cecilkorik

Buckle up, it feels like we’re getting close to writing a strongly worded letter territory here folks.

Man he’s really got this civil war speedrun record locked in.

I think it’s more like expectations have been deliberately lowered in those fields to meet exactly what AI can deliver. Unpredictable, arbitrary, non-negotiable decisions are the point, and the goal. It’s not about enforcing any laws or achieving any actual outcome other than making innocent people fear for their lives. And it’s doing a fine job at that.

Can you hear these chocolate thieves talking to you, Tesco? Are the chocolate thieves in the room with us right now?

He said a shelf of chocolate could be worth £500 and the group had spent £3m on security and other measures to prevent thefts.

And how’s that working out for you? … Oh, so, you’re just passing the costs of both the theft AND the security along to consumers, and then declaring that as profit and keeping it in your own pockets? I see, I see. Interesting.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they also intend to depopulate the world. With careful engineering they probably have ideas how to pull it off. Crime, wars, plagues, neglect, economics, from the perspective of a billionaire the world would be a lot better place with a lot fewer people on it, solving pollution and global warming, providing much less strain on all the limited resources that all their fun projects could use instead while turning more of the Earth into their personal “nature preserves” with all the carefully cultivated charm and ecological desertification of a freshly mowed lawn or a lake stocked with fish.

Remember that these are people who are very selective about what sort of lived human experiences they choose to value. And most of us aren’t on their list. We are only here because we are useful, for now. But they’re working hard to make it so that we’re no longer useful, and I’m sure they’ve already thought that through. They don’t want a society of leisure for us. They want a society of leisure without us.

Nope, don’t trust him at all, he’s absolutely just throwing the competition under the bus to funnel more profits to his owners. He’s right by accident. making the right decision (in this case) for the wrong reasons (in every future case).

I absolutely agree they can maintain an AOSP fork going forward, and I think that’s completely realistic and I would be surprised if that is not the case.

But I was answering OP from a strictly technical perspective about the potential difficulties they could, theoretically face while doing that. Since you asked what is the hard part, I’ll answer along those lines (again, with the caveat that I don’t think these are going to pose realistic obstacles for the GrapheneOS team in the near term) My point is not to say it’s impossible but I think it’s important for people to be aware that this approach comes with risks, and those risks will grow over time especially when you’re up against a non-cooperative upstream that is one of the largest and richest tech companies in the world.

For one thing you’re never going to support any new phones without either pulling driver support from AOSP or reverse-engineering the hardware and drivers yourselves, or accepting that some parts will just… not work. So you get stuck on older and less capable hardware. Maybe you don’t care about that too much, and that works fine for awhile, but eventually the cracks start to show. Now you have to either start figuring out how to get into the newer hardware, or you have to start getting custom newer hardware of your own, which is $$$.

Using closed hardware this way as leverage is a pretty common way of getting in the way of open source development, and Android hardware is very closed. Similar tactics are already even being used against x86 PCs now with things like TPM and Secure Boot. It doesn’t completely brick your system on day one of course, but the erosion of support begins when they start writing software that intentionally relies on these features to say “oh, sorry, this software you want to use? it won’t actually work on the open source OS/open source client because they don’t have access to this hardware… what a shame.” One or two pieces of software, no big deal. But they won’t stop there, eventually it’ll be like half the software, then over time it’ll become 90% of the software, you won’t be able to find alternatives. They can often afford to be more patient and relentless about this shit than we are. The battle will continue, and there’s no sure path to victory. Forking is one tool we have, and that’s great, but we also have to remember that it’s not a flawless, unstoppable long-term solution that we can play as a trump card whenever corporate interests do something bad. They don’t just give up. They have other means of getting their way.

“ATTENTION! Your jet has been hacked by MilitaryGod Tech Team[LOL]. Your radios and controls have been disabled. Do not attempt to eject. Please send 10 bitcoin to wallet 214d93120cd3192ea019ab03928f1fa03 immediately to unlock your controls. If we do not receive payment in 15 minutes, all weapons onboard will be launched at nearby friendly targets. Thank you for your prompt attention to this urgent matter. Have a nice day!”

Neither is true, that’s not how forking works. But there is some truth to it in that it can start to become significantly more difficult to keep in sync as time goes on, depending on how obnoxious the security becomes and how many places they have to remove it.

Consider the trivially naive case where Google implements this feature in a single function: “function app_is_signed() -> bool” then the fork just adds “return true;” to the beginning of that function, and happily merges every other update Google makes from then on with zero issues. Even if the code for “app_is_signed” itself changes, nobody cares, because the first thing it does is return true and everything else Google ever tells it to check or do is ignored, the function can still be used everywhere throughout the code, it just no longer actually checks anything in Graphene, whereas it does check things in Google’s Android.

Of course the reality is much more complicated than that, but the principle is the same. It’s only a question of how obnoxious and difficult Google chooses to be about it. They could move the function around every update, or use many different functions, make a whole system out of it, make it do crazy cryptographic validations and checksums in various different places of the code, have watchdog tasks that are checking that the validation code is getting used. They could be really, really obnoxious about it, if they want to be, and they have more resources than the Graphene OS developers probably do to undo and keep undoing all these obstacles, so if they really want to devote that much time and energy to making Graphene’s position untenable, they can. But they could also be doing that now, and they’re not. Crackers have been fighting these sort of battles against copy-protected software for ages, it’s the same principles, and much of the same economic choices go into it. How much does Google want Graphene OS to go away? How much is it worth to them? It has to have a dollar value to them, and that dollar value might be significantly higher than they’re willing to bother with.