‘AI First’ means AI comes before the users, which can be true for any service. It was never an app for you. Just an app that you happened to use.

This wouldn’t be much of an issue if most of the laptops nowadays didn’t come with soldered in ram and no options of expanding.

Very good question indeed. Sadly, it doesn’t help that Chomsky keeps avoiding answering this and other related questions.

As someone so vocal about serious crimes going unpunished, I’d imagine he’d just openly say what’s going on. If he’s so adamant about staying silent, it only adds more doubt and further questions.

Leave it to colorblind people to name everything color-related.

Recently there was a similar incident in China involving a Xiaomi car. This led to an incoming legislation that will require all cars to have mechanical handles in case of emergency.

Tesla alone had many such cases and there are no plans whatsoever to do anything about it.

Imagine losing to China in safety regulations.

‘People with nothing to hide’ don’t exist. All of us have something that we’d like to keep private or even secret.

Sometimes it’s little silly things we do when nobody’s watching, like tasting our pets’ food. Other times it’s porn and what specific kind we read/watch/play. And in a tiny, miniscule minority of cases it’s crime. Even fewer of those cases are crimes that actually hurt anyone.

Depriving 99.99% of the population (the remaining 0.01% are politicians) of basic rights just to pretend you’re stopping crime that 0.001% of the population is comitting. Pretend, because we know it doesn’t even work anyway.

Nearly 25 years of mass, global surveillance by the NSA, CIA and FBI, and they failed to catch even a single terrorist or terrorist-to-be. Meanwhile there’s a public shooting almost every day.

It’s not just about basic human rights or fundamental principles of society. These programs simply don’t work. It’s a waste of resources. The only result is bulk data gathering on the citizens. I wonder what that could be used for…?

Good enough I guess?

But why spend resources on useless features that nobody asked for and nobody’s going to take advantage of? Instead of, you know, implementing anything that may benefit the users?

He was recently asked about it and did not respond. His wife in his place said he has no comments to add.

Tough but fair.

All you need to do is print it, forge the signatures and input it in the national registry. Should be doable.

Are you sure it won’t apply? As far as I understand, it’ll apply to all devices with Google services installed. Which includes most ROMs, as well as non-Google ROMs after you manually install gapps. Is my understanding off?

There have been at least 2 more CEO killings recently. But mainstream media is deliberately not reporting on it, because it’d likely lead to even more. Don’t forget everything is owned and managed by the same groups of people.

Some things are - on purpose - made easy to misuse and - by design - accessible to people, who are likely to misuse them. All this money, this supposedly cutting edge technology, and reporting to the police, but they aren’t able to tell when a child is at risk and report it as well?

Smells like bullshit to me. More like they don’t care. I’m not so sure children should even be allowed to use chatbots in the first place. Or only allowed to use versions specifically trained for interactions with children. But of course - banning children from accessing youtube and wikipedia is a much more pressing concern.

Hey everyone! As many have noticed, the PinePhone Pro is currently out ot stock on the Pine Store. Unfortunately we have to deliver you the following news: the PinePhone Pro is officially discontinued. We were told it didn’t sell well enough to keep production going. But the good news for current owners are that spare parts will still be made for up to two years, depending on demand. Meanwhile, the trusty PinePhone (A64) is still alive and kicking, and Pine Store plans to keep it rolling for about two more years.

Well, that sucks. So I guess the better move here would be to wait for something new? I don’t think the regular PinePhone is at all viable as a daily driver.

OnlyOffice, not OpenOffice. This is a different suite entirely. Might be better for people coming from MS Office, since it looks practically identical. Also supports opening multiple files as tabs.

I’m a huge fan of Pine64, but I wouldn’t expect the PinePhone to be a great replacement for an Android smartphone. Personally I have quite extensive experience with PineBook Pro, PineTime and PineBuds Pro. I haven’t had the chance to try the PinePhone, but I’d definitely go for the Pro.

Even then, prepare for a junky experience and forget about lixuries such as good camera, nice screen, smooth UI/UX. Their devices are great, and the ideas behind them more so. But unfortunately they rarely work well, perhaps with the exception of PineBuds Pro.

As of right now, it’s looking like GrapheneOS will be unaffected, and Google has yet to lock down the bootloader. So this should remain a valid option for at least 2 years.

Other than that:

• Any smartphones with an unlocked bootloader + any ROMs without gapps
• Chinese smartphones with non-Google Android builds
• Linux smartphones
• Bonus: Huawei is about to release their own non-Android OS, but I wouldn’t expect it to be privacy-friendly

Honestly there probably isn’t any good, long-term solution. Personally I’m somewhat shocked we’ve gone this many years with reasonably open smartphones. Next step is probably closing bootloaders in new laptops, as part of the switch to ARM (which is already undergoing).

It’s very likely that no amount of negative feedback will change anything. Why not waste some of their time anyway? Write to them, call them, spread the word. This is the only thing we can do. Even if it goes through regardless - at the very least we can make it as unpleasant as possible.

Two things especially worth noting from the article.

If you have a non-Google build of Android on your phone, none of this applies.

This means that at least GrapheneOS will be unaffected for now. Other ROMs without gapps will be unaffected only as long as you don’t install gapps. Since Graphene has a sandbox for them, I’m assuming it’ll be fine. That is, unless Google decides to lock the bootloader entirely.

In September 2026, Google plans to launch this feature in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand. The next step is still hazy, but Google is targeting 2027 to expand the verification requirements globally.

So most users worldwide still have at least 1.5 years until it’s implemented. Plenty of time to get a Pixel and install Graphene on it. Or to figure out some other plan.

Don’t get me wrong - this is insane, unreasonable and horrible news for everyone. We should push back as hard as physically possible against it. However, at the very least we still have some time to figure things out before the policy rolls out.

(…) it was all avoidable.

It really wasn’t. Everything in American politics for long years has been leading to this point. It was always bound to happen, sooner or later. Sure, by choosing another president you could have potentially delayed it by a few years. But later it would have happened anyway. This is not a ‘Trump issue’. This is a ‘USA issue’.

I think Americans are the only ones who haven’t seen this coming. And I don’t mean that in a hostile way. Your education system has been sabotaged for decades, so it’s no wonder the people are uninformed and ignorant to what’s going on. The only ones to blame are the psychopathic politicians and billionaires who deliberately made this happen over the last 200 years.