noirscape

Why is this part of Play Services? It should be something on-device as part of AOSP, not something that further entrenches Google.

(In case it's not obvious: rethorical question, Google just wants to do platform lock-in with Android and sees this as a useful means to bludgeon it.)

It's their entire MO; their name indicates the idea is that they are also a successor to geocities. No backend support whatsoever, just HTML/CSS/JS and whatever other files you need to host a site (images).

Their AUP isn't unreasonable: don't use them to host scams/spam people, don't abuse their services for an SEO farming operation, don't infringe on people's copyright, don't get their IPs blacklisted and don't use their services to harass or threaten people. All fairly standard as far as "we don't want to get sued/get in trouble" is concerned.

There's also an API to upload files to, shouldn't be too difficult to use it to rig up an SSG deployment script for it, or alternatively you can use their web interface to upload the resulting files. (Although it is on the assumption that you shouldn't abuse it.)

It's because of Google Play Services and the subsequent years long gutting of AOSPs application list. Google enforces OEMs to bundle their entire suite if they want to ship with Play Services and then uses that as an excuse to kill the basic AOSP phone apps that are outside of their ecosystem. That in turn harms the ability for Custom ROMs to ship basic apps like SMS readers, phone dialers and similar such, all of which used to be (maybe some still are, but they're all very much not well maintained) part of AOSP. If there's any silver lining, the upcoming play service blockade to install your own software on Android is likely going to at least create a burst of users for older devices.

The actual numbers are frankly even more disappointing - these numbers are heavily pushed up up by waydroid, which is an emulator for Android apps on Desktop Computing. More than half of the US installs is running Waydroid, with the actual most used real device in the US being nx_tab... which is LineageOS for the Nintendo Switch. That's a difference of 180k and 12k btw. The most used actual phone in the US for LineageOS is beyondx, which is the codename for the Galaxy S10 5g, a device that at a glance stopped being sold last year.

China by contrast fares much better when it comes to LineageOS (as Google Play Services isn't allowed in the country by export controls, the control from Google isn't nearly as strong there); the most used device there is actually a phone, the Xiaomi Mi 8 (dipper) and right behind it, the Xiaomi Mi 10T(/Pro) codenamed apollon.

Final country worth mentioning is Brazil, which apparently really likes the moto g7 power (ocean), a phone from roughly the same period as the Galaxy S10 5g.

Vietnam is also relatively high, with the Galaxy S7 (herolte) being the most used device. Russia is just a case where it's basically all waydroid users - not real phones.

At least from my understanding of the world, most of these numbers make sense if you consider them in proximity to US power, financial capabilities making phones last longer than their official support dates and just a rough idea of what phone brands are popular in which country.

Because the conversation is incomplete if we're talking internationally.

The cost of living in the US is much higher compared to most other first world/rich countries for one. Count up someone's basic living expenses in the US and those in another country (so taxes, rent and fixed costs) and the US often ends up much higher in terms of absolute values. In other countries, taxes usually soak up more of those fixed costs, reducing them more across the board for most people. The US also has very little protection against surprise fees at checkout (to the annoyance of non-Americans when ordering stuff online from the US), so a lot of stores sell on higher markups relatively speaking, making the same goods more expensive in the US. There's also healthcare, which needs little elaboration because the US is to my knowledge the single most expensive country to live in when it comes to that.

That applies to the US as a whole; it's why someone can say they're making 300k USD a year, say they're apparently barely able to stay afloat and then the rest of the world pretty much regards the US economy as being fundamentally wrong in some form. In most places, 300k USD a year is living in the upper class (as in, "work this job for a decade and you can retire early" money), not scraping the bottom of the barrel. By modern conversion standards, that's about 263k euros, or about 21k euros each month.

Then there's the tech sector specific problems. San Francisco is expensive to live in, and most US tech companies are in SF. Take the US cost of living problem, amplify it specifically for the tech sector (which is usually not talked about, since it's hard to vocalize). Second is that the US tech sector has more creative ideas and money than business sense - throwing money at a problem like the purse doesn't exist is a very US tech thing that doesn't apply anywhere else. It means that it's possible to hire people at far more inflated prices than the job is realistically worth.

Whether a wage is good or bad is pretty much entirely dependent on the local economy. Someone making 2000 EUR a month in Europe makes just above/right below the poverty line. Someone making 2000 EUR a month in Brazil is living an upper class lifestyle. That's an extreme comparison, but is a good indicator.

You're probably thinking of the Steam debacle. Nintendo wasn't responsible for that.

What happened was that Dolphins developers wanted to release the emulator on Steam. Valve, independently from anyone else, send a message to Nintendo's legal team asking if they think it's permissible to distribute Dolphin on Steam. Nintendo's lawyers essentially responded with the company's policy on emulation ("third parties doing emulation is not okay") and that they might consider looking into their options should Dolphin release on Steam. After that, Valve told the Dolphin developers that the game was banned from Steam.

Nobody send any legal threats or anything; no C&D was issued, no DMCA invoked, no lawsuits, nothing. As far as the legal side of things is considered, the only thing that happened is that a business refused to do business with someone. (Which is generally their right to do, as long as it's not because that someone belongs to a protected class and being an emulation developer is not a protected class.) That's why Dolphin's devs also effectively had no recourse, even if they could pay the necessary lawyers. You can't force someone else to sell/publish your stuff.

Great post. Redis is just kinda overkill whenever I've had to use it. Memcached by contrast is very simple, fast and works without needing to do much fiddling with it.

One big tip I should recommend is to increase the default memory size limit to something more realistic for modern hardware (and arguably this should just be increased on the upstream's side as well, instead of making everyone reconfigure shitty defaults). It's very easy to exceed the memcached default key value, since it's just 1mb; the maximum size of memcached as a whole is 64mb, which is similarly very low. Outside of that, it works very well and the lack of persistence is great at making it not do things it's not supposed to do (which is a big problem with Redis' feature creep, the projects mainpage promoting AI drivel alone should point towards that.)

It's also worth noting that some of those trillion dollar companies have had staggeringly bad responses when confronted with the fact child predators are running amok on their platform.

The CEO of Roblox is probably the single easiest example to point at; when confronted about his platforms issues when it comes to enabling child abuse, the first response he had was to claim that child predators were an untapped market and then claim to be interested in adding a dating site feature to Roblox.

That's the kind of rethoric these bad laws are a response to, and is the elephant in the room that a lot of the tech industry fails to recognize. (Including the privacy advocates, for whom every nail looks like it has a hammer shaped solution.) Age verification isn't a good solution to this problem, but it at least forces the hands of these companies to address it if they don't want to face jailtime for knowingly abetting predators - they can't pretend to have clean hands anymore if they're mandated to verify user ages.

There's almost certainly better solutions, but that's also why attestation (where the source device transmits the user's age, rather than storing a ton of PII of them elsewhere) misses the mark. Attestation doesn't fix that problem.

> The closest vision back then to what we're getting now is the moody ship's computer from hitchhiker's guide.

It's not the ship computer, but the door AIs, which had this marketing blurb in the brochure:

> All the doors in this spaceship have a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you, and their satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done.

Tellingly, the main characters respond with annoyance whenrver the doors speak up.

Hitchhikers Guide should not have been as prophetic as it ended up being, but here we are.

Browsers have an absolute insane level of relatively unchecked permissions to do whatever they want on a client.

There's a lot of effort by browser developers to scope creep the browser into essentially being an OS-agnostic tech stack (one where, conveniently, code can be shipped across the network "as necessary", removing a lot of user agency for the software being ran); Chrome being the biggest driver of this, while Firefox has an extremely weak spine in trying to limit it.

It's fairly dire and I wouldn't be surprised if there's a lot more of these side channel attacks in a lot of web APIs.

They can, but there's an OS option that basically is "I'm going to say yes, but then effectively do no". Basically it'll pretend to the application that a permission is granted, but then just keep returning empty information or doing nothing with it. So notification perms would then be seen as enabled, but nothing is actually being send to the user.

Unfortunately Google isn't really exposing this to users, so you need something like App Ops or adb to set it up.

Or probably the most straightforward one, which is SSL termination. Most backend software usually has very bad support for HTTPS communication, while it's typically extensively documented for something like nginx. It also catches some other strangeness like making it easier to update the certificate.

The biggest risk is incorrect usage of the default_server directive, the proper way in which to handle it isn't usually taught in most "here's how you use nginx" tutorials. Most usually just have you edit the default server blocks.

Tldr that covers 99% of all cases: you want 2 default server blocks, one on port 80 and one on port 443. The one on port 80 should only return 444 (an internal nginx status code that stops the connection immediately with no response), while the one on port 443 should use ssl_reject_handshake to terminate the SSL connection as quickly as possible without causing strange errors (you also need a self-signed certificate because otherwise openssl refuses to do protocol negotiation correctly, but the cert doesn't actually do anything). After that, specify your actual domains as separate server blocks using server_name (including a separate one for each to do the port 80->443 redirect).

Arguably this should be the default configuration shipped by distros, but it isn't for some reason, which doesn't help matters.

If you're using nginx/apache/literally anything that does reverse proxying correctly, this shouldn't be a problem unless you're routing all traffic over default_server rules unstead of server_name (or the equivalent).

They should be stopping this attack at the door (even if only to clean out your logs from scraper door knocks), which is probably why it went unnoticed for years. I don't think anyone would be deploying {A,W}SGI servers on public facing ports these days. Even if only because SSL termination is much easier in the proxy layer.

Also good lord that ARS article is a mess. What the hell happened there? An ASGI server isn't unique to AI or anything, it's just a regular supply chain dependency. I kinda expect better from ARS on stuff like this.

In 2 years the contract is up for renegotiation to a different entity (and there's now plenty of political pressure to go with a different one), so I don't think it's a problem by then.

Tying the process up in the courts for that period is also a political victory, since by the time it'd be resolved, Solvinity wouldn't have the contract anymore anyways.