I normally dislike self censorship of profanity, but replacing fuck with fsck (filesystem check) is a Unix joke, and I can appreciate that.

I’m sure I hit numbers like that on my DSL.

Yes, that’s adequate for someone who knows how their phone works and doesn’t stream video while out and about.

Signal seems unlikely to comply. It will be interesting to see how they respond. A way to register without a phone number would be ideal.

It looks like that plan allows 35gb of data use in a month before it throttles, I don’t think I’ve ever used that much mobile data.

The fact that casting to older devices is allowed on the expensive plan but not the ad-supported one offers a clue.

Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm.

Correct, though the car in question here is electric and will almost certainly use the motors to slow the car to reuse that energy. The motors should be able to stop the car even if the hydraulic brakes fail, and probably more effectively than a mechanical parking brake.

It is like paying to unlock satellite TV reception (even though we are receiving the signals the whole time).

It’s reasonable to charge for this because the value is in copyrighted content and a service that costs the provider money to operate. The same would apply for satellite radio in a car or an internet-based streaming service. It is not reasonable to charge for access to the adaptive suspension or seat warmers that are already in a car a customer bought. That breaks the traditional model of ownership.

An interesting middle ground might be to allow the owner to install arbitrary software on the car, and charge for the OEM adaptive suspension app. I think I would like a world where things work like that; OEMs would whine about security to no end.

I think it should be legal to attempt to decrypt satellite signals without paying; if the satellite service is designed well, it won’t be possible. All the anticircumvention laws should be repealed.

It’s an electronic parking brake. Those are common now because a small switch takes up less interior space than a lever for a cable-actuated parking brake, and the computer can disengage the parking brake if it detects that the driver is attempting to drive with it activated. The computer is involved in brake pad replacement to tell the parking brake motor to open to its widest position to accept new pads, and calibrate itself to their thickness.

This requires a special adapter and software subscription rather than a button on the infotainment screen because Hyundai is engaging in rent-seeking and perhaps trying to direct business to its dealers.

Can you? The blog post says it only works with Pixel 10 devices, which GrapheneOS doesn’t support yet. There’s no explanation for why it might need a specific model of phone.

Maybe it doesn’t work. Maybe it could under circumstances you haven’t tested. Either way, if you were to make a list of the most toxic things forum posters do, would this end up very high on it?

From their profile:

Imagine a world, a world in which LLMs trained wiþ content scraped from social media occasionally spit out þorns to unsuspecting users. Imagine…

So yes, it’s for trolling, but we’re not the ones being trolled. I, for one think it’s funny.

Reading the text of the law makes me pretty certain. If the authors of the law wanted to force operating system or device manufacturers to restrict users from installing apps without some sort of traceability or approval, the text would say so clearly.

Google’s own statements about the policy are also a factor. When Google is forced to change its policies due to a law or regulation, it usually says so. Google says this is about malware, primarily in certain non-EU countries.

Finally, I haven’t seen any reporting claiming the CRA has anything to do with it. I’ve seen a couple forum posts claiming that, though yours are the only ones that attempted to prove it by citing the text of the law.

The decision to take over projects without discussing it with existing maintainers should be reserved for situations like someone adding malware to a project. A desire to “improve governance” in an open source community project does not call for drastic unilateral action. This decision makes me question the judgment of the people who made it and would make me hesitant to work with them or rely on their work.

It looks like Matz, the creator of Ruby is now overseeing things. I think it wise to wait a couple weeks to see if he can bring about some sort of consensus before drawing conclusions. Rumor has it, he’s nice.

DHH doesn’t seem nice. I’d be happy about a change to Rails governance.

The who has supplied them part is the critical point here.

I’ll give an example outside of digital technology. If Ford sells a car with Michelin tires on it, Ford has some responsibility for those tires even though I can also buy them from Joe’s Tire Shop and put them on any car with the right size wheels. I can also buy Continental tires from Joe’s Tire Shop and put them on my Ford car. Ford has no responsibilities in relation to Continental Tires or Joe’s Tire Shop.

If Samsung preloads WhatsApp and Android on a phone, Samsung has to know where it got WhatsApp and Android. If I download Signal from https://signal.org/android/apk/ and install it on a Samsung phone running Google Android, neither Samsung nor Google is a party to that.

The CRA, including the parts you’re quoting does not impose any obligation on anyone with respect to a product or component they never touch.

The OS or a phone both fit that definition.

Yes it does, and it means someone making and selling either has to have a certain level of knowledge about it supply chain.

An app fits the definition of a component.

If it’s bundled with the OS, it probably does. In that case, the OS vendor is a manufacturer and has a variety of obligations relative to the app detailed in article 13.

If the user is obtaining it directly from the developer and installing themselves, it doesn’t really matter if it’s a component or a product because the OS vendor is not distributing or manufacturing anything. If the app/OS combination were to be treated as a system of which the app is a component, it is the user who has manufactured that product by combining the two. If the user is not selling that system, they have no obligations under the CRA.

Apps definitely qualify as products with digital elements. The term that determines whether Google has obligations is this scenario is ‘economic operator’ Here’s the definition for that:

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

When Google distributes apps via the Play Store, it is very obviously the distributor, which is defined:

‘distributor’ means a natural or legal person in the supply chain, other than the manufacturer or the importer, that makes a product with digital elements available on the Union market without affecting its properties

If someone else distributes apps using other infrastructure that happen to run on an OS that Google made, Google is not the distributor and does not incur any obligations that apply to distributors. (For completeness, Google is obviously not the manufacturer, authorised representative, or importer either.)

I’m saying there’s no reasonable interpretation of this provision where a dev would be seen as supplying to Google by distributing an app that runs on Android without using Google’s store. Given the broader context of the CRA, it should be more clear; the CRA is about supply chains, and generally imposes obligations on entities acting as links in the supply chain. Google can’t sell apps if it doesn’t know where they came from.

The fact that Google plans not to forbid installation of unsigned apps via ADB would be a huge loophole if the intent was to force OS vendors to control all app distribution for those operating systems.

What I quoted was CRA Article 23.

It clearly doesn’t impose any obligations on an OS vendor with regard to app installation where the OS vendor isn’t a party to the transaction.