Do not accept the premise of assholes.
I hope we can get the EU to fund a truly open Android Fork. Maybe under some organisation similar to NL Labs.
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Furthermore, the need for a trustworthy binary to be auditable to a certain hash or something would make banning this a simple task if Google would want to go that route.
How are things in the EU on whether it's legal to buy a SIM card without showing ID?
The task, therefore, is to convince enough politicians to establish an independent unit that can address this issue without direct political influence.
Fund the unit with enough money so that it can take care of the cybersecurity and sovereignty of all citizens.
A side effect of this would hopefully be that these politicians would then be digitally literate enough to recognize nonsense such as chat control as such and reject it outright. I hope that most politicians would not really want such omnipotent surveillance tools if they could truly grasp their scope.
And even in that case, doing this for a long period of time violates most roaming policies
It varies per country. In some you can just buy one (or more) SIM cards at a supermarket without any ID.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_roaming_regulat...
Edit: Google could ultimately use that as a lever in licensing deals with manufacturers. It'd marginalize everything.
In some places your plan will be cancelled for roaming beyond a certain number of days or quantity of usage. Telecom laws and polices vary widely.
In some EU member states this might be fine, but definitely not all.
> Your local drunkard will be happy to get $10 to buy a SIM card for you.
Buying a SIM card was always the easy bit. Getting it activated may not be, it depends on which country you're in.
https://www.telekom.de/prepaid-aktivierung/en/start
"For the Selfie-Ident you identify yourself with your identity card, passport or residence permit. (Selfie-Ident is currently possible worldwide with the German ID card, residence permit and passport. Alternatively, you can use Video-Ident and identify yourself in a video call with an employee.)
Important: Temporary identification documents are not supported due to internal check. You need a tablet or smartphone with a camera and an internet connection."
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f1421e1afcf4...
This is actually the advantage of doing it. You make the thing (call it a "personal app loader" or something rather than a "circumvention tool"), they ban it, now you campaign against them or make antitrust arguments presenting the ban as an anti-competitive practice or use the ban to refute claims that they're not inhibiting third party app distribution.
Even if you know they're going to be the villains, you still want to make them actually do it so that everyone can see them doing it.
Several of those are the opposite of security features, like SafetyNet support, which might be a convenience in some cases but it mostly makes it so you can't upgrade certain parts of the system to newer versions even when the old versions have security vulnerabilities.
No one else even bothered to make a list.
>Several of those are the opposite of security features, like SafetyNet support, which might be a convenience in some cases but it mostly makes it so you can't upgrade certain parts of the system to newer versions even when the old versions have security vulnerabilities.
Citation needed
As a result, sites where I could rent a number for verification, now don't offer local numbers anymore.
The two are not equivalent issues; the first one is ill-formed as stated.
Cryptography is a tool of control. It's "dual-use", in the same sense like a knife or nuclear fission is - its moral valence depends on who is wielding it, and to what end.
In the context we're discussing, encryption is being used against the people. Working encryption is in fact needed to make chat control work - it's fundamental to it, the same way it is to Developer Verification and Safetynet/Remote Attestation. It would be great if EU decided to break that set of encryption applications. Alas, chat control only wants to break E2EE on messages, and uses encryption elsewhere to guarantee E2EE stays broken.
A more general comment about this thread, and related ones in the past: people really need to stop thinking about "encryption" and "security" as inherently good. They're not. Most of the social problems with computing, the attempts at user disempowerment and disenfranchisement, persist because they apply cybersecurity solutions.
The core question of security is always: who exactly is being secured, and from who.
That doesn't make the biased list good.
> Citation needed
Are you not aware of what SafetyNet is? It's the thing where Google certifies that the phone is running the software produced for it by the OEM. The problem, of course, being that the OEM stops issuing updates and then the certified version has known vulnerabilities. Which is a lot of the point of wanting to install a newer ROM on such a device, except that then it won't pass SafetyNet because you replaced the vulnerable but certified code with third party code that has the patch but not the certification.
Secure for who, and from whom?
Remote Attestation and Developer Verification both make Android OS and platform more secure against malicious actors that would want to defeat the guarantees the platform gives, guarantees that enable secure digital services.
Yes, this includes protecting the banking services and DRM media services and advertising platforms from malicious actors like you and me, who pose a real threat to the revenues of the aforementioned players, by:
- Expecting banking to do security right on their own side, instead of outsourcing it to mobile platform and society at large (like with "identity theft" trick);
- Enjoying entertainment and education in ways the vendor or IP owner does not like or can't be arsed to support, and thus not spending extra on the inferior ways that are supported;
- Not looking at the ads.
Same is with Chat Control. Chat Control improves security of the society against threats such as sexual predators who want to hurt children, or citizens who disapprove of how the current ruling class is governing the people. To effectively provide that security, Chat Control in turn relies on a secure OS and platform providing secure digital services - in particular, secure against those malicious actors that would want to circumvent Chat Control protections.
Is the larger picture clear now? Security technologies are not inherently good, they're morally ambivalent. They're "dual-use". It's important to consider their deployment on a case-by-case basis, always asking who is being secured, and what are the actual threats they're being secured from.
The chancellor in Germany is also not directly elected by majority vote but by parliament.
Its a reasonable criticism that the EU structures make democratic legitimisation very indirect, but that is at least partly a result of the EU being a club of sovereign democracies. The central tension was extremely evident during the Greek debt crisis, you have a change in government in Greece, but due to EU level constraints they can't enact a change in policy. More independent power ininstitutions less dependent on the member state, means the sovereign democratic national governments can't act on their local democratic mandates.
Except the are a couple degrees of separation between the democracy part and in the running the EU institutions.
The EU parliament is also a very superficial imitation of a real parliament in a democratic state. It has very limited say in forming the “government” or decision making.
> result of the EU being a club of sovereign democracies
So either revert to it just being a trade union or implement fully democratic federal institutions. The in between isn’t really working that well.
The parliament would have picked Weber, but nobody cared since its just there to rubber stamp predetermined decisions.
He was the leader of the party which won the plurality in the elections and had its support. EU had a real chance to move towards becoming a real parliamentary democracy if it went that way.
In parliamentary democracies the parliament is elected directly and is generally sovereign (optionally constrained by a constitution or some set of basic laws and powers delegated to regional governments and such).
In no way does that describe the EU. It has no equivalent body. Its imitation “parliament” is extremely weak and barely has a say in who forms the closest EU has to a “government”.
If politicians are not all power-hungry caricatures, is it possible that the same is true for businesses?
Android has millions of users worldwide, many of whom are far less computer-literate than HN users. I think it's very reasonable for Google to put speed bumps in front of malware developers trying to distribute through the Play Store. If you're a half-decent dev, $25 is nothing compared to the opportunity cost of your time in developing your app.
This whole thing seems to be a fairly recent announcement on Google's part, so it's unsurprising they're still hammering out details for hobbyist devs? How about making constructive suggestions for ways that Google can protect ordinary people without stopping power users?
Recall that the premise of this thread is that the EU should sponsor an alternative to Android. The EU vs US question isn't really topical, since no one suggested that the US government should sponsor an alternative to Android instead.
Here's the up-to-date comparison: https://eylenburg.github.io/android_comparison.htm
As far as I know, there is no significant features other distros have that increase their privacy or security over what GOS has. I'm not entirely sure about the SafetyNet thing, but GOS is by far the most up-to-date to the AOSP out of these distros.
That’s the new Spitzenkandidate system. The council is supposed to pick the candidate put forward by the main political force in the parliament.
The EU is a real democracy anyway. All the members of the council are themselves democratically elected. It has a weird three parts political system but everyone in it is elected or appointed by people elected.
Also, I'm not saying Chat Control is dual-use, I'm saying crypto is. Chat Control actually needs working crypto to be properly implemented.
I struggle to see any good-faith need to erect additional barriers to protect users from running the programs they want on devices they own, when you already have to be fairly expert to enable developer mode, install via adb, etc.
Moreover, some of the stuff with green boxes is still kind of a privacy fail. For example, with GNSS (i.e. GPS) your device calculates its location from the timing of radio broadcasts emitted by a network of satellites. It has extremely good privacy properties because your device is a passive radio receiver and neither the satellites nor anyone else know you're there when you use it. "Network-based location" can sometimes work when you're somewhere you can't hear the satellites, but now you have Google or someone else building a database of nearby wireless APs etc. in order to make it work, and in the process you're effectively uploading your location to them.
"The Parliament also has the power to censure the Commission by a two-thirds majority which will force the resignation of the entire Commission from office. As with approval, this power has never been explicitly used, but when faced with such a vote, the Santer Commission then resigned of their own accord."
The fact that the whole democratic setup is highly complex is in itself a problem. But the concrete deficits people mention are never true or don't apply to other democracies either...
In practice the EU Parliament has been a lot more trouble for the executive than is typical in national bodies. The one valid point is that the parliament does not have the right to initiate legislation itself. That is unusual, but in practice many people who are actually close to political processes seem to say this is mostly symbolic, as national bodies can't really draft effective legislation without cooperation from the executive either... Stil definitely something I would love to see addressed.
In the last cycles the candidate who led the party who won the parliamentary elections became head of commission.
So this is just wrong. The EU parliament has more power than US Congress or the UK parliament in this respect.
Before it was unclear so it was better to allow installation of apps without any verification to appear as more open.
Remember any regulation/law has unintended consequences. At one point Apple decided that PWAs would no longer be supported in EU so they don't have to provide equal capabilities to implement them in alternative web browsers, fortunatelly they changed their mind by obtaining an exception. PWAs is the only alternative choice for making "proper" apps on iOS (no hacky sideloading methods).
I think overally DMA is more a loss than a win (good on paper, terrible in practice). It codified worse things. The EU app stores are still fully controlled by Apple (harder to install, they can just decline or drag notarization of any apps or revoke your license to dev tools, you need to still pay them, etc.).
For various apps the EU market is too small (esp. for things that need to be global) to invest into the development so while you can for example theoretically develop a real alternative web browser to Safari/WebKit (forbidden by App Store rules) nobody is willing to do it.
> > The ID presented at time of purchase does not have to be the ID of the actual user of the card
>In some EU member states this might be fine, but definitely not all
It seems hard if not impossible to prevent or stop?
The DMA is an attempt to reclassify what “market” means in the modern age where we have a global tech oligopoly. This is because a simple “test” for monopolism doesn’t work in this world of multinational megacorps.
Again, your complaint is a double standard. You are doing similar in the USA - albeit without an actual structured act - as per the recent rulings on the Google Play store.
The EU has simply codified the rules for their vision of the future where people aren’t beholden to a handful of tech overlords, whereas the USA is making similar incremental “changes” through case-law. I’m not saying either way is correct, but it seems like they are both headed in the same direction.
Their objections in general seem to be fairly pedantic, e.g. objecting to a connectivity check which could be improved in a theoretical sense but in practice that shouldn't be leaking anything you're not already giving up by having a phone which is turned on and connected to a cellular network.
I do think having a technical bypass is good - it isn't mutually exclusive with also having a legal bypass. I just hope that the gov'ts are smart enough, and agile enough, to make this happen before it becomes too late (aka, once the gates close, it will never open again, like apple's ecosystem).
