So what?
As if the US government or US compabies don't play the same "underhanded" tactics to harm competition.
Selling at a loss to earn market share is a perfectly valid strategy for US corpos. Why is China supposedly doing the exact same thing suddenly not as nice?
So... a "Make sure all votes are for the only true candidate" army?
And... They didn't communicate this with you beforehand?
Yeah.
Edge still has its problems, but it's nowhere near the hot mess it wass in 2015 when it was basically a reskinned IE. Once they switched to Chromium it was still a hot mess, butit did get polished and has all the features you'd expect of a modern browser.
That being said, Edge is the main innovator behind built-in AI chats and similar bloat, which Chrome also likes to shove down people's throats.
And although the feature has existed as a Firefox addon for ages, I think the first browser to support tab groups and horizontal tabs was Edge.
So since both are pretty on-par feature (and bloat) wise, run the same engine and are made and maintained by billion-dollar corpos gobbling user data, both seem like two sides of the same coin.
So for 'normies', it pretty much boils down to which ecosystem you're more ingrained - that will make you prefer Edge or Chrome.
Us lunatics on Linux and/or ActivityPub prefer an independent option.
Still. A civilized society doesn't give every single person in a uniform the licence to tackle, kill and assault whomever without facing any real consequences. Sure, the money's nice, but not getting tackled would've surely been much more civilized.
Aunt Tifa hit a double-jackpot. Second, the money. But first and foremost - she's still alive. She's also white, which might have more causal relationships with her getting said jackpot than should be the case in a civilized society.
The problem is that not everyone has either her luck or her complexion.
When the company's immune to accountability [...] backlash changes nothing.
Not really. Backlash is important because it shows there's an alternative. And not to the company - the company won't change. But its users, customers and consumers just might.
It creates publicity, which triggers people to talk and think about the issue.
Which is a good thing as well as a driver of change.
Boycotts are also effective. The only problem is, huge companies have their fingers in multiple jars (industries, brands, etc.) and their main customers are other companies.
This gives them a great dose of stability. But if people were to suddenly boycott all of say Nestle's brands, stores wouldn't order new Nestle stock.
There's also no need for extreme backlash in some cases. Just look at Walmart or Microsoft.
Microsoft is bleeding users at a record rate. Sure, the year of the Linux desktop is still not here, but Linux market share has been rising dramatically lately. Why?
Because Microsoft keeps shooting itself in the foot.
Walmart is a similar story.
There's something about huge consumer-facing companies that makes them extremely vulnerable to losing focus and falling out with consumers.
If some more Boeings fell out of the sky and not just one or two a few years ago, airlines would be looking to clear thenselves of all Boeing stock. This wouldn't even need backlash.
Backlash is a source of bad PR. And bad PR causes customer loss. That's profit loss. That's a bad credit score. Hell, even the government might take a look and find some issues they'd like to check out!
As you can see, this can all spiral out of proportion.
And backlash is the first step in this story.
Well, I was thinking along the lines of, if you fall for a crypto scam, 24 h does nothing about it.
If someone calls as a Nigerian Prince and you want to buy in, a cooldown won't help either.
If someone impersonates your close family, it just might. But I imagine scammers are smart enough to dissuade the victim from calling the known number with a reasonable excuse. Then the cooldown wouldn't help in this situation either. Something something scammers being good and all that.
And even if we disregard all that, there's always the option of having the switch have no cooldown if set during initial device setup. Afterwards - sure. Give a 24 or 48 hour cooldown.
If someone wants it immidiately - they can do a factory reset.
But the problem is - this is not what's being done. What is being done is the start of a 72 hour cooldown, then 1 week, then 3 months, then no option to switch off at all. This is what I'm against, and what most other Lemmings are.
And to top it off - acting like this to "protect users" is a slippery slope of ignorance in and of itself.
You see, putting users under a glass dome (what all these "security" measures are) takes away their knowledge. With enough hand-holding ("security" or otherwise), they end up dumb, ignorant and incompetent.
"With great power comes great responsibility". Well, the opposite is also true: "With no power comes no responsibility".
And such powerless users are the ones who will, ironically, fall for ALL the scams.
The ones who are so "protected" that they have no common sense idea of how and what their phone does.
Once "logic" turns to "magic", you're in for a wild ride.
Because, even if they do know (which most won't), they won't be able to prevent the scam.
Why?
Because they're mostly locked out of and don't have posession of their phone.
They may be the owners, but Google is the one who can do what it wants with the phone. Not the user.
Of course it wouldn't work.
Do you think putting a 24 h lock on your grandma's front door will prevent scammers from coming in?
No. No it won't. Any good scammer will be organized enough to start the scam and release the lock, then return after the timeout to finosh the job.
Do you think people vulnerable to scams will magically notice the scam in 24 hours?
Also, do you think most scams use sideloaded apps? Amazon gift cards are an easier vector. There's also premium SMS.
Modern scams have nothing to do with security. They prey on people who fall for them. No security measure, save for a trusted friend telling them it's a scam will work.
What this is is a thinly-veiled attempt to lock users out of using their own devices and to strenghten a slowly-crumbling ecosystem.
Of course it did.
For two reasons.
First - if anyone complains they can always say there exists a bypass, no matter how idiotically unworkable and annoying the process might be.
Another aspect is that devs will probably want to test their apps easily and quickly - App stores are notorious for updates taking a few days to be approved. Even for Google, full-on lockdown might seem overkill. They don't want to bother with speeding up their update approval process so devs can push test builds through the Ecosystem. Giving some route towards sideloading is a much saner solution.
That makes absolute sense.
Just like a calculator shouldn't assume a "4+4" should be "corrected" to "4+1" just because incrementarion is the most common arithmetic operation by far, a self-respecting search engine autocorrect what is in essence a fairly common search just because a more common one exists.
The "doppelganger problem" is really why this is not an easy issue to answer
I wouldn't agree. Sure, Taylor Swift would own her likeness. But so would her doppleganger.
This could be done on a nonsensical basis such as first-dibs or whose ever is the most well-known, but the only logical option is that both are protected.
So if our Taylor doppleganger goes around just looking and existing with an appearance closely matching Taylor's, she's protected under her own likeness.
If she goes on to claim of being Taylor Swift and swindles people, that's a seperate issue dealt with impersonation statutes.
Even cosplaying as they did with Dolly Parton would be protected under free speech/expression.
Since these protections already exist, a right to likeness only really stops the deepfakes, which is exactly the point.
Well...
A data center is... A data center. So a central plave for data.
It isn't called Data Warehouse, Data Industrual Plant or Data Mega Shop.
So - if the place is... a central place for the town people's data (as in OC's cases)....
Wouldn't "Data Center" be a fitting name?