The Android Runtime On Chrome OS Makes Use Of Wayland

[Passso]

-A camera app that generates ascii pictures on the spot, because fuck yeah.

You just changed my average day into a "cool pic party".

[starshipeleven]

This doesn't apply, since the proposal doesn't involve running the google blobs. The idea here is to be able to download and install 3rd party applications in .apk files, and run THOSE.

Same issue as with Microsoft compatibility layer for apk.
Most of the users of this will be kiddies pirating games, as most people won't run around the net to download apks and install them.

Also, you don't let anyone pay for paid apps, which is a big issue for those that want them.

For now it is a beta so they focus on getting it to work at all, but don't think they want to keep paid apps android-only.

[starshipeleven]

Huh?
NOBODY TARGETS DESKTOP LINUX.
NOBODY AT ALL.
EVER.

I didn't say exclusively targeting, and there is a bunch of applications that offer a linux version too without being made by FSF.
Consider that with the new technologies of Snap and Flatpack the ones making an application for linux can target all distros instead of just 'buntus or RHEL.

So this won't make any difference. If anything, it will draw people TO desktop Linux, because now they can run their Android applications that they otherwise would need Android to run.

Wrong, this will quickly turn the underlying linux system into nothing more than a "lower layer" to use applications made for Android, for most mass-users.

People will not be using "desktop linux", they will be using Android PC.

Really is it so hard to grasp that what makes or breaks an OS isn't the OS itself but the ecosystem of applications?

[unixfan2001]

... Windows is a broken mess of hacks itself, so any application trying to emulate it needs to be the same.

In order to be really considered fully backwards compatible to Windows, it also needs to come with an insanely broken compiler chain and a set of developers who couldn't figure out how to actually build anything on it...

[liam]

If you value your freedom and privacy, Google's business model has some fundamental problems:

1. They collect data about users for targeted advertising. The more details they can collect, the better their ad revenue so they work very hard to collect as much as they can. I'm not comfortable with any company having this much data about most citizens - especially when intelligence agencies in the US repeatedly violate the law, exceed their jurisdiction, and access information without cause.

2. Google releases useful software as open source, but they keep their core services as proprietary to maintain their market advantage and facilitate data collection. Google also does not push their device partners to release device drivers. Hundreds of millions of older Android phones are too slow to match the latest Samsung Galaxy whatever but faster than a Raspberry Pi. If the full source code was available, you could install Android 5, Debian, or whatever you want on it and repurpose it as part of a baby monitoring system or a toy web server or whatever you want. Instead, it's in the recycle bin because you can't do anything other than run an older version of Android with unpatched security vulnerabilities.

3. The Android App Store and Chrome Web Store facilitate the sale and distribution of proprietary applications. So in addition to Google's own data collection and privacy violations and DRM, you have those things from thousands of other pieces of software too.

Now to be clear, I understand that Google exists to make profits and I understand why 97% of the population considers these violations of their freedoms acceptable in return for access to the services Google provides. But you can't call Google a company with "an ideal combination of free". They are ultimately as much an enemy of user freedom and privacy as Microsoft and Apple.

I don't care if Google has this data about me. It is in there interest to do EVERYTHING IN THEIR POWER TO KEEP THAT INFO TO THEMSELVES. If people can't trust them to keep their data to themselves, then people stop using their services. Similarly, if that data leaks, they lose one of their best resources.

Android is a TINY part of the software for which they are responsible, and even there they do a pretty good job. As for their services being "proprietary": if you were the master of Google, how would you go about changing that?
I do agree that I wish google would push the component companies into contributing their drivers/firmware to mainline.
Google does contribute to open firmware projects (like that openbios/uefi replacement whose name escapes me), and used the nouveau drm for their pixel c tablet.

BTW, I thought I said MY IDEAL.

Calling them an "enemy of user freedom" seems...a bit too intensely ideological. I'm just going to say that I'm not aware of another service provider that does offers the same combinations of benefits, which I've previously mentioned, as Google.

[liam]

Please note, they don't genuinely give a fuck about who you are (name and stuff) and who are your friends and where you live (more precisely than city name). They track you by asking the device its google ID or something, which is either in a cookie or in a special facility (for Android), and if you change that by tapping around in settings or if you delete cookies and/or block google tracking in your browser (kinda easy) you enjoy 100% stealth from them.
They gather data to profile you to send ads, which means knowing where you have been and what you bought, but not knowing who you are.
Even if NSA called Google they would have a hard time telling them any useful info to track you down (unless you posted such stuff yourself).

This was very nicely said, and I wish I hadn't forgotten to add some of these points in my response to that poster.

ss11, imho, people who get really upset about google are "triggered" b/c of a few things: 1)general distrust of for profit entities and government, 2)they fear, but more importantly believe that a $Pick_Your_Own dystopian nightmare of "Big Brother" is basically already here (related to these folks are the ones who(seriously) scream SKYNET in the comments section of almost any article about "AI", 3)well, there is no 3

The first one pulls in disparate groups so there's not much we can generalize about them (in this area).
The second is a rather huge compaction of ideas such that meaningfully breaking it apart would take more effort than I now feel myself willing to exert.

Hopefully this is somewhat coherent

[ssokolow]

This was very nicely said, and I wish I hadn't forgotten to add some of these points in my response to that poster.

ss11, imho, people who get really upset about google are "triggered" b/c of a few things: 1)general distrust of for profit entities and government, 2)they fear, but more importantly believe that a $Pick_Your_Own dystopian nightmare of "Big Brother" is basically already here (related to these folks are the ones who(seriously) scream SKYNET in the comments section of almost any article about "AI", 3)well, there is no 3

The first one pulls in disparate groups so there's not much we can generalize about them (in this area).
The second is a rather huge compaction of ideas such that meaningfully breaking it apart would take more effort than I now feel myself willing to exert.

Hopefully this is somewhat coherent

1. You'd be surprised how few "anonymous" pieces of data you need to intersect to uniquely identify someone. (Unlike woodpeckers, who need to know when to try another tree, our probability instincts are garbage)

2. Google has everything they need to map your ad-targeting ID to a Google account (which the NSA can learn a lot more from) if you log into it on your Android phone. Even if they can't map it to a real person in an automated fashion, who knows what a disgruntled employee could find useful. (I see blinding Google as equivalent to having an automatic timer for your lights and pickup for your newspapers when you go on vacation.)

3. We've already seen Google get mad once because the NSA tapped their trunks without telling them, and, last I heard, the NSA is build a data center to store everything they snoop for future reference and, if necessary, possible later decryption when technology is more powerful. I think a little paranoia is justified there.

4. The whole reason everyone is pushing two-factor auth that is either SMS-based or requires SMS for setup, despite the former being horribly insecure, is so they can map your account to a mobile number, which they consider to be the holy grail of correlating targeting information across accounts.

That sort of thing is why I've been working to divide my services across as many providers as possible and to only use 2FA if I can get access to the TOTP seed without using SMS or a proprietary app.

[starshipeleven]

1. You'd be surprised how few "anonymous" pieces of data you need to intersect to uniquely identify someone.

viewing habits aren't exactly the best. Consider that they don't snoop passwords or have access to what you actually look at, they only know a guy (or the same guy) visited site X and looked at Y page at the Z time.
If the site integrates the google analytics, so it wants to track you, they provide telemetry on what you do on their site by keywords, like "user clicked on Article1", or "user is reading page 2", they don't dump the whole page with any private info to the Google's servers (mostly because they don't give a fuck, the service is supposed to track your buying habits, not to collect info for NSA to home on you dirty un-american non-white terrorist)

(Unlike woodpeckers, who need to know when to try another tree, our probability instincts are garbage)

Animals in general use smell. They have much better smell, not some handwavium "probability instincts".

2. Google has everything they need to map your ad-targeting ID to a Google account

Wrong. By default your ID is mapped to the account already, you can choose to not have that from a setting in google play services settings on Android (I assume there is something online too but I never checked).

Seriously people why every paranoid people shouting hot air on teh internet fails to know the basics of the services he is paranoid about?

Even if they can't map it to a real person in an automated fashion, who knows what a disgruntled employee could find useful.

People not understanding the concept of big data are the most fun. To get anything moderately useful out of their multi-hundred-TB databases you need advanced search algorithms and time and security clearance, a "disgruntled employee" isn't going to have access to that.

4. The whole reason everyone is pushing two-factor auth that is either SMS-based or requires SMS for setup, despite the former being horribly insecure, is so they can map your account to a mobile number, which they consider to be the holy grail of correlating targeting information across accounts.

Wrong, the whole reason everyone is pushing two-factor auth is that people uses shit passwords because they are dumb cows, so service providers are sick of having idiots that "got their account stolen" pester their support teams and give them bad PR with "massive hackings happened" news.

Phone numbers are stored in the same way as passwords, the service owner can't have access to them (otherwise you must be all over the place with letting a site owner know the password for your account too). This because privacy laws, because they don't want NSA to annoy them to get the numbers, and because any hack or leak that exposes phone numbers would be a major PR hit, much more than the usual email leak.

And please explain how sms is "horribly insecure", as there is no way in hell someone can intercept a SMS AND correlate that to the specific session of the program that asked for it without having pwned the device already.

That sort of thing is why I've been working to divide my services across as many providers as possible and to only use 2FA if I can get access to the TOTP seed without using SMS or a proprietary app.

Wrong again. You can pretty much have your own cloud using open software on a device you own.
You can even put up a mail server and it's not even hard.

[starshipeleven]

As for their services being "proprietary":

I always wonder what the hell is a "proprietary" service at all.

I mean, a service is a "job" that is done by third parties. Not an object, but a sequence of actions, done by workers or machines.

How can a service be "open"? You can open the tools if it makes sense to do so (and that is what they do usually), but opening the servers or their configurations or the procedures they follow in the company (as not all services are 100% digital in nature) is a bit batshit hardcore communism for no benefit.

I mean, why should say youtube open their server software to all? It's not like it is doing totally revolutionary stuff in there, there are zillions of video sharing services that can do more or less the same.

Or google's location infrastructure. It's not like you can replace google's with yours already (if you have a few tens of billion dollars laying around), you don't need to get a full dump of their software to do so.

[anda_skoa]

How can a service be "open"?

There are a couple of approaches to find viable definitions for this.
Usually they revolve around the possibilty of being able to replicate it.

E.g. is the API specified, is the reference implementation openly available, can your own data and meta data be transferred, etc.

But there are often additional concerns, e.g. do the terms of service require you to give up rights, etc.

Cheers,
_