Posted by ribtoks 23 hours ago
The bad news: US decided to weaponize big tech’s leverage over the world and does not enforce these laws anymore that fix vanilla capitalism.
You’re confusing markets with capitalism.
Market Socialism (the only reasonable kind) would have these same issues. If Google was owned by the workers instead of capitalists, it would still have incentive to grow. The worker owners would have the exact same incentives as current owners. The only difference would be who the owners are.
Capitalism is not actually “the final boss” that internet leftists make it out to be. Socialism is not the panacea that leftists make it out to be. Surveillance is not a “capitalist only” thing.
We are going to see sooooo many scams out there. No wonder Google is locking down third party Android apps outside of their control, getting a user to install "device verification.apk" will become super trivial after people have clicked through these popups a couple times.
- Touchscreen user interface is objectively worse than a mouse and keyboard. Portability is the the only benefit to this interface, but this also works strongly to attack impulse control. It's always on you, just a moment away.
- Smartphones are significantly worse for privacy. In a LOT of ways. We can discuss this if you're interested.
- Many smartphone apps exist solely because a website would be less addicting and would also not be able to collect as much data as an app. ie, it's a choice that's worse for you and better for the company.
- They're significantly less open. Yes, grapheneOS and other alternatives exist, however it's not like a computer where I can just install whatever I want without asking the provider permission to unlock the device.
- I touched on this in two other bullets, but it's worth highlighting here: they're built intentionally to be addictive.
- The operating system and hardware are effectively interlocked. (yes, I know grapheneOS exists) but for any modern thing you might actually require a smartphone for (banking app, OTP app, etc) you must be using Apple or Google.
- Providers don't produce security updates well enough; Apple is "better" here, but my 10-15 year old computer can run modern Linux. People brag about 7 years of support on an iPhone. I'm under the impression that Android is better than it used to be, but in the old days any random vendor would give you about 1 year of update support and then you'd be hosed running old Android until you bought a new phone.
- Nobody cares if I own a desktop computer or not, but it's getting to the point that businesses will not work with me unless I have a modern smartphone.
I could probably go on, but I really hate these things.
au contraire, touch screen is objectively better, and i dont buy laptops where the screen isnt a touch screen. cursors and mice and focus on laptop+mouse UXs is just horrible, and for keyboard only even worse.
the touch screen is much simpler, in that you touch or swipe on the thing, and it makes the motion in direct response to what you touched. the input is physically linked into the interaction, rather than some changing relative position.
-- sent from Chrome on Android
That entire QR barcode thing is so that you can browse the web on your laptop/desktop, and _still_ rely on smart phone's attestation, no mobile browser needed.
>As someone who is working in incident response and malware analysis I have to say that is one of the worst ideas I have ever seen. A lot of companies have issues with ClickFix [1] and other social engineering campaigns and now Google wants to teach users that they should scan QR codes to proceed on a website.
>How should we realistically teach Susan from HR the difference between a real Google Captcha QR code and a malicious phishing QR code - you (realistically) can't. I wish we could - but those people don't work in tech, they will never know and I can't really blame them because at the end of the day they are just happy that they don't have to deal with tech after work.
>We have spent years of behavioural conditioning to prevent QR-code based phishing attacks (some people call it Quishing but I hate that term) and since the QR code is being scanned from a mobile device (99.99% of the time the private device), we have no EDR visibility on those devices and can't track what's happening if people scan it.
>This is more of an invitation for threat actors than it is something that holds them back.
However, a lot of recent bot traffic are sophisticated scrappers called "LLM's." You can tell claude to "research X from this www.example.com" and will automatically scrape it and summarize it, something that a LLM is perfect for. Gemini tends to share links instead, presumably because most of Google's revenue comes from ads served on those websites, so if it completely killed the traffic to those websites it would just make less money. Incidentally, I wonder if Claude/Gemini use an search engine-like "index" of all websites or it refuses to cache anything to always fetch "fresh" data.
If this is employed, I don't think the web is only going to be gatekept to Google devices. I think it will also be gatekept to Google's AI's.
Google would be able to display a captcha that no LLM could defeat, and then just let its own LLM pass through.
The same could be said about its other bots, such as the web crawler. Google's bot could crawl webpages that no other crawler would ever be able to simply because it has free pass to captcha-gated GETs. Although the same could be true already today.
Google Cloud fraud defense, the next evolution of reCAPTCHA