Sometime who worked for an advertisement provider told me it worked well as a signal, though. This was before it was obsolete. So few people used it that it helped identify its users.
(His employer explicitly ignored it. They used an ML algorithm to assess signals, but they overrode that particular assessment as soon as they discovered it.)
Why is it going to be huge? Who are the customers and what do they want?
I don't follow this closely, just look at the pretty pictures. If there's demand for lifting much bigger/heavier things to orbit than presently possible, I would probably not know, for lack of pretty pictures. So please tell.
A small town where I've lived was very much like its neighbours, but one particular neigbour was different in two clearly visible ways: ① there were (still are) more rich people in that neighbour and ② it was much easier to get financing for starting and growing companies in that neighbour.
I live in Munich. Couldn't find numbers for the metro area, but I found numbers for Bavaria. It seems that Google's electricity usage has grown to the point where it uses more than half as much energy as the Bavarian car-using commuters do. Still less, but more than half. (This counts only trips between home and work and only those by car, and the number is decidedly imprecise.)
So at this point, I assume that Google uses more power than the Munich metro-area single-car commuters, even for the widest definition of metro area (the widest I've heard spans 6m people, four times Munich's own population).
Is this reasonable? Is it reasonable that a collection of services with >1B users uses more energy than the single-car commuters in a metro area like Munich? I rather think so. (But then I don't have a high opinion of the value of driving to work.)
Enshittification is neither invariant nor universal — Rolls Royce has built cars for a hundred years and the new models still aren't Ladas or supermarket shopping carts.
Claude is a paid service, not one of those freebies where you are the product and receive as little consideration as practically possible, while advertisers are the paying customers for whom the service is optimised.
We're still arguing for several reasons, one of them is that people still confuse the user with the owner, as you do. "The user must be able to override" is implies that if you have physical access to someone's phone, you can install a keylogger before handing the phone back its owner. Nice for you but I imagine the owner might still quibble, even if you quote TRON.
It's complicated… in a sense the bulletproof solutions are the ones that raise the cost of executing the attack above the average take. In another sense even they aren't bulletproof.
This particular attack requires getting users to sideload apps that would be rejected by the play store, and most users don't have developer mode enabled. Therefore, the cost of persuading someone to enable developer mode matters. If the procedure to enable developer mode changes from "open settings, scroll down, tap, scroll down, tap seven times" to include e.g. a 96-hour wait for developer mode to be enabled, then the cost of the attack rises by whatever it costs to stay in close contact with the victim for 96 hours, close enough to react if the victim comes close to realising the truth.
This isn't a guarantee. You can still get phished even if the phisher has to spend 96 hours in intensive contact with you. Some victims are worth that effort, maybe you are, and maybe the phisher made a mistake and puts in the effort to phish you based on the mistaken assumption that you're a millionaire.
There are also other things like that. If Google can ban the keylogger you use quicker than you can deploy new builds, for example. Still no guarantee.
Are you in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore or Thailand? Those were the four worst-affected countries IIRC. Although I seen to remember Ecuador or Bolivia as well?
(They do something about other scams too. There was another thing they published recently, I didn't pay attention since no side effect of that concerned me, something to do with caller ID.)
The attack in question doesn't use apps on the store, or even any attempt to get them on the store. There are also other attacks, but the one that prompted this change uses social engineering to get people to tap the build number seven times, sideload something and get a keylogger that then picked up their banking details and used them. Several governments raised the issue, Google acted. (The actions are to slow down the tap-seven-times process, so it becomes harder for the scammers to keep their victims fooled until the keylogger is installed, and also to tweak the timings, so the scammers can't outrun the app-banning process.)
If you haven't had your bank account drained, the scammers you met were different ones. (And I'm sorry that you've been scammed.)
Of course Google generally tries to squeeze profits out of… whatever it does, but eh, by closing something? Google is the company that makes a million in profit from the openness of the web in the time it takes me to write this paragraph, why would that company think that closing something improves its competitive stance?
This started with phishing, poor people being tricked to install apps that then drained their bank accounts. So to resist, maybe focus on that evil? Better international cooperation, better prosecution?
I know Graphene has innovative security measures, do you happen to know whether that includes anything wrt. phishing or social engineering?
(For those who haven't been following along: this whole affair started with phishing. People were social-engineered into installing an app and a little later their bank accounts were empty. A big issue in various poor countries.)
This seems to sum it up: "At least four Spanish projects or companies have been offered for sale, according to people familiar with the matter. Arena Green Power SL and Matrix Renewables have been shopped around, the people say, asking not to be named discussing private processes. Both companies declined to comment. Privately held RIC Sun España SL was on the market, but the company says that’s been shelved as it works to add batteries to its parks."