I find both sides of this discourse have value: the federal loss of regulatory powers WRT corporations, and getting grassroots going again. I feel like my neighborhood streets are not places anymore, they're entirely liminal. Nothing happens in these spaces, no playing or working, except as strictly necessary.
You're the only one saying that. Be honest in your posts. Everyone else is saying that Palo alto doesn't permit nearly enough housing to be built. I can't build an ADU because my city won't permit structures within 7.5m of my rear property line. I have the skills and the cash and the need, but not the permission.
It's an economic drag, making housing scarce. All the businesses that need service workers have a much harder time operating in a housing desert like palo alto. More of them will close, and not be replaced. The surviving restaurants will be so busy and understaffed that it's less pleasant to visit than the better restaurants in Fresno. Same for all the other services, like a hotel, or a mechanic, grocery store, pharmacy, parcel delivery. It's also difficult for the b2b suppliers to survive. Suddenly your mechanic has to order parts from farther afield, and your car takes an extra day to fix.
9 years of the api working, then Google shuts them down. I expect an interface to be consistent after working for 9 years.
I think they're trying to keep their story simple, for the sake of clarity. I believe the nextcloud team when they say they need the permission.
Part of the issue is that nextcloud has many use cases, including ones where your files don't get synced to your mobile device until you touch the file, replacing them with a reference to a file. It's cool cause you can access and manage a tb of pictures or documents from a 64gb android.
> I believe the nextcloud team when they say they need the permission.
I don't (and I do use NC). The sentence "SAF cannot be used, as it is for sharing/exposing our files to other apps" is simply wrong and llm_nerd is right that SAF should be able to handle that use case,see
There are some restrictions regarding which directories you can access, but for most use-cases it should be perfectly fine. It's also not that this should come as a surprise to them. In fact, there's an issue about this from the NC team themselves from August '22:
> I expect an interface to be consistent after working for 9 years
Even if that interface is insecure and harmful to users ?
As an industry we've learnt a lot about how apps siphon and sell your data. And I appreciate this probably doesn't apply to NextCloud but it can be difficult to build an API that is flexible and secure so you will get casualties.
Shady apps use file access to do tracking of various sorts and simply ingest private data that has nothing to do with their nominal purpose. Sophisticated users probably wouldn't install those apps, and certainly wouldn't agree to their request for filesystem access, but that's not who Google is trying to protect here.
It's obviously not a security problem or a harm when used by an open source file synchronization app, and Google is being unsophisticated with its policy here.
Maybe they should not remove APIs for open source apps then. If you can vet the source code and the app has been built from the source code you vetted, then there is no point in removing capabilities for reasons other than market monopolization and extinguishing features for non-Google developers. After all, these security rules don't apply to Google themselves.
(btw, not singling out Google - IMHO Apple is bad here too. This duopoly in the smartphone space is a major PITA)
Most of the time, when apps are caught doing something really shady, they're removed from the Play Store for doing the shady thing. A story wouldn't report that they stopped working because of a policy change, but some of these wouldn't make it into the store now:
But does the policy solve this problem? The first link is a file explorer app. In theory that app should be granted the permision by Google. They could get established and then start collecting data later. So how does the policy help?
In practice the only way it helps is by Google basically telling everyone other than big trusted orgs no, and that's not an open ecosystem.
Why not just give the user a big fat warning, even telling them that apps which request this permission have been known to steal data in the past, then let them decide for themselves?
It reduces the attack surface area, and in theory allows more thorough vetting of apps that are eligible to use the permission without spending additional resources. I say in theory because I have the impression Google wants this to be almost entirely automated and isn't actually doing a good job vetting apps that use risky permissions.
> that's not an open ecosystem
No, it is not. Did someone claim it was?
The open ecosystem of Android is that users can choose to install apps from any source they like. Apps like Syncthing-Fork and (full-featured) Nextcloud are available from other sources including F-Droid. Google does a couple things to privilege its own store, though I think those are being mitigated due to legislation and litigation.
Well, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't but the idea that a local store owner wouldn't give me if I were to give off a "dangerous vibe" would be somewhat concerning. But maybe I have ancestry etc. where I just don't give off that vibe. More generally, I guess I'm just pretty used to lodging where a delayed flight doesn't mean I can't get in.
I'm a paying customer, why tf should I care what the clerk thinks?
I paid the money, give me the key. Plus at no point did I pay them any money -- they're just, essentially, key escrow.
It's good marketing for them since being in and out of a pizza place means someone will likely buy a slice, but as a BnB customer IDGAF what they think outside of giving me that bloody key.
Yes, I think there was a few things going on with covid, most of all the fact that shipping got halted for a year and we're still unwinding the damage from that (although, mostly smooth now).
It seems to have some reasonable length limitations. It refused to distill this epic analysis of dungeons across 3 games, since the video approaches 4 hours long: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PajArJbPfpE
That was true until the Global Financial Crisis in 2008. Now, they use their finance arm to help customers finance very large purchases. This is common in heavy industry.
Isn't that precisely how it started? Then, they realized they had so much they could open that financing to more than just large industrial clients. Did they just scale it back to their original intent?
