just to be clear, for fear we mentally normalize this

1. this is hostile behavior from Chrome
2. what the customer does with the browser, in a sane world, is of no concern of the guy who made it.

to accept that another person has one sided authority to determine what you can and can’t do with a tool, after it is in your possession is weird.

then how does it know… that… nevermind

Kids, remember, Google is an advertising company.

…and letting users know, at some level, they are analyzing every video uploaded to google drive.

What proof? Facts?

just some critical thinking notes.

The title says: “Findings Cast Doubt…” One might expect that the core of the essay will be … findings. One might expect that as with most commonly taught English writing practices, the first paragraph would both outline the point, and give a brief summary of the point.

Seven, eight paragraphs in, the ‘Findings’ are still being teased.

This type of article … accurate or not, is working through a ‘Palm reader’ technique, where they build up a series of ‘connections with the subject’, a long line of ‘Yeses’ then they slowly begin to introduce _their points. The technique is able to slip past some percent of critical thinking, because the person has been led down a path of agreements.

Again accurate or not, it couches the ‘Findings’ in a sea of ‘everyone knows’, ‘modern scholars agree’ , ‘doubts have existed from the beginning’. These are not facts, they are well worded disparaging digs, which contextualize the subject to their bias.

What about the one sided ability to change a contract??

A year from now Roku pop up says “Click to Accept” , the text says **"this contract means you’ll have to give us your first born child? ** My reasoning says if they can do one then they can do the other. There is nothing that would prevent them from adding ‘fees’, or ‘subscriptions’ or simply turning off the device. (!)

This is egregious. We bought something. In normal commerce, the contract was set in stone at that moment. The seller can’t roll up 2 years later, change the contract, force you to agree before you can use your device, and then say , well maybe if you beg, you can opt out.

late to the party, but I had OperaGX do a clever evil thing recently - I have an old machine running MacOS 10.14 (for reasons), I had GX up, and I alt-tab’d and noticed there was the “don’t symbol” (ghostbusters) over the OperaGX Icon. I thought, “that can’t be right”. I’m running GX right now. I double checked, and I was using GX with several windows open. But the symbol was right - they had Updated OperaGX that I WAS running, WHILE I was running it, to a version that WOULDN’T work on the computer I was on. I eventually restarted GX, and got a 'You can’t use OperaGX with this version of MacOS". Jerks.

I dug around, and very roughly, the .app file is not the App. They use a folder off in Library to store the actual pieces of the app, and it there is a few different pieces, and the .app file points to the actual executables.

Anyway it was fun while it lasted. Never again.

Ah, common misconception - hacking an API != creating a compatible program. ( reverse engineering)

Imagine a drill company has a special shape for its bits. Our law allows someone else to either… make bits that can fit in that shape OR make their own drill that can accept those bits.

“BUT they copied!” - it doesn’t have to be a copy to be compatible, and they don’t even have to use the ‘special shape’ just be able to work with the special shape. The law does not allow for protections around that. Doing so would be by definition anti-competitive. Our anti competition laws or rather our IP protection laws are not intended in any way to ‘ensure a monopoly’. The IP laws give a person a right to either keep something they do secret OR share that knowledge with the world so we all benefit, in exchange for a very limited monopoly.

Practically speaking, If I got the KFC Colonel to give me the list of 11 herbs and spices in a Poker game, and then started making my own delicious poultry that is totally cool. Likewise, If I figured out that all that was inside a Threadripper was blue smoke and started making my own blue smoke chips, the law is ok with that.

In this case roughly, Having a public facing endpoint. And then saying that the public can access that endpoint is cool Saying that only the public using the code I alone gave them – well… that’s not been litigated a lot, but all signs point to no.

It’s like Bing saying its for Safari only, and suing people who accessed it using Chrome. It is a logical claim, but the law does not provide that kind of protection/enforcement.

tl;dr these concepts are old but being newly applied to fancy technology. The laws in place are clear in most cases. A car maker can not dictate what you put in the tank. FedEX and UPS can’t charge you differently for shipping fiction books or medical journals or self published stories. And they’d probably get anti-trust scrutiny they even told you what brand/style of boxes you had to use.