Hopefully there's an appeal on this and this judge gets reprimanded for his decision. Functionally this is the equivalent of an apartment manager or condo manager being ordered to go into someone's house, search specifically for contraband and then remove that contraband. Just because they have emergency access and repair access does not make them a law enforcement agency nor does that mean that courts can order a private companies to perform searches and seizures outside of a law enforcement getting assistance to execute a search warrant.
The supreme Court is already ruled that 4th amendment protections do extend to cell phones. This order clearly runs contrary to that.
You are aware the United States laws do not extend outside its jurisdiction? Why do you believe 4th amendment protections are enforceable in Argentina?
If you don't believe that United States law extends outside of its jurisdiction the Coast guard would like to have a word with you which enforces US maritime law around the world in international waters. Additionally US routinely enforces its law in various aspects around the world in different countries. The US also controls what laws from other countries its citizens are allowed to enforce.
Lastly Google being a US company that operates internationally, they should absolutely refuse to honor any of this as it is in direct violation of the laws of its home country.
> If you don't believe that United States law extends outside of its jurisdiction the Coast guard would like to have a word with you which enforces US maritime law around the world in international waters
Do you have a specific complaint? US courts do not allow lawsuits for things that happen in international waters unless they pass an 8-part test.
But at the same time, UN law of the sea treaties say that any nation may combat piracy in international waters. On top of that is the UN Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts against the Safety of Maritime Navigation [1], which adds a number of additional acts that any nation may enforce in international waters. But you should probably be glad that the US is doing the bulk of this: The United Nations is perfectly ok with a sham "trial" of any suspected wrong-doer followed by summary execution and throwing the body overboard. The US does not allow that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_for_the_Suppression...
I don't think you read the article at all. The order was explicitly only for Argentinians.
But that order must be enforced by Google. Argentina cannot enforce it unilaterally arbitrarily without Google's help. I'm not sure you understand the mechanism of enforcement that they are requesting.
What's next? Courts in Brazil order Twitter to censor stuff?
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GDPR, DMCA and similar laws seem to disagree.
If you think the GDPR is enforceable in the US you should let the surveillance capitalism industry know. You won't have to report back when you're done. We'll hear the laughing.
>> Functionally this is the equivalent of an apartment manager or condo manager being ordered to go into someone's house, search specifically for contraband and then remove that contraband
If it could be achieved at scale with no resources, a judge might have tried it; the intersection of enforceability, law, and scalability is foreboding.
Hopefully not. I strongly disagree with the decision but I think the fallout helps highlight the power these companies have to the public at large.
Brazil had a similar thing a few weeks ago, but it got drowned in the news because if was related to the Twitter/X block.
While the block itself may be legitimate, as the motivation was the refusal from X from deleting a few tweets doxxing a police investigator and his family members, the whole process was done in a few little short of a full blown dictatorship: one of the points of the court order demanded Google and Apple to remove all VPN apps from their stores, and some legal experts interpreted that as also ordering removal from the phones themselves. The justice that sent the order backtracked it later, but it was possible and the order was standing during that time.
The VPN issue got relatively little discussion on the press and too many people were too quick to equate criticism of the overly broad court order with defense of Twitter and Musk, so the well was poisoned from the start.
I use a less risky/shady version of the MagisTV app with Stremio [1] and the Torrentio extension [2]. Stremio is available legally on the Play Store, and I installed it on my Chromecast with Google TV/Android phone/Windows PC, it's awesome. The shady part is installing the Torrentio extension.
This setup allows you to stream pirated movies and series with a clean UI. You can search for movies in a IMDB-like database, save them to watch later using the library feature, add subtitles, select streaming quality, and the extension syncs with your Stremio account, so you only need to install it once and it works across all your devices. I suspect this might get shut down soon due to legal pressure. MagisTV offers live TV, sports, and more, so the pressure from corporations is even greater.
Of course, if your ISP monitors you for pirated content, you could get into trouble if you don't use a VPN. However, in my country, it's not a big deal since a lot of people use torrents. Piracy is likely more common in South America compared to the US or Europe.
“What will be achieved once this is completed is that the installed app disappears and cannot be downloaded again, thus breaking the cycle of digital piracy. The only way [Magis TV] could circumvent this is to develop a new app where we would be waiting for them, ready to do exactly the same thing once we identify it.”
... Or they add another step to the distribution or sideloading process that mutates the apk with a little bit of random data so that it won't have the same hash and thus won't be identified for deletion.
I love the confidence prosecutor types say this stuff with. They get up enough knowledge to stop one (1) crime then decide they've stopped all crime forever, then they're completely blindsided when their targets make some tiny change and bypass their brilliant checkmate entirely.
And succinctly demonstrates they have absolutely zero understanding of how an application works, much less identifying what constitutes an application. Incompetence and money deciding everyones fate as usual
Yeah exactly, I can see Revanced supporting it
I believe Magisk does this, where upon first launching the app it can "hide" itself by assigning a random package name.
Lucky Patcher does the same.
Does Google have the technical ability to do this?
I'm not sure the android platform API's actually let google play services do it, and even if they did, I'm not sure google play services has code to uninstall an app not from the play store on request.
You bet your ass they do! Play Protect "may deactivate or remove harmful apps from your device" [0]. I'm not sure how much more straightfoward they could be. Google built this tool, they objectively have the ability to remove apps from your device, and advertise it as a feature. Now an Argentinian court of law is demanding they use this feature to remove an app.
Notably, this "feature" is on by default - and we all know just how pushy large corporations can be about how their services are to be used, to the point options are routinely toggled "accidentally". Things like auto-update settings for apps on the Play Store, or... well, name a Microsoft feature they're pushing.
[0] https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/2812853?hl=en
I was wondering the technical mechanism as well, from the wording of the article(which I will note has no clue how it is going to happen) It sounds like an android update will erase the app if found, and perhaps blacklist it.
Does google have access to phones beyond the playstore?
These "fully loaded Android TV boxes" are running very modified and many generations out of date versions of AOSP according to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41536961 so I doubt they even contain Google Play services or have the ability to update
Then I would consider Google's apps to be malware.
Is google able to un-install any sideloaded application for any android version?
For example, android 7, 8,9, 10 etc? Or was there a specific update that made this possible?
Frankly this is quite worrysome as we already know google enabled COVID "controls" without any opt in or notice, and I believe this affected all versions of android.
Google can absolutely do this. Google's ability to do this isn't tied to an Android version. After being repeatedly hammered on support timelines, they started pushing functionality into Google Services (think the Play store, Google Play Services, and Google Services Framework)
Google Play Protect is one such service. One that Google tells you explitely can (has, and will) "deactivate or remove" apps from your device, sideloaded or not [0].
The only answer is a phone without Google Services. I don't mean "Don't sign into the Playstore", I mean deactivate (or flash a ROM without) every Google service - because who knows if it'll "accidentally" be turned on again
[0] https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/2812853?hl=en
Yes. They proactively do this if you try to sideload versions of "official" apps they won't want you to use
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/09/android-now-allows-a...
That's very different - they allow an app to check if it was installed through Google Play and it can then decide to show you a message and shut down.
Not the same functionality as automatically deleting apps from your phone.
So next step is to publish custom builds with a random value added somewhere, so every download the of apk is unique. Good luck finding all the possible sha-sums.
All the more reason to keep GApps completely off one's devices. Even if Google doesn't overreach, governments can and (per TFA) do.
Or abandon anything related to Google completely. Sent from my Librem 5.
What browser are you using ? Its laggy mess on mine
Firefox with NoScript. Javascript is slow indeed.
Nothing is better for sharing than docs/sheets, Microsoft options are sooo slow and cumbersome.
Go ahead and provide me some lengthy solution that will break with an update, I hit sheets + share and I am using it on my phone, my computer, and friends.
Until Google deletes your sheet because it says something that some government doesn't like.
Google docs looks like the kind of product a team of students could build as a summer project. It's missing all kinds of fairly basic features (have fun adding a text box or arrow between two things on the document for example.)
Yet somehow it's still the best thing out there for shared documents.
I suspect it is winning by network effect and lack-of-business-model meaning nobody else can compete with 'free'.
I'll start: Protonmail Docs