I'm using stock Android with a bunch of F-droid apps and no Google account. I've never installed anything from Play and don't feel like I'm missing anything.
I don't use F-Droid, but I've been an Android user for several years on two different devices and I've never associated a Google account with a device. I've installed all my software from APK downloads from the open source project site releases they came from.
It was really nice last year when I moved to a new device. I restored my last SMS, call log, and contact backup with the open source app I use for that, then loaded the rest of the apps I use from their APKs. It was a lot like getting a new PC. Very enjoyable.
On some devices I run custom distributions (mostly LineageOS), others I just root and de-fang by removing all objectionable content including the Google bits. In all cases I put on F-Droid with a few configured repos to get the applications I want. On a few devices I also add some proprietary apps which are more or less mandatory - electronic ID (BankID) being the main one - either by manually installing it or through Aurora Store, an alternative play store front-end which does not require a Google account. No Google, no problem and no real hassle. My current main phone - a Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Pro - is 8 years old, I already have a replacement in a drawer but have not configured it yet because I first want to make a cover for it. Even though it is 8 years old it works fine, the battery holds for 2 days and all applications I need still run on it. The oldest device in use is 15 years old and also works fine but it can no longer be used as a phone since 3G was switched off where I live.
The scams are likely to some from outside Play. In the US, these scams don't run because iPhone is the dominant platform and side loading in iOS is not possible. In the rest of world they are widespread.
"Likely"? Do you mean that based on actual data, or are you using it as a weasel word so you can present whatever convenient "facts" that benefit Google as truth?
I’m betting on the latter. No Kitboga video mentions custom Android apps. What actually appears on almost all videos are online ads/spam or fake celebrity accounts messaging random people on Facebook.
It's funny how you aggressively push solutions that ignore the most common scam vectors investigators encounter. Could it be a coincidence that your proposal conveniently places every aspect of people’s lives at the mercy of big businesses? Or that the scam vector you downplay, ads and social media, just happens to be cash cows for some of the richest companies in history?
We already have plenty of paid lobbyists cheering the transfer of wealth from the poorest to the richest. There's no need to do that dirty work for free. Weaponizing the elderly being scammed of their life savings while protecting those that benefit from it is beyond messed up.
The scams that are happening in the rest of world are calls posing as bank support about urgent security issues and telling people to install apps to protect their accounts.
Absolutely! Never had one problem with apps on FDroid. Not even when tbe Simple Mobile Tools suite was sold to a shady company without a heads up to its users. And that safety isn't an accident.
And how much grift happens through Android side loading? (BTW, I hate that weasel word used to vilify a perfectly reasonable activity.) Practically all grift on Android happens through apps on the Play Store. People who know how to 'side load' are also usually careful and smart enough to think about what they're putting in. That's not a useful target for grifts either.
As somebody put it, Google goes after others without cleaning their own house first. It's just abuse of power at this point.
If you don't have the framework, you don't have to worry about any of this (you also don't get the benefits, bank apps that require validated OS, tap to pay etc, without the framework).
> It also includes a line stating that with permission from the city agency, Palantir can “de-identify” patients’ protected health information and use it for “purposes other than research”.
Under HIPPA, "research" has a very specific definition which renders "purposes other than research" quite broad. Yes, it's "with permission" but it does depend on the city agency fully understanding what ancillary things Palantir can do with de-identified data once it has left the covered entity and without further explicit permission.
Can you? My understanding is that AI cannot claim copyright and my assumption would be that copyright law immediately extends authorship to the user operating the AI (or their employer).
So you're suggesting that an AI translation of, say, a novel removes human authorship from the result? Unless a human goes in and makes further "substantive transformations" to the AI generated work?
And if that's not what you are saying then how are you determining that prompts to and AI are not copyrighted by the author of the prompt? The results are nothing more than a derivative work of the prompt. So you are faced with having to determine whether the prompts themselves or in combination are copyrightable. Depending on the prompt they may or may not be, but you can't apply a blanket rule here.
(Notwithstanding that Claude inserts itself explicitly as co-author and the author is listed on the commit as well)
> The Copyright Office affirms that existing principles of copyright law are flexible enough to apply to this new technology, as they have applied to technological innovations in the past. It concludes that the outputs of generative AI can be protected by copyright only where a human author has determined sufficient expressive elements. This can include situations where a human-authored work is perceptible in an AI output, or a human makes creative arrangements or modifications of the output, but not the mere provision of prompts.
People have tried over and over again to register copyright of AI output they supplied the prompts for, for example, in one instance[1], someone prompted AI with over 600+ cumulative iterations of prompting to arrive at the final product, and it wasn't accepted by the Copyright Office.
> In March 2023, the Office provided
public guidance on registration of works created by a generative-AI system. The guidance explained that, in considering an application for registration, the Office will ask “whether the ‘work’ is basically one of human authorship, with the computer [or other device] merely being an assisting instrument, or whether the traditional elements of authorship in the work (literary, artistic, or musical expression or elements of selection, arrangement, etc.) were actually conceived and executed not by man but by a machine.”
You are going to have to prove that things Claude stamps as co-authored are not the work of an "assisting instrument". It's certainly true that some vibe-coded one-shot thing might not apply.
I would also note that the applicant applying for copyright in your linked case explicitly refused guidance and advice from the examiner. That could well be because the creation of that specific work was not shaped much by that artist's efforts.
I wouldn't read too much into that when discussing a GitHub repo. It really will depend on how the user is using Claude and their willingness to demonstrate which parts they contributed themselves. You need to remember that copyright extends to plays and other works of performance. Everything the copyright office is saying in your linked ruling suggests that an AI-implementation of a human-design is copyrightable.
Yes, but the point is that the AI output could still be covered by the definitely-human copyright in the prompt, just not a new copyright in the output.
For example, machine-translating a book doesn't create a new copyright in the new translation, but that new translation would still inherit the copyright in the original book.
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