You ignored the second half of that statement which changes the meaning a lot. They are not trying shit returns on that, and that's the point. Bottom line it is a monopoly and you can choose to believe they won't abuse that but I don't and believe they definitely are.
Again, you're exaggerating my point way beyond what I said. I never said it has to be at cost or free. That would be absurdly idealistic and run counter to basic economic principles. Stop with this, you know it isn't even close to my point.
20 billion on play alone in 2017. Didn't see their revenue total but Q2 2018 was 30 so 120 is a safe assumption. Meaning it accounted for 1/6 of their revenue... They aren't dumping even half that into the distribution piece or even likely most of the support structure by now. There's your numbers. I'd say 16% is a bit bigger than "relatively nothing."
Now, considering I am a software engineer and work on enterprise level systems and architecture, yea I have a pretty good idea of what goes into Android development. Don't get on a high horse with that like I'm some pleb that doesn't know what I'm talking about. I've deployed large scale systems with everything you're mentioning for fortune 500 companies though mostly not consumer facing.
The last part is just you being asinine. I'm clearly referring to the largely known fact that Google collects and sells information and not even acting like somehow you don't know. Google does in fact want people to believe otherwise, I was merely making an aside.
That's a cop out though. Google assumed their own risk by getting into the market and turning the phones into a computer just like Epic assumed risk buy using their own installer. And if Epic created the vulnerability you damn right they are going to be held responsible for that. Microsoft isn't held accountable for Adobe putting garbage software on their platform.
This is a platform. They are computers with telephony functions. I really don't understand why you want to give them a pass based on some idea that they are some how different, but you're clearly not going to agree with me nor I with you. You're entitled to your own opinion but we're rehashing now and not really contributing to a productive discussion at this point.
That sounds more workable then. I guess I need to get my Pi back out and play around with it again. I got a 3 a while back and it got mothballed because all the stuff I wanted to use it for became overly complicated really quickly. I liked the idea of being able to do PoE when I saw this, but guess I'm not familiar enough with the other parts for the boards.
Wait, so then you're saying as a consumer you're perfectly fine with having to pay an additional 30% markup because of Google's mainstream distribution monopoly? I guess to each his own, but that seems pretty damn excessive to me still.
I also think the cut they are taking is excessive regardless of it being a game or being popular. They are entitled to some type of servicing fee (I don't expect an OS to be given away for free), but they are not redeveloping the app store every month/year. The damn thing has been largely unchanged for some time now. Yes some of it is to fund Android development and again that is fine, but this is not their only revenue stream. I really can't blame Epic for not wanting to hand over that much money to them. And as I said in another post, no Google did not violate the letter of their policy, but I do feel they violated the spirit depending on what the patch rates were (someone else pointed out they may have been at a decent level, we don't know the real numbers though).
The rest of it, I will 100% give you they assumed the risk creating their own installer and publishing outside the standard distribution channels (I'm just not arguing with their reasoning for doing so). They did fuck up and deserve some PR hit for doing it. Unfortunately what has become clear to me through all of these posts and the volume of people landing on different sides of this, were honestly speculating a lot without more information. Large part of it comes down to which side we're willing to give the benefit of the doubt as to being less dishonest (not going to use honest, neither company is actually honest). I personally have become a bit jaded with Google so I tend to put less faith in them...
That is a fair point if true, but it seems self-defeating for Epic to say anything if that were the case. Perhaps it can then be thrown in the pointless corporate pissing match, but I stand by Google does have ulterior motives.
Seriously man, you're actually like they are still pouring billions into it and getting shit returns for that. Not only that, don't think I ever said they had to give it away for free... I write software for a living, I know what the markets look like and that would be a pretty stupid position for me to take. You're taking a basic argument and way extending it to an extreme that was never even implied. This has gone beyond continuing to make a good living for their initial work. This has drifted well into the gouging realm.
I admittedly skimmed it and missed that part. Still sounds stupid though, now you have to buy a second board to cover most of the use cases anyway? So now the cost is doubled at least (depending on how difficult/expensive the pass through headers are) and it isn't really an out of the box solution.
I think that's a bit of hyperbole. The default position on apps from phones always was "work with what the manufacturer makes available for purchase on the store or hack your phone. Period". Apple stepped in and let people develop (for a fee) free apps in addition to paid ones, but the single point of distribution was and is the App Store. Android was the very first OS that even gave you the option to sideload.apk files without having to screw with a PC like PalmOS on the Treo. You're angry that it wasn't as open as the PC world. That wasn't ever in the cards.
Again though, my point is why? The only reason that is not in the cards is simply because they artificially made it that way.
Because they make the software that runs the phones? If you don't like it, go get a different phone, or write your own software for the phone. Or if you don't want to do that, go get a Tizen or Plasma Mobile compatible phone, overwrite the stock Android with that and have at it. I mean sure, Tizen's riddled with security holes and Plasma only works on a couple of Android devices but baby steps.
Up front I buy that they have some rights to that somewhat due to investment and such, but even though you don't want to accept the comparison to the PC market (for some reason) we already went through this with Microsoft and it was ruled they should not/do not have unilateral authority over something like this. There is an inherent risk when a company puts out more than a product and they are actually creating an ecosystem and/or market. Once they venture into those realms they don't get to dictate to the consumer and businesses within that marketplace everything about that market. If they did we would have a pure oligarchy develop in every country that attempted to create a capitalist system.
You're right. They stand to make nothing. And they risk introducing instability. So why on God's Green Earth would they? Do you do extra work for free that might cause you more problems in your day job? I don't. Why would they?
Instabliity? No. This stuff is not any more unstable than what is going to run on a normal PC. These things are not magic and Google Engineers are not wizards. They are mini PCs with a different Operating System and built on the same principles as everything else. That is just business talk bullshit that no engineer in their right mind is going to accept and honestly neither should the consumers.
Beyond that, as far as making a better side-loading mechanisms, I refer you to my previous point that when they created a marketplace they gave up some of the unilateral authority. Even if they were allowed that, they shouldn't be/have been acting like it is this huge open and free platform. They know it was misleading to people, but thought no one would notice or care on the consumers side if they were only taking advantage of the developers and businesses. To their credit sadly, they are right and most people don't care or notice. The backwards part is the consumers are either literally paying for it in higher costs for the software or indirectly paying for it due to lower quality work.
Bottom line, I have absolutely no issue with them making money for what they do. Everyone has that right and that is how the system works, but they are outright gouging and taking advantage of a monopoly that they intentionally created.
Initial development is beside the point. They've made that investment back with tons of return so many times it is ridiculous. I'm perfectly fine with them taking some cut as everyone should be paid for their work, but 30% is excessive imho especially when they are just abusing a market monopoly. It might be different if they were continuing to invest that much into the infrastructure continuously, but as I said they barely do anything with the Play Store anymore. They also are monetizing in a lot of other ways despite what they want everyone to believe...
While this "study" by "scientists" is pretty shaky, to play devil's advocate one should not dismiss something simply on the basis of a person's affiliations either. Especially when this is the affiliation of one person, that appointed a group that actually did the studying. Now, combined with other evidence (I haven't read the paper and don't plan to) this may indeed be a bunch of hand-waving at best. Or it could be a ground-breaking bit of information to be used as a cautionary tale for our future and current leaders. Either way, my original point stands.
If I'm looking at the pictures right, that fan also seems to cover the GPIO pins entirely... Wouldn't that kill a ton of use cases for someone deploying this thing remotely with a PoE setup?
Misleading headline is misleading... I was really confused when I read the summary and it had nothing to do with the headline until you click through to the article. Editing fail there slashdot...
The problem with your arguments are you're applying expectations of open-ness for PC OSs to the mobile phone market.
While true, why should they be applied different? Phones are just mini computers and in many cases people use them as their main computer anyway. The only reason the markets are treated differently in that regard is the companies behind the major developments engineered the market that way. It was a much more organic process with PCs originally and they were not able to force-feed consumers their own ideas with as much success (Plus as much as I dislike Torvalds, Linux gave a big middle finger to closed platform usage in the early days).
We're not talking about Windows, Android's main competitor is Apple's IOS. How's Android look compared to that? How are those IOS competitors to the App Store there doing? Exactly.
Apple is just as guilty if not more. The argument that "It isn't as bad as they other guy" is still weak. Using a more extreme example would be, "I'm not so bad, I only beat that guy into a state or paralysis/coma, while that guy beat another to death!" Neither one is right, just less wrong...
And it is. To MANUFACTURERS. It's a packaged OS that anyone who wants to build a device around can do so. Your disconnect is you are conflating how Android is considered an open platform to how Linux is on the X86 space.
When they came up with it originally they tried to compare it in much the same way as the Windows/Linux relationship, but they became very dissatisfied with the fragmentation of the market. While the Android One development has helped Android beat Apple they also used that initiative to solidify some monopolies within the platform. Google Play is the lynch pin to that monopoly. Companies can't even branch Android effectively and reach a decent market because of Google's policies with it and their is no real alternative market.
And I disagree. Google put a mechanism in for experienced users to be able to load an untrusted.apk file with the expectation that only people who understood the ramifications of doing so - i.e. so called "power users" - would use it. And now Epic's told everyone and their grandma to allow untrusted.apks to be installed on their phones. Epic is the party saying "Google wanted a cut of our cash flow so we're just gonna tell everyone to toss out a basic security feature of Android so we can make some more money!"
I'll give you that Epic did take a big risk in using that to accomplish this, but why exactly should Google have such a monopoly on the distribution of software to the phones? Same with Apple. It creates a serious pay to play scenario that isn't really different than the spirit of net neutrality. Google is trying to force people to access the consumers through them for a hefty fee. It is a "security feature" but it is also a digital bouncer for Google. Why can't they provide a more secure way for independent market places or developers to distribute apps? Simple, profit. They stand to make nothing and even lose their monopoly if they did that. If they really cared about users as much as they claim this would already be standard just like software security certificates and dll signing.
I should amend, I feel Google is going against the spirit of their policies (with their extension on disclosure) even though they didn't technically violate the letter of it. If you disagree, then to each their own.
In finding the vulnerability, yes they were concerned. Given how popular the game is though, the disclosure should have been delayed and Google knows it. If they had worked with Epic they probably could have waited until at least a 75% patch rate (which is reasonable) was attained before making the disclosure. Especially given how new this thing is right now. Because of Google's practices on Android, it is more complex for users to patch Epic's installer and Google knows that too, but doesn't care. It looks as it they thought, "we can spin the narrative that if they used our distribution platform they would have had plenty of time," and play innocent that this was policy (regardless of the fact that it is also normal practice to extend the disclosure time for extenuating circumstance, like this).
Meanwhile, if they HAD waited a little bit longer and the saturation was high enough the vulnerability would be nearly useless by that point (and lets be real, the 75% I mentioned wouldn't have taken all that much longer to wait out, they wouldn't have even hit the 90 day policy...), because by the time someone could exploit it their success rate wouldn't be good enough to make it worth their while. The only reason they have the 7 day after patch policy is normally that is enough time to reach the patch rates that make the vulnerability useless.
Some money is appropriate, but 30% is pretty damn excessive. Factor in the taxes and most of the companies are lucky to get half of what they are charging and a bunch of that I'm sure is overhead.
I see two major problems with your argument. First, Android is supposed to be open source/marketed as being the open platform, but the practices of Google are really counter to this. Normally I don't care to get into the pissing matching between companies (frankly I don't care if the companies kill each other usually), but these particular pissing matches are actually harming consumers. Then, Google is intentionally distributing Android with some built in dark patterns to scare users into only being comfortable with using Google Play where they get a large cut of profits for very little work. I mean they didn't even put that much work into Google Play to start. I don't mind them taking some profit as that is how the Android Platform is monetized and allows it to be freely distributed, but they literally take more money than these companies are taxed. Something is pretty wrong with that picture.
On top of that, they have taken great pains to prevent other stores from taking much hold or allowing for simplified individual distribution to the Android platform in any way. Imagine the uproar if Microsoft did this with Windows. Epic did take a risk for this business decision and definitely fucked up with the execution, but Google is doing some real shady shit now and straight up trying to punish them. This is some fucking mob tactics to keep anyone else from doing the same and them losing the stranglehold on their distribution monopoly. This behavior is NOT good for consumers at all and honestly, pretty unfair to businesses and developers too.
You must either work for Google or do some shady practices of your own. Google violated their own policies in stark contrast to normal practices to disclose this damn near as soon as it was found. They literally put people at risk irresponsibly and unethically simply because Epic decided to not contribute to their literal monopoly on app installation platforms for Android (the phone vendors have their own, but they are just trying to pull the same crap as Google on their hardware). This is past petty. I'm really starting to sour on Google's bullshit that they pull with every fucking product or platform they touch...
Also consider, Google is not handling this in any way different than Microsoft was with Internet Explorer and other software that they bundled into Windows, and remember Microsoft lost that anti-trust case badly. Now look at the browser market share... Hell honestly, it may be worse because Google is taking a MASSIVE cut of revenue for doing next to nothing anymore with Google Play. Seriously, most of these companies have to fork more over to Google than they do to the fucking US Government for taxes...
Beyond that, it's simply not something that really needs to be the concern of customs and border patrol, with carte blanche authority to confiscate, copy, or rummage through. Especially given that ANYTHING that can be smuggled in as a data on a smart phone can be trivially transmitted accross the border completely encrypted via the internet, terrestrial radio, satellite, flashes of light from a boat in international waters, stenography in cat videos on youtube.
I think this is the crux of it all. They are basically trying to apply the logic, "we search other stuff at the border so here is an opportunity to search data too!" When this shit could be EASILY circumvented by anyone trying to do anything nefarious. It then becomes just a blatant invasion of privacy on US citizens. They are not transmitting physical fucking goods that could do any damage or be subject to certain restrictions. This is nothing but data that is legally allowed to freely pass via electronic cables/radio waves into and out of the country every damn second. People should not have to resort to crazy practices using burner phones or transmitting data across the border and wiping the phone etc.
Bottom line, these are ridiculous bullshit excuses to invade privacy on fishing expeditions that have no real legal ground to stand on (I'm not a lawyer, but it is pretty obvious this is violating the spirit and perhaps letter of the law). If the courts have an sense of justice left this should be a blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment and the practice should be barred from being used against anyone else.
You know if all you say is true, that is great for you. Problem is that type of company is by FAR not the norm.
Counter anecdote: My last job I worked at for 6 years right out of college and ended up working for them as a senior engineer within about 3 years. I secured 3 major accounts (and I mean fortune 500 companies too) due to the projects that I worked to deliver and while they had this same kind of lip service, NOTHING real came of it. They still barely increased my salary at review time despite glowing performance reviews from management, co-workers, and customers (seriously, some of them straight up would request me to work on their projects), our benefits actually got worse over the course of those 6 years, and they increasingly expected me to take on more work than I should with a lot less time off. All this happened while the company saw records revenue and profits (they reported the numbers to the employees, privately held) and almost everyone in my office and even the other two major offices complained of piss poor wages and barely usable benefits.
This resulted in ungodly 17 to 20% turnover numbers for a couple of years. I left late last year (honestly should have left earlier, but gambled that the experience was worth the trade-off), signed on with my new employer who gave me a base salary that is nearly 50% higher than my previous one, with stock options, bonuses, great benefits, normal work hours, good vacations, etc. The list of improvements goes on. I studied up on my current employer's handling of the great recession too and they did do pretty well by their workers within reason (big company so it is almost unavoidable). In fact, the only time they had to do major lay-offs in our particular office is when a sales team grossly overstated several project timelines and underbid the cost so badly that they lost a major account (the entire sales team was FIRED not laid off...) so they had to lay the people off that were hired for that account.
All this said, I even had other job offers all in the same time frame that I ended up turning down based on basic numbers and merit. The basic point is just because you got lucky and landed a decent company does not mean it is a good idea for others to just sit tight and depend on what is mostly a bunch of assholes running their current employer. If you want to get ahead, take a stab and find something better. If you are not wanting to climb the ladder, that is perfectly fine, but everyone should also be aware that most companies want you to believe they are this great merciful employer. At the end of the day however, most won't hesitate to cut your throat if it suits their whims. If we all sit and just take what they give us wages sit stagnant (like they are right now in spite of the market landscape) and you just keep handing them all the power and profits. Capitalism doesn't even kind of work if most people just sit around and say, "well, I'm just glad I have something even though it isn't what I'm worth." Being grateful and thankful is one thing, but be wary of becoming complacent.
This is not protected as free speech. Not at all. If that were the case there could be no law against clandestine spying in general as long as it is not for a foreign entity. And hello corporate espionage laws! They are somewhat narrow in scope, but they still protect companies from unscrupulous information gathering methods being used against them.
You raise a very important point and distinction many don't consider. Privacy policies are just that, policies. This effectively means the company doesn't intend to engage in this behavior right that second and that it is self-enforced. Nothing actually prevents them from collecting troves of information over time, changing the policy one day and then selling it off to the highest bidder. One might be able to initiate some type of civil suit, but the burden of proof to get over the preponderance of evidence is going to be a bit rough. If you can't prove that was their intent from the start, they get off without so much as a slap on the wrist.
Personally this is why I get so sideways with people insisting there doesn't need to be regulations against this type of behavior. Typically they hide behind the old chestnut, "regulations put undue hardship on the companies" but given how easily they can ruin hundreds of thousands if not millions of people's lives (hello Equifax) it seems insane to not put the weight of real legal threats on them for doing so. Financial incentive only goes so far in my opinion. They have some financial incentive to protect information to a point, but eventually investing beyond a particular level cuts into their outrageous margins too much. Then, when they do something stupid or a big buyer comes along and wants that information about their customers, it is the people they duped into handing it over that pay the price. Hell, some of these services you can't even avoid using with becoming a fucking hermit/mountain man. Again with Equifax, how exactly did I opt into them running the credit services and collecting massive volumes of information on me just because I was born into the damn world?.
Investors often don't give a single shit how moral/ethical/just plain evil a company's plan is as long as it is legal. Remember, the almighty dollars rules many at the top. I personally avoid investments in any of the companies engaging in such activities, but I am by far in the minority...
Slashdot Mirror
You ignored the second half of that statement which changes the meaning a lot. They are not trying shit returns on that, and that's the point. Bottom line it is a monopoly and you can choose to believe they won't abuse that but I don't and believe they definitely are.
Again, you're exaggerating my point way beyond what I said. I never said it has to be at cost or free. That would be absurdly idealistic and run counter to basic economic principles. Stop with this, you know it isn't even close to my point.
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20 billion on play alone in 2017. Didn't see their revenue total but Q2 2018 was 30 so 120 is a safe assumption. Meaning it accounted for 1/6 of their revenue... They aren't dumping even half that into the distribution piece or even likely most of the support structure by now. There's your numbers. I'd say 16% is a bit bigger than "relatively nothing."
Now, considering I am a software engineer and work on enterprise level systems and architecture, yea I have a pretty good idea of what goes into Android development. Don't get on a high horse with that like I'm some pleb that doesn't know what I'm talking about. I've deployed large scale systems with everything you're mentioning for fortune 500 companies though mostly not consumer facing.
The last part is just you being asinine. I'm clearly referring to the largely known fact that Google collects and sells information and not even acting like somehow you don't know. Google does in fact want people to believe otherwise, I was merely making an aside.
That's a cop out though. Google assumed their own risk by getting into the market and turning the phones into a computer just like Epic assumed risk buy using their own installer. And if Epic created the vulnerability you damn right they are going to be held responsible for that. Microsoft isn't held accountable for Adobe putting garbage software on their platform.
This is a platform. They are computers with telephony functions. I really don't understand why you want to give them a pass based on some idea that they are some how different, but you're clearly not going to agree with me nor I with you. You're entitled to your own opinion but we're rehashing now and not really contributing to a productive discussion at this point.
That sounds more workable then. I guess I need to get my Pi back out and play around with it again. I got a 3 a while back and it got mothballed because all the stuff I wanted to use it for became overly complicated really quickly. I liked the idea of being able to do PoE when I saw this, but guess I'm not familiar enough with the other parts for the boards.
The 30% is part of the overhead.
Wait, so then you're saying as a consumer you're perfectly fine with having to pay an additional 30% markup because of Google's mainstream distribution monopoly? I guess to each his own, but that seems pretty damn excessive to me still.
I also think the cut they are taking is excessive regardless of it being a game or being popular. They are entitled to some type of servicing fee (I don't expect an OS to be given away for free), but they are not redeveloping the app store every month/year. The damn thing has been largely unchanged for some time now. Yes some of it is to fund Android development and again that is fine, but this is not their only revenue stream. I really can't blame Epic for not wanting to hand over that much money to them. And as I said in another post, no Google did not violate the letter of their policy, but I do feel they violated the spirit depending on what the patch rates were (someone else pointed out they may have been at a decent level, we don't know the real numbers though).
The rest of it, I will 100% give you they assumed the risk creating their own installer and publishing outside the standard distribution channels (I'm just not arguing with their reasoning for doing so). They did fuck up and deserve some PR hit for doing it. Unfortunately what has become clear to me through all of these posts and the volume of people landing on different sides of this, were honestly speculating a lot without more information. Large part of it comes down to which side we're willing to give the benefit of the doubt as to being less dishonest (not going to use honest, neither company is actually honest). I personally have become a bit jaded with Google so I tend to put less faith in them...
That is a fair point if true, but it seems self-defeating for Epic to say anything if that were the case. Perhaps it can then be thrown in the pointless corporate pissing match, but I stand by Google does have ulterior motives.
Seriously man, you're actually like they are still pouring billions into it and getting shit returns for that. Not only that, don't think I ever said they had to give it away for free... I write software for a living, I know what the markets look like and that would be a pretty stupid position for me to take. You're taking a basic argument and way extending it to an extreme that was never even implied. This has gone beyond continuing to make a good living for their initial work. This has drifted well into the gouging realm.
Difference is there is now a viable market alternative and it shows in their market share. Microsoft has barely 10% share factoring in Edge and IE.
I admittedly skimmed it and missed that part. Still sounds stupid though, now you have to buy a second board to cover most of the use cases anyway? So now the cost is doubled at least (depending on how difficult/expensive the pass through headers are) and it isn't really an out of the box solution.
I think that's a bit of hyperbole. The default position on apps from phones always was "work with what the manufacturer makes available for purchase on the store or hack your phone. Period". Apple stepped in and let people develop (for a fee) free apps in addition to paid ones, but the single point of distribution was and is the App Store. Android was the very first OS that even gave you the option to sideload .apk files without having to screw with a PC like PalmOS on the Treo. You're angry that it wasn't as open as the PC world. That wasn't ever in the cards.
Again though, my point is why? The only reason that is not in the cards is simply because they artificially made it that way.
Because they make the software that runs the phones? If you don't like it, go get a different phone, or write your own software for the phone. Or if you don't want to do that, go get a Tizen or Plasma Mobile compatible phone, overwrite the stock Android with that and have at it. I mean sure, Tizen's riddled with security holes and Plasma only works on a couple of Android devices but baby steps.
Up front I buy that they have some rights to that somewhat due to investment and such, but even though you don't want to accept the comparison to the PC market (for some reason) we already went through this with Microsoft and it was ruled they should not/do not have unilateral authority over something like this. There is an inherent risk when a company puts out more than a product and they are actually creating an ecosystem and/or market. Once they venture into those realms they don't get to dictate to the consumer and businesses within that marketplace everything about that market. If they did we would have a pure oligarchy develop in every country that attempted to create a capitalist system.
You're right. They stand to make nothing. And they risk introducing instability. So why on God's Green Earth would they? Do you do extra work for free that might cause you more problems in your day job? I don't. Why would they?
Instabliity? No. This stuff is not any more unstable than what is going to run on a normal PC. These things are not magic and Google Engineers are not wizards. They are mini PCs with a different Operating System and built on the same principles as everything else. That is just business talk bullshit that no engineer in their right mind is going to accept and honestly neither should the consumers.
Beyond that, as far as making a better side-loading mechanisms, I refer you to my previous point that when they created a marketplace they gave up some of the unilateral authority. Even if they were allowed that, they shouldn't be/have been acting like it is this huge open and free platform. They know it was misleading to people, but thought no one would notice or care on the consumers side if they were only taking advantage of the developers and businesses. To their credit sadly, they are right and most people don't care or notice. The backwards part is the consumers are either literally paying for it in higher costs for the software or indirectly paying for it due to lower quality work.
Bottom line, I have absolutely no issue with them making money for what they do. Everyone has that right and that is how the system works, but they are outright gouging and taking advantage of a monopoly that they intentionally created.
Initial development is beside the point. They've made that investment back with tons of return so many times it is ridiculous. I'm perfectly fine with them taking some cut as everyone should be paid for their work, but 30% is excessive imho especially when they are just abusing a market monopoly. It might be different if they were continuing to invest that much into the infrastructure continuously, but as I said they barely do anything with the Play Store anymore. They also are monetizing in a lot of other ways despite what they want everyone to believe...
While this "study" by "scientists" is pretty shaky, to play devil's advocate one should not dismiss something simply on the basis of a person's affiliations either. Especially when this is the affiliation of one person, that appointed a group that actually did the studying. Now, combined with other evidence (I haven't read the paper and don't plan to) this may indeed be a bunch of hand-waving at best. Or it could be a ground-breaking bit of information to be used as a cautionary tale for our future and current leaders. Either way, my original point stands.
If I'm looking at the pictures right, that fan also seems to cover the GPIO pins entirely... Wouldn't that kill a ton of use cases for someone deploying this thing remotely with a PoE setup?
Misleading headline is misleading... I was really confused when I read the summary and it had nothing to do with the headline until you click through to the article. Editing fail there slashdot...
The problem with your arguments are you're applying expectations of open-ness for PC OSs to the mobile phone market.
While true, why should they be applied different? Phones are just mini computers and in many cases people use them as their main computer anyway. The only reason the markets are treated differently in that regard is the companies behind the major developments engineered the market that way. It was a much more organic process with PCs originally and they were not able to force-feed consumers their own ideas with as much success (Plus as much as I dislike Torvalds, Linux gave a big middle finger to closed platform usage in the early days).
We're not talking about Windows, Android's main competitor is Apple's IOS. How's Android look compared to that? How are those IOS competitors to the App Store there doing? Exactly.
Apple is just as guilty if not more. The argument that "It isn't as bad as they other guy" is still weak. Using a more extreme example would be, "I'm not so bad, I only beat that guy into a state or paralysis/coma, while that guy beat another to death!" Neither one is right, just less wrong...
And it is. To MANUFACTURERS. It's a packaged OS that anyone who wants to build a device around can do so. Your disconnect is you are conflating how Android is considered an open platform to how Linux is on the X86 space.
When they came up with it originally they tried to compare it in much the same way as the Windows/Linux relationship, but they became very dissatisfied with the fragmentation of the market. While the Android One development has helped Android beat Apple they also used that initiative to solidify some monopolies within the platform. Google Play is the lynch pin to that monopoly. Companies can't even branch Android effectively and reach a decent market because of Google's policies with it and their is no real alternative market.
And I disagree. Google put a mechanism in for experienced users to be able to load an untrusted .apk file with the expectation that only people who understood the ramifications of doing so - i.e. so called "power users" - would use it. And now Epic's told everyone and their grandma to allow untrusted .apks to be installed on their phones. Epic is the party saying "Google wanted a cut of our cash flow so we're just gonna tell everyone to toss out a basic security feature of Android so we can make some more money!"
I'll give you that Epic did take a big risk in using that to accomplish this, but why exactly should Google have such a monopoly on the distribution of software to the phones? Same with Apple. It creates a serious pay to play scenario that isn't really different than the spirit of net neutrality. Google is trying to force people to access the consumers through them for a hefty fee. It is a "security feature" but it is also a digital bouncer for Google. Why can't they provide a more secure way for independent market places or developers to distribute apps? Simple, profit. They stand to make nothing and even lose their monopoly if they did that. If they really cared about users as much as they claim this would already be standard just like software security certificates and dll signing.
I should amend, I feel Google is going against the spirit of their policies (with their extension on disclosure) even though they didn't technically violate the letter of it. If you disagree, then to each their own.
In finding the vulnerability, yes they were concerned. Given how popular the game is though, the disclosure should have been delayed and Google knows it. If they had worked with Epic they probably could have waited until at least a 75% patch rate (which is reasonable) was attained before making the disclosure. Especially given how new this thing is right now. Because of Google's practices on Android, it is more complex for users to patch Epic's installer and Google knows that too, but doesn't care. It looks as it they thought, "we can spin the narrative that if they used our distribution platform they would have had plenty of time," and play innocent that this was policy (regardless of the fact that it is also normal practice to extend the disclosure time for extenuating circumstance, like this).
Meanwhile, if they HAD waited a little bit longer and the saturation was high enough the vulnerability would be nearly useless by that point (and lets be real, the 75% I mentioned wouldn't have taken all that much longer to wait out, they wouldn't have even hit the 90 day policy...), because by the time someone could exploit it their success rate wouldn't be good enough to make it worth their while. The only reason they have the 7 day after patch policy is normally that is enough time to reach the patch rates that make the vulnerability useless.
Some money is appropriate, but 30% is pretty damn excessive. Factor in the taxes and most of the companies are lucky to get half of what they are charging and a bunch of that I'm sure is overhead.
I see two major problems with your argument. First, Android is supposed to be open source/marketed as being the open platform, but the practices of Google are really counter to this. Normally I don't care to get into the pissing matching between companies (frankly I don't care if the companies kill each other usually), but these particular pissing matches are actually harming consumers. Then, Google is intentionally distributing Android with some built in dark patterns to scare users into only being comfortable with using Google Play where they get a large cut of profits for very little work. I mean they didn't even put that much work into Google Play to start. I don't mind them taking some profit as that is how the Android Platform is monetized and allows it to be freely distributed, but they literally take more money than these companies are taxed. Something is pretty wrong with that picture.
On top of that, they have taken great pains to prevent other stores from taking much hold or allowing for simplified individual distribution to the Android platform in any way. Imagine the uproar if Microsoft did this with Windows. Epic did take a risk for this business decision and definitely fucked up with the execution, but Google is doing some real shady shit now and straight up trying to punish them. This is some fucking mob tactics to keep anyone else from doing the same and them losing the stranglehold on their distribution monopoly. This behavior is NOT good for consumers at all and honestly, pretty unfair to businesses and developers too.
You must either work for Google or do some shady practices of your own. Google violated their own policies in stark contrast to normal practices to disclose this damn near as soon as it was found. They literally put people at risk irresponsibly and unethically simply because Epic decided to not contribute to their literal monopoly on app installation platforms for Android (the phone vendors have their own, but they are just trying to pull the same crap as Google on their hardware). This is past petty. I'm really starting to sour on Google's bullshit that they pull with every fucking product or platform they touch...
Also consider, Google is not handling this in any way different than Microsoft was with Internet Explorer and other software that they bundled into Windows, and remember Microsoft lost that anti-trust case badly. Now look at the browser market share... Hell honestly, it may be worse because Google is taking a MASSIVE cut of revenue for doing next to nothing anymore with Google Play. Seriously, most of these companies have to fork more over to Google than they do to the fucking US Government for taxes...
Beyond that, it's simply not something that really needs to be the concern of customs and border patrol, with carte blanche authority to confiscate, copy, or rummage through. Especially given that ANYTHING that can be smuggled in as a data on a smart phone can be trivially transmitted accross the border completely encrypted via the internet, terrestrial radio, satellite, flashes of light from a boat in international waters, stenography in cat videos on youtube.
I think this is the crux of it all. They are basically trying to apply the logic, "we search other stuff at the border so here is an opportunity to search data too!" When this shit could be EASILY circumvented by anyone trying to do anything nefarious. It then becomes just a blatant invasion of privacy on US citizens. They are not transmitting physical fucking goods that could do any damage or be subject to certain restrictions. This is nothing but data that is legally allowed to freely pass via electronic cables/radio waves into and out of the country every damn second. People should not have to resort to crazy practices using burner phones or transmitting data across the border and wiping the phone etc.
Bottom line, these are ridiculous bullshit excuses to invade privacy on fishing expeditions that have no real legal ground to stand on (I'm not a lawyer, but it is pretty obvious this is violating the spirit and perhaps letter of the law). If the courts have an sense of justice left this should be a blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment and the practice should be barred from being used against anyone else.
You know if all you say is true, that is great for you. Problem is that type of company is by FAR not the norm.
Counter anecdote: My last job I worked at for 6 years right out of college and ended up working for them as a senior engineer within about 3 years. I secured 3 major accounts (and I mean fortune 500 companies too) due to the projects that I worked to deliver and while they had this same kind of lip service, NOTHING real came of it. They still barely increased my salary at review time despite glowing performance reviews from management, co-workers, and customers (seriously, some of them straight up would request me to work on their projects), our benefits actually got worse over the course of those 6 years, and they increasingly expected me to take on more work than I should with a lot less time off. All this happened while the company saw records revenue and profits (they reported the numbers to the employees, privately held) and almost everyone in my office and even the other two major offices complained of piss poor wages and barely usable benefits.
This resulted in ungodly 17 to 20% turnover numbers for a couple of years. I left late last year (honestly should have left earlier, but gambled that the experience was worth the trade-off), signed on with my new employer who gave me a base salary that is nearly 50% higher than my previous one, with stock options, bonuses, great benefits, normal work hours, good vacations, etc. The list of improvements goes on. I studied up on my current employer's handling of the great recession too and they did do pretty well by their workers within reason (big company so it is almost unavoidable). In fact, the only time they had to do major lay-offs in our particular office is when a sales team grossly overstated several project timelines and underbid the cost so badly that they lost a major account (the entire sales team was FIRED not laid off...) so they had to lay the people off that were hired for that account.
All this said, I even had other job offers all in the same time frame that I ended up turning down based on basic numbers and merit. The basic point is just because you got lucky and landed a decent company does not mean it is a good idea for others to just sit tight and depend on what is mostly a bunch of assholes running their current employer. If you want to get ahead, take a stab and find something better. If you are not wanting to climb the ladder, that is perfectly fine, but everyone should also be aware that most companies want you to believe they are this great merciful employer. At the end of the day however, most won't hesitate to cut your throat if it suits their whims. If we all sit and just take what they give us wages sit stagnant (like they are right now in spite of the market landscape) and you just keep handing them all the power and profits. Capitalism doesn't even kind of work if most people just sit around and say, "well, I'm just glad I have something even though it isn't what I'm worth." Being grateful and thankful is one thing, but be wary of becoming complacent.
This is not protected as free speech. Not at all. If that were the case there could be no law against clandestine spying in general as long as it is not for a foreign entity. And hello corporate espionage laws! They are somewhat narrow in scope, but they still protect companies from unscrupulous information gathering methods being used against them.
You raise a very important point and distinction many don't consider. Privacy policies are just that, policies. This effectively means the company doesn't intend to engage in this behavior right that second and that it is self-enforced. Nothing actually prevents them from collecting troves of information over time, changing the policy one day and then selling it off to the highest bidder. One might be able to initiate some type of civil suit, but the burden of proof to get over the preponderance of evidence is going to be a bit rough. If you can't prove that was their intent from the start, they get off without so much as a slap on the wrist.
Personally this is why I get so sideways with people insisting there doesn't need to be regulations against this type of behavior. Typically they hide behind the old chestnut, "regulations put undue hardship on the companies" but given how easily they can ruin hundreds of thousands if not millions of people's lives (hello Equifax) it seems insane to not put the weight of real legal threats on them for doing so. Financial incentive only goes so far in my opinion. They have some financial incentive to protect information to a point, but eventually investing beyond a particular level cuts into their outrageous margins too much. Then, when they do something stupid or a big buyer comes along and wants that information about their customers, it is the people they duped into handing it over that pay the price. Hell, some of these services you can't even avoid using with becoming a fucking hermit/mountain man. Again with Equifax, how exactly did I opt into them running the credit services and collecting massive volumes of information on me just because I was born into the damn world?.
Investors often don't give a single shit how moral/ethical/just plain evil a company's plan is as long as it is legal. Remember, the almighty dollars rules many at the top. I personally avoid investments in any of the companies engaging in such activities, but I am by far in the minority...