Is it possible to allow sideloading and keep users safe?

It is a move taken in lockstep with EU's Chat Control and UK's Online Safety Act, and the proposed Kids Online Safety Act in the US. The common objective of all is total control of digital lives of citizens and allowing the government to snoop on all internet communication while not disabling end to end encryption. They need end to end encryption to lock out external adversaries (Russia China etc) but they need to see the contents of encrypted messages to monitor internal adversaries.

First step is blocking you from running any apps not allowed by Google/Apple.

Second step is putting in the systems to snoop on end to end encrypted communication apps on the endpoints, enabling intel agencies to detect thoughtcrime without exposing everyone's chats to Chinese/Russian intelligence. This will most likely be done by OSes recognizing the apps and extracting private keys on demand.

Last step is locking the bootloaders so you cannot have a phone which lacks the 'features' added in the second step.

But ask yourself, would business do this anyway? The answer is yes. Google needs a growth target and modeling app store lockin and fees is there.

Youre free to live in paranoid government land, but its an unnecessary abstraction. Its actually the EU and US rulings against their monopoly thats driving it.

Again, the paranoia is just drivel.

> Its actually the EU and US rulings against their monopoly thats driving it.

Can you elaborate on this? Locking phones down like this would seem to make Google an even bigger target for future anti-trust suits, no?

Monopoly enforcement only occurs when theres no natural monopoly.

Well, in this domain (government surveillance), probably not paranoia.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden

This is just what you'd expect any government that is either competent or greedy to be doing, given the technologies at play.

Calling it "thought crime" is, of course, a bit glib. But things like "we want to monitor the communications of every pro Palestinian university student so we can take proactive disruptive actions" are very real and not so hidden desires and sentiments of modern Western governments.

how then? just a rough idea would be nice. because don't see it. as much as it pains me, but i have to admit that i find the article convincing. i see these people around me every day. they have no experience with technology. they didn't even go to school long enough. yet they all have a smartphone with no idea what it is capable of, or what the consequences are. and they are used to the government taking care to protect them.

Even if we are restricting installing apps, there are less heavy handed measures. By enabling .apk installs only via developer options/command line/adb in a way that the average user will never be able to figure out, for example. Sprinkle a few warning pages with scary red lettering and it's fine. Grandma will never figure out how to run adb commands on Gentoo.

There is a tradeoff between liberty and security. You can never guarantee security; the Google rules in the article won't ensure it either, as Google has been shown to simply not care about scam/malware apps published onto its own app store anyway. The whole security angle is a misdirection. The whole move is about control.

> "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

- Benjamin Franklin

You have already given in to tyranny when you've given that total control.

> "Many years ago I posted that I could not see anything wrong about sex between an adult and a child, if the child accepted it.

> "Through personal conversations in recent years, I've learned to understand how sex with a child can harm per psychologically. This changed my mind about the matter: I think adults should not do that. I am grateful for the conversations that enabled me to understand why."

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html#14_Septe...

(I do agree with your comment overall, anyway.)

they don't sell them to people who don't know how to use them. with the exception of knives. but unlike technology, people do know how to use knives without getting hurt. they can easily see that chainsaws are dangerous. they need a drivers license for a car, and they can't get opiates without a prescription.

none of these controls are available for apps, and yet, because they don't know how to use phones/apps safely, because they can't tell the difference between an app that is save, and one that isn't, they risk their livelihood because they fell for a scam. they are not going to install those apps by themselves. they will ask the techshop around the corner to do it for them, and the scammers give the techguy a cut for installing that app that steals your money.

the problem is of course lack of education, but education doesn't have a quick fix. in the meantime many peoples lives will be ruined.

By contrast, they think the 4 ton death machines are a really cool way to impress girls and that's what they're used for. Similar in Europe, by the way.

Not that there's any shortage of people who think guns are a cool way to impress girls.

> Children: Humans up to age 12 or 13 are children. After that, they become adolescents or teenagers. Let's resist the practice of infantilizing teenagers, by not calling them "children".

Older than 13 is not a child. Man is using that statement. Even if you want to argue that he didn’t really mean it like that, which I disagree with, opponents would have a field day with that to discredit him

Stallman is like Humpty Dumpty (""When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less") and that masks some of his terrible beliefs. Also in his clarification (I refuse to call that an apology) why aren't we questioning why he needed to be told that sex with minors is bad? Why did he lack the skills to look up anything about consent and child development before saying that he though sex with >= 13 year olds was ok?

(To be clear, I mean I wish he didn't have problematic views any more, not that I wish you hadn't informed me.)

Speaking of typos, I think you mean <=13 not >=? As in, referring to the fact that he previously thought it was ok with kids of any age (vs having now changed his mind about younger children but still thinking it's OK for 13+)? Unless I'm either misunderstanding the situation with him, or am making my own mistake about sentence structure or > vs < logic in some way

Edit: on the subject of why would someone need to be told that it's bad, on that point I actually don't agree with you. Because while I don't think there's an excuse for needing to be told that raping someone is bad, I have known several people who had sexual experiences when they were children, that they considered to be consensual at the time and that as adults they looked back on as not being negative, and therefore their opinion was that if a child "consents"/wants it to happen, then it's morally OK.

Of those people who I've personally discussed it with, 100% have changed their opinion after learning how it can have terrible long term effects on some people regardless of their having believed they wanted it to happen at the time.

But I don't think it's necessarily intuitive that if a 12 year old believes they want to have sex with an adult it must be wrong, especially not if, like these people I've known, they themselves had that experience and were lucky enough not to suffer in the long term (at least I hope they're all still not suffering).

It's the fact that we know from looking at the big picture that it's likely to cause problems in a child's development that teaches us that actually we shouldn't consider a child saying "I want this" to count as consent. If anything it's unintuitive, since as a rule of thumb we should think that people, including children, should have agency over their own bodies - and we make an exception in this case, because enough data has shown that children consenting to sex does, far too often, lead to mental health problems, if not immediately then later in life.

(I think/hope I've been clear enough that nobody would read my comment and get the impression that I'm condoning adults having sex with children. If any of my wording does give that impression it's a mistake. Do not have sex with children, ever.)