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Your Microsoft example is only equivalent if Microsoft was also scanning hotmail and MSN messenger for threats against the company.

I think I see where you're coming from, but to me, the analogy falls short.

I think it's because email has the postal system metaphor to work with: I put my letter in an envelope, the post office just forwards it. Similarly, Hotmail does not _need_ knowledge of the contents of my email to forward it to its destination. If you asked a user who had access to their email, they might reasonably expect only the recipient would.

With LLMs, it is quite clear to the user that you are interacting with _something_ that is inspecting your messages and reacting to them. If you asked the user who had access to their inputs, they'd probably say "Claude" or "Anthropic". Thus, when Claude rats them out for threatening violence, they probably wouldn't be that surprised.

To me, this feels much closer to someone phoning up Microsoft's customer support phone number and mentioning that they have a gun and know where Bill Gates lives, and that then resulting in a visit from the police. I do idly wonder if it was intentional that this user had this conversation with Claude, and not, say, with ChatGPT or Gemini.


The social security administration does have a central database of essentially everyone born in the US after 1986, when a law was passed that required you to provide the SSN of anyone you claimed as a dependent on your taxes. As a result essentially every child born in the US is issued an SSN along with their birth certificate.

Enumeration at birth was piloted in three states starting in 1987, made available to all states in 1989, and more or less in use everywhere by 1997 ... Needing an SSN for taxes is the motivation (or vice versa) but implentation of the tax change happened before implementation of enumeration.

Also, it should be noted, parents can opt out of enumeration at birth. The child certainly doesn't have input into that decision.

Medical professionals are generally legally obligated to report births, but not all births happen with medical supervision.

I was in college around 2000. Some of my fellow students had no way to obtain an official birth certificate as the county records had been lost in a flood or a fire or something.

Older generations also have the legacy of Jim Crow. Birth registration rates in 1940 in some states was close to 80%. [1].

If you're born today and don't have a birth certificate, it's a giant PITA and your parents will likely end up getting your birth retroactively documented. Maybe when they want to claim you for taxes; maybe to enroll you in school.

If you were born in 1940 and didn't have one, you probably just made do... When 24% of the children in Arkansas didn't get a birth certificate, everybody is going to be fine with you not having one.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1527492/?page=3 (paper from 1943)


> after 1986

This kind of thing has come up before with "murder for hire" advertisements [1]. The publishers were only found liable when the advertisement was very explicit. Seems like the bar is quite high and courts are currently unwilling to impose "undue burden" on publishers.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soldier_of_Fortune_(magazine)#...


There is a conflict between "publishers should be responsible for everything they publish" and "a free press".

If you have to buy a newspaper to publish your info, that is quite a high bar.

At the same time, none of us* want malware scum to use newspaper ads to fleece people.

*OK, some of us write malware scum. I don't count their opinions as valid.


Just denying write access outside the build directory and denying network access would go a long way and won't break pretty much any well-behaved build systems.

Any C library that's also packaged by debian supports being built under these conditions because it's required for everything except non-free packages: https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-source.html#main...


> Just denying write access outside the build directory and denying network access

As the link you posted mentions, you need a tiny bit more than that: you also need write access to the temporary directory (/tmp and similar). Many build tools temporarily store files there; for instance, unless things have changed since I last looked, if you don't use the -pipe argument the C compiler stores its temporary intermediate files (preprocessor output, assembler input) there.


I do disagree. They've funded macOS R&D for decades without charging developers anything. Why should iOS be any different?


It's not against the law to create a better and more profitable business.


It's not, it just means when they say they "need to", they lie.


Better business for a specific company doesn't mean better markets for consumers and other participants, and we make laws to ensure the latter even if it's at the expense of the former.


It should be against the law to create they kind of business they have, though


go ahead and make the law then. until then it isn't



Why? Android has 72% of the market in 2025. As an individual company Apple has 20% of the market. Samsung has 19%.

Just don't buy an iphone and move on with your life.


I still wish to sell to users of iOS.

Apple has conveniently, for them, set themselves up as an unwanted middleman.

This is only possible for them to do because they make billions per quarter and I’m a struggling solo developer.

I can’t believe people are defending apple.


> Apple has conveniently, for them, set themselves up as an unwanted middleman.

I don't see users complaining, it's mostly developers.


What’s your point?

You don’t think users wouldn’t prefer to pay less for their software?

Do you think most users have given this a thought? Do you think they are even aware of the issue?


Google is also listening though. They are slowly introducing similar restrictions after seeing what absurdity Apple gets away with as "compliance" of needing to also allow anyone to offer software for iOS. Our mistake is thinking it's fine that apple believers get vendor lock-in because there is still Google and Android lets you run whatever code you want. Yeah, until it doesn't


Why do you want huge companies to be allowed so much control?

What is it about letting them restrict what people can do in order to squeeze even more money out of them and other companies that appeals to you so much?

Where do you think this should stop?

Should my wifi router be allowed to only work with some brands of phone or laptop?

Should my mobile service provider be allowed to ask for a percentage of any payment I use over their connection?

Should my car by allowed to refuse to park if the owner of the car park doesn't share ticket revenue with its manufacturer?

If not, why not?

Personally, I choose to believe that just like some things cannot legally be agreed to contractually (even if they're in the contract and you sign it), some business models should also be unacceptable to society. That includes any situation where by owning a platform, media property, or content/service delivery technology or provider, a company wants to force itself as a middleman between any two parties.


Companies can't simply do that.

In fact, you will have a guarantee of failure if e.g. your messaging app doesn't support iOS


If companies had a product people cared enough about, people would stop buying iPhones.


well, they seldomly do, which is exactly why companies are forced to it


They charged for the operating system. The first MacOS X was $130.


I think the point is that they didn't charge developers anything specifically to be developers or sell apps. They just needed the same hardware and software as everybody else, which, yes, they probably had to buy.


The OP article is also wrong on multiple counts. "Customer behavior" data like call recordings and email addresses/activity is specifically not included in Google's purchase. See page 18 of the court document they link, the "Google's Data Purchase Request" column on the right lists what is and isn't included.


None of that customer data is included in the purchase. Page 18 of the linked court document is the source of these record counts, and on the right is a "Google's Data Purchase Request" column that lists all of this "Customer Behavior" data as "not included".

The Register is not a serious publication and completely missed this. Other outlets reporting this story do not include the claim that customer data is included.


Sure, but there is enough tertiary information that google owns that explicit customer information isn't necessary. They can and will use this to "enhance" customer profiles. It'll cost them time and money, but those are things they have already.


>Register is not a serious publication

Do you have a source to back this up? The register has been covering IT since before most people here were born, and literally invented BOFH.


And the Daily mail was founded in the 1800s. Age of the publication doesn't in any way correlate with the factuality of the reporting.


So what is included?


It's not really the same unless the human cleaner also wears a gopro to record and archive their entire cleaning session for later review (and potential sale to data brokers when the cleaning company wants more money).


This is still a thing on Android if your work account is a Google account and uses the Work profile feature. You can pause all apps in the Work profile on a schedule (or on demand), so it includes any work apps you might have in addition to email.


Microsoft is not a GPU manufacturer, Apple is. The 3rd parties Microsoft left it up to are the GPU manufacturers.


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