Posted by tencentshill 5 hours ago
Corporate mobile operating systems suck. Including "apps" to run on them, generally
There are some that do not require corporate approval and do not try to phone home but it's a relatively small fraction
Probably if the appmaker donates to the Trump foundation it will be withdrawn within the day.
It'll void any warranty.
The Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act disagrees with you.
Here's a legal view that explains it further [1].
Basically, they can deny warranty service if you make modifications, and they can tie it to a failure. You can add 100s of HP to your engine profile with these things, and why would it be reasonable to expect a manufacturer to warrant related component repairs if they're pushed beyond spec?
Here are relevant quotes, and []'s are mine.
> The Magnuson Moss Warranty Act requires manufacturers to honor their warranties and auto manufacturers only warrant their vehicles against manufacturing defects. Your claim here could be denied because the failure was not due to a defect in a factory component. It was caused by something added to the car[...] That system caused a non-defective part to fail. Your mod did not void the [entire] warranty. It’s just that the failure was not caused by a factory defect.
> Obviously, an aftermarket camshaft or a hopped up ECU won’t void the entire warranty on your car. The master cylinder failed? The blue tooth quit working? Unless there is a logical connection between the mod and the part or system that failed, you should be good to go.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty...
[1] https://lehtoslaw.com/will-modifications-void-new-car-warran...
They can deny a claim. You can challenge that, they will need to prove the modification caused the defect. They cannot void your warranty, in whole or in part. The most they can do is make a note of your modification and then use that as a reference going forward to deny individual claims as they happen.
You might argue that they are likely to win those claims, because they have the engineer who will show up in court to explain why your modification was the problem. On that I'd agree. But they'll have to do that for every claim they deny (assuming you take them to court).
[1] https://www.motor1.com/news/729265/toyota-gr-corolla-warrant...
Adding insult, one guy had his comprehensive insurance coverage lapse right before!
Just because you use the internet to commit the crime doesn't make it not a crime.
The case being discussed is one where someone might be able to use the product to break the law.
So it’s more like demanding that Home Depot, Walmart, Amazon give the names of every American who’s ever bought a crowbar because the DOJ has heard that some people are breaking into buildings with crowbars.
It has been alleged that the government doesn’t want to prosecute these people who are the ones committing the crimes, they “just want to talk” in order to prosecute the company. Not sure I’d trust that without a signed immunity agreement. If I were forced to speak to these goons, I certainly wouldn’t say a word unless they gave me one of those - regardless of what I was using the gadget for.
Please explain to me how ICE (part of the nominally democratic USG) can be held accountable for summarily executing citizens.
This isn't really anything terribly new either. The government regardless of who the current president is will routinely go after individuals for (allaegedly) hurting coprorate profits. We saw it in the Napster/Limewire era, in the BitTorrent era and even with physical products far earlier than that. There's a ban on importing cars less than 25 years old because Mercedes-Benz dealerships lobbied for a law in the 1980s because too many people were importing them directly from Germany at a lower cost [2].
Heck, 60 years of Cuban embargoes and sanctions as well as the 1954 Guatemala coup were US efforts at the behest of the United Fruit Company. Same thing for oil and the 1953 Iranian coup.
[1]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/google-broke-its-promi...
[2]: https://www.jalopnik.com/the-25-year-import-rules-history-is...
More importantly, there's not spying on the user in the first place. The law doesn't force Google to spy, nor does it force Apple to lock consumers (for sure not "owners") out of their phones, so that they're left helpless when the CCP bans VPN and protest apps [1] (not to imply spying from Google alone isn't bad, before any other actors get involved).
[1] https://www.pcmag.com/news/apple-pulls-mapping-app-used-by-h...
Fortunately, we have more powerful policy tools to clean the air than attacking individual gearheads... convert America to an electric car system. You need to attack these problems at the point of production. Consumption side approaches are petty and not very effective.