• 48 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: December 18th, 2023

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  • I don’t see what makes you so certain. The EU unambiguously wants computing devices to be more locked down. It wants responsible developers to be tracked.

    If your argument holds, then that only means that there is a loophole allowing devs to distribute apps anonymously. That’s where the car analogy fails. There are exceptions for small enterprises and “open source stewards”. These exist so that small players and start-ups won’t be overwhelmed by bureaucracy. They are not supposed to protect dev privacy or user freedom.

    I can only repeat that I find your argument valid. I just don’t believe it would stand up in court. If Google was pushing back on this, I would still back them up on such arguments. But they understandably don’t.

    Unless there is a major change in attitudes in Europe, we are going to see much more mandated control and surveillance, anyway.


  • If it’s bundled with the OS, it probably does.

    Components “placed on the market separately” are explicitly included a being part of the product.

    Let me try to gather this together:

    The manufacturer, the authorised representative, the importer, the distributor, or other natural or legal person shall, on request, provide the market surveillance authorities with the name and address of any economic operator who has supplied them with a software product, including software or hardware components being placed on the market separately;


    Economic operators shall, on request, provide the market surveillance authorities with the following information: (a) the name and address of any economic operator who has supplied them with a product with digital elements;

    ‘economic operator’ means the manufacturer, the authorised representative, the importer, the distributor, or other natural or legal person who is subject to obligations in relation to the manufacture of products with digital elements or to the making available of products with digital elements on the market in accordance with this Regulation;

    ‘product with digital elements’ means a software or hardware product and its remote data processing solutions, including software or hardware components being placed on the market separately;


  • The verification demand is for Google certified Android.

    ‘electronic information system’ means a system, including electrical or electronic equipment, capable of processing, storing or transmitting digital data;

    The OS or a phone both fit that definition.

    ‘component’ means software or hardware intended for integration into an electronic information system;

    An app fits the definition of a component.

    Maybe you would have to argue that an app is not actually a component. But if it’s a stand-alone thing, then why does it rely on an OS?

    I think you can make a good argument that a phone without an OS is not a system. It’s not capable of much. Maybe custom roms will remain an option.


    Anyway, Google is not abusing that loophole. So, no problem. F-Droid encourages users to complain to EU lawmakers about Google being a meanie. Maybe the EU will close it anyway as part of future tech regulation.


  • Here’s a definition:

    ‘product with digital elements’ means a software or hardware product and its remote data processing solutions, including software or hardware components being placed on the market separately;

    I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that such apps are components “placed on the market separately”. In fact, I think it’s exactly within the meaning. In any case, even if not, such loopholes are usually plugged by some of the vague, general obligations.

    I don’t think ADB installation is a loophole. Once you poke around in the insides of a device, you’re generally on your own. I expect that devices are going to become more locked down before these regulations enter into force but only as far as absolutely necessary. Google doesn’t want to lock out the next generation of devs. Unless or until there is some fuss about people doing something bad and this is declared a loophole.












  • If some laws in country A have a problem with this, then they should unplug their internet wires at the border, or at least learn how to use them and/or govern their citizens.

    What used to be called The Great Firewall of China. It used to be unthinkable for western countries.

    You can’t blame this on old people. This is only happening now that the Boomers are on the way out. People who sent international letters or made international phone calls were aware that they were communicating with a different country with different laws. I think we are seeing this now, because now we have people who experience the internet as something happening on their own phone, at their location.



  • Grocery store.

    Assume that all the foodstuffs that people normally eat have the same potassium content as these nettles. Then you’d need to consume 1.25kg of your normal food per day to get enough potassium. Someone who consumes less than 1.25kg of those normal food stuffs would not get enough potassium. If normal food stuffs have a significantly lower potassium content, then you’d expect widespread potassium deficiency.

    Maybe, but it doesn’t seem to be a serious public health issue. So common food can’t have significantly lower potassium content than those nettles. What with averages being averages, some foods will have more than others.


  • Feels more like the brick layer is equivalent to someone paid to create training data. You absolutely would want to ask the architects and engineers researching no ways in housing and construction. Not that they know what avenues of research will work out, but they do know the avenues of research.

    No one expected the splash that LLMs or image diffusion models would make. Years later, the conversations on Lemmy are still dominated by people who still haven’t looked up how they work.

    GPTs completely nuked the whole field of natural language processing (NLP). People had dedicated years of their lives to solving tiny aspects of that. That got solved practically over night. Sentiment analysis? Just ask the chatbot. Some of the seemingly smart people who make seemingly informed criticisms of LLMs are NLP guys, who just can’t let go of their old ideas.