The user mails you a box with a note that says "1kg of 4chan packets pls", and a prepaid return label to an address local to you. You put the packets in the box and kick it down the street to its "destination". Job done as far as you know.
The place you sent the box then repacks it and mails it to the UK. Somehow the UK thinks that you and only you have broken the law.
Your mistake is taking Google's argument at face value. Protecting users is an outright lie, this is purely about control.
Google doesn't give one single shit if users download malware from the Play Store, but hypothetical malware from third party sources is so much worse that we need to ruin the whole OS? That doesn't pass the sniff test.
Google wants to make sure you can only download malware from developers who give google a cut. They want to control the OS and remove user choice. That's all it is. That's what it's always been about.
"Protecting users" is a pretense and nothing more. Google does not care at all about user safety. They aren't even capable of caring at this point. There are far, far cheaper and more effective ways to actually protect users, and google isn't doing any of them.
I'm assuming good faith and giving them the benefit of the doubt.
Of course it might be that they want more control. In addition to controlling the world's most popular web browser and the world's most popular search engine and the world's most popular online advertising network and the world's most popular online video service.
It's really hard to when there's already technical solutions. They could require a process like bootloader unlocking that puts it in "dev" mode for instance
While signing is useful, leaving no escape hatch imo is blatantly predatory
These restrictions already don't apply to something you install over adb, so there's already that. But that still considerably raises the bar for things like apps made by sanctioned entities, for example, most Russian banks.
It's all part of the war on general computing. This dystopian nightmare is coming to desktop operating systems too. See the age verification stuff that's all of a sudden being pushed hard by countries all over the world.
As someone that was going to switch from iPhone to Android/Pixel later this year, at least now I know not to bother anymore, as the locking down of Android won't stop here.
It's crazy to me how technical people willfully disregard the coming end of individually-owned general purpose computers. I have a strange mix of nostalgia and crushing sadness knowing that I got to live through that time.
For me the joy comes from the understanding that the answer to "Is xyz possible?" is always, always "yes". It might be difficult, expensive, or take a long time, but my stance as an engineer is that anything is possible.
Hyperbole, yes, many things are in fact, not possible. But most people have the size of the two categories confused. The number of things that are categorically impossible is less than a rounding error compared to how many things are possible.
The joy and wonder of being an engineer is in taking problems deemed "impossible" and creating possibilities. It's in extracting a solution from infinite possibilities and redefining what possible even is.
No, Microsoft bailed pretty early. Apple gave it one shot and gave up.
The entire VR/AR industry sort of crumpled up and died while metaverse was still burning a billion dollars a day.
I worked in a VR startup at the time. Nobody could find a customer and all the competing startups slowly bled to death (including mine). Everyone was really holding their breath that Apple Vision would bring some life back to the industry, but once it became clear that it was a flop, everyone gave up.
First one was I think during the releae of the first Oculus, when still hardly anyone got to actually try out VR headsets. An absolutely HUGE area in one of the main halls, the queue going once around the entire area, many hours of waiting time, etc.
Second visit was two years later, in the "indies, hobbyists and everything else hall" - staffers of some Chinese gaming startup were stopping random passersbys and essentially pleading for them to try their VR game - the headset of course being technically superior than the Oculus during the first visit...
Meta going so hard was part of the covid “new normal” psychosis. Surely we’ll all just stay home and buy crypto assets for the rest of our lives! The hardware I think is pretty good - I just never really found a use for it.
My new job has some kind of insurance add-on which is an entire company of people with the express purpose of negotiating with your primary insurance to get specialty medication paid for.
Sticker price on my partner's medication is $10k/mo. Insurance alone refused to pay anything. This third party negotiator managed to get insurance to pay some, the manufacturer to discount it, and a "copay card" with several thousand dollars preloaded appeared to pay the rest.
We ended up paying zero out of pocket for the medication but it took two weeks of thrice-daily phone calls with various entities.
The very notion that an entire company can exist and sustain itself solely on negotiating with your insurance provider on your behalf is utter insanity. I've heard horror stories about communist bureaucracy from Soviet-occupied European countries, but I don't think even the USSR can compete with the modern American healthcare bureaucracy. It's outrageous and unconscionable.
I spun up a VM on my proxmox server and loaded HAOS. Job done. The only added steps involved giving the HAOS IP to my reverse proxy, now it's reachable from the outside net.
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