Many of us are not only exhausted, but exasperated at the fact that the good majority of the consumer market continues to give permission to the very activities we are all supposed to be denying. In the end, we vote with our dollars, so we, the vocal minority can be as loud as we want but if the majority continues to buy, use and comply with the product, it's really just a lot of yelling for no reason, isn't it? That's how it feels, anyway.

I know, I know; can't start a fire without a spark. But I've been at it for two decades, since the first smartphone dropped, something I resist adopting for nearly a decade. I'm seeing my kid's generation growing up in this world, condition by it from the start despite our best efforts and they simply don't seem to care. From where I'm standing, I feel old, brittle and tired from all this, but there's nobody to pass the torch to.

So understand that when one of us comments "I'm so tired and disillusioned," we do so after years of resisting, and those words are not uttered lightly.

> So understand that when one of us comments "I'm so tired and disillusioned," we do so after years of resisting, and those words are not uttered lightly.

My great-grandfather fled France with his family during the second world war. My grandfather fought in the second world war - essentially after he got to Canada, he enlisted and headed back to fight against fascism. He eventually came back to Canada because the rest of his surviving family was here.

I get tired of fighting for privacy, and standing up for users, and pushing back against some of the most egregious abuses of tech companies, including the tech companies I work for. When I think that it's not worth fighting, or I think that I could probably get a promotion and way more money if I just suck it up and start building ad-tech or surveillance tech, I think about how disappointed my grandfather would be with my decision.

Stoicism isn't the shitty memes that folks post online re-enforcing toxic masculinity, it's getting up in the morning after taking a break from the good fight, and continuing to push back despite being tired. Understand that when you wake up in the morning, or feel the need to comment "I'm so tired and disillusioned", remember that there are many, many other people tired and disillusioned along side you or OP continuing the fight. Take a break if you need to, and come back to keep fighting.

They have trillions of dollars to burn. They have expensive lobbyists which they use to essentially buy laws. Governments want them to succeed because they also want to control people's computers.

It's just a matter of time until we lose everything. It's not really a struggle. Look at what just happened. We made sacrifices for years by using Android because it was open and Google just rendered it all moot by introducing hardware remote attestation to discriminate against anyone who's actually enjoying that openness. What's the point?

"What's the point?"

Right, it's very disheartening when the large majority of smartphone users couldn't give a damn about such matters. As I mentioned elsewhere, the problem has been made much worse by the fact that most smartphone users are addicted to electronic heroin—apps provided by Google, Facebook, et al.

There's no other way of describing the situation other than it's an unmitigated disaster. Tragically, Big Tech hit on a formula that has billions of users glued to their phones many to the point of obsession—it's absurd, nothing like this has ever happened on such a grand scale in all of human history.

When people like us try to fix the problem we're confronted on all sides—we not only have to deal with a money-rich and very hostile Big Tech and also with governments who want to only deal with it (for reasons I mentioned earlier) but also with a large percentage of the world's population who would feel threatened and annoyed at even the mere mention of changes to their phones' ecosystem.

When the enemy goes to the extent of effectively 'parasitizing' those with whom we are trying to help and protect into a zombie-like state of inaction then we've little hope of changing things for the better.

It's all very depressing.

One approach, not ideal by a long shot but one of the easiest, is to only use old devices and old OSes. Things that have been cracked and/or are easy to root.

"But it's not secure!" -- yeah, that really is the point.

> only use old devices and old OSes. Things that have been cracked and/or are easy to root.

> "But it's not secure!" -- yeah, that really is the point.

Well, no.

The point isn't just to rail against impositions from someone else wanting what they see as essential for their security, but also to keep things secure and⁰ free¹ for you, the user.

Holding your devices back constrains both your security and your freedom rather than helping you in either manner. Security because you will be missing important updates in that regard, and freedom because your device won't be able to negotiate connections with external services² that you want to use³.

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[0] And where these two conflict, you should be free to chose your threat model and therefore which compromises to make, except where that could negatively affect others.

[1] The freedom of reasonable action form of free, not monetarily free etc.

[2] We hit this a short while ago with some legacy code+infra using SOCKS via OpenSSH to make unauthenticated HTTPS calls from source addresses we can't fix (authentication is done with SSH, control is by the other end having the fixed address of the SOCKS host in the whitelist) - upgrading the VM running the SOCKS proxy upgraded OpenSSH which deprecated a number of encryption and negotiation options, the old client library used didn't support enough new ones to be able to negotiate a link, newer versions required a later .Net version that is supported inside SSIS, so we had to rearrange how those calls were made (obviously the long term fix is to kill all that legacy SSIS stuff, all SSIS stuff including the people that made it, with fire). The same will happen with parts of what you use your device for, if you keep it back in the way you are suggesting.

[3] Banking facilities being a key area that you'll likely hit problems with first, after that other online commerce flows, and so forth.

I've been largely doing this for other reasons.

It is not a good long term solution, however, because older phones do not support newer versions of the operating systems and gradually you'll notice that fewer and fewer applications work on your phone, because they require a newer operating system.

I've been using an old OS as my daily driver for five years now[1]. You absolutely can do it, but it's a lot of work!

1: https://mavericksforever.com/

I maintain a software to aid in installation of Windows 7 to new PCs (FlashBoot Pro): https://www.prime-expert.com/flashboot/ . Recently there was a reduction in sales. You are welcome.

This is not going to be successful once they demand strong authentication of clients on the server side - the banking apps already do this, you can't have your phone rooted or compromised.

Wait until the authorities will require strong client side authentication for social media sites, news sites, and everywhere user generated content is accepted, tied to official ID issued by the government

To be honest I don't see an easy path to escaping the walled garden in our interactions with big companies and governments (banking, traveling, mainstream social networks, etc.).

But at least we can build alternatives for interpersonal communication and other uses independent from big companies, like the late 90s-early 2000s Internet, and access that with free devices.

> But at least we can build alternatives for interpersonal communication and other uses independent from big companies

We mostly can't. The most we can do is grow new big companies.

The internet was carefully reorganized so that it's impossible to do anything without money moving around.

Chat control will make this illegal.

If you want the whole commerce in the EU collapse and the CEO's wanting to really hurt and then kill Ursula von del Leyen and the associated lobbies, yeah sure. Let them suicide.

CEOs don't seem too bothered about security or the ability to use custom ROMs

Maybe that would be a good thing. Don't get hooked on social media or news that survive on outrage and echochamers, just... enjoy life.

Utterly pointless. We'll be systematically discriminated against at every turn. We'll lose access to finances, services, communities and even simple sites because our computers aren't corporate owned. We'll become so marginalized we'll only be able to visit places like HN, places that at least try to pay some lip service to everything the word "hacker" stands for.

And then they will make it so our devices need to pass hardware remote attestation to connect to the internet and even that will be taken away from us.

I don't know what to do anymore. The future is bleak. The free computing we love is being destroyed by forces outside our control, forces that cannot be stopped no matter what we do because they have trillions of dollars and their interests are aligned with those of governments the world over.

Get in to woodworking and ham radio I guess

They may try that, sure, but 1/ it will take some time, during which we can still enjoy some amount of freedom and 2/ they may not succeed everywhere, or all of the time.

This is not enough. Things like banking apps are virtually necessary for many people's daily lives, yet they often require a non-rooted phone with Google Play Services spyware installed at the OS level, or they will simply refuse to open. Never mind the fact that we're so into late capitalist consumerism that it's routine to deprecate support for 2 year old OSes.

This needs law/regulation forcing the duopoly to open up, unfortunately even in the EU we're moving in the opposite direction.

Not just forcing the app store duopoly to open up, forcing banks to open up and prohibiting these kinds of restrictions that are based on "we insist that you trust some large corporation that we also trust".

Exactly. I'm literally penalized because I have control of my own device (which somehow isn't an issue with the much more "insecure", root-wise, browser on a linux desktop)

> which somehow isn't an issue

now. In general it certainly is; web interfaces will be phased out unless web browsers gain client attestation capabilities (at which point it's game over for the open web).

E.g. Revolut never had a web interface and is doing just fine.

And the sentiment that I own the things I've bought and paid for and should be able to do what I want with it. That a company shouldn't be able to come in and take away features, that I purchased with the device, away from me for absolutely any reason.

I can't go to Google HQ and reinstall their locks because I think their locks are insecure, and I certainly can't declare myself the arbiter of who should be allowed to open their locks. I'd be charged and put in jail. But they can do the digital equivalent to my device and that's valid business.

> Things like banking apps are virtually necessary for many people's daily lives

I disagree. I think most people could do just fine without them. Some might need to buy a desktop computer or even visit their bank's website using a browser on their phone, but humanity got along just fine without cell phone banking apps for a very long time. Many of the old options still exist for a lot of common banking activities. Options like calling your bank on the phone, using an ATM, or going to a branch in person. If your bank really doesn't allow you to do anything with your money without a cell phone app I'd say finding a new bank is justified. Better yet, try to find a credit union.

Banking apps are convenient, but it's getting to the point where the inconvenience of being abused by the OS outweighs the convenience of a banking app which is probably collecting (and selling/exploiting) data they couldn't get from a visit to their website anyway.

> or even visit their bank's website using a browser

when desktop browsers are considered less trustworthy to the bank than mobile apps (this is approximately now) they'll invert the functionality and limitations surface so mobile will have more authorizations than desktop browser (this is also happening now).

client attestation is a fundamental transfer of freedom from the client to the server. it's nice in theory (I too want my money safe), but at the very least it needs a third party with different incentives, not the OS, hardware and browser vendor.

Yes, you already need the app to accept flagged transactions (that the bank didn't deny outright) for my Bank, no way to do that in a Browser.

> Banking apps are convenient

The only need I have for banking apps is created by banks themselves, to verify online payments. But it would work just fine with regular text messages. I don't need a banking app at all.

(And maybe verifications aren't needed either, since in the 40+ years I have been using a credit card, never once have I been asked to verify something that I didn't initiate myself.)

In many regions specific apps are needed for reliable identity verification.

Just because you don’t care about banking apps doesn’t mean I don’t. You might churn your own butter, but that doesn’t mean I don’t need to be able to pick it up from the grocery store. Our lives are different from our parents, whose lives are different than theirs. The answer isn’t “just go back 20 years and live like we used to”. The answer is to life in the modern world and still have our basic freedoms.

> routine to deprecate support for 2 year old OSes

> unfortunately even in the EU

("Save the planet".)

> We have to keep defending our own freedoms against non-stop assault until the end of time

That's the human condition. The price of liberty.

However, there are easier ways and harder ways to do it. The key concept to think about is sovereignty. What do you own? What do you control that depends on as few externalities as possible?

The big shift people are going to have to start thinking about is abandoning the network, because the enemies of freedom are increasingly locking it down.

- I own PC hardware that runs Linux. I own a copy of Linux which runs entirely offline. To the extent I get updates to it, they are licensed and distributed in such a manner that it's very hard for the bad guys to mess with them, as Microsoft does with Windows 11.

- I own copies of many media, books, music, movies, TV series, games, these reside as non-DRM'ed bits on my SSD that do not phone home, they don't need the network. I have local copies of software that does not require the network to play them. I have physical copies of these things in some cases.

This is not to say that I never use Netflix, Youtube, Spotify, Steam etc. but I keep them at arm's length and cut back on my usage of them at every opportunity. They are all network tools owned by our enemies, and need to be treated as such.

There really isn't shit they can do to me that would sting, short of cut off the electricity. In the event that the Internet purveyors of slop go Full Evil, and they probably will, I am well equipped.

Now of course the topic of sovereignty is far far bigger than consuming media, and we could get into things like desktop applications or where you interact with your friends as well. But the principles are the same. Go offline.

Yep, there are times when I feel like it is best just to let them win to the point it completely break the bottom of the bucket. Rather than a slow creep, a sudden lurch so that everyone can see it.

Freedom is a constant struggle

Y'know what's troubling to me, freedom as a struggle is indirectly related to other people/ social-political issue.

Like, the people if they decide, they want freedom, are almost guaranteed to get it. But nobody demands it in the truest sense and it feels like the govt. isn't controlled by the people but rather almost by lobbying and that social media etc. have made people complacent in the sense that either we think that others will fight for us or that social media has become a propaganda machine.

I almost broke last night realizing that nuclear can be completely green energy but it isn't the issue of technology but rather political. To me, it felt like a lot of really quality of life changes (like water access, clean cities, good air quality index, atleast where I live) are all almost political issues at this point.

But I am not hopeful towards people, I am hopeful towards tech though. It feels like people have free will, so they might actually pick a net negative option for everybody (trump?), so I am not an optimist because I feel like I have to trust people in the process and I feel like people can do both good and bad, so I wonder how much better our lives have been compared to our ancestors. Maybe trade-offs?

I genuinely felt so weird realizing this, its hard to explain. Like it felt like I can do nothing but watch. And to me I feel like I am being a pessimistic because a lot of people in power feel stupid/inefficient man.

We just don't have a choice. WE have a choice b/w 2 parties and call it freedom.

Of course, freedom will be a constant struggle. People have made it as such. Its on all of us, we all need to take accountability. I get it, accountability is hard, but its much better than waiting for a hero to save us all. We can do it if we realize this.

> To me, it felt like a lot of really quality of life changes (like water access, clean cities, good air quality index, atleast where I live) are all almost political issues at this point.

This is why I struggle when discussing anything on this website - these were always political issues. Everything that touches the way society functions is a political issue. Tech is just a vehicle of political agenda. Freedom is purely political notion, this is why different traditions have different concepts of it. And to obtain it, as well as other things, you need political action. Yet, most HN users, at least that is my impression, tend to think that it is about creating yet another software project or founding startup.

And this is why corpos and government are winning.

Well, political action is hard to bring and you would need an average citizen to weigh his vote into action and not just use his vote for his own biases and as I also said, its really depressing when we think of this to be as a reality and I myself, would like to hide or somehow "prove" that this isn't the case if that makes sense. So no wonder the majority of us techie/hn users feel this way, you aren't wrong for the impression, I also feel like that's true atleast in my opinion being in this community and there is nothing wrong with that but the reality is kinda bitter.

> Yet, most HN users, at least that is my impression, tend to think that it is about creating yet another software project or founding startup.

I don't think that a startup is sufficient, but it can be an important step in the right direction. I came to my bank, showed them my Librem 5 phone and asked where I can download an app for it. It was a much clearer message than "but Android isn't free!" (which is of course true). I do the same with governmental services.

Government in EU will want it once they introduce the Chat Control legislation and observe that it is trivial to circumvent by either modifying clients to not scan or using free open source alternatives. Logical next step is to lock down all devices and thereby also ensure total and utter surrender of all our digital infrastructure to the current duopoly in the mobile device market (Apple and Google).

So, people who need can always use linux and can even just compile everything from source.

How will you install Linux when all the hardware manufacturers are forced to enforce Secure Boot? All for security, of course.

They can't force the entire world to use Windows, its a national security risk for countries other than USA.

Each country would need a locally maintained OS they can force on people

They are effectively forcing official Android on all smartphones in most countries with digital ID apps using Play Integrity. More and more people are using smartphones as their main computation device now.

Well that is true sadly but desktops and servers are still a different subject

For now. They have a legacy of openness that will take a while to squash for sure. But they're experts at this kinda maneuver.

A lot of Linux distros work fine with secure boot

They all works fine because Microsoft allows distros to sign their keys. We are a single bad law or a change of corporate politics away from them not doing that and deleting Linux out of existence on personal computers.

Now, maybe you’ll still be allowed to if you have a special license from the government to purchase approved hardware to run it in a datacenter. Which can be promptly revoked if you were found to be running illegal VPN software or something like that.

You can self-sign keys. Secure Boot has had a mechanism for that already for years (mok on Linux).

They can, but if service providers start requiring client attestation, it won't help at all.

This isn't a technical problem. It's a political problem. We should be fighting this with our wallets, votes, voices and influence, not technology. Politicians and industrialists should be informed in no uncertain terms that the enaction such draconian measures will result in significant hits to their ambitions.

The only problem is that it's a tiny minority of us which can even grasp the concept of having root access on your owned computer. The majority believe the Apple (and now Google) narrative that "only the manufacturer can keep them safe" and why would they themselves ever have an opinion on the specific code running on their computer?

Not when vendors you count on require you to use a provably locked down version and when the government makes it a crime to circumvent. At first u It'll be the banks who are pushing for it now, but why not Amazon and Netflix abd everyone else eventually?

And you can do that, but your bank and all government services will use Web Environment Integrity API to refuse to service you unless you are using a Google-approved flavor of Linux (e.g. ChromeOS) or Windows.

Can I tweak it? Can I simulate a NN autocomplete?

"Government in EU [which is a very marginal part of the production of electronic devices, wants to implement a "Digital Euro" that requires relying] all our digital infrastructure to the current duopoly in the mobile device market (Apple and Google)[, completely external yet planned crucial part of the forthcoming monetary system]."

<think> They do not sound pretty sound to me. </think>

--

Edit: speak up, snipers (we are in front of a freefall and you play the fool)... I think it is rational in the discourse to show that in malice or stupidity there is a relevant upper level that shows a more radical condition.

The EU is posing towards reliance of «all our digital infrastructure to the current duopoly in the mobile device market (Apple and Google)», which is controlled by third parties.

The question really isn't whether we should be able to modify computers we own, its whether we own them at all.

The question of how private property, intellectual property and posession/ownership should work is indeed something humanity hasn't properly figured out yet.

But if anything, regular people should have more of the cake.

We have! The only problem is a very limited amount of legal decisions accidentally paved the way for a massive dystopia. In particular, the first sale doctrine [1] solves everything immediately.

The courts assumed good faith with a licensing exception, and maybe it was. But that opened the door to essentially completely dismantle the first-sale doctrine. Get rid of that loophole and all this stupidity ends, immediately. Well that and the DMCA. Once you buy something, it's yours to do whatever you want to do with it short of replicating it for commercial benefit.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine

We also need regulation to prevent unbreakable hardware locks. Integrating the locks deep into VLSI makes removing them unrealistic.

As a more specific way to do this, I'd like to see any software that hardware companies make for their own hardware designated (at the choice of the company) as either part of the hardware or a separate product. In the former case, it must be made available under GPLv3 with full anti-tivoization provisions. In the latter case, it must use only public and documented interfaces and must be completely realistic for another company to make a competing product on a level playing field. Ideally the separate products would also need to be highly cross platform if technically feasible where the burden of showing that it isn't is on the developer.

I'm not sure if we need regulations preventing it as much as we need regulations that manufacturers have to make it clear before buying the product.

Informed consent goes a long way.

You might be right. We're seeing a paradox of more and more exclusive ownership of property for commercial interests (land, water, airwaves, orbits) and fewer and fewer exclusive ownership for individuals (rented homes, licensed software, subscriptions etc). I too think we're still in a transition stage and humanity has yet to figure this thing out.

It's actually what Marx was warning about - private property ending in the hands of the few as an endgame of capitalism.

Was Marx really warning us? I always read that as him describing his strategy to take down capitalism.

I.e. a warning would be if he didn't want it to happen, but my understanding is that he very much did.

It's not we haven't figured it out. It is that gov and corp prefer to be shepherds and we are OK to be sheep. We figured it out a long time ago.

The solution certainly won't be through legislative or judicative powers as they have failed predictably and repeatedly. Sometimes reality must be molded a bit of fait accompli.

No - private property is clear.

The question that hasn't fully been worked is how to allow people to think/feel they own something, while having no actual legal rights to it. But, as we see, this is being worked on.

Record companies figured that one out a long time ago.

Throwing your hat in the political ring?

regardless of what the corporations say we do own the devices we purchase.

Not always. There have been car manufacturers that sold vehicles with features only enabled by a subscription. You may buy a car with heated seats, but the heated seats only work if the manufacturer enables them.

And there should be no law against enabling the heated seats in the car you own without interacting with the manufacturer.

Too bad there is one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...

Laws can be interpreted in such a way that invites robber barons to pound sand, or repealed.

Considering the same law is used to strike a 3 hour GPU documentary over a ~30 second clip, I think it serves to corporate pretty well.

GamersNexus' 3 hour documentary about GPU smuggling (which is way more than a vlog as HN commenters like to portray) is struck down by Bloomberg because they didn't want their 30 second clip, which is squarely fair use BTW, of POTUS speaking to be in that. GamersNexus repealed successfully, but Bloomberg tried to bully them [0].

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUnRWh4xOCY

I don't understand why people think this is something corporations desperately want. It's something they'll abuse if you leave it sitting around for that, but that's just the argument for getting rid of it. How does the ability to be a petulant grouch benefit them? It has negligible monetary value and causes PR damage. It's a footgun that nobody needs and only fools want.

And if they're actually the cartoon villains it would imply, rather than just banal petty autocrats carelessly fooling around with a toy they deserve to have taken away from them, then we should maybe less be saying "it makes sense that they would want it this way" and more be sticking their heads in a guillotine so we can show the children the proper way to resolve a dispute with a tyrant.

In neither case should a law like that remain on the books.

Looks like it's complicated. The video has some theories.

- Bloomberg has a similar investigation which is deeply undercut by GamersNexus video. GN seen the labs, Bloomberg got their access revoked, so theirs is an empty video, and they want the views.

- The video holds no punches back about anyone, and Bloomberg has an NVIDIA sponsored section dedicated to them.

- There's no other source which recorded POTUS' words, and maybe they don't want these words to be widely available, video argues.

- Lastly, they wanted a licensing fee for that 30 seconds to leave their videos alone.

So, when you're a beancounting billionaire corporation, you can have the reasons to go after a bearded guy who manages to do a better job and make you look bad.

Because, monies.

That's precisely the "petty autocrats carelessly abusing a footgun" scenario. They've made themselves look bad for negligible benefit while harming innocent people. It's the argument for taking it away from them.

The heated seat is an edge case, but there is also the entirely valid argument that you shouldn't be able to arbitrarily modify your car (e.g. replace the breaks with some home-grown solution), as it can put yourself and others in danger, and I see no evil in that being enforced by the government. A more IT-related example might be what radio frequencies can we use - if anyone could spam the whole spectrum, we would lose more than from the "freedom" of being able to do that.

So it's actually far from trivial to draw a line.

You are permitted to change whatever you like on your car, subject to a roadworthiness inspection by the relevant transit authority.

Cargo van -> Camper van conversions go through this all the time - you add/remove seats, add a lot of weight in the form of beds, water tanks, etc. add/remove windows, put solar panels on the roof... After those changes you have to take it down to the vehicle inspection, and they tell you whether or not your changes have been deemed acceptable to drive on public roads.

> replace the br[ake]s with some home-grown solution

Funny you mention the brakes, because a friend of mine told me just days ago that he used to change his own brakes consumables (pads) until the new car, which "throws an error" if you replace the part - you have to go to an official service office for the computer configuration.

Now, do not forget that the need for the intervention of third parties lowers the car reliability ("far away", "too expensive", "device too old", "operation failure", "inexperienced operator" etc.).

This should show that your argument has difficult sides. Of course you should be able to act on your critical possessions. It should be within a good framework, but it should be fully, practically possible.

> there is also the entirely valid argument that you shouldn't be able to arbitrarily modify your car

In at least two european countries that I know of (but probably in all of them) cars need to pass periodic technical inspection to be allowed on the road. Breaks are tested, among other things.

On top of that, you totally can modify your car (even the brakes) provided that you use some certified part that's good enough for your type of car. And you should pass the inspection that tests everything.

I understand that GP point was about home-made brakes (like the software counterpart), but software on a smartphone is not (yet) deadly for others if it doesn't work as expected.

Technical inspections are mandatory across the board in all of the European Union, although the rules (such as the interval between inspections), may differ between countries. The minimum is every two years, some countries do yearly. This is actually governed by a European mandate.

In much of the EU you are also required to request an additional technical inspection if you have made major changes to the car - for example, I had to take mine in when I had a tow hitch installed, and a friend had to take their camper in when they installed an additional seat.

Vanishingly few people want to crash their car due to sub-par breaks. If someone is malicious, the physical access to the car is going to be enough to not stop them and murder is already illegal. So, is this a real issue? If it is, is regulating this the most effective choice for what to regulate to increase safety or are other things more hazardous? Removing freedom and creating mandatory bureaucracy shouldn't be done over imaginary issues.

> but there is also the entirely valid argument that you shouldn't be able to arbitrarily modify your car (e.g. replace the breaks with some home-grown solution), as it can put yourself and others in danger,

That is a nonsensical argument.

"You shouldn't be able to put anyone else in danger" - agreed.

"You shouldn't be able to modify your car" - wtf does that have to do with danger?

"Modifying brakes (not breaks)" is not the same thing as "Putting people in danger". Sometimes we modify them to have better braking than the standard.

What countries actually do is test the end-result, i.e. Does the car conform to the legally mandated required braking performance?

Rather than campaign to stop people from owning property anymore, maybe just enforce the existing laws (which, as far as I know, are enforced already anyway).

This campaign to divide people into an owning class and a servile class is pretty damn repugnant, and "Because someone can be harmed if we allow people to own things" is just the new "But think of the children" nonsense.

It's trivially easy to draw the line. If it's to be illegal to make some modification to your car then that law is to be enforced by the government rather than the manufacturer.

This is the same argument people make between Apple and Android.

Can I use an Android phone without using Google? Yes, of course you can. There are plenty of secure OS's like Graphen, Lineage, Calyx and many others. Do people really care enough to use them? Hardly any, which proves my point.

Same thing here. Most people will just pay the fee to get the seats. Some might just opt out and not get them. Others will shop around and find some legacy cars that are older that have them but don't require a subscription.

At the end of the day? There's ALWAYS a choice. How hard do you want to look to avoid the subscription? Is it really worth your time and effort? Some would say yes, the vast majority really DGAF. People have been lulled into not caring about stuff like personal privacy and having a say in what's being peddled to you.

There's always a choice… unless you want to access your bank account that is. In which case there is no choice but to use the official unrooted android OS.

Am I the only one that found that to be a reasonable edge case?

The seat heating was apparently shortening the life of the leather seats. Its cheaper to include heated seats in all cars, than it is to maintain 2 different sets of production. The subscription basically offsets the cost of needing to replace the seats more frequently when the heating is enabled.

Likewise, if you manually enabled the seat heaters, then complained that the seats were falling apart quickly, having given you a legal out to get that feature enabled in warranty, would not have to replace your seats for free.

Not to mention, they apparently already ditched the subscription over backlash.

> The subscription basically offsets the cost of needing to replace the seats more frequently when the heating is enabled

I never heard of car-manufacturers periodically replacing seats within warranty because of the wear of the material, regardless of being "more frequently" or not. This sounds like a massive oversight in product-design.

Of all the cases I know, the customer had to bear the cost of such "wear and tear" cases.

How about automated high/low beam switching or enabling the nominal power of your car instead of handicapping it by default?

If you agree that above are edge cases too, I have a Volkswagen to sell you [0].

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQNeIcQXy74

>How about automated high/low beam switching

I would want the ability to change that. I actually think I can mess with that on my car.

>enabling the nominal power of your car instead of handicapping it by default?

Big topic for me. My car has a DPF, and appears to have been geared such that despite containing an automatic DPF burn process, the engine never quite reaches the required temperature, so I need to perform manual burns.

I have straight up asked the dealer for a method to enable the auto burn process, manually. And have asked if theres a retune available, to make the gearing just a little bit less efficient, giving me more power and more engine heat.

The issue, pretty much verbatim from their head regional diesel mechanic is that any modifications of that nature would fuck the emissions standards they had to limbo under. So its categorically denied. They also issued me with stern official warnings that anything I do to make the car more reliable may also void my warranty. And the unofficial advice I have received is that the DPF is "f*cked mate" and to "get the petrol hybrid before the government forces it to wear a similar PPF"

The car also very suspiciously moderates the engine output unrelated to gearing/tune. Just sometimes underperforms at random. I believe its computational again, like you say, handicapping it for emissions reasons.

These things are largely optional for me, but I wont mess with them too much until I am out of warranty.

> I would want the ability to change that. I actually think I can mess with that on my car.

Yes, generally you can disable on demand, but Volkswagen now sells the feature as a subscription. So you need to pay to enable. Maybe this is because it reduces the lifespan of the LEDs. Who knows.

> handicapping it for emissions reasons.

Volkswagen sells you another subscription for that now, at least for their electric vehicles. You can buy the option if you want your EV to perform as it's designed.

Emissions is a completely different beast. However their 140HP and 170HP TFSI engines had no different parts rather than the mapping.

Manipulating engines in a way which alters their carbon footprint is a sensitive topic, and while I was positive towards diesel systems, the particulate matter they emit, the fog they cause (see Paris photos, it's eye opening) and German engineering at its finest (i.e. Dieselgate scandal) soured me from diesel's automotive applications, big time, permanently.

> Volkswagen sells you another subscription for that now, at least for their electric vehicles. You can buy the option if you want your EV to perform as it's designed.

You can also buy "for life" subscription (around £600, if I remember the news about it correctly), so you could also say that the stronger engine costs 600 pounds more when you purchase the car. Not too different to buying the cars in the past: more powerful engine adds to the price tag.

Instead, you can sell the cars at increased (nominal, actually) power and remove the lower tier altogether while keeping the cost savings of removing another production line and logistics for the lower powered motor. Moreover you can allow users to have a choice of power from get go (i.e. Reduce to 150KW for more range). It's a couple of variables at most. Will changing the variables too much will wear down storage that faster?

Same is true for the internal combustion engines. Since they already developed the ability to store multiple maps and change the mapping when required. :)

But, where's the value in that, I mean for shareholders, innit?

FWIW, the traditional engineering argument in this case is:

By selling the same hardware with multiple tiers of functionality artificially locked behind increased prices, it becomes profitable to develop and manufacture products that would otherwise not make economic sense. This occurs when there aren't enough potential buyers of the full-featured version at a price that makes the full-featured version on its own profitable, but the sum of all customers at all price/functionality tiers is profitable. i.e. this model results in products that would otherwise not exist.

I have mixed feelings about that argument. The main one being that it's not much of a stretch to go from that to "the full-featured version sold at price X would be profitable, but because most customers are willing do do without the higher tiers of functionality, we can make even more money by selling a reduced-functionality version at price X, and charge a premium for the extra features", and it sure seems like that's what a lot of American businesses do. But I assume at least some of the time, it really is the former and not the latter.

Ok, let's say you own an iPhone. Please try install alternative OS on your iPhone, if you succeed, you own your phone.

In a legal sense, yes. In a practical and technical sense, no.

The contention point will be whether you purchased the device or not.

This is a ridiculous take.

And the answer is we don't. If we can't run our own software, then we do not own the computer. To run software of our choosing we need the cryptographic keys to the machine and we sure as hell don't own those keys.

The thing is most people do not want to mess with computers. They are terrified they are going to break them. Frankly they are not wrong. I spent yesterday just trying to get a div tag to flow correctly with all the objects around it, a whole day down the drain. I have a pretty good idea what I am doing. However, for others these things we call computers are inscrutable devices that just 'decide' to do something wrong. We have built this https://xkcd.com/2347/ and expect everyone to be cool with it. Most people most certainly are not, and are willing to give away whatever just to make it easier to use, and not randomly screw up. Apple and Google can take whatever they gave away now because well most people really do not care. The rest of us can pound sand for all they care. We effectively have a duopoly and they are acting exactly in the manor of that.

Also add "the right to maintain". Too many Android devices have drivers hidden behind kernel forks that will never be updated.

I'd love to install OpenWRT on my portable 5g modem currently running Android - . but I can't and likely never will. Same for my IoT automated blinds

Reminds of RMS's The Right To Read - http://mat.puc-rio.br/~nicolau/stallmann/tycho10h.html

Computing devices hardware and operating systems should be treated as essential digital infrastructure, with laws in place to ensure that the owner of the device retains full control over it and to prevent manufacturers or developers from over-imposing their control.

Computing devices hardware and operating systems should be treated as a consumer's choice.

If a company offers some benefit at the cost of some restriction, then users should decide if that benefit is worth the cost. For most Android users, it will be - my grandma isn't interested in the freedom of indie devs to develop for her phone, she's interested in not accidentally installing malware.

I don't like that as much as you don't - for my own devices. But like anyone else who cares about that, I can root it and get past the digital nanny state.

If you treat it as a consumer choice, there's a rather uncomfortable marketing question - "What, precisely, is the value proposition of a locked down Android device?"

A few years ago "A smartphone so intuitive that grandma can understand it." used to literally be one of the arguments cited for picking iOS over Android. The UX is far more polished and you are far more likely to find an interesting iOS-exclusive app than an Android-exclusive.

Further, as a hardware manufacturer, Apple is far more likely to manage its walled garden in the consumer's interest, as compared to Google - an advertising company.

If Android gets locked up, all the high-end Android manufacturers, especially Samsung, are going to face a slow, but inevitable death.

I would agree of there was a choice or actual free market. But there isn't, and your argument is fundamentally flawed. Because there often is no actual choice, the options are artificially restricted. Starting with, many phones cannot be rooted. Then, if you can root, multiple functions are suddenly unavailable, not because of a fundamental technical problem, but because Google, the phone OEM or the app dev decided to not give you the options you wanted.

The Play Store doesn’t protect your grandma from installing malware. Using that as an excuse for transferring control is weak and carries much bigger consequences.

Owner having full control over the device does not prevent a company to offer same benefits and restrictions. But these restrictions need to be optional, so the owner can decide whether to enable or disable them.

There is no chance that we own our computers unless we figure out how to setup chip manufacturing factories at the 10 million dollar price point.

Without commoditized hardware, big capital will surely be in control of software.

I think there is also still room to legally require a common SW-layer with respective documentation to utilize features of underlying hardware (optional without the shipped OS on top, disconnecting the device from the shipped ecosystem).

This would also make sense in order to prevent e-waste and put this old hardware to better use.

It's crazy to think how much computing power is just added to a drawer or landfill every day, just because there is no reason for the vendor to allow you to repurpose it.

I would e.g. LOVE a "Browser on everything" OS which just provides a Browser OS for outdated hardware, but the only way this could work on scale would be if the device-vendor would be mandated to provide and document the lower layer...

I can buy a computer, disable secure boot, install linux and then do w/e I want.

Same can be true for phones?

But I want" secure boot. It makes me* safer.

For the same reason I relock bootloader after flashing alternative Android flavour on my phone.

You didn't write the code for the bios, nor could you.

There's always a degree to which the manufacturer has to.

What about Coreboot/Libreboot?

https://www.coreboot.org/

https://libreboot.org/

Even with Coreboot on anything vaguely modern, there is a 'Management Engine' or 'Platform Security Processor' you can't practically control. On the better understood Intel versions, this is running a full MINIX 3 operating system and controls the network card in ways the BIOS and operating system root cannot monitor. It runs a significant amount of code; with hardware obfuscation that has not yet been broken.

You are right of course, but I consider that a hardware concern, not BIOS.

Sorry, no banking for you then.

Pretty sure this would boost fintech/blockchain apps even more vs. using banks directly, if it ever happened.

Even now, I don't really use a bank app for 90% of my needs.

No traditional banking at your parts? Actually I am informed those at your site can provide more services (more open) than the banks I have around now.

But here, no, only some bad players require a smartphone and an account to OS providers to make the bank account work.

I'm holding on to my rolling token generator like it is made of gold, they won't give me another one and force me to use their app. But the app requires a non-rooted phone or it will refuse to function. I've already asked them to give me a free phone just like they gave me a free token generator. So far no dice. Oh, and better still, for large transactions you are not allowed to use the phone app.

> I've already asked them to give me a free phone just like they gave me a free token generator

It's not a matter of free, it's a matter of "certified": they make you use third party devices, but if anything happens they may make it your fault on the legal side. If a device is part of the banking agreement, the device must come from the bank and the responsibility must rely entirely on the bank.

> app

In all of this: how can it be remotely possible to think that in order to get a critical service - accessing your money - one could be supposed to have a contract with some remote alien party (the "App Store")? Because I am guessing your bank does not directly give you the "app". Already this makes me wonder about how the population can be blind to unbelievable levels to the systemic insanity.

Some of them do not require any smartphone - but some of them require that you make a contract with an uncontrolled firm on a different continent to have a money deposit account. And the amount of people who will go "are you mental?!" in front of them are presumably (evidently) negligible.

Good question, I am not able to answer it though. But you are right, it makes no sense at all.

This is something the folks in the Permacomputing space have been discussing on and off for years.

Maybe we can make chips at the level of a 386 but they would be freedom respecting.

Starting to sound like Stallman again.

https://github.com/x653/xv6-riscv-fpga is a fully open RISC-V core, using fully open tools written to tiny FPGA. It betters 386 performance, is practical for an individual to recreate, and it is almost inconceivable that the underlying hardware could have compromised this usage. If your security posture cares about ME et al. you also shouldn't be running any form of speculation, so 'modern' performance would be off the table even if you bought Nvidia and TSMC. I would more judge a concerted effort comparable to larger open source projects could design verifiable hardware for processes that it readily available to crowdfunded projects that are more efficient and performant then anything released in the previous millennium.

We live in a world where the top chip makers are being shaken down by the US government to keep access to markets because embargoes and tariffs. And where software developers have to have a live feed of what every user is doing to Brussels or be arrested.

Too much capitalism isn't our problem.

> And where software developers have to have a live feed of what every user is doing to Brussels or be arrested.

Please elaborate, with sources.

Likely referring to EU Chat Control: https://brusselssignal.eu/2025/08/eu-chat-control-law-is-a-s...

So something that is not a thing yet, and is being actively campaigned against?

Yes, we normally act when the vehicle speeding towards us is seen far away already.

Most member states are for it.

Sounds like if US citizens hope for that, we can get it.

Conditioning such rights on the device being "owned outright" will just push the same bad actors to rent you the phones instead of buying them, the same as they did with software licenses. The only way to really fix it is to break up the wealth and power of individuals and corporations based on their total effective power, regardless of the source from which that power is derived.

>The only way to really fix it is to break up the wealth and power of individuals and corporations based on their total effective power

That simply transfers the power to the one doing the breakup, which in most cases, are the Governments, which are notoriously known to invade user's privacy under the guise of protection of children or whatever.

Tell that to all those assholes that are making malware and scamming society on billions.

Most of users are not able to keep themselves safe in the internet - they want to install all kind of crap without thinking too much.

All of this is companies making it possible that average Joe could just click links, install any kind of crap and still be somewhat secure.

This is not related to malware or scams, and using that is nothing but a PR smoke screen.

While Android is vulnerable, especially to user stupidity, people mostly get scammed by fake credit card charges or by giving access to their notifications and contacts allowing for spam.

And yes, while there are "infected" APK's for popular apps , this again isn't the case here.

The real case here is money.

Apple earns $27B from commision on apps, while Google earns about $3B. Why?

Because Android users are "less willing to pay", which includes pirated APK's and "unlocked" app versions. Eliminating the possibility of using these for 99% of the people will be enough to force them to pay for that app/service in the end, raising the Play store revenues.

Do not trust Google when it comes to "doing it for the user" - their mission is to establish as strong of a monopoly on the platforms and extract as much value as possible. They spent more money on lawyers & policy lobbyists in the last 10 years trying to keep Android closed than some S&P500 companies are worth.

Well of course they are not "doing it for the user" but that would be a different discussion if scams and malware were out of the picture.

Doesn't this kill two birds with one stone?

Forcing users to pay for apps rather than install pirated APK's and unlocked apps both raises Google's revenue and reduces the risks of malware and scams.

The consequence is naturally, the savvy users who know how to avoid risks lose the ability to have more control over their phone.

This assumes that Google actually does reduce malware and scams within their garden, but they do not. They are just as prevalent (perhaps more so) within the apps that Google certifies.

So the only thing it kills is the risks to Google's revenue, not the risks to users' security.

My opinion on this changed as we helped elderly parents with declining capabilities. The internet is an extremely dangerous place for those less cognitively able.

It is extremely hard to live without the internet - it's almost impossible - everything from your bank to your doctor to restaurants to the barber that wants to be paid by Venmo. Taking away your parent's internet connection is even harder than taking away their driver license. (And also more isolating.)

There is no law enforcement; there's no consequence for scammers; there's no technology stack that is safe for the less able. It's a brutal Wild West where the weakest are attacked without recourse, flooded with misinformation and lies, and targeted by significant financial scams.

Okay and how does play protect and play integrity prevent this? Anyone?

Hint: it does not. Look around the play store, it's 80% malware and scams.

Why is this the case? Because it has to be or Google goes bankrupt. Google is an inherently parasidic company. They make their money off of advertisement, scams, and conjobs. The more shit the digital world is for you, the better for them. You will always have an adversarial relationship with Google.

They don't want ads that don't lie. They don't want apps that are honest. They don't want to limit notifications. They don't want to get rid of email spam.

The reason Apple devices are so much more pleasant for everyday use and there's so much less scams and adware isn't because Apple is a saint. Its because ultimately Apple doesn't give much of a fuck if they screw over con artist, because that's not the thing keeping them from bankruptcy.

Thank you! Apple is just as evil as the next company. The difference is in how they make their money and what their incentives are.

Google has chosen the path of duping their customers by selling them to the highest bidder. That's their business model across the board.

Apple has chosen to sell devices at a significant markup with the inherent agreement that they won't sell their customer to the highest bidder. After building trust in that arena for years, it wouldn't take much to destroy that credibility. So far, they know this. I'm getting concerned about them starting to plug ads into their core applications, so only time will tell if they get MBA'd to shit.

I set my parents up with a computer and locked it down nice and good. A few months later they called me asking me about this full screen message they couldn't figure out how to make go away that was demanding they call Apple or Google for tech support.

I was able to remote in and close it. Then I noticed the message saying uBlock Origin had been disabled in Chrome (because Google broke ad blocking).

Thanks Google.

I actually filed a complaint with the WA Attorney General over that. My older parents got hit by that exact process. So there’s at least a public record complaint that Google is now actively blocking cybersecurity technology (because that’s what adblocking software ultimately is).

Driving is also extremely dangerous for the less congnitive able, that doesn't mean that we should let BMW decide where and when you are allowed to drive.

We also don't trust old people to live on their own, that doesn't mean we force every adult into dormitories.

Driving is licensed and regulated by the government. Are you suggested internet licenses that required semi-regular tests and strict enforcement by governments?

Is driving regulated because drivers can seriously harm themselves, or is is because drivers can easily harm others?

Yes aaand yes.

Interesting choice to cherrypick and then straw man one part of one example. They didn't say the government should get to decide where someone drives; it was the OEM, BMW in their example. That is basically what Google is doing here by locking down a previously open-ish platform.

Having a license doesn't mean you are restricted in where you can go unless we start considering the fringes like provisional (learners') permits complete with curfew. Therefore, your example doesn't fit. But OP's does, because it is equivalent to asking "do you think your refrigerator should refuse to cool items manufactured by an entity it doesn't like... to Keep You Safe(tm)?" Maybe you buy from non-verified cottage industry workers at the local farmers market. People who maybe didn't upload their PII and licenses to the refrigerator manufacturer, so it refuses to operate until you remove the offending item. Out of the utmost respect for your safety, of course.

Imagine if Charter Communications/Spectrum decided to block you from using their service and modem/routers from accessing any media created by Universal (owned by their rival, Comcast). It doesn't really have anything to do with safety, but they could pearl clutch and blame it on some risqué content that Universal releases via its imprints.

Yes, but this doesn't do absolutely anything to prevent this.

I've helped elderly family members and non-techie ones who barely know how to open a facebook account - none of them had "malware apps" installed. Their problems were mostly these:

- Websites asking for notification permission just to spam with unrelated malware or porn notifications

- Their calendars being filled with events that are nothing but links to porn or gambling sites, leading to constant notifications

- Apps that don't work yet are filled with ads - blood pressure meter on your phone, sugar level measurements, step trackers - filled with ads and trying to get 1000$ purchases

- An app actually being a launcher filling your screen with ads.

- Hell, even I, as someone who has deep intimate knowledge of Google Play Billing, got scammed by an app when upgrading from their weekly to their monthly offer, with them now charging both.

Google can intervene at any point here, they have reviewers, they control the store, they control the browser, hell, they basically control the device. And they have rules and policies for it, but it's convenient for them to ignore it. They have their cash cows and will fight tooth and nail to protect them as long as it makes them profit.

> Websites asking for notification permission just to spam with unrelated malware or porn notifications

People have been giving Apple shit forever for not supporting this "web standard" in Safari, but it's 99% used nefariously for this exact purpose. Websites should not be able to send push notifications.

I do not want websites to have equal capabilities to apps. Installing an app on my device is a very purposeful decision I make that I only do if I'm trusting it and willing to manage its permissions. Visiting a website is not.

Then maybe it should be more opt-in. We're losing settings and configurability as time goes on. And like encryption it can be a one way street, requiring a full reset to turn it off. That's open security. This is a cash grab

you're describing the dangers of the open internet, but this is about the dangers of non-app-store apps. android already makes it quite difficult to side-load non-app-store apps; certainly not something a tech-illiterate user could do by accident.

Their incentive is even stronger: most users of ReVanced for example unlock YouTube, which belongs to Google. In that case we are talking about 100% revenue loss, not 30% app commission. This goes for NewPipe, etc.

I wonder if OsmAnd, Termux, F-Droid would survive this or will be casualties. Who will authenticate for a decentralized open source app that has 100 active contributors?

Exactly, especially when Google can revoke your account or keys at anytime.

Basically this give Google the way to blacklist any app you release now, in or out the play store for the sake of "security".

It's just about control and finally squashing the app that aren't to Google taste.

I can't image that ad blockers or ReVanced has any real impact on YouTube. I'm the only one I know using either. So that's 1 in about 300 maybe?

Locking down Chrome and killing ad blockers is not some huge effort, it's closer to the flick of a wrist. Neither is locking down android. They can just do it. And if they think there is nothing anybody can do about it, they will, to get that last 0.01%.

But no doubt they are under an enormous amount of pressure to do this from a variety of corporations and governments as well.

> Tell that to all those assholes that are making malware and scamming society on billions.

So like Google?

Software that acts against the wishes of the user is malware, let's not forget that.

Completely agree. We seem to have forgotten the word "spyware", I don't see it used anymore because it became the norm. But let's call things by what they are.

Exactly this; the vast majority of people cannot be trusted with root access. And for those that can, the majority won't need or want it.

While I do believe root access should be possible, it shouldn't be easy. Because I'm confident my dad who wants to pirate F1 instead of pay for whichever overpriced premium streaming platform bought the rights this year would root his ipad and install a dodgy stream player if it was easy.

My 75 year old mother has root access, and she is perfectly fine.

> Tell that to all those assholes that are making malware and scamming society on billions.

And then? I don't know how many times I've downloaded APKs, including obviously malicious ones by accident. But not once has it ever been installed - not even when it was deliberate. The only way I ever 'sideloaded' anything is using 3rd party stores (just fdroid and aurora in my case), which themselves had to be installed via ADB after enabling developer mode. If you have that much skill, you're almost surely skilled enough to understand the security implications of sideloading and choose wisely.

And there are far worse malware available on play store than anything on fdroid repositories, if anything at all - anonymous or not. I hope you remember the SimpleMobileApps fiasco. People who installed it from fdroid were safe from the malicious update, but those who did it from play store were not, when the entire suite was turned into a spyware overnight. Not to mention the tea and boxscore apps scandal. Neither would have made it into fdroid. Google cares the least bit about security, if that isn't clear from the spyware tht each new android phone comes bundled with.

In all, Google's claim of security here is deceptive and farcical. The actual target is going to be the patched apps like revanced, root access software and anything else similar that allows the savvy user to escape the unfair and arbitrary limitations imposed by Google. The ultimate target is the users' pockets. This entire discussion is full of people reaffirming that conclusion. But scapegoats will be found and sacrificed regardless. Let's just not for once. Google deserves the atmost and undiluted contempt and condemnation for their greed and their willingness to erode consumer rights that underlie such dishonestly worded hostile and unilateral decisions.

To install 3rd party APKs on Android involves deliberately removing some guard rails. You need to allow it in settings, you need to enable developer mode, you need to agree to each individual source as a trusted source. If people are still blaming malware on this, when malware exists in the actual Play store, then they're delusional.

Right now, the average Joe can't click a link and install a 3rd party app. Meanwhile, you can install malware from the actual authorised sources, or even just come across a vulnerablity in chrome.

Keeping your devices up to date with security patches will save orders of magnitude more people from malicious software than stopping 3rd party app installation.

I occasionally develop Android apps for myself (mostly out of curiosity and experimentation, but sometimes out of a need for some particular functionality). I'm not going to apply for some developer permit and verification just to do this. I may as well buy a damn iPhone.

> You need to allow it in settings, you need to enable developer mode, you need to agree to each individual source as a trusted source. If people are still blaming malware on this, when malware exists in the actual Play store, then they're delusional.

To be fair to the security folks at Google, people will follow these steps like clockwork. The only thing they care about is getting the app on their device.

The root cause of all of this: banking/finance/payment apps figure they can trust your device, because no one has regulated a universal trust root into existence. Google encouraged this with SafetyNet/Play Integrity, and convincing Visa/MasterCard that devices can be trusted for contactless payments.

Now there's one gaping hole left: you can still install unverified software from anywhere, and said software will use all tricks possible to convince users to grant accessibility permissions and give up the keys to the kingdom. There have been many attempts over the years to make this harder, but malicious apps are getting even more sophisticated, to the point of installing shortcuts to entire fake versions of your banking app on the home screen.

So Google is being pressured by governments and markets to make it harder to produce installable malware, when a better way to prevent malware while protecting user freedom is already here: passkeys. You cannot steal passkeys with a third-party app, no matter what tricks you try, because they are tied to domains and APK signatures. Stop trusting stealable credentials and you stop needing to trust the entire hardware and software stack behind the app calling your backend.

You don't have to prevent root access. You just have to inform user of the risks, void warranties if you want but let users do whatever they want with the hardware that they own.

> "void warranties if you want "

Please don't push the Overton Window any further. Installing my own software on my own PC should never void the hardware vendor's warranty. That delegitimizes the core concept of a PC.

(A horrific possible dystopia just flashed through my mind: "I'd love to throw out Chrome and install Firefox so that I could block ads, but, the laptop is expensive, and I can't afford voiding the warranty". I bet Google would *love* that world. Or, a UK version: "I'd love to use a VPN, but, regulation banned them from the approved software markets, and anything else would permanently set the WARRANTY_VIOLATED flag in the TPM").

This is where it's heading, and I see this as the real driving force behind secure boot on x86_64.

It depends on what your software does; if it removes hardware protections then your warranty should be voided. Of course, those protections are either hardware or impossible to remove, like emergency cooling / lowering voltage when stuff overheats.

> You just have to inform user of the risks

Warnings aren't always enough, sometimes we have to lock people down and physically prevent them from harming themselves.

It's not always people being stupid. I recall reading an article by someone who got scammed who seemed generally quite knowledgeable about the type of scam he fell for. As he put it, he was tired, distracted, and caught at the right time.

Outside of that, a lot of the general public have a base assumption of "if the device lets me do it, it's not wrong," and just ignore the warnings. We get so many stupid pop-ups, seemingly silly warning signs (peanuts "may contain nuts") that it's easy to dismiss this as just one example of the nanny state gone mad.

Please read again the sentence you just typed.

> We have to lock people down and physically prevent them from harming themselves.

You can apply this argument to literally anything, and taken to its logical conclusion, this is exactly what will happen.

> sometimes we have to lock people down and physically prevent them from harming themselves

I highlighted the word you missed, deliberately in my opinion, as it completely changes the meaning to exclude your frankly idiotic assertion.

> sometimes we have to lock people down and physically prevent them from harming themselves

Seriously ill people as an exceptional last resort though, right? Or just everyone?

I’ll take a real world example where I watched someone start to climb over the side of a bridge. Luckily my words stopped him but I did consider whether I should pull him back and pin him to the ground for his own good.

Is your position that it would be better for his freedom for me to let him jump if I couldn’t dissuade him?

Even if it's illegal? (like transmitting on forbidden frequencies)

It's not always the user who's installing software. Lots of people depend on other people to manage their devices. Manufacturers like the hardware they delivered to be trusted so users trust it regardless of who handled it.

I always hear as the excuse but it is ridiculous. If the user wants to transmit on "illegal" frequencies, all he has to do is to change the country setting in their Wi-Fi router, et voilà, illegal transmissions.

The entire Android OS has about as much access to radios than your average PC, if not less. In fact, even on recent android devices, wireless modems still tend to show up to the OS as serial devices speaking AT (hayes) (even if the underlying transport isn't, or even if the baseband is in the same chip). Getting them to transmit illegal frequencies is as much easy or hard as is getting a 4G USB adapter to do it.

At least in EU, transmitting is illegal, having hardware to transmit is not.

That's why people can buy TX/RX SDRs and Yaesu transceivers without a license.

AFAIK the radioamateur world, serious violations of frequency plans are rare and are usually quickly handled by regulators. OTOH, everyone is slightly illegal, e.g. transmitting encrypted texts or overpowering their rigs, but that's part of the fun.

And in some locations, quickly handled by the local amateur community, with foxhunts and community outreach to frequency violators - only getting regulators involved when just talking to the offenders fails.

> Even if it's illegal? (like transmitting on forbidden frequencies)

That's not relevant here. If frequencies are illegal, it should be impossible to program it in such a way. But even otherwise, it's the responsibility of the user to follow local laws. If I have a PTT phone, it's not legal for me to use forbidden frequencies just because it's possible. Why do these manufacturers care about what doesn't concern them when they violate even bigger laws all the time?

> It's not always the user who's installing software. Lots of people depend on other people to manage their devices.

That should be up to the user. Here we are talking about users who want to decide for themselves what their device does. You're talking as if giving the user that choice is the injustice. Nope. Taking away the choice is.

> Manufacturers like the hardware they delivered to be trusted so users trust it regardless of who handled it.

I see what you did here. But here is the thing. Securing a device is not antithetical to the user's freedom. That was what secure boot chain was originally supposed to accomplish until Microsoft managed to corrupt it into a tool for usurping control from the user.

Manufacturer trust is a farce. They should be deligating that trust to the user upon the sale of the device, through well proven concepts as explained above. They chose to distrust the user instead. Why? Greed!

> If frequencies are illegal, it should be impossible to program it in such a way.

You know there's a very fine line between hardware and software in this case so you're actually advocating for drm like control here.

> They should be deligating that trust to the user upon the sale of the device, through well proven concepts as explained above.

That same user who forgets passwords and recovery keys all the time and loses all access to documents when a device breaks? And you're presuming giving that kind of person who doesn't understand sh*t about backups, device security etc full access to their devices will not result in a lot of compromised devices?

I'm not sure manufacturers are the best party to trust but they have an interest in a secure reputation, which the majority of dumb users or eavesdropping governments do not have.

> They chose to distrust the user instead. Why? Greed!

There are more reasons to distrust the user. I don't buy greed is the only relevant one.

> so you're actually advocating for drm like control here.

Absolutely not. I'm saying that the hardware shouldn't have that capability at all in the first place. But whatever. Don't restrict it. Those functionalities are usually under the control of the kernel. If the user is smart enough to tinker with the subsystems at that level, they're also smart enough to deal with the consequences of its misuse. That isn't a good justification to just lock down devices like this. The harm that comes out of that is much worse than what anyone can do with an RF baseband chip.

> That same user who forgets passwords and recovery keys all the time and loses all access to documents when a device breaks? And you're presuming giving that kind of person who doesn't understand sh*t about backups, device security etc full access to their devices will not result in a lot of compromised devices?

Yeah, so? It's not like such a person is ever going to unlock a complex safety lock. Examples for that exist already. Who can sideload an app into a fresh Android device without enabling the developer mode and then installing the APK through ADB? Dumb users won't ever persist enough to reach there. To take it further, the user can be given the root key to the secure boot chain on a piece of paper with the explicit instruction to not share it with anyone or even use it if they don't know how to. Ordinary users can then go on about their day as if it is fully locked down. It's unfair to deny the control of the device to the smart user, when such a security is possible. The existence of a dumb user is not an excuse to lock out smart users.

> but they have an interest in a secure reputation, which the majority of dumb users or eavesdropping governments do not have.

I guess you haven't seen the spyware that OEMs ship with the android devices. Even Samsung is notorious for it - especially on their smart TVs. I'm not going to talk at all about the Chinese OEMs. For that matter, it's very hard for a normal user to even uninstall facebook - an app that's known to collect information from the device that it doesn't need. Manufacturers caring for their security reputation was some 20 years ago. Only Apple does it these days, just because it's their highlight feature. But even they tried once to ship off images on the phone to iCloud without the users' permission to 'check it for csam'. The rest treat it like a portable spying device on steroids.

> There are more reasons to distrust the user. I don't buy greed is the only relevant one.

Trusting the user isn't the manufacturer's prerogative. It's supposed to be the user's property once they pay for it. You are insisting on the manufacturer retaining control even afterwards - something I and many others vehemently oppose as unfair and scummy. Now if you are worried about the security reputation, proven methods exist that allow the smart users to take full control of the device while preventing regular users from shooting their own foot. But OEMs and their apologists pretend that the problem is entirely on the user side and the only solution is to lock it down in a block of glue. And there is one good reason for this ignorance, oversight and denial - greed. Retaining control over the end device forever allows them to squeeze users for their every last penny. I will need another epic post just to enumerate the ways in which the control over the end devices allows them to do so. But I'm not going to do that because HN has entire stories and discussions on each of those topics.

Especially if it's illegal (like speaking against the government, in some countries).

Maybe this is a bit of a hot take, but I think any government that has the ability to absolutely prevent people from breaking the law is a government with far too much power. I'm all in favor of law enforcement, but at some point it starts to cross over the line from enforcement to violation of people's free will.

Yes, very clear warnings; I could live with a small permanent icon in the status bar (via the GPU firmware) etc. But absolutely should not void warranties (overclocking might but never just root).

If you can't destroy your own hardware by rooting, do you have true root access?

Easy enough to have an efuse blow if you overvolt; then an dificult conversion on a warrenty claim. Whilst ideologically this is ceeding some control I can accept it.

I don't think users understand the risks. I'm broadly accepting of the protection of end users through mechanisms. Peoples entire lives are managed through these small devices. We need much better sandboxing to almost create a separate 'VM' for critical apps such as banking and messaging.

The problem is Dunning Kruger effect.

The people who shouldn't disable these security features tend to be the first to do so. And then complain the loudest when the enter the "find out" phase.

Google themselves promotes malware - take a look at the play store. Adware, adware, adware, name meant to confuse people, more adware, probably has a keyloggers, adware adware, probably steals your data, adware adware.

For fucks sake, Meta is at the point they're pulling malware tactics to sell ads.

Circumventing permissions for app to browser talking? Really? FOR ADS? Thats where we're at?

I'm over it. Anyone who thinks this has even the faintest thing to do with malware is legitimately delusional. Not misinformed, delusional.

I think we should actively make the web more hostile again.

I know literally 0, 0 people who have installed malwares or had their smartphones hacked in their life times.

The very few I know that have had this happen where all computer users, and virtually all victims of social hacking such as "hey, I'm from IT department, sending you an email, could you please...". A friend of mine exposed sensible data of thousands of customers of her bank like this.

well, as someone working in a department that also has Fraud detection responsibilities, the amount of users that lose tons of money because of scam apps, spoofed apps, identity stealing apps, is big. Like insanely big. I am all for it that these apps get significantly harder for the average joe to install or run on their phones.

It's a considerable number well into the 8 figures $/year that we have to cover (Granted this number is not specifically smartphones, also includes desktops, but I know smartphones is the bigger piece nowadays.)

(insuring this is near impossible, there is always a large part risk we have to pay ourselves and cannot cede to a reinsurer)

The problem isn't play protect or whatever the fuck, because 80% of the play store is malware, adware, and spyware anyway.

The problem is actually Google and other big tech.

Let's consider: why are users installing so many apps?

Because, on desktop, this doesn't happen. We don't ask people to download and run an EXE to look at their friends funny cat photos. No, we open the web browser.

The reason we have so many apps on mobile is because we require the malware. Google requires the malware. We need to be able to run privileged and unsandboxed code on users devices and this is the world that Apple and Google have created.

Users shouldn't be fucking downloading apps for 90% of the stuff they do anyway - including the non malicious apps! But they do, because they have no choice.

Think about it. Provide a web interface and miss out on juicy spyware? Or install executables on your customers systems? Apps are far too enticing for big tech.

it's very common in india

… who know about it.

> scamming society on billions

so somehow my friends and family got hacked, lost money but don't know about it?

actually i know of one case where my mom got billed for airbnb even tho she didn't book the ticket but pretty sure I had her password in a text file so might've been me that got hacked on my PC.

Airbnb refunded her and then had no more issues. So 1 case in my entire life and it probably wasn't on a mobile device.

You can get hacked without losing money. If you devices gets used in a bot net, if your computer gets used to mine crypto, etc. Your work files gets stolen by hackers and sold to competitors in china, etc.

All those are things normal people wont notice.

> bot net

Fair enough, but besides mail spam which is filterable and DDos for which there are counter services, does it really impose that big of an issue to justify such a strict lockdown?

> mine crypto

Considering how little mining power mobile devices have and how anyone would figure out pretty fast there's a problem with heat / battery issues from it idk if that's really realistic these days. Hard to keep this one hidden while also profitable

> work files gets stolen

I think this has already been solved by corporations on PCs, there are already solutions for locking down a work issues laptop as for phone I think that's rarely an issue since people mostly use it for communications so probably rare for really sensitive info to be on there.

Overall those issues don't really hit me as that critical to impose such measures and there are ways to severely limit impact for people that care about security

> Considering how little mining power mobile devices have and how anyone would figure out pretty fast there's a problem with heat / battery issues from it idk if that's really realistic these days. Hard to keep this one hidden while also profitable

I mean, check out HiddenMiner, ADB.Miner, HummingBad, WireX…

I agree that this is an overreaction, but the problem is real, and the fact you don’t know anyone who knows they’ve had a malware infection doesn’t mean that that is reality.

Malware is not a huge problem that requires restructuring the entire ecosystem to be closed and authoritarian. Nobody I know has ever had problems with malware or scams on Android.

This has nothing to do with malware, and has everything to do with locking down the Android ecosystem to keep out competitors to Google's services.

Take away all these freedoms and users will still get scammed. It doesn't help and it's not the real point.

Root access on your phone isn't enough: there's layers below root.

I accidentally read this as "there's lawyers below root" and I'm not sure I'm wrong.

It's lawyers all the way down :)

No matter what runlevel you’re on, judges are lower still.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runlevel

This. But being able to get root is a very good starting point.

Yep. I don't need/want root access, as it is too much of a security risk IMO. But of course the possibility to install a `su` binary should be there.

I primarily want to be able to unlock the bootloader to install a custom de-googled Android Version (such as GrapheneOS) and then lock the bootloader again (using a custom_avb_key). This is currently possible with Google's Pixel devices, but most Android devices don't even offer this...

This should be a part of right to repair. The grouping would get more people with common cause together.

100% in alignment with this! Direct quote from the end of the post I linked:

“In the broader conversation of right to repair regulations, we also need to be thinking about a "right to root access" for computing devices.” :)

I see no other way than regulation to force the two to provide drivers and manuals for alternative OS makers.

We should've nipped it with Apple, but there was so much _whatabout_ing that the conversation always go sidetracked with assertions about the free market and what not. It turns out, there is no free market, and we're just living in someone's managed device walled garden.

It's amazing how often we hamper the majority of society by protecting the bottom quintile from the consequences of their own mistakes.

That's not what it's ever actually about. You're buying a disingenuous framing that pins blame on the bottom when all these harmful trends come from the top. This isn't to protect grandma, it's to protect Google. This is always what happens when you allow pockets of power with interests misaligned from those of most people. The pockets of power get their way, and people are worse off.

The thing is, even if Google has a hidden motive in this case, the prevailing public morality doesn't allow you to argue against a measure designed to protect the weakest and poorest among us. Once a vulnerable group has been invoked, the public stops caring about their rights, the cost-benefit balance and most other rational concerns.

I think the phenomenon is most visible in the United Kingdom. Not just with respect to the recent age verification measures, but also with respect to the government's recent financial misadventures.

That's not entirely wrong but I dislike the framing.

It appears to transfer the guilt of a successful deception that manufactures consent to public morality and the vulnerable. The real issue is it couldn't succeed without mendacious officials that suffer no consequences and uncritical/supportive media pushing the ball across the line.

It's also a much broader phenomenon than "protect the vulnerable". There are many other overused buttons they press to seek consent e.g. fear being the most common. Fear of terrorism, fear of job losses or tax rises, prejudice of others etc.

> You're buying a disingenuous framing

Of course it's a disingenuous framing. A certain kind of person is both attracted to power and deathly afraid of people voicing unapproved opinions "outside their kitchens".

Things can have multiple justifications, some public, some not: some conscious, some not. Central control and a feeling that a parental figure is in control of the tribe primes, at a primal level, a certain kind of person to like an idea. The specific post-hoc justification is almost incidental.

That said, such things need a semblance of legitimacy to work. It'd be much harder to crack down on general purpose computing under the guise of safety if we had cultural antibodies agains safetyism in general.

I have a friend from college who once clicked on a link to download more RAM for his PC. He has a PhD now and deserves it - the PhD just isn’t in anything tech-adjacent. Bottom quintile is a floating signifier.

Everyone makes mistakes

Protecting the bottom quintile from consequences of thier mistakes also protects everyone else if they ever make those mistakes in a momentary lapse

Maybe society shouldn't be structured in such a way that people have to be constantly hyper vigilant to avoid mistakes with high consequences

It's just not possible to prevent mistakes while letting people color outside the lines. Most brilliant ideas look like stupidity at first. I want to live in a world that biases towards discovery over safety.

There is a line, at least a blurry one, though.

There is not much to discover from e.g. not using seatbelts. There is absolutely a need to protect a population from itself which should cover certain stuff, while not others.

> There is absolutely a need to protect a population from itself which should cover certain stuff

No, there isn't. I'd much rather live in a world where we were able to make our own decisions about personal safety, regardless of how poor those decisions are.

In a perfect world, nobody would be forced to wear a seatbelt and yet everyone would eagerly wear one.

I'd also much rather live in a world where everyone does the right thing, there's no greed, stupidity and short-sightedness. Unfortunately I have to make do with our current one. The fact is that a lot of people are stupid. Even very clever people often act irrationally and against their own interests. In the end, we have to strike a balance between personal freedom and the need to protect people from themselves.

Let's look at the case of mandatory seatbelts, and entertain your proposition that people don't need to be protected from themselves. What will happen?

Well, quite a few things are basically inevitable:

1. The issue will be politicized and there'll be hardliners who refuse to wear seatbelts. There are people who are vehemently against wearing full face helmets while riding motorbikes, even though the injuries from faceplanting into the road at speed are truly ghastly. 2. Once the number of people not wearing seatbelts goes up, a whole slew of interesting negative externalities pop up (and you seem to be gleefully ignoring these): 2.a) Simple fender benders will suddenly result in severe and fatal injuries instead of scuffs and bruises. 2.b) Insurance costs increase to cover the higher likelihood of injuries. 2.c) Fewer people can afford insurance. 2.d) Society has to bear the burden of treating and supporting people who get maimed and need lifelong care.

So what is your proposal to do here? What would you do with a person who didn't wear a seatbelt and got severely brain damaged due to this? Just abandon them to die? It was their choice after all. Who should bear the burden of treating these people? Do we now have tailor made insurance for those who don't wear seatbelts? What if these people will simply opt out of insurance?

At the end of the day, a society has to make a few pragmatic tradeoffs and limit certain freedoms as the cost is just not worth it.

Your comment is a perfect example of the worldview I described. Your argument is essentially that without rules stupid people will do foolish things and get hurt.

Yes, they will. So what? That's the price of freedom. I've never been a fan of slave morality.

> Who should bear the burden of treating these people?

You're arguing that we're all the hook if we let people do dangerous things and clean up after them when they screw up. There are two ways out of this situation, not one.

There's a direct line from mandating seatbelts to mandating developer certificates. If you accept in one domain that it's legitimate for power to reduce freedom to protect people from themselves, you'll accept it in every domain.

Look: in order for a mandate to be justifiable, it needs to at least provide superlinear benefit to linear adoption. That is, it has to solve a coordination problem.

Do seat belts solve any coordination problem? Do they benefit anyone but those wearing them? No. Therefore, the state has no business mandating them no matter the harm prevented.

A certain kind of person thinks differently though. He sees "harm" and relishes the prospect of "protecting" people from that "harm". They don't recognize the legitimacy of individual bad decisions. The self is just another person trying to hurt you. This kind of person would turn the whole world into a rubberized playground if he could.

> Do seat belts solve any coordination problem? Do they benefit anyone but those wearing them? No. Therefore, the state has no business mandating them no matter the harm prevented.

If drivers were the only ones who wore seatbelts, you would have a point. In practice, seatbelts save the lives of the passengers, spouses, kids, etc. who are riding in the car, and hence this is indeed a coordination problem.

You don't necessarily need to prevent all the mistakes, you can often just make them less costly.

s/the bottom quintile from the consequences of their own mistakes/the top centile from antitrust law/g

The "bottom quintile"? By what metric?

To be fair to Google, they got so much cricticism for allowing so many spam apps.

Why do we need app stores in the first place?!? No app stores => no vetting, let users download whatever apps they choose, and deal with the consequences.

Agreed. The store are unnecessary and sold under the guise of "protecting" the user, when it's really about controlling user use, keeping them ignorant and spying on them.

Google does not care if your data is leaked by an app offered by some nebulously defined verified developer that phones home without reason, or that you develop a problem with online gambling or predatory micro transactions, etc. Blows my mind that we have come this far in the fight for user rights, ownership and accountability and still the majority is going to just trust Google because they're Google. No corporation is your friend. Let the users operate the device they paid for* as they see fit, learning to accept the responsibility for for all the success and failures that come with it and we will suddenly start seeing much, much smarter users.

Mostly it's about milking app sales with the app store fees. Apple for instance get's about 15-20% of it's gross profit from app store fees. For Google it has been estimated that play store fees make up about 13% of their Google services profit.

I think initiatives like this are a form of "marketing" to show that "hey, app stores are important because we protect the users. We shouldn't be regulated away."

App stores are riddled not only with spyware and malware, but also with harmful content like gambling apps targeted at kids. And they claim some moral high ground as an excuse to ever more pervasive spying and control? Fuck me, Stallman was right all along.

It's a tricky balance-act to secure their ecosystem.

The more measures they take to secure it while allowing the user to decide whether to participate, the more drastic this opt-out user-decision becomes.

In order to now preserve that "open ecosystem", they would have to provide the user an option to disable Google Services entirely, which would turns the device almost into a separate product

All this is unlikely to happen just for the sake of "pleasing the community", I believe we need a general legally binding definition of what functions the user owns if (and when) a device is stripped of any services on top.

If my car loses functions once it loses connection to the manufacturer, this bare set should be communicated as the purchased value ("in exchange for your money"), separately from any on-top "in exchange for your data" business-model

The problem is phones became too important. They get trusted more than desktops for things like banking and ID verification.

Feeling like the optimum solution is to just have two devices. Your phone that has all of your banking, ID, etc. and another device that’s completely open, can install whatever you want on, but doesn’t matter too much if it gets hacked.

If this is a reasonable direction, it could still be achieved on the same device. There would be sufficient security architecture available to completely isolate those two areas.

But I feel the issue is less about malware gathering your banking, ID etc, but malware holding your data hostage, using your (social) network for nefarious purposes or tricking you into something you don't want to do.

And for all those cases, having that "other" device doesn't help.

> If this is a reasonable direction, it could still be achieved on the same device. There would be sufficient security architecture available to completely isolate those two areas.

The problem here is: Who controls the means of input and output - the screen and keyboard? The trusted identity thingy sometimes needs to show the user some details, have them key in a pin number, things like that. So they know whether they're approving a $2 in-app purchase, or a 10-bitcoin transfer.

If the free and open part of the system controls the screen and keyboard, the details could be shown wrong and the pin number could be keylogged and replayed later.

If the secure-and-locked-down part of the system controls the screen and keyboard, the free and open part of the system is basically reduced to an app or website.

And if the secure-and-locked-down part of the system has its own separate screen and keyboard - it's hardly the same device.

Dual boot + secure boot solves it. People just don't want to use it.

You want to reboot your device any time you need to, say, approve a credit card payment?

No thanks.

> they got so much

And get judged for their reactions, as is proper procedure.

Why am I reading today articles that present an apocalypse without clearly specifying if there is a "way out OS flag" (allow installation of unverified APK)?

Yeah on the play store, nothing wrong with enforcing standards there, but enforcing a monopoly on it changes that.

> we will be confirming who the developer is, not reviewing the content of their app or where it came from.

What is the point of that? Then app content is the problem.

Ideally if they setup manual review then it would resolve some issues.

It's so that when someone installs a fake banking app and gets their money taken they can point the authorities to the right person to arrest.

Very true and this was predictable. That said, I haven't installed any apps for months now since I don't consider Android to be a usable OS anymore. It could be technically, but I have no will to fight Google and manufacturers on their lock down ambitions.

Ironically that degraded phones to be just that. Phones with build-in high quality cameras. For everything else there are better alternatives.

You can't steal something if you can't own it.

so we are doomed? since people don't even really get why right to repair is important this kind of concepts fly way above the head of most peoples..

Sure. You will have the right to root, unless on a device with a locked bootloader. /s

Lets just call it what it is and what we all want. "The right to modify". It doesn't give you the right to copy, so it will never break any law protecting intellectual property.

[dead]

You'll own nothing (not even your digital assets) and be happy!

> Every day we stray farther from the premise that we should be allowed to install / modify software on the computers we own.

I’ve never agreed with this premise.

I buy things that mostly meet my needs and desires in every other walk of life. I’m personally OK with extending this to computers as well.

That doesn't make sense. How do meet your own needs and desires if you can't use your own property the way you want?

And isn't the point in this very situation that people simply can't buy what they want because Google and Apple are a duopoly and now Google is going to follow the path of restricting what you can do with your own property?

> How do meet your own needs and desires if you can't use your own property the way you want?

My needs and desires aren’t that complicated. There’s nothing that I really want or need to do that I can’t do on my phone or iPad.

The logic here seems to be "I don't care about freedom because my jail cell is large enough." What if you wake up one day and it isn't?

Your response reminds me of Snowden's quote, which I'll likely butcher because it's from memory, but roughly: "Saying you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don't care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say".

I'm 45 years old. I've woken up 16,000+ times and it's been fine.

I know what I do on computers/phones/iPads. I know that every computer/phone/iPad I've ever owned has done more or less what I wanted. I'm usually the weak link, not the device.

I don't go to bed worried that the sun is going to rise in the West. I've got things that seem likely to happen to worry about.

If I were in the 0.01%, savings wouldn't be a thing. I wouldn't even need a home. Just go around staying wherever I like for as long as I like doing whatever I want. I wouldn't really care about what google or apple does with their devices, who attacked or defeated whom and all that bs because I wouldn't be in survival mode.

At least this is probably how people in charge of enshittification think like.

This is based on the false assumption that the free market solves every problem.

But the reality (which was correctly identified by Adam Smith himself) is that the effort required to enter a market can sometimes be so high, that we practically end up with oligopolies, see mobile OSs. They require a network effect to make sense, so the entry cost is not just developing the product, but also to somehow convince basically every other player to consider you a target platform - which is a cyclical problem that you can't just bootstrap yourself into. Even Microsoft failed at it, even though they were paying hefty sums to companies for apps working on their OS.

> This is based on the false assumption that the free market solves every problem.

I assure you it is not.

Ok I'll bite. Tell me what you find appealing about losing authority? Is this some kind of emotional response for not wanting to take responsibility?

How can I lose something that I don’t have any interest in having?

My needs and desires are to have control over my tech stack.

Neat! That’s why I said, “I’m personally OK with…” rather than “You’re personally OK with…”

Are you intentionally defending a rent-economy or just ignorantly?

Oh it’s intentional.

OK. Why?

Because I have a fundamentally different view than the comment I replied to.

The funny thing is Stallman started his fight like half a century ago and on regular days Hacker News shits on him eating something off of his foot and not being polished and diplomatic, and loves practical aspects of Corporate Open Source and gratis goodies and doesn't particularly care about Free Software.

On this day suddenly folks come out of the woodwork advocating for half baked measures to achieve what Stallman portrayed but they still hardly recognize this was EXACTLY his concern when he started the Free Software movement.

Stallman actively hurts the cause with his behaviour. I'm not only talking about his eccentricities, but also the adversarial and combative language. Yes, Amazon is trying to swindle us, but few people will be convinced of that when you start your argument by calling the kindle an "Amazon swindle" every time, directly implying that anyone who has one is an idiot or even malicious.

Yes, it's unfair that someone can be 100% correct but people won't listen to them because of their appearance or mannerisms. But whining about that unfairness is unproductive. People will never listen to someone who can't stop themselves from eating stuff from their foot in public.

I used to 100% feel the same, but at some point I realized the problem was me, not him, in not viscerally understanding his goals. His stated goals are very clear, but the audience usually has somewhat overlapping, but nevertheless distinct goals. This is indeed at the very core of Open Source-Free Software feud. The base is almost entirely the same people, yet the ideologies are not the same, and in a very interesting way: the differences are critical to RMS's ideology, but minute to the other side. Thus, the other side thinks of a crazy guy ruining the whole thing for nothing or very little, and evaluates him as net negative for "the cause." Well, it is absolutely true, for their cause, not his.

I think his take on what compromises are valid and what aren't makes this clear: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/compromise.en.html

In fact, this particular incident, re Android, a seemingly "open" system, is a perfect example of the importance of his PoV in particular, as it illustrates that Open Source ideology would not have been enough to ensure the user is in control.

The problem is: you never get to have your goals or arguments listened to when you fail to represent yourself as a basic human. That means not putting weird stuff in your mouth on camera, not looking too unkempt, not being too belligerent before you get to your points – and never, never, never discussing the fine differences between ephebophilia and pedophilia on a mailing list.

His point of view and his goals are completely besides the point that he is unfit as a spokesperson for them.

Sadly. Because I agree with him quite a lot, and he does have good arguments.

No, that isn't the problem. The problem is that you are comparing a human in one corner (mortal, fallible, made of meat, imperfect, objectively poor) with a very large conglomerate of corporations on the other side (immortal, disembodied, transnational, legal staff on retainer, very, very wealthy, made of paper, hard to criticize in the same way that you could criticize a person). No corporation is even going to put weird stuff in their mouth on camera or look unkempt. They'll make their arguments, reasonably, legally watertight and accompanied with bags of money through their lobbyists.

No, the problem is that you’re thinking of this like Spock - purely logical. Humans aren’t logical. We absolutely trust/distrust each another based on appearances and mannerisms. This is not limited to RMS.

People are prejudiced, plain and simple.

Yes, he's a human. But what you are failing to mention is that those corporations are made up of humans. And don't just imagine the C-suite when I say that. I'm talking about the developers and other highly-technical positions who may care very little about what's good for the corporation they work for over the long term. Those people also have instincts around and standards for what they consider decent behavior. Many of them (just like most people from most walks of life) will just stop listening if the person making the argument seems actively antagonistic upfront even if they would agree with the main argument that person is making.

Diplomacy does matter whether you like it or not. Especially before the person or people you're trying to persuade have heard your argument.

Those are only issues because you decided to make them the topic. It's all a distraction. Just focus on his message, which far more important than anything you're talking about.

> you fail to represent yourself as a basic human

You sound exactly like the people who condemned Socrates to death 24 centuries ago.

No, they sound like Socrates' friends begging him to properly argue for himself in court, in order to not be condemned and killed.

I don't think Stallman is abrasive out of a sense of respect and duty to the system of public debate.

Squints, head moves back then slowly swivels to look at news channel with POTUS speaking....

One issue is your automated dehumanization of someone who doesn't match cultural norms as not being "basic human".

You continuing with culture that fundamentally dismisses/devalues humans is the main issue here. Culture change starts from within. He works as a spokesperson for me becahse I'm much more inclined to someone showing basic humanity, like eating off a foot, than someone showing basic inhumanity, like catering to preferences born inside a country (like the US) that was founded on genocide & enslavement.

I don't think Stallman is an effective spokesperson or campaigner for his own cause, though. Corporate-friendly open source has got enormously popular, to the point where the biggest open source collaboration platform, Github, is owned by Microsoft. Stallman is not troubling them. It's his own side he's driving to irrelevance.

>Github, is owned by Microsoft

There was a time getting bought up by a large company seems like a great success and exit strategy. Now days the only things that I want spend my time making are things that are useful for people around me, not things that are useful for industrial military and surveillance state.

isn't android corporate friendly open source?

No, sorry. By and large, when people criticize RMS for his behavior, they aren't saying "RMS being deeply associated with Open Source makes it harder for me to convince my boss to get the company to switch to X FOSS software or donate to Y project". The Open Source side of things is way bigger than RMS now. He's inconsequential to their world.

No, just about everyone critiquing RMS's behavior is saying that it negatively affects his own movement. That it makes it more difficult to advocate for Free Software, that it diminishes the FSF.

> Well, it is absolutely true, for their cause, not his.

You have it backwards. Open Source is so much bigger than Free Software, that it's not even funny. The Open Source people are not scared of RMS affecting a movement widely accepted in almost every major tech company.

One can be correct but convince no one, a modern day Cassandra.

I would argue he's had unimaginable success in the context the movement started. Even Microsoft is fully on-board with that. It's just that the industry has grown beyond the original stakeholders to billions of people and the problem is now so much bigger and the goalposts have changed.

It's inconvenient to have to recognise that we are being f**ed in the ass by corporations like Amazon, but that doesn't make it any the less true unfortunately.

It's also a damn shame that the majority of the people who are skilled at communicating messages effectively are working for these corporations; because without them, the unfiltered message of people like Stallman is all we've got.

It is a damn shame, and it is also a choice. If that majority chooses to work for the corporations, perhaps humanity just does not deserve better. There isn't anyone else but us humans who can fix this thing. If we choose not to, it won't be fixed period.

I was always somewhat put off by his extreme vigilance over the word free. Stallmans usage of free software is exactly the same as the rest of the worlds open source. We also have “source available” for software that is license encumbered but distributes the source.

So much time and effort wasted on a fruitless effort to redefine words that already have well established meanings.

Stallman has mentioned this before that it is a limit of the English language. Thus the use of Libre.

Problem is that many people today do still mistake Free software as no cost and for good reason. Funnily enough, "open sourcesource" turns out to have great SEO. Free software doesn't.

There are so many ways one could work around this (apparent) limitation. Liberty software, unbound software, modifiable software. Go all in on libre rather than putting it in an awkward 'free/libre' combo - languages borrow words from each other all the time. Swap the order round and talk about software freedom, or digital freedom. Make a portmanteau like libreware...

I'm not especially good at this, and obviously 'free software' has the benefit of a few decades history among the people who actually know it. But almost anything seems better than a phrase which has a very obvious meaning that's not the one you meant, and the consequent need for fussy little explanations. Especially when most Free Software is also free software.

Alas this is something many have been debating for decades at this point. Unfortunately, there isn't a really clear answer. Both sides have good and bad points.

That is entirely wrong and is a widespread misconception. The difference between free software and open source software is at the core of this 'android verified developer controversy' we are discussing here in a humongous thread. Stallman was warning us about exactly this sort of unethical arm twisting when he was policing the meaning of the word free software. (Somebody taught me this when I held this same misconception. But I was expecting moves like this ever since I understood the distinction.)

As you may be aware, the open source initiative started much after free software movement by people who disagreed with Stallman and the free software philosophy. The core idea of OSI is that by keeping the source code open, more people from a wider background can work on it to improve its quality in terms of features, design, correctness, bug reporting and fixing, security, documentation, etc. The idea is to make software more of a shared resource, thus achieving what is difficult for a single company to achieve. With that in mind, OSI borrows one more requirement from the FSF - there can't be any limitation on the user as to how they use it.

Now coming to the Free Software philosophy as defined by FSF, opening the source is just a secondary concern - a means to an end. That end, the primary concern, being computing freedom. What it means is that any computing device must do only and exactly what its owner wishes it to do. This means that the device owner must be able to verify the functionality of the software and modify it to suit them, if necessary (with 3rd party help, if needed). This is possible only if the device owner also has the source code of the software. But that's where the requirement for open source code ends for free software. If the author of the software and the device owner wishes, they can keep the source all to themselves. There are plenty of cases where this actually makes sense. Anyway, the people who possess the software are also allowed to distribute the software as they see fit.

As you can see, the computing freedom part is the centerpiece of the free software philosophy. But it isn't a concern at all for open source. I will explain why later. In practice, most licenses that satisfy one philosophy automatically meets the requirements of the other. Thus free software license list and open source license list overlap for the most part (with a few exceptions). But the philosophical differences extend well beyond the licenses and deep into the software design itself. If the device owner/software user is supposed to have any freedom, the software must be small, easy to read and understand, easily hackable and modifiable, well documented, highly modular with very good glue layer and highly configurable. This concept pervades the GNU software design. Emacs is the best example of this. Others include GNU Shepherd, Guile, Guix, Poke, GDB and a lot of others.

Now coming to open source, we have this notion that if the source code is open, it is pro-user and pro-freedom. This is true for most FOSS code, because their authors have more or less the same idea. But it's entirely possible to create an open source project that actively denies or even degrades the control of the device owner over their device, and thus their freedom. Take these examples - Android, Chrome browser (and its derivatives), SystemD and VSCode. How many of these projects listen to the public about their design choices? Which among them can you realistically fork and maintain as an individual or even as a company? (Not even MNCs try that with Chrome). How deeply and freely configurable are any of them? Are you able to remove or disable their user-hostile features? Are you able to use their submodules? Have your ever seen their code while troubleshooting or debugging? Have you been able to stop them from corrupting open standards and ecosystems? These are the open source non-free software .

Now, how did open source become popular in place of free software? Its proponents would have you believe that FSF is heavy on 'ideology'. Except, those ideologies were actually very stark warnings about the future. Open source became popular because the corporations used their enormous wealth to downplay, malign and suppress the idea of computing freedom. This is just like how they made permissive licenses popular over copyleft licenses. Both were driven by greed. If the suppression of copyleft licenses was about obtaining unpaid labor, suppression of computing freedom was about usurping the device owners' control over their own devices.

Now that we have problems like Google mandating developer verification on Android, or unilaterally deprecating XSLT from the web standards, know that they are all the result of everyone contemptuously dismissing Stallman as an attention seeking lone rebel when he was trying to draw attention to the oppression that he clearly foresaw. Heck! Even I could see this from a mile away! But this world is driven by hype and ill advised blind faith.

Stallman is a "prophet": he needs to be extreme and rigid in his ideology so that the world shifts to a more moderate middle ground. For GNU to actually change the world, they need to be a pole of extreme that is opposite to our status quo of capitalist consumption. You are not supposed to emulate him.

You see this phenomenon in every movement for societal change. The more dogmatic they are, the larger their effect on public opinion.

The fact that the modern programming world defaults to releasing their code using corporate-friendly OSS licences like MIT is thanks to Stallman's and GNU's campaigns.

You're exactly right. And what you're saying is sort of shifting my perspective on non-violent extremist movements that I usually find insufferable. You may not be able to stand them but you do need them.

Android is open source. It is not free software. The issue we're discussing right now should make the difference very clear.

Android that ships on the Google pixel is neither open source nor free software. It’s a proprietary OS based on AOSP.

The AOSP version of Android is both open source and free software. Open source and free software are both exactly the same thing.

If they were really the same, you should flip the question around. You do realize the Open Source folks invented that phrase explicitly to avoid using (and dare I say to undermine) the term Free Software?

Same way Vegan was forked to Plant based diet, to strip out the ethics question.

> Vegan was forked to Plant based diet

That's news to me! But no. Open source philosophy isn't free software stripped of its ethics question. I have written an essay/article/novel/epic here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45027202

> Stallmans usage of free software is exactly the same as the rest of the worlds open source.

Not at all, that's why there are separate terms! GNU has an article that's worth reading: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

I'll point out a very practical case. I was once-upon-a-time interested in Nostr, because I liked the relay idea. I looked for a client, and found one called Amethyst. When I installed it, I saw the author had inserted a pop-up on load that had me agreeing to his "Terms and Conditions" for using "the service". But the author had no service...he was worried about his liability if I posted something. Stallman saw this coming! From the article above:

> Third, the criteria for open source are concerned solely with the use of the source code. Indeed, almost all the items in the Open Source Definition are formulated as conditions on the software's source license rather than on what users are free to do. However, people often describe an executable as “open source,” because its source code is available that way. That causes confusion in paradoxical situations where the source code is open source (and free) but the executable itself is nonfree.

> The trivial case of this paradox is when a program's source code carries a weak free license, one without copyleft, but its executables carry additional nonfree conditions. Supposing the executables correspond exactly to the released sources—which may or may not be so—users can compile the source code to make and distribute free executables. That's why this case is trivial; it is no grave problem.

And this is _exactly_ the argument the author of Amethyst makes, check out how he reasons through the additional restrictions: https://github.com/vitorpamplona/amethyst/issues/378

His reasoning is squarely in this weird zone the Stallman wrote about:

> I am confused. Why are we mixing the license with the terms of use? These two files are separate legal matters. The Privacy is used by the Play Store to manage the distribution of the executables. The MIT license relates to the source code only.

> In other words, the MIT license removes any author liability from the misuse of the code. But when the author is also providing the system as binaries (which is an additional service in every jurisdiction I know of), there are many other legal issues that the source code license won't cover.

> And I don't know about you, but I am not comfortable allowing people to use the Play Store version or the FDroid version for these activities written in the Privacy statement. Most of them are local crimes that should not happen anyway.

> This has nothing to do with the source code license, which people can still download, compile and use in nefarious ways.

Anyway, my point is, in practice, there's a million ways to water down "open source" to remove user freedoms, and the value of Free Software is that it keeps the focus in the right place to avoid falling victim to those tricks.

Calling the kindle the "swindle" hurt open software?

Listen to yourself.

Yeah, let's be nice and polished. No blood, no foot eating, just nice people talking in nice settings (castles, maybe?) around a warm cup of tea.

That's how revolutions succeed, historically.

Or you go shouting in the beer house every Tuesday about how the failed state is giving away your riches to others and that these communists are ruining the country. You then have your goons go beat up the communists for fun and when you get enough people behind you, you abuse a loop hole in the constitution which causes re-voting over and over again until you win majority power.

No revolutions turn out good for everyone, and there is no solution that fits all. Sometimes the rich and powerful needs to be dragged into the streets and executed, so they are reminded to be scared of the people under them. If they don't fear the population, then they see that there are no consequences for their actions.

[dead]

To put my thoughts into one sentence: You can't fight the system within the system.

Why would someone use Kindle?

Well if they are too stupid and ignorant to consider the meaningful content of what someone says and get so fixated on how they are disgusting (although it is obvious that he is doing that to attract attention and make what he says memorable), perhaps it is fitting that they lose all their freedoms.

Frankly I find it refreshing in a world where everyone is obedient to the corporate overlords to have someone who just doesn't give a shit and calls it out exactly the way he sees it.

We don't need more polished people.

> Stallman actively hurts the cause with his behaviour.

People arguing this should realize that actors fighting oh the other side of the war might act kind and use politically correct wording, but they're still eroding our freedom little by little.

Arguments like this ("his behaviour") really mean that people care about policing other people's behaviour more than they care about the actual topic being discussed.

Downvote me if you want, I don't care:

- Stallman, singlehandedly, did more than anybody else for freedom in the computing industry.

- People pushing those arguments a huge part of the problem.

- People like Stallman are a huge part of the solution.

Expecting someone who built what he did to be normal is even more ridiculous.

If he were normal he’d probably have ended up working at MS, IBM, Oracle.

Of course if his behavior bothers you then fork it and rewrite his work and maintain it then you have a laundered version of the same thing but you probably don’t care that much about his behavior to do that so it’s pointless to bring up.

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I get where you're coming from, but I think you need to understand that the vast majority of people (conservatively maybe >95%) are perfectly fine with using Amazon. If you just start metaphorically punching all of them you won't convince them of anything. I don't think you can really make something socially poisonous that way without a significant group of people, in socially powerful positions, already agreeing with you.

I think you're overestimating how many people think like you on both of these topics (iOS/Android and Amazon).

Not long ago the vast majority of people were also perfectly fine with smoking (and even second hand smoking) and using asbestos.

But sure, what other kind of approach do you suggest that would work better to, say, kick them out of the EU ?

You're comparing buying stuff from Amazon... to fascism? Your moral compass is a bit extreme.

Amazon has remotely deleted purchased books from customers. And, the irony, 1984 among them.

So now people who use Amazon are the enemy?

People who use amazon are part of the misguided masses.

It's possible to believe both that Stallman is over the top and that stuff like this Google action is bad, and even to be right on both. It's even easier to believe that Stallman has had some good ideas but is still a deeply flawed human being, and has also incidentally not been the most effective advocate for his own ideals.

It is possible, sure, but I have a feeling it goes unrecognized how prophetic and precise his concerns were, and that this is very similar to his original issue with the closed-source printer software he was not allowed to fix, and he does not get credit for his predictions, as people simply pass by, and not connect it to the Free Software issue, when issues like this happen; meanwhile he takes all the downsides of being brash and anti-corporate, which is taken advantage of by the Corporate Open Source crowd.

But Android is open source. In a way the situation here shows the limits of what is possible just by imposing license requirements that require distribution of source code. The problem is the concentration of power in the provision of services. Even licenses like the AGPL don't really solve the problem here, which is that there is a coalition of businesses including, say, Google and banks, that via their provision of essential services hold worrisome sway over the practical ability of many individuals to live their lives.

Stallman's statements about how the person controlling nonfree software "is your master" are important, but they don't go far enough. The problem is not just the controlling of abstract intellectual property like intellectual property rights to particular software. The problem includes the actual control of how services are provided. When the provision of important services --- be they auth, email, banking, groceries, whatever --- is concentrated in a few hands, those hands become masters of many, regardless of the software licenses involved.

Yes, in a way FSF has succeeded beyond their wildest imagination and they are facing a new world with new challenges.

> The problem includes the actual control of how services are provided.

FSF has opinions about SaaS which they call SaaSS (Service as a Software Substitute).

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...

Android is not open source. There is an android open source project, but it's not what you colloquially think of as Android. Its not the android you're running on your phone - in fact, I don't believe it can run on any phone currently produced on Earth. Its really more of a showcase, not a software.

> Even licenses like the AGPL don't really solve the problem here, which is that there is a coalition of businesses including, say, Google and banks, that via their provision of essential services hold worrisome sway over the practical ability of many individuals to live their lives

If Android was AGPL without source assignment, this wouldn't be an issue.

Thanks to the anti-tivoization clause manufacturers are required to provide you with the ability to run your own code on the device, without any restrictions, so you'd have a guaranteed right to root the device and sideload your own apps, without something like SafetyNet being able to figure it out.

Android is open source but not "free software" which is exactly on point. People have been fooled to think that open=respecting your freedoms, but there is no equivalency.

Basically my point is that it's not really about software. It's about access to things that are of practical use. Having a monopoly (or oligopoly) on hamburgers or hammers would be a similar problem. It's true that within the software realm, open source (or "free software" or whatever other term you want to use) increases access, but it doesn't in itself solve the problem.

The people writing the software need to eat and if they can't do that it doesn't matter what the license is, the software won't get written and no one will be able to use it. Moves like this thing by Google are about economics rather than licenses or abstract ideas like "freedom". A world with ten gazillion closed-source programs competing would likely be more free than one with tons of open source software but only one company that can pay a living wage so that people can work on that software.

It's easy to piss on the individual.

Ask yourself how come free software is everywhere, with licenses for various stuff neatly tucked away out of sight unless you're trying to find it, not to mention all the giant clusters of Linux machines in data centers running Samba, PostgreSQL, and all sorts of free software, and at the same time the FSF still has just a small appartment on the 5th floor of a building in Boston?

Here, take a look: https://www.fsf.org/about/contact/tour-2010

They don't work there any more.

https://www.fsf.org/about/contact/

>As of September 1, 2024, we have gone remote and no longer have an office for people to visit.

IIRC they moved somewhere else in the interim.

It has http links to images that don't display when mixing secure content with insecure is disabled.

Having spoken to Stallman over the years many times. One of the most difficult people to talk to, but completely spot on with his ideas.

> completely spot on with his ideas.

Which ideas? I've read ideas from him that were borderline scandalous. I wouldn't say that 100% of what he ever said was "completely spot on".

Now if we are talking about the subset of his ideas that were completely spot on, then yeah, they are completely spot on :-).

I guess my point is that one can agree with a subset of his ideas and still dislike the guy. And I don't see why those ideas couldn't live without him. Especially if they are completely spot on. I don't get the cult of personality, not only for Stallman.

Just talking about his views on software and technology. When it comes to stuff outside that, I get his logic but damn he misses on a lot of things. Some very notable over the years. ;)

Who is doing a better job?

Because I see A LOT of “open source” advocates these days, and more and more “source available”.

But the old school Free Software hippies(that started with BSD, NOT GNU, IMNHO) are slowly dying out and being replaced with?

Cory Doctorow.

He's not an open source advocate as such, but his work on consumer rights and enshittification promotes solutions like using open source software, right to repair and strong consumer protection regulations.

I can understand why some devs would have tried to ignore the writing on the wall for Android over the last few years (hopefully not from now on), but it's especially galling when you see some of them still using the likes of Github and Discord...

It's interesting because I feel like I see more criticism against Android devs than against web devs. As if the web was "more free".

AOSP is as open source as Chromium is, and both are controlled by Google. To those who criticise Android devs... are you running Firefox?

There are people who have been pretty steady in their convictions over decades. Not that we have much illusions about the end game. Stallman has issues, but they're minor compared to the issues that the likes of Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft have. But they get to hide their nasty little habits behind the corporate veil of respectability.

It's a sad state of affairs when a guy born in 1953 and a 70+ years old is our reference for freedom.

What happened to GenX, Millenials and GenZ ? Why aren't there any more vocal activists doing something? The internet fuked us up. We're full of armchair experts "fighting" the cause laying in our coach.

Plenty of Gen Z caring about freedom, but unfortunately lot of them being deported from the U.S. for defending Palestinians.

I mean - Western world is a bit tougher place for protesting than it used to be, due to capital accumulation. Free SW is admirable but a pretty first world problem, unfortunately, low on the list of priorities.

"lot of them being deported from the U.S. for defending Palestinians."

Can you cite me a source for this? Specifically to show that there are a "lot" of them being deported, and that the cause is definitely "for defending Palestinians" and nothing else?

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/columbia-d...

A simple google search away.

Lack of free SW is unfortunately a universal problem for basic human rights now.

Millenials here. We did. A lot of a lot. And nobody cared.

Even today on HN most use chrome instead of firefox and mac instead of linux and. If you can't even convince the biggest nerds that supporting alternatives is important, what chances do you have?

This nerd cares about security, and Chrome is significantly more secure than Firefox and Mac is significantly more secure than any Linux distro.

99% of the time security is about securing the product from the user. Just like Google's action we're commenting under

I must be a shit nerd, I've never in my life thought about browser safety.

How the hell is chrome significantly more secure than firefox?

It is right to highlight the fight for libre software that Stallman championed.

The world would be a much, much worse place without Free Software. We own the obligation to keep the fight up. So many of us profit from it, and so many people depend on it.

I don't care if RMS is gross or whatever, what I care about is RMS defending pedophiles or being abusive or harassing people. I've crossed paths with him a good bunch of times with them in OpenSource events, even been on the organization of some of those events. Friends and acquaintances have also met him lots of times. I even know people that have hosted him at their homes (and will never do it again).

I know, autism-something-something, but I'm autistic (too?) and I have friends in very different places of the spectrum, and they know that, if anybody tells them that something they've done feels bad or they don't like it, they won't do it again.

That's really what hurt his career or whatever.

Stallman was smeared for being uncompromisingly rigorous and objective: https://stallmansupport.org/explaining-events-that-led-to-st...

It was all witch hunt from there.

I can understand Defending bad people. He is railing against freedom of injustice. I understand being abusive. He is feeling hopeless. I haven’t seen Harassment so I don’t know what to make of it.

He seems to walk the path of purity of ideas. And may come off as aggressive. As a by product, he may also be aloof from the career ladder. His trust in being nice to people is broken (autism?).

He has some good civil rights stuff https://www.stallman.org/

This friend of mine dealt with S. - and found a completely irrational part. We tried to steer history for the best, S. let it flow (in that occasion, of course. He just would not listen).

He can be mostly right but also terrible for his own cause at the same time. Anyone that doesn't see that must not know even the tiniest fraction of the stories, or like him also has a cognitive disability.

fact: it is possible to be a good and clean person at the same time

No, I hate this change from Google, and everyone involved with it should be ashamed of themselves, but Stallman is an extremest and I don't believe his world would be better than this one.

There's genuine need for application developers to gain access to extremely secure end-to-end attestation of the environment their apps are running in. Its a rare need, but it does exist. There's also genuine need for some consumers to opt-in to a strict security regime.

Google's change forces this draconian, dishonorable regime on all application developers and on all users. Its a change that serves no one except their shareholders.

> not being polished and diplomatic

That is severe understatement. Plenty of people and political activists are not polished and not diplomatic ... while still not reaching Stallmans levels. Majority of them, actually.

> eating something off of his foot

Yeah, that episode is unforgettable.

one can both see far into the future and fit one's foot into one's own mouth. it is possible to do two things.

[flagged]

I don't think I can come up with a worse reason to build an opinion on someone than not following the orthodoxy in the extremely stupid context of culture wars.

Especially that big corpos are very willing to use any pronouns you'd like.

I think his proposal to use "per" instead of "they" actually makes a lot of sense, because "they" is very confusing in a lot of contexts, because it's a word already used for another function. I don't see how you perceive that as something negative.

The quote about pedophilia is concerning indeed, but I think that rather stems from ignorance about the issues than promoting pedophelia. It's easy to shit on such things and wokely dismiss someone's entire opinion, which I find a bit weak.

Some context re that matter: https://stallmansupport.org/debunking-false-accusations-agai...

The guy quite obviously is diversely talented. A computer genius, but well below generally agreed upon levels of mental deficiency in areas that most people care about.

I read your comment and assumed he ate some food that fell on his foot. And I thought that was gross. But omg it’s so much worse

is it really worse than losing your freedoms?

We really shouldn’t have the frontman of free software be someone who is a creep towards women and who can’t take care of himself.

Official announcement: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/08/elevating-...

More info:

https://developer.android.com/developer-verification

https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...

Personally...we all know the Play Store is chock full of malicious garbage, so the verification requirements there don't do jack to protect users. The way I see it, this is nothing but a power grab, a way for Google to kill apps like Revanced for good. They'll just find some bullshit reason to suspend your developer account if you do something they don't like.

Every time I hear mentions of "safety" from the folks at Google, I'm reminded that there's a hidden Internet permission on Android that can neuter 95% of malicious apps. But it's hidden, apparently because keeping users from using it to block ads on apps is of greater concern to Google than keeping people safe.

> we will be confirming who the developer is, not reviewing the content of their app or where it came from

This is such an odd statement. I mean, surely they have to be willing to review the contents of apps at some point (if only to suspend the accounts of developers who are actually producing malware), or else this whole affair does nothing but introduce friction.

TFA had me believing that bypassing the restriction might've been possible by disabling Play Protect, but that doesn't seem to be the case since there aren't any mentions of it in the official info we've been given.

On the flip side, that's one less platform I care about supporting with my projects. We're down to just Linux and Windows if you're not willing to sell your soul (no, I will not be making a Google account) just for the right to develop for a certain platform.

It's never about security (at least not user's security). It's like you pointed out only about power and locking in customers. They don't care if your phone gets hacked or you bank account drained. They care about the bottom line. Android is fine. Google should have 2 layers if they're worried playstore 1 has only well vetted authors and apps. playstore 2 can be the free for all (mostly) of the current store. These could be two different apps or prominent tags. Choice is good, lock down is bad. Corporate does not like employees or customers to have freedom, that's why it's our duty to fire people like the current US regime who always side with corporations over customers.

It's the security of having happier shareholders, making more money.

That's still security, albeit an entirely different threat model.

This is a drastic response, but they didn't make up the security threat. Attackers convincing users to side-load malware is a thing.

https://www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/hotforsecurity/hacker...

The thing is that people sideloading good non-malware apps because they want to is also a thing, and all kinds of icky apps that abuse permissions but are still verified and installed through the Play Store are also a thing. This doesn't really change what is a thing. It just moves more stuff under Google's control.

security is the "Save the Children" of technology. It's not that there isn't a theoretical thing there, it's that in the real material sense, the actual actions taken are power grabs for control and suppression.

> Attackers convincing users to side-load malware is a thing.

Sure. It’s also not Google’s problem.

It’s not Victorinox’s problem of someone uses a Swiss Army knife to cut someone else. It’s not Toyota’s problem if someone deliberately runs over a pedestrian.

Car companies do care if their cars are easy to break into and will improve the security of newer models, even if any particular theft is not their fault.

If they don't do that then their reputation will suffer and governments might take notice. So, in practice, big companies do have to care about their users, not individually but in aggregate.

That's a bad analogy. No one is complaining about Google providing Android security updates.

This is like a car manufacturer preventing the installation of all unapproved aftermarket accessories by claiming they're protecting you from a stalker installing a tracker on your car.

I don’t actually think it’s that bad. If all of a sudden we started hearing an awful lot about Android phones having viruses, to the point where almost everyone had a friend who got a virus on their android. I think the market would actually shift. We’d probably see more people moving to iPhones.

> Car companies do care if their cars are easy to break into and will improve the security of newer models, even if any particular theft is not their fault.

Didn't Kia go over a decade without caring or improving until the Kia Boys stuff?

Yep, it took a while but it eventually caught up with them.

They made it up in the sense that it's completely unnecessary - most malware is on the Play Store.

What is the source for this extraordinary claim? Also, malware hosted in the play store has the property of being tied to an identity which can be banned.

I don't need a source, it's common fucking sense.

1. Most users do not use fdroid or APKs to download software. They download software from the play store.

2. Therefore almost all malware will target the play store.

3. Therefore most malware actively used comes from the play store.

4. Compounded, the play store does almost nothing to prevent malware and actively encourages certain types of malware like spyware and adware.

5. Compounded, Google gets a cut from each piece of malware sold on the play store or advertised on the play store, therefore they have no incentive to prevent malware in any significant way.

> Every time I hear mentions of "safety" from the folks at Google, I'm reminded that there's a hidden Internet permission on Android that can neuter 95% of malicious apps. But it's hidden, apparently because keeping users from using it to block ads on apps is of greater concern to Google than keeping people safe.

You've never needed the internet permission to exfiltrate data. Just send an intent to the browser app to load a page owned by the attacker with the data to be exfilled in the query parameters.

Wouldn't that launch the browser app and bring it to the foreground? I wouldn't compare that to having full network access.

It'd launch the browser app. You can have your evil page redirect to a benign page so it just looks like Chrome randomly opened or whatever. It is not as powerful as full network access as you can only send so much information in query parameters, but if you are doing some phishing or stealing sms 2fa codes or whatever then it is plenty to send back whatever payload you wanted to.

And of course basically every app requires internet permissions for ordinary behavior. The world where an explicit internet permission would somehow get somebody to look askance at some malware that they were about to download is just not believable.

The ability to launch other apps can be put behind a permission screen too.

> had me believing that bypassing the restriction might've been possible by disabling Play Protect, but that doesn't seem to be the case since there aren't any mentions of it in the official info we've been given.

I don't think we can know for sure before the change is actually in place. Going through Play Protect would certainly be the easiest way of implementing this - it would be a simple change from "Play Protect rejects known malware" to "Play Protect rejects any app that isn't properly notarized". This would narrowly address the issue where the existing malware checks are made ineffective by pushing some new variant of the malicious app with a different package id.

It's a big change for the ecosystem nonetheless because it will require all existing developers to register for verification if they want to publish a "legit" app that won't be rejected by any common Android device - and the phrasing of the official announcements accurately reflects this. But this says nothing much as of yet about whether power users will be allowed to proactively disable these checks (just like they can turn off Play Protect today, even though very few people do so in practice).

> This is such an odd statement. I mean, surely they have to be willing to review the contents of apps at some point (if only to suspend the accounts of developers who are actually producing malware), or else this whole affair does nothing but introduce friction.

Requiring company verification helps against some app pretending to be made by a legitimate institution, e.g. your bank.

Requiring public key registration for package name protects against package modification with malware. Typical issue - I want to download an app that's not on available "in my country" - because I'm on a holiday and want to try some local app, but my "play store country" is tied to my credit card and the developer only made it available in his own country thinking it would be useless for foreigners. I usually try to download it from APKMirror. APKMirror tries to do signature verification. But I may not find it on APKMirror but only on some sketchy site. The sketchy site may not do any signature verification so I can't be sure that I downloaded an original unmodified APK instead of the original APK injected with some malware.

Both of these can be done without actually scanning the package contents. They are essentially just equivalents of EV SSL certificates and DANE/TLSA from TLS world.

> Typical issue - I want to download an app that's not on available "in my country" - because I'm on a holiday and want to try some local app,

The solution here is just to get rid of artificial country limitations which make some users download APKs. None of those make sense in the online world anyways.

Play Protect is just spyware to monitor app usage & exploitation. It doesn't prevent or protect anything.

<< we will be confirming who the developer is, not reviewing the content of their app or where it came from

To be honest, it almost makes me wonder if the issue here is not related to security at all. I am not being sarcastic. What I mean is, maybe the issue revolves around some of the issue MS had with github ( sanctions and KYC checks ).

Can you elaborate a little bit about this hidden internet access control setting?

<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.INTERNET" />

It's been there since Android 1.0.

What's missing is a way for the user to deny it.

Google also used to show you which apps used Internet permission in Play Store. But they removed it, which makes it harder to notice which apps don't use it.

Google mostly doesn't let you deny permissions while running apps that require them; recently there's some permissions that you can pick at runtime. So it's not suprising that they don't let you deny this one, when they don't even show it in the store.

Oh man remember when the Play Store showed ALL permissions an app used BEFORE installation and Facebook's one was so long you had to scroll multiple times?

It is still there

App page => "About this app" => "App permissions / See more" at the bottom of the page => look for "have full network access" in "Other"

You can deny it on Graphene OS.

Even device owner (MDM) apps can't revoke that permission.

Even on the play store Google management has demonstrated they can, and will, "revoke" ownership. For example, when a single payment is blocked on your credit card because you did a charge-back against them. Then, suddenly, they point to a 250 page EULA "you agreed to" that describes what they mean by ownership: nothing at all.

Interesting, you can't deny it on stock Android? TIL. You can on LineageOS.

It's available on GrapheneOS btw, when you install a new App it shows a checkbox where you can disable internet access.

"Hidden" isn't exactly right. It's completely inaccessible, unless you use a custom ROM like LineageOS. But it is a real permission:

https://developer.android.com/develop/connectivity/network-o...

Force enabled, more like

You can deny internet to any specific app.

So KYC but C is “competition”.

And K is "kill".

Doesn't Windows have the same thing aka Code Signing?

https://www.electronforge.io/guides/code-signing/code-signin...

You can install unsigned apps on Windows just fine, maybe with one extra nag screen. Plenty of large open source projects don't sign their installers - VLC being one big example that many normal people use.

IIRC Windows is testing to turn that nag screen into a "no you don't". Which is such BS given all the evidence we have that malware vendors and bad actors have and continue to get their malware signed by MS because they simply can't reliably detect it.

What is the hidden internet permission called? Is there any way to enable or see it?

No you can’t enable it, nowadays developer just declare if they want internet permission. Before, user could say « no, I don’t want you to have internet access ».

It’s something possible only on grapheneos as far as I know.

> Every time I hear mentions of "safety" from the folks at Google, I'm reminded that there's a hidden Internet permission on Android that can neuter 95% of malicious apps

Of that they still refuse to sandbox the play store.

It's easy to see that there's a pattern on what they are copying from GrapheneOS.

> Of that they still refuse to sandbox the play store.

It's absolutely essential that Google Play Services have "root" permissions and circumvent the permissions system normal apps have. How else would Google have access to all of your data? :)

> But it's hidden, apparently because keeping users from using it to block ads on apps is of greater concern to Google than keeping people safe.

The internet permission has nothing to do with ads? It's a hidden permission because:

1) Internet connection is so ubiquitous as to just be noise if displayed

2) It's not robust, apps without Internet permission can still exfiltrate data relatively easily by bouncing off of other apps using Intents and similar

It absolutely has to do with ads. While there are various ways to exfiltrate small amounts of data, the non-collaborative ones are rarely silent and most importantly, they won't let the app get responses (e.g. ads) back.

The main thing this permission would be used for would be blocking ads. Also distinguishing shitty apps that are full of ads from those that aren't. If there is a calculator that needs Internet and one that doesn't, which one are you going to use?

> The main thing this permission would be used for would be blocking ads.

This permission has existed for longer than runtime permissions. You have never been able to revoke it, it was just something you agreed to when you installed the app or you didn't install the app.

It was "removed" in that era because if every app requests the same permission, then nobody cares about it anymore. When every app asks for the same thing, users stop paying attention to it. So no, it had fuck all to do with ads because that was never a thing in the first place. And ad blocking doesn't require this permission, either.

> Also distinguishing shitty apps that are full of ads from those that aren't. If there is a calculator that needs Internet and one that doesn't, which one are you going to use?

You can still use it for this. Apps are required to declare the permission still, it's listed on the Play Store under the "permissions" section. Similarly the OS reports the same thing. Presumably F-droid or whatever else also has a list of permissions before you install, and it'll be listed there.

Although Google's own Calculator app requires Internet permission. Take that for what's it worth.