I don't think there are a lot of cases which bear specifically on this change in interpretation, because it was somewhat gradual. So instead I'll just give you a rough overview of the concept, then refer you to some books that you can read for more detail.
Basically, when the Bill of Rights was written and ratified, it had nothing to do with individual rights, because the anti-Federalists who were demanding a Bill of Rights weren't really concerned about individual rights. Not because they didn't care about them, but because they trusted their state assemblies to protect individual rights, as they had been doing for generations (consider that the Virginia Assembly had been in full operation for 150 years when the Bill was written). Indeed, at the time the whole notion of a Bill of Rights was based on the Magna Carta and the English Bill of Rights, which were, respectively, about the rights of the Barons and about the rights of the people collectively, not individually. Rather, the anti-Federalists who Madison (a Federalist) was trying to appease were concerned about the risk of a new, distant and aristocratic[*] central government trampling on the states, and the rights in the Bill of Rights were specifically to protect the states. Even apparently individual rights, such as freedom of speech, press, religion and assembly, were actually mostly about political speech, etc. of the form practiced in state governments. Even religion, since many states at the time had an official state religion, often tied deeply into their politics. Really, only the legal procedural elements were about protecting individuals... and even those were important particularly because the aristocratic federal government might try to use judicial processes against the leaders of the states.
What the 14th amendment did was to fundamentally change the role of the federal government in individual rights. Prior to the 14th, it had basically no role whatsoever, and that seemed good to the founders. But the next 70 years showed that states also could become very oppressive of individual rights, and not just to slaves. In order to defend slavery, many of the southern states had severely restricted the rights of even white people. For example, North Carolina made it a capital crime to preach against slavery to a congregation, neatly stomping the freedoms of speech, religion and assembly all in one law! So by the time reconstruction came around, the country had learned that not only did collective states' rights need to be protected from the federal government, but individual rights needed to be protected from the states.
That began the "Doctrine of Incorporation", whereby the Supreme Court individually incorporated elements of the Bill of Rights into the 14th, against the states. The most recent example of incorporation was in McDonald v Chicago, which incorporated the 2A into the 14A, making the 2A apply to the states. More subtly, along the way the meanings of many of the rights actually changed. There's a good argument to be made that the original freedom of assembly was intended to preserve the right of state legislatures to assemble and make laws for their states, but that makes no sense whatsoever in terms of individual freedoms, so it is now interpreted as a general right of people to assemble in groups as they like for whatever purpose they like (with exceptions).
For another example, consider the 2A and 3A, collectively called the "military amenmdents" and which really should be read as a single concept in the original Bill of Rights. The real purpose of those amendments was to protect states from the military might of a central government. The militia clause was motivational and explanatory. But when the Bill of Rights is reinterpreted as a set of individual rights that no longer really makes sense, and hence SCOTUS found in DC v Heller that there is an individual right to keep and bear arms -- note that they did not incorporate in Heller, so they didn't directly apply the 14th amendment but they sti
That's true from the point of view of an app developer. However it is different from the point of view of a device maker.
I'd like to respond but I think this is getting too close to the anti-trust investigation discussion, so I won't. Sorry. I generally ignore the common (and probably quite correct) wisdom that employees shouldn't discuss their employers' actions in public, but I draw the line where legal action is involved. To be precise, I've twice gotten phone calls from Google attorneys who -- very politely and apologetically, mind you! -- told me to shut my big mouth, when I said things about ongoing legal issues. I'm pretty thickheaded, but I do learn eventually:-)
Perhaps the complaint is that Google isn't quite up-front about this wall of separation.
It seems to me that Google is quite up-front about it. If there's an issue it's just that people don't want to believe it. I'm not sure moving pieces of the business out of the Google company to separate Alphabet companies would help with that.
Because when they do realize it, they block the site and warn the user?
Google has every incentive to make the web as safe an experience as possible for its users. Without those users coming to use their services by the hundreds of millions, they don't generate all that ad revenue. There's no profit in intentionally allowing a user to become infected by a bad site.
I suppose I wasn't clear. I meant that Google always knew that it indexed malicious sites, and knows that it always will index malicious sites. Google tries to identify and block them, but that will always be best-effort, never a guarantee. Maybe that's what the OP was saying, too, but the way he said it made it sound like Google believed the index was clean at some point.
Google's lock in system bases not on the google-owned apps (they are just a few, and yes they are very much used by users, but I guess people can come up with an alternative). The main reason to be locked in to Google is their proprietary APIs they offer to app developers. You can't simply take an apk and publish it on an alternative market, if there are no gapps installed on the device, most of the apps won't work.
I don't see that.
Looking at the APIs in question, I see a pretty extensive list, but it's pretty much all just stuff to interact with Google services. There are APIs for:
Google ads
Google analytics
Google search integration (AppIndexing)
Google account authentication
Google cast devices
Google drive integration
Google fit integration
Google games integration
Google cloud messaging integration
Google location services
Google maps integration
Google street view integration
Google+ integration
Google vision integration (server-based service for doing object recognition)
Google wallet integration
Wear integration
Only the last item (Wear integration) isn't obviously tied to some Google server-side systems. And while the above list is a pretty useful set of services for apps that want to use them, there are lots and lots of apps that have absolutely no need for any of the above... with one exception. I suspect what breaks most apps that don't work on non-GMS devices is the lack of the ads API. But there are third-party ads libraries which wrap the GMS ads API as well as other ads APIs so that app developers who don't want to be tied to Google only (and many do like to use other ad networks, so there's a reason for this other than independence of GMS APIs) can use those. Thanks to the run-time class loading and introspection features of Java, it's fairly easy to write code that checks whether a particular class (e.g. com.google.android.gms.ads.MobileAds) is present, and to then do something more useful than crashing if it's not and AFAIK all of the ads aggregation APIs do that.
My perception is that Google tries hard to ensure that as much as possible goes into the core system, and as little as possible goes into the GMS APIs. The exceptions are (a) things that are inherently tied to Google services and (b) things that Google wants to be able to update on its own (e.g. WebView). That second category is stuff that Google will move back to the core system if and when OEMs fix their update process problems, I expect.
(Disclosure: I'm a Google Android engineer. Note that I'm carefully *not* addressing the topic of the EU anti-trust investigation, and I will not, for obvious reasons.)
How about this very subject until they just recently changed it? I should think that would be an adequate example of one such instance, yes?
Are you saying Google once claimed that all of their search results were perfectly safe to click on? I don't think I understand what you mean. Could you elaborate?
They cheated with their placement at some point in the past.
I think it was favoring their own ads or some such.
No, the argument was that they shouldn't be advertising their own services on Google search at all, or else should artificially boost competitors' ads. Google's response was that their self-promotion ads on Google search were selected for a particular search results based on exactly the same relevance and quality ranking algorithms used for everything else. In other words, that they applied precisely the same rules to their ads as everyone else's.
So, unless your argument is that they were lying, this is another example of Google applying their rules consistently, including to themselves.
Where do these guys come from? Someone must be kicking over the rocks for them to escape into the wild. Why not tackle real issues like hunger, torture, spying on citizens, wars, military budgets, infrastructure, climate change, etc?
Because Utah doesn't have any issues with torture, spying on citizens, wars, or military budgets, and is already working on issues like hunger and climate change? I'm not arguing about whether or not this particular initiative is good or bad, but your line of thinking assumes that (a) states can do something about a bunch of stuff that they can't and (b) that governments should only focus on one thing at a time. Both assumptions are ridiculous.
There is some power there, certainly, but the fact that Android is open source means that if Google pushes too hard the partners can simply set up their own app stores, stop calling their devices "Android", and do what they like. Some of the big players are totally capable of doing this.
Capable technically a financially... possibly, yes. Actually going to do that? My twenty bucks says "no way in hell!". Can you imagine a cell phone in the shop with a tag saying "cannot talk to Google Play nor Windows Store"? That would be like a desktop computer with a tag "cannot play games because it does not run Windows".
It's really not that inconceivable. Consider, for example, if the top two or three Android manufacturers decided to ally with Amazon, which already has an app store. And obviously there would be no tag saying "Cannot talk to Google Play store". There would be a tag saying "Can run hundreds of millions of apps from the Amazon app store"... and it would be true. App developers don't often bother with the Amazon store now, but if that was the way to reach all new Samsung devices, you can bet that they would.
My iPad 2, which is at least a year older than my iPhone 4s, would beg to differ with you.
I stand corrected. The iPad2 is indeed a few months older than the iPhone4S. It doesn't change the fact that Elledan compared the worst outlier among Nexus devices to nearly the best outlier among Apple devices. Perhaps he wasn't intentionally cherry-picking devices to support his argument but that was the effect.
Interesting, since Apple products continue to be solidly supported for a minimum of 24 months.
Where's Apple's published commitment to that effect? Oh, I'm not denying that it's true, just that they don't provide any guarantee.
so your 18 month minimum needs to be upped by 6 months just to play ball
You need to re-read the post. The minimum is two years from release or 18 months from last sale, whichever is longer.
name 1 Google device that has seen even 24 month's support
Nexus S, Nexus 4, Nexus 5, Nexus 7v1, Nexus 7v2.
The Nexus 6 and Nexus 9 will hit that mark when they reach two years of age later this year. And of course that's just major release updates. There are also 3+ years of security updates.
I ignored the rest of your post because it's purely unsubstantiated opinion. I prefer to stick to verifiable facts.
One of the big obstacles to regular updates is that many OEMs, especially the larger ones, have so many different devices to update. What looks to consumers like one product may actually be dozens of separate SKUs, for different regions or carriers, with slightly different hardware features, etc., and these different SKUs often run slightly different software. So it's not a matter of "the build", but rather dozens of builds for each "model", each of which has to be tested by the OEM, and then tested again by the carrier.
And this is one of the biggest reasons why Android sucks and iOS rocks.
Ignoring the unsubstantiated opinion, it's also the reason why Android market share has dominated iOS for years now, and iOS continues to decline. Yes, most of those Android phones are cheap devices that barely qualify for the name "smartphone", while iOS still leads in the lucrative premium segment (though that lead is eroding), but that's exactly the point. The wide variety of Android devices available means there are Android phones for every niche.
It's all very similar to the Windows vs MacOS story. In the last few years the combination of the iPhone tie-in and the fact that so much software has moved to the web browser, making it platform independent, but prior to that Windows trounced MacOS for the simple reason that you could buy whatever sort of Windows PC you wanted, and at a very aggressive price point, due to the many manufacturers of PC compatibles. A single manufacturer simply can't compete with an entire ecosystem. That doesn't mean a manufacturer can't carve out a very profitable niche for itself, which Apple has done incredibly well, but it will always be only a niche.
Google wax apparently too stupid and short-sighted to look into the future a little bit, and see the all-too-predictable outcome of losing control over their "Brand". And make no mistake: Most people DO know that Android means Google.
Meh. Google's brand is one of the strongest in the world, and Android is enhancing it, not dragging it down. Until recently most people did not know that Android was Google. Actually most people didn't know that Android was a thing at all; they just knew there was "Samsung", "LG", etc. That is why Google started the "Be together. Not the same." advertising campaign, to help people realize that Android existed and ran on all of those phones... and that it was from Google.
I realize it's hard to break free of the RDF, but you should give it a shot.
Google had no power, because Google didn't make phones at all, and had no interaction whatsoever with carriers. If anyone was in a position to play the kind of hardball Apple did with carriers, it was HTC. But they weren't, because the Dream didn't have nearly the consumer impact that the iPhone did. It was only the runaway success of the iPod and the corresponding consumer cachet that allowed Apple to hold the line with the carriers... and remember that Apple almost didn't succeed. All of the carriers initially refused their terms, and AT&T only got on board with the condition that the iPhone be exclusive to AT&T's network for five years. HTC didn't have the clout to negotiate that sort of deal even if they'd been willing to try. And Google had absolutely no say at all.
1. Twice now, I have had to root my devices to prevent them from auto-installing patches that caused serious problems with the machine, e.g. overheating, massive slowdowns, lock-ups, draining a battery 5 times more quickly than designed, and otherwise making the phone/tablet basically useless... While I realize Google has limited control over the manufacturers' behavior
Correction: Google has basically no control over manufacturers' behavior.
Updates that un-root the phone take away a lot of control. In fact, not having root in the first place effectively means that Google owns my hardware and I just pay for it.
You mean that the company that made your phone owns your hardware and you just pay for it. If you don't want that, buy unlockable phones. All Nexus devices are unlockable, and there are a few other companies that also sell devices with unlockable bootloaders. And, FYI, rooting phones that don't have legitimately unlockable bootloaders is going to become very, very hard, perhaps in many cases impossible, as we continue tightening down the security model. So if you want to continue rooting, prioritize that in your purchase choices.
But, actually, rooting is a bad idea from a security standpoint. I firmly believe that you should be free to do it, but it does reduce device security.
The lesson I have learned out of owning a Google Android device is to never buy Android again. Apple and even Windows update their devices for as long as reasonably possible, while Android is a walking security risk, even on Nexus devices.
Your lesson is overly-broad, because the Galaxy Nexus is an outlier in the Nexus line, and one that will not happen again. The SoC vendor, Texas Instruments, got out of the SoC business, canned the employees and apparently lost all of the source code. Google provides system images for Nexus devices, but OEMs and their suppliers provide all of the lower-level binaries, so this left Google pretty much unable to update anything but the surface level components of Android. OS upgrades always entail lower-level component upgrades as well.
The Galaxy Nexus is the only Nexus device to have suffered this fate. All of the others have been updated for as long as Google felt it was reasonable to continue updating them. Further, Google has now formally committed to a defined support plan for every Nexus device -- something that AFAICT no other company has done. That statement includes Apple. If you buy a Nexus, device you know it will receive major OS upgrades for at least two years from the time the device was released or 18 months from the time it was removed from the Play Store, whichever is longer. Usually the latter is longer, since they stay on the Play store for about a year. Similarly, it will receive security patches for at least three years from release and 30 months from the time it was removed from the Play Store, whichever is longer. Those timelines are committed minimums, not maximums.
To make those commitments possible, Google has obviously negotiated commitments from suppliers so a repeat of the Galaxy Nexus situation cannot occur.
On the other side, you're comparing the Galaxy Nexus to the iPhone 4S which is an outlier in the opposite direction from Apple. No iOS device has been supported as long as the 4S has. And you're also ignoring the fact that iOS 8 rendered the 4S pretty close to unusable. I have one kicking around and it works and has iOS 9... but it's hasn't been something I'd want to use since iOS 8 was released (just 8 days after the 4S was discontinued; I feel sorry for the people who bought those last 4S units. I hope they were cheap).
>> Google Says 30% of Android Devices Don't Get Regular Patches
>> In the Android ecosystem, carriers are also responsible for pushing security patches to users, so while Google pushes security updates each month, not all carriers and device manufacturers release them to all users regularly.
It sounds like the ball's in Google's court. "Want to be an 'Android' vendor? You agree to keep your devices updated with our security patches."
(I'm a member of Google's Android security team, but not an official spokesperson. Treat all of the following as informed personal opinion, not an official statement.)
If only it were that easy. A lot of people overestimate the power that Google has to tell OEMs and carriers what to do. There is some power there, certainly, but the fact that Android is open source means that if Google pushes too hard the partners can simply set up their own app stores, stop calling their devices "Android", and do what they like. Some of the big players are totally capable of doing this. Also, the contractual arrangements aren't renegotiated at whim, there's a schedule (every other year, I think?) so Google can only change them on that schedule, and even then it's a negotiation, not an opportunity for Google to dictate terms.
Still, Google does have considerable leverage, is using it, and this aspect of the ecosystem is getting much better. Rapidly, actually, on the time scales associated with designing and building hardware (as opposed to Internet time).
One of the big obstacles to regular updates is that many OEMs, especially the larger ones, have so many different devices to update. What looks to consumers like one product may actually be dozens of separate SKUs, for different regions or carriers, with slightly different hardware features, etc., and these different SKUs often run slightly different software. So it's not a matter of "the build", but rather dozens of builds for each "model", each of which has to be tested by the OEM, and then tested again by the carrier.
If you're planning on doing regular software updates for a substantial period of time, that's a ridiculous way to structure your product line and build processes, but most OEMs weren't planning on that. Now, most of the major (and many minor) players are, which means that going forward they're going to be working to simplify their offerings and streamline their development and update cycles to be able to turn updates around quickly and test them cost-effectively. They rarely have the bandwidth to go back and fix things up for older products, though, so to some extent the transition to a fully-patched Android ecosystem is going to involve waiting out the decline of older devices.
And keep in mind that by the time a device hits the market it's already been in development for well over a year. So if OEMs got the message in 4Q2015 that they were going to need to do regular updates on future devices, it'll be 2Q2016 or so before they figure out what that means they need to change for new device planning, and then late 2017 before the new crop of devices launches, all set up for monthly update cycles. Carriers have their own retooling to do.
This all means that the Android security team fully expects that we'll have to continue focusing on defense in depth rather than rapid patch deployment as our primary method of protecting user devices for the next few years. Luckily, the current set of techniques seems to be working astonishingly well. Much better than I would have thought.
Once the ecosystem gets far enough down the regular-update path, mind you, it may well become reasonable for Google to mandate regular patching in the contractual relationships that provide OEMs with access to Google's apps, just as you'd like to see happen now. Given that hardly anyone is tooled up to do it right now, though, I don't think there's any way Google could impose that mandate.
The blame lies 100% on the git community for this debacle.
That was true for a few days after the release of 2.7.4, maybe even a few weeks, if we're generous. But the blame gradually shifts to Apple as time goes on and they leave the vulnerability unpatched. By now, it's 100% on Apple. It's not as though Apple doesn't have a mechanism for delivering patches, either.
The first amendment only protects you from government. Sanders campaign is not a government entity and can act as they are acting within their rights.
It's the government that defines and (partially) enforces trademark and copyright law. The fact that they're doing it on behalf of a private entity doesn't change the fact that it's a government action to suppress speech. What does matter is that the constitution specifically authorizes Congress to implement intellectual property rights legislation, so there's something of a conflict between the original text and the first amendment. But Congress and the courts have attempted to balance the issues, and the result is that there are first amendment-related limitations on the scope of intellectual property rights.
The nature of trademark is such that if one doesn't attempt to defend it when violations are brought to one's attention it dilutes the trademark. It isn't like copyright or patents where you can selectively enforce.
On one level you're right. On a deeper lever you're completely wrong.
Yes, it's true that leaving your trademark undefended can cause you to lose it. But there's an alternative to shutting down every use you find: You can simply grant gratis licenses. Not only does this ensure that your trademark remains undiluted, but it even allows you to exercise a non-trivial amount of control over usage because you can attach strings to the license grant. Even if the trademark use isn't actually infringing, as long as you keep the strings relatively light people are highly likely to follow your guidelines just because it's easier than getting lawyers involved, and because they appreciate that you're trying to work with them.
In a case like this, the campaign might even get some good press out of it if they worded the license letter in a suitably humorous way. Sending C&D letters merely out of an obligation to "defend the trademark" is dumb, and shows an extreme lack of creativity.
All of this assumes there actually is a trademark to defend, which other posters have called into question.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think there are a lot of cases which bear specifically on this change in interpretation, because it was somewhat gradual. So instead I'll just give you a rough overview of the concept, then refer you to some books that you can read for more detail.
Basically, when the Bill of Rights was written and ratified, it had nothing to do with individual rights, because the anti-Federalists who were demanding a Bill of Rights weren't really concerned about individual rights. Not because they didn't care about them, but because they trusted their state assemblies to protect individual rights, as they had been doing for generations (consider that the Virginia Assembly had been in full operation for 150 years when the Bill was written). Indeed, at the time the whole notion of a Bill of Rights was based on the Magna Carta and the English Bill of Rights, which were, respectively, about the rights of the Barons and about the rights of the people collectively, not individually. Rather, the anti-Federalists who Madison (a Federalist) was trying to appease were concerned about the risk of a new, distant and aristocratic[*] central government trampling on the states, and the rights in the Bill of Rights were specifically to protect the states. Even apparently individual rights, such as freedom of speech, press, religion and assembly, were actually mostly about political speech, etc. of the form practiced in state governments. Even religion, since many states at the time had an official state religion, often tied deeply into their politics. Really, only the legal procedural elements were about protecting individuals... and even those were important particularly because the aristocratic federal government might try to use judicial processes against the leaders of the states.
What the 14th amendment did was to fundamentally change the role of the federal government in individual rights. Prior to the 14th, it had basically no role whatsoever, and that seemed good to the founders. But the next 70 years showed that states also could become very oppressive of individual rights, and not just to slaves. In order to defend slavery, many of the southern states had severely restricted the rights of even white people. For example, North Carolina made it a capital crime to preach against slavery to a congregation, neatly stomping the freedoms of speech, religion and assembly all in one law! So by the time reconstruction came around, the country had learned that not only did collective states' rights need to be protected from the federal government, but individual rights needed to be protected from the states.
That began the "Doctrine of Incorporation", whereby the Supreme Court individually incorporated elements of the Bill of Rights into the 14th, against the states. The most recent example of incorporation was in McDonald v Chicago, which incorporated the 2A into the 14A, making the 2A apply to the states. More subtly, along the way the meanings of many of the rights actually changed. There's a good argument to be made that the original freedom of assembly was intended to preserve the right of state legislatures to assemble and make laws for their states, but that makes no sense whatsoever in terms of individual freedoms, so it is now interpreted as a general right of people to assemble in groups as they like for whatever purpose they like (with exceptions).
For another example, consider the 2A and 3A, collectively called the "military amenmdents" and which really should be read as a single concept in the original Bill of Rights. The real purpose of those amendments was to protect states from the military might of a central government. The militia clause was motivational and explanatory. But when the Bill of Rights is reinterpreted as a set of individual rights that no longer really makes sense, and hence SCOTUS found in DC v Heller that there is an individual right to keep and bear arms -- note that they did not incorporate in Heller, so they didn't directly apply the 14th amendment but they sti
That's true from the point of view of an app developer. However it is different from the point of view of a device maker.
I'd like to respond but I think this is getting too close to the anti-trust investigation discussion, so I won't. Sorry. I generally ignore the common (and probably quite correct) wisdom that employees shouldn't discuss their employers' actions in public, but I draw the line where legal action is involved. To be precise, I've twice gotten phone calls from Google attorneys who -- very politely and apologetically, mind you! -- told me to shut my big mouth, when I said things about ongoing legal issues. I'm pretty thickheaded, but I do learn eventually :-)
Most of this is getting too close to discussion of the anti-trust investigation, so I won't respond. Sorry about that.
Perhaps the complaint is that Google isn't quite up-front about this wall of separation.
It seems to me that Google is quite up-front about it. If there's an issue it's just that people don't want to believe it. I'm not sure moving pieces of the business out of the Google company to separate Alphabet companies would help with that.
Because when they do realize it, they block the site and warn the user?
Google has every incentive to make the web as safe an experience as possible for its users. Without those users coming to use their services by the hundreds of millions, they don't generate all that ad revenue. There's no profit in intentionally allowing a user to become infected by a bad site.
I suppose I wasn't clear. I meant that Google always knew that it indexed malicious sites, and knows that it always will index malicious sites. Google tries to identify and block them, but that will always be best-effort, never a guarantee. Maybe that's what the OP was saying, too, but the way he said it made it sound like Google believed the index was clean at some point.
Google's lock in system bases not on the google-owned apps (they are just a few, and yes they are very much used by users, but I guess people can come up with an alternative). The main reason to be locked in to Google is their proprietary APIs they offer to app developers. You can't simply take an apk and publish it on an alternative market, if there are no gapps installed on the device, most of the apps won't work.
I don't see that.
Looking at the APIs in question, I see a pretty extensive list, but it's pretty much all just stuff to interact with Google services. There are APIs for:
Google ads
Google analytics
Google search integration (AppIndexing)
Google account authentication
Google cast devices
Google drive integration
Google fit integration
Google games integration
Google cloud messaging integration
Google location services
Google maps integration
Google street view integration
Google+ integration
Google vision integration (server-based service for doing object recognition)
Google wallet integration
Wear integration
Only the last item (Wear integration) isn't obviously tied to some Google server-side systems. And while the above list is a pretty useful set of services for apps that want to use them, there are lots and lots of apps that have absolutely no need for any of the above... with one exception. I suspect what breaks most apps that don't work on non-GMS devices is the lack of the ads API. But there are third-party ads libraries which wrap the GMS ads API as well as other ads APIs so that app developers who don't want to be tied to Google only (and many do like to use other ad networks, so there's a reason for this other than independence of GMS APIs) can use those. Thanks to the run-time class loading and introspection features of Java, it's fairly easy to write code that checks whether a particular class (e.g. com.google.android.gms.ads.MobileAds) is present, and to then do something more useful than crashing if it's not and AFAIK all of the ads aggregation APIs do that.
My perception is that Google tries hard to ensure that as much as possible goes into the core system, and as little as possible goes into the GMS APIs. The exceptions are (a) things that are inherently tied to Google services and (b) things that Google wants to be able to update on its own (e.g. WebView). That second category is stuff that Google will move back to the core system if and when OEMs fix their update process problems, I expect.
(Disclosure: I'm a Google Android engineer. Note that I'm carefully *not* addressing the topic of the EU anti-trust investigation, and I will not, for obvious reasons.)
Google may have indexed bad sites and not realized it. News at 11.
Where do you get the idea they didn't realize it?
How about this very subject until they just recently changed it? I should think that would be an adequate example of one such instance, yes?
Are you saying Google once claimed that all of their search results were perfectly safe to click on? I don't think I understand what you mean. Could you elaborate?
They cheated with their placement at some point in the past.
I think it was favoring their own ads or some such.
No, the argument was that they shouldn't be advertising their own services on Google search at all, or else should artificially boost competitors' ads. Google's response was that their self-promotion ads on Google search were selected for a particular search results based on exactly the same relevance and quality ranking algorithms used for everything else. In other words, that they applied precisely the same rules to their ads as everyone else's.
So, unless your argument is that they were lying, this is another example of Google applying their rules consistently, including to themselves.
Where do these guys come from? Someone must be kicking over the rocks for them to escape into the wild. Why not tackle real issues like hunger, torture, spying on citizens, wars, military budgets, infrastructure, climate change, etc?
Because Utah doesn't have any issues with torture, spying on citizens, wars, or military budgets, and is already working on issues like hunger and climate change? I'm not arguing about whether or not this particular initiative is good or bad, but your line of thinking assumes that (a) states can do something about a bunch of stuff that they can't and (b) that governments should only focus on one thing at a time. Both assumptions are ridiculous.
Maybe he can look into why there is such a problem in his own state and get back to us?
Isn't that what he's doing? This is a discussion in the state legislature.
Capable technically a financially ... possibly, yes. Actually going to do that? My twenty bucks says "no way in hell!". Can you imagine a cell phone in the shop with a tag saying "cannot talk to Google Play nor Windows Store"? That would be like a desktop computer with a tag "cannot play games because it does not run Windows".
It's really not that inconceivable. Consider, for example, if the top two or three Android manufacturers decided to ally with Amazon, which already has an app store. And obviously there would be no tag saying "Cannot talk to Google Play store". There would be a tag saying "Can run hundreds of millions of apps from the Amazon app store"... and it would be true. App developers don't often bother with the Amazon store now, but if that was the way to reach all new Samsung devices, you can bet that they would.
Google controlled *none* of those phones, and had no place at the table with the carriers.
My iPad 2, which is at least a year older than my iPhone 4s, would beg to differ with you.
I stand corrected. The iPad2 is indeed a few months older than the iPhone4S. It doesn't change the fact that Elledan compared the worst outlier among Nexus devices to nearly the best outlier among Apple devices. Perhaps he wasn't intentionally cherry-picking devices to support his argument but that was the effect.
Interesting, since Apple products continue to be solidly supported for a minimum of 24 months.
Where's Apple's published commitment to that effect? Oh, I'm not denying that it's true, just that they don't provide any guarantee.
so your 18 month minimum needs to be upped by 6 months just to play ball
You need to re-read the post. The minimum is two years from release or 18 months from last sale, whichever is longer.
name 1 Google device that has seen even 24 month's support
Nexus S, Nexus 4, Nexus 5, Nexus 7v1, Nexus 7v2.
The Nexus 6 and Nexus 9 will hit that mark when they reach two years of age later this year. And of course that's just major release updates. There are also 3+ years of security updates.
I ignored the rest of your post because it's purely unsubstantiated opinion. I prefer to stick to verifiable facts.
One of the big obstacles to regular updates is that many OEMs, especially the larger ones, have so many different devices to update. What looks to consumers like one product may actually be dozens of separate SKUs, for different regions or carriers, with slightly different hardware features, etc., and these different SKUs often run slightly different software. So it's not a matter of "the build", but rather dozens of builds for each "model", each of which has to be tested by the OEM, and then tested again by the carrier.
And this is one of the biggest reasons why Android sucks and iOS rocks.
Ignoring the unsubstantiated opinion, it's also the reason why Android market share has dominated iOS for years now, and iOS continues to decline. Yes, most of those Android phones are cheap devices that barely qualify for the name "smartphone", while iOS still leads in the lucrative premium segment (though that lead is eroding), but that's exactly the point. The wide variety of Android devices available means there are Android phones for every niche.
It's all very similar to the Windows vs MacOS story. In the last few years the combination of the iPhone tie-in and the fact that so much software has moved to the web browser, making it platform independent, but prior to that Windows trounced MacOS for the simple reason that you could buy whatever sort of Windows PC you wanted, and at a very aggressive price point, due to the many manufacturers of PC compatibles. A single manufacturer simply can't compete with an entire ecosystem. That doesn't mean a manufacturer can't carve out a very profitable niche for itself, which Apple has done incredibly well, but it will always be only a niche.
Google wax apparently too stupid and short-sighted to look into the future a little bit, and see the all-too-predictable outcome of losing control over their "Brand". And make no mistake: Most people DO know that Android means Google.
Meh. Google's brand is one of the strongest in the world, and Android is enhancing it, not dragging it down. Until recently most people did not know that Android was Google. Actually most people didn't know that Android was a thing at all; they just knew there was "Samsung", "LG", etc. That is why Google started the "Be together. Not the same." advertising campaign, to help people realize that Android existed and ran on all of those phones... and that it was from Google.
I realize it's hard to break free of the RDF, but you should give it a shot.
Google had no power, because Google didn't make phones at all, and had no interaction whatsoever with carriers. If anyone was in a position to play the kind of hardball Apple did with carriers, it was HTC. But they weren't, because the Dream didn't have nearly the consumer impact that the iPhone did. It was only the runaway success of the iPod and the corresponding consumer cachet that allowed Apple to hold the line with the carriers... and remember that Apple almost didn't succeed. All of the carriers initially refused their terms, and AT&T only got on board with the condition that the iPhone be exclusive to AT&T's network for five years. HTC didn't have the clout to negotiate that sort of deal even if they'd been willing to try. And Google had absolutely no say at all.
1. Twice now, I have had to root my devices to prevent them from auto-installing patches that caused serious problems with the machine, e.g. overheating, massive slowdowns, lock-ups, draining a battery 5 times more quickly than designed, and otherwise making the phone/tablet basically useless... While I realize Google has limited control over the manufacturers' behavior
Correction: Google has basically no control over manufacturers' behavior.
Updates that un-root the phone take away a lot of control. In fact, not having root in the first place effectively means that Google owns my hardware and I just pay for it.
You mean that the company that made your phone owns your hardware and you just pay for it. If you don't want that, buy unlockable phones. All Nexus devices are unlockable, and there are a few other companies that also sell devices with unlockable bootloaders. And, FYI, rooting phones that don't have legitimately unlockable bootloaders is going to become very, very hard, perhaps in many cases impossible, as we continue tightening down the security model. So if you want to continue rooting, prioritize that in your purchase choices.
But, actually, rooting is a bad idea from a security standpoint. I firmly believe that you should be free to do it, but it does reduce device security.
Not true. Many updates are much smaller than the whole package.
The lesson I have learned out of owning a Google Android device is to never buy Android again. Apple and even Windows update their devices for as long as reasonably possible, while Android is a walking security risk, even on Nexus devices.
Your lesson is overly-broad, because the Galaxy Nexus is an outlier in the Nexus line, and one that will not happen again. The SoC vendor, Texas Instruments, got out of the SoC business, canned the employees and apparently lost all of the source code. Google provides system images for Nexus devices, but OEMs and their suppliers provide all of the lower-level binaries, so this left Google pretty much unable to update anything but the surface level components of Android. OS upgrades always entail lower-level component upgrades as well.
The Galaxy Nexus is the only Nexus device to have suffered this fate. All of the others have been updated for as long as Google felt it was reasonable to continue updating them. Further, Google has now formally committed to a defined support plan for every Nexus device -- something that AFAICT no other company has done. That statement includes Apple. If you buy a Nexus, device you know it will receive major OS upgrades for at least two years from the time the device was released or 18 months from the time it was removed from the Play Store, whichever is longer. Usually the latter is longer, since they stay on the Play store for about a year. Similarly, it will receive security patches for at least three years from release and 30 months from the time it was removed from the Play Store, whichever is longer. Those timelines are committed minimums, not maximums.
To make those commitments possible, Google has obviously negotiated commitments from suppliers so a repeat of the Galaxy Nexus situation cannot occur.
On the other side, you're comparing the Galaxy Nexus to the iPhone 4S which is an outlier in the opposite direction from Apple. No iOS device has been supported as long as the 4S has. And you're also ignoring the fact that iOS 8 rendered the 4S pretty close to unusable. I have one kicking around and it works and has iOS 9... but it's hasn't been something I'd want to use since iOS 8 was released (just 8 days after the 4S was discontinued; I feel sorry for the people who bought those last 4S units. I hope they were cheap).
>> Google Says 30% of Android Devices Don't Get Regular Patches >> In the Android ecosystem, carriers are also responsible for pushing security patches to users, so while Google pushes security updates each month, not all carriers and device manufacturers release them to all users regularly. It sounds like the ball's in Google's court. "Want to be an 'Android' vendor? You agree to keep your devices updated with our security patches."
(I'm a member of Google's Android security team, but not an official spokesperson. Treat all of the following as informed personal opinion, not an official statement.)
If only it were that easy. A lot of people overestimate the power that Google has to tell OEMs and carriers what to do. There is some power there, certainly, but the fact that Android is open source means that if Google pushes too hard the partners can simply set up their own app stores, stop calling their devices "Android", and do what they like. Some of the big players are totally capable of doing this. Also, the contractual arrangements aren't renegotiated at whim, there's a schedule (every other year, I think?) so Google can only change them on that schedule, and even then it's a negotiation, not an opportunity for Google to dictate terms.
Still, Google does have considerable leverage, is using it, and this aspect of the ecosystem is getting much better. Rapidly, actually, on the time scales associated with designing and building hardware (as opposed to Internet time).
One of the big obstacles to regular updates is that many OEMs, especially the larger ones, have so many different devices to update. What looks to consumers like one product may actually be dozens of separate SKUs, for different regions or carriers, with slightly different hardware features, etc., and these different SKUs often run slightly different software. So it's not a matter of "the build", but rather dozens of builds for each "model", each of which has to be tested by the OEM, and then tested again by the carrier.
If you're planning on doing regular software updates for a substantial period of time, that's a ridiculous way to structure your product line and build processes, but most OEMs weren't planning on that. Now, most of the major (and many minor) players are, which means that going forward they're going to be working to simplify their offerings and streamline their development and update cycles to be able to turn updates around quickly and test them cost-effectively. They rarely have the bandwidth to go back and fix things up for older products, though, so to some extent the transition to a fully-patched Android ecosystem is going to involve waiting out the decline of older devices.
And keep in mind that by the time a device hits the market it's already been in development for well over a year. So if OEMs got the message in 4Q2015 that they were going to need to do regular updates on future devices, it'll be 2Q2016 or so before they figure out what that means they need to change for new device planning, and then late 2017 before the new crop of devices launches, all set up for monthly update cycles. Carriers have their own retooling to do.
This all means that the Android security team fully expects that we'll have to continue focusing on defense in depth rather than rapid patch deployment as our primary method of protecting user devices for the next few years. Luckily, the current set of techniques seems to be working astonishingly well. Much better than I would have thought.
Once the ecosystem gets far enough down the regular-update path, mind you, it may well become reasonable for Google to mandate regular patching in the contractual relationships that provide OEMs with access to Google's apps, just as you'd like to see happen now. Given that hardly anyone is tooled up to do it right now, though, I don't think there's any way Google could impose that mandate.
Why in the world would they download a complete X-Code replacement to change one small binary?
The blame lies 100% on the git community for this debacle.
That was true for a few days after the release of 2.7.4, maybe even a few weeks, if we're generous. But the blame gradually shifts to Apple as time goes on and they leave the vulnerability unpatched. By now, it's 100% on Apple. It's not as though Apple doesn't have a mechanism for delivering patches, either.
The first amendment only protects you from government. Sanders campaign is not a government entity and can act as they are acting within their rights.
It's the government that defines and (partially) enforces trademark and copyright law. The fact that they're doing it on behalf of a private entity doesn't change the fact that it's a government action to suppress speech. What does matter is that the constitution specifically authorizes Congress to implement intellectual property rights legislation, so there's something of a conflict between the original text and the first amendment. But Congress and the courts have attempted to balance the issues, and the result is that there are first amendment-related limitations on the scope of intellectual property rights.
The nature of trademark is such that if one doesn't attempt to defend it when violations are brought to one's attention it dilutes the trademark. It isn't like copyright or patents where you can selectively enforce.
On one level you're right. On a deeper lever you're completely wrong.
Yes, it's true that leaving your trademark undefended can cause you to lose it. But there's an alternative to shutting down every use you find: You can simply grant gratis licenses. Not only does this ensure that your trademark remains undiluted, but it even allows you to exercise a non-trivial amount of control over usage because you can attach strings to the license grant. Even if the trademark use isn't actually infringing, as long as you keep the strings relatively light people are highly likely to follow your guidelines just because it's easier than getting lawyers involved, and because they appreciate that you're trying to work with them.
In a case like this, the campaign might even get some good press out of it if they worded the license letter in a suitably humorous way. Sending C&D letters merely out of an obligation to "defend the trademark" is dumb, and shows an extreme lack of creativity.
All of this assumes there actually is a trademark to defend, which other posters have called into question.