Hans-Christoph Steiner @eighthave@librem.one
Joined Aug 2019
Hans-Christoph Steiner
boosted
The App Fair Project has posted our thoughts on the Digital Markets Act review:
https://appfair.org/blog/gatekeeper-paradise/
#DMA #keepandroidopen #appfair
Hans-Christoph Steiner
boosted
I'm honoured to have been elected to the Board of Directors of F-Droid, the most well-known #opensource alternative to the Google Play Store. 
Imagine Microsoft deciding from now on what you can install on your laptop. No internet, you can only download things through the MS app store. Apps that MS has approved. Who wouldn't find that suffocating? Yet that is what Google wants to do on our Android phones (and what Apple already has - a closed ecosystem).
1/3
Hans-Christoph Steiner
boosted
I am very happy to join the @fdroidorg Board of Directors for the upcoming two years.
F-Droid is in the heart of the Open Source community, which I see as a very important part of the shift away from the US big tech here in Europe. Success of Open Source on mobile is success we all can share.
F-Droid gives visibility to software developers who want to build experiences without predatory practices.
This is important.
@neil I like it! Anyway to get more resources out there. I know that EFF, ACLU, FSF, FSFE, etc do this to some degree, but they have very few resources to offer.
@indigotime That's a link to the source code for the source.android.com website, specifically the "jb-dev" branch which was last updated in 2012. Nice idea to look at the source code, here you can see the actual commit where they removed the "philosophy" in 2014:
Hans-Christoph Steiner
boosted
“Don’t forget international traffic, […] which is one of the fastest growing markets.” –Michael Peterson of Deutschen Bahn
We, as passengers, know that the demand for more and better cross-border rail is there. Now is the time to back it up with policy and offerings that make it possible.
Apparently, #Google has lost track of their goal for #Android "We wanted to make sure that there was no central point of failure, where one industry player could restrict or control the innovations of any other. " https://web.archive.org/web/20120501080416/http://source.android.com/about/philosophy.html
That page is 404 Not Found now...
On #Google's official download page for the #AndroidSDK they list a column "SHA-256 checksum" but then provide a SHA1 value. WTF?
https://developer.android.com/studio#command-line-tools-only
The last third of that is an interesting discussion about whether it actually pays off to use the latest versions of dependencies based on the data that #Sonatype gathers from #MavenCentral and other repositories
https://opensourcesecuritypodcast.libsyn.com/2026-state-of-the-software-supply-chain-with-brian-fox
The last third of that is an interesting discussion about whether it actually pays off to use the #latest versions of dependencies
Hans-Christoph Steiner
boosted
Google Play Integrity: what if Google dictated what software ran on your computer.
Open source implementations of attestation: what if a bunch of other people dictated what software ran on your computer.
Look, these handcuffs are permissively licensed!
No, thank you.
Hans-Christoph Steiner
boosted
🇺🇦
On a train to #Dagstuhl, I finally got to read the nice write-up about on-device local-web-to-app tracking: https://localmess.github.io/assets/bridges-to-self-localmess-usenix-security-26.pdf
TL;DR summary: You might want to uninstall (or deactivate if pre-loaded) all #Facebook and #Yandex apps from your phone. That kind of behavior is pretty clearly malicious - not even just ethically wrong, but seems actually illegal (at least in the EU, though IANAL).
@besendorf @lennybacon @breakdownthewalls @AwetTesfaiesus @GrapheneOS Now, your bank example: your bank introduces friction to its own services, not to the services of competitors.
@besendorf @lennybacon @breakdownthewalls @AwetTesfaiesus @GrapheneOS Its clear that Google wants to introduce friction. Google has been found to be a monopolist in many countries around the world. Monopolists aka gatekeepers are known for introducing friction for competitors to maintain their monopoly. Google is not introducing this friction to Google Play, but only to competitors. There is plenty of malware in Google Play itself. This is illegal trust building. They are self-preferencing
@besendorf @lennybacon @breakdownthewalls @AwetTesfaiesus @GrapheneOS
* Google's original proposal solely gave themselves the ability to turn off all apps on Android for any developer they chose for any reason.
* Google's current proposal requires turning on Developer Mode. I know of no technically sound reason for this, this is done just to dissuade users. Turning on Developer Mode means exposing a whole bunch of other things that most users will never want enabled.
And there is more...
@besendorf @fdroidorg @lennybacon @breakdownthewalls @AwetTesfaiesus It is important to be clear what "Android" is. CalyxOS, LineageOS, GrapheneOS, Waydroid etc. are not Android. Google controls what can be called Android quite tightly and they set a huge number of requirements, many NDAed and not public, before something can be called Android. They defend this with lots of lawyers. AOSP is still open source and AOSP-derivatives can be Android-compatible. But Google is closing Android itself
Age bans are popular https://www.politico.eu/article/poll-europeans-support-social-media-ban-minors/
How would you convert that into support for cracking down on Big Tech? Seems a tough story to tell.
@POLITICOEurope @politico-media-POLITICOEurope
This take reads a bit like "regulating social media won't work so we should instead regulate social media". I agree badly implemented age bans will not work, or might make things worse. As much as I support the DMA, its effect is quite limited. And that's the best we've got against Big Tech
@LilahTovMoon For Brexit, it seems fair that leaving the EU required the same size majority as joining. The Common Market referendum of 1975 required a simple majority, also in parliament.
Hans-Christoph Steiner
boosted
It appears one or more impersonators have already registered some of the #Android applications that I maintained, including @appmanager. I've reported this to #Google, but not sure what's going to happen. The Android developer verification is still in beta, and it doesn't have a lot of features now to deal with this kind of problems.
@ondra People like Apple iOS because of the smooth integrated UX. That's only possible when using lots of native apps. And iOS users spend most of their time in native apps. The web app UX is still second rate, even when massive companies like Google and Microsoft pour resources in. Web apps provide their own lock-in effects, for Google especially, since they have so much control over the browser.
Joined Aug 2019
