Normies: “Stolen vehicle slow-down!? YES, please! It’s not like I could steal my own vehicle!”

hehe… you TOO can become a partner! We’re having a special! Anyone willing to pay for partnership access coincidentally gets an unrelated trove of personal data!

The competition doesn’t need to be open, they just need to motivate Google to be open.

…but could that actually happen? I’m not sure what WOULD motivate Google to be open. Even if there were three or four more major mobile players (all with equal market share), and Google had the only platform that allowed unblessed software to be installed, I’m not sure that would pressure Google to continue to be “the open choice”, but more likely to take this same action as “the odd man out”.

At a fundamental level, there is an illusion/concept planted in the human mind that “force answers everything”, and when they run out of ideas (or all the ideas that they have would require too much [re]work to their liking) the tendency is to fall back onto “just use force” as an easy “solution”.

If I had to guess, I would speculate that their motivation is a long-term play to squash the general perception that Android has more malware (and is therefor less secure) than iPhone. Just about every article I’ve seen to that effect includes (1) enable unknown sources, and (2) install this malware app; so they probably see the current hurdles as insufficient and intend to perma-ban dev accounts that they find signing malware apps.

Nope. Here’s a hint: https://www.cgaa.org/article/scam-insurance-phone-calls-and-emails-to-work-emails

Read it again, more carefully… :)

I guess AI is best measured by how much power it consumes… ?