#google store app
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orbesargentina · 6 months ago
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La Google Store es una tienda minorista de hardware operada por Google, donde podrás encontrar una amplia gama de dispositivos y productos de la marca. En esta tienda, podrás adquirir los últimos modelos de smartphones Google Pixel, así como productos Google Nest para el hogar, dongles Chromecast, dispositivos Fitbit y una variedad de accesorios como auriculares, estuches, cargadores y teclados.
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mostlysignssomeportents · 11 months ago
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An Epic antitrust loss for Google
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A jury just found Google guilty on all counts of antitrust violations stemming from its dispute with Epic, maker of Fortnite, which brought a variety of claims related to how Google runs its app marketplace. This is huge:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/11/technology/epic-games-google-antitrust-ruling.html
The mobile app store world is a duopoly run by Google and Apple. Both use a variety of tactics to prevent their customers from installing third party app stores, which funnels all app makers into their own app stores. Those app stores cream an eye-popping 30% off every purchase made in an app.
This is a shocking amount to charge for payment processing. The payments sector is incredibly monopolized and notorious for its price-gouging – and its standard (wildly inflated) rate is 2-5%:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/04/owning-the-libs/#swiper-no-swiping
Now, in theory, Epic doesn't have to sell in Google Play, the official Android app store. Unlike Apple's iOS, Android permit both sideloading (installing an app directly without using an app store) and configuring your device to use a different app store. In practice, Google uses a variety of anticompetitive tricks to prevent these app stores from springing up and to dissuade Android users from sideloading. Proving that Google's actions – like paying Activision $360m as part of "Project Hug" (no, really!) – were intended to prevent new app storesfrom springing up was a big lift for Epic. But they managed it, in large part thanks to Google's own internal communications, wherein executives admitted that this was exactly why Project Hug existed. This is part of a pattern with Big Tech antitrust: many of the charges are theoretically very hard to make stick, but because the companies put their evil plans in writing (think of the fraudulent crypto exchange FTX, whose top execs all conferred in a groupchat called "Wirefraud"), Big Tech keeps losing in court:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/
Now, I do like to dunk on Big Tech for this kind of thing, because it's objectively funny and because the companies make so many unforced errors. But in an important sense, this kind of written record is impossible to avoid. Any large institution can only make and enact policy through administrative systems, and those systems leave behind a paper-trail: memos, meeting minutes, etc. Yes, we all know that quote from The Wire: "Is you taking notes on a fucking criminal conspiracy?" But inevitably, any ambitious conspiracy can only exist if someone is taking notes.
What's more, any large conspiracy involving lots of parties will inevitably produce leaks. Think of this as the corollary to the idea that the moon landing can't be a hoax, because there's no way 400,000 co-conspirators could keep the secret. Big Tech's conspiracies required hundreds or even thousands of collaborators to keep their mouths shut, and eventually someone blabs:
https://www.science.org/content/article/fake-moon-landing-you-d-need-400000-conspirators
This is part of a wave of antitrust cases being brought against the tech giants. As Matt Stoller writes, the guilty-on-all-counts jury verdict will leak into current and future actions. Remember, Google spent much of this year in court fighting the DoJ, who argued that the company bribed Apple not to make a competing search engine, paying tens of billions every year to keep a competitor from emerging. Now that a jury has convinced Google of doing that to prevent alternative app stores from emerging, claims that it used these pay-for-delay tactics in other sectros get a lot more credible:
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/boom-google-loses-antitrust-case
On that note: what about Apple? Epic brought a very similar case against Apple and lost. Both Apple and Epic are appealing that case to the Supreme Court, and now that Google has been convicted in a similar case, it might prompt the Supremes to weigh in and resolve the seeming inconsistencies in the interpretation of federal law.
This is a key moment in the long project to wrest antitrust away from the pro-monopoly side, who spent decades "training" judges to produce verdicts that run counter to the plain language of America's antitrust law:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down
There's 40 years' worth of bad precedent to overturn. The good news is that we've got the law on our side. Literally, the wording of the laws and the records of the Congressional debate leading to their passage, all militate towards the (incredibly obvious) conclusion that the purpose of anti-monopoly law is to fight monopoly, not defend it:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/14/aiming-at-dollars/#not-men
It's amazing to realize that we got into this monopoly quagmire because judges just literally refused to enforce the law. That's what makes one part of the jury verdict against Google so exciting: the jury found that Google's insistence that Play Store sellers use its payment processor was an act of illegal tying. Today, "tying" is an obscure legal theory, but few doctrines would be more useful in disenshittifying the internet. A company is guilty of illegal tying when it forces you to use unrelated products or services as a condition of using the product you actually want. The abandonment of tying led to a host of horribles, from printer companies forcing you to buy ink at $10,000/gallon to Livenation forcing venues to sell tickets through its Ticketmaster subsidiary.
The next phase of this comes when the judge decides on the penalty. Epic doesn't want cash damages – it wants the judge to order Google to fulfill its promise of "an open, competitive Android ecosystem for all users and industry participants." They've asked the judge to order Google to facilitate third-party app stores, and to separate app stores from payment processors. As Stoller puts it, they want to "crush Google’s control over Android":
https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/news/epic-v-google-trial-verdict-a-win-for-all-developers
Google has sworn to appeal, surprising no one. The Times's expert says that they will have a tough time winning, given how clear the verdict was. Whatever this means for Google and Android, it means a lot for a future free from monopolies.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/12/im-feeling-lucky/#hugger-mugger
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itsonlypolite · 2 months ago
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I miss posting but college classes are keeping me busy so here!! I'm working on a Voice of the Broken Shimeji! (you know, those little guys that crawl across your computer/phone screen?) Progress has been slow but like, here's some cute Broken gifs that I made for it!
Walk cycle:
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Animation for when you pick him up:
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And a neutral animation, just a yawn. He's eepy :)
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Anyways that's all for now, I'm still alive!!
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If people like this, when I finish I can probably find a way to share this so people can have their own Broken? First I gotta finish this though haha
(also feel free to suggest more neutral animations! I'm working on just making sure he has all the necessary animations first but then I want to make more neutral stuff too!)
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skylineheights-if · 3 months ago
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i would also like to mention that i have recently been brainrotting over this man
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...so it is likely his influence may seep into harlowe a tiny bit
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icewindandboringhorror · 7 months ago
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sometimes looking at like Self Help Strategies lists for the symptoms I'm having is always just like:
thing that I already do
thing I have tried 10 times
thing I already do
thing that I don't have the money to do
thing I already do
thing I've been doing since I was 10yrs old to no avail
thing that is impossible given my situation
thing that doesn't apply to me
thing that I already do
thing I have already tried
hrmm, oh wait, maybe finally- OH, yeah.. okay. thing that I already do but it was just phrased slightly differently
thing I have already done
#I think maybe productivity tips help less if the reason you're unproductive is partially like.. physcial health and other extenral things#out of your control. rather than just like having trouble paying attention or spending too much time on tiktok or whatever#all the strategic to do lists in the world are not going to somehow prevent me from waking up with a debilitating migraine or whatever#or having external stressors or lacking resources and connections or other Productivity Essentials etc.#especially many tips involve stuff like 'cut off from social media' since thats the modern day time waster for so many poeple#and it's like.. lol.. i can hardly even maintain a blog even thuogh i actively WANT TO DO SO. 'shut off your smart phone!' already#done babey i fucking hate smart phones i shall never use an app unless i am forced to. 'delete tiktok' yep. already covered. tiktok and#all of those thinsg are my enemies. 'save money by cancelling some of your services' cool. already ahead of you.#who the fuck is out here paying for like 10 different subscription services. pirated videos uploaded to google drive and youtube to mp3#my beloved. etc. etc. and so on. 'socialize less' .........LOL.. if only you knew.. mr.writer of the article. i can barely muster#talking to friends more than once a month and even less if I'm actively sick (often occurence) etc. etc. ... hewoo#I think maybe instead of generic productivity tips I need more like.. how to refocus and be productive anyway even if you have a headache#or are nauseous or etc. Not that those are always things to ignore. and of course you should let your body rest and etc. But plenty of peop#e have mild physical symptoms and just work through them. Ithink something about the way my body/mind is SOO hyper attuned to all#sensory information just makes it like... constantly 'GRR well I cant focus on WRITING right now because my lef#t ear feels weird and my socks are too itchy and my back has a strange pressure and I'm vaguely warm and my eye feels some ssort of#way it doesnt normally feel and I'm hyperaware of my breathing and also nauseous for no reason' and like half of those things I#think '''normal''' people wouldnt even notice or at least would be able to just live through. but for me it's like.. nealry impossible to i#gnore and soooo distracting always. like 'wahh.. nooo we can't draw or get anything done.. my legs feel slightly heavy or something!!'#like............. ok......... who cares. thats not even a PAIN sensation it's just something weird. but it's just like.. NO. constant#mental alerts about the 'heaviness' of your legs be upon ye. Though Imean like.. yes.. 70% of the time I am in genuine pain#or having some sort of actual ailment with trackable physical symptoms. but sometimes it's just like... we could totally be working right#now and ignoring this silly thing but my brain is fixated on it for no reason uncontrollably. etc. etc. I guess it's the same way that like#most people can go to a grocery store without the whole experience being so overwhelming and so much stuff going on at once#that they have to rest afterwards but like.. in my own HOME doing NOTHING i feel like I should be able to not get overwhelmed lol. ANYWAY#Rolling my bastard little rock up a dumbass hill and so on and so forth
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bat-luun · 1 month ago
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i just finished that podcast you recommended me a little while ago, the sounds of nightmares. ough,,, it was SO GOOD. i absolutely loved it, thank you so much for the rec!!
also i may have to play little nightmares now- i've heard people mention it a lot but didn't really know much about it. the lore and vibes are FANTASTIC though and i love puzzle platformers, so yeah. when i have the time, it'll happen
YAYY!!! im so glad you liked it!!!! :D
also please please PLEASE get into the little nightmares theyre my favorite games like ever?? i LOVEE their art design and gameplay and story and vibes and falls over died.
i can definitely send you a few videos about thr lore if you want! oh also theres Little Nightmares III coming out some time in 2025 andCBHDBDHHFHS I AM SO HYPED FOR IT!!!!!!!! >:D
LN3 is also gonna be co-op so im down to play the game with you if you want! (thats also IF i end up getting my hands on it lol-)
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lukaherehelp · 9 months ago
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I'm one of the many people that will be waiting for the uncut finale on the 24th, but since I know some of y'all can't wait: it is on bilibili.
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magz · 4 months ago
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FUTO keyboard is a Local, private source-available digital keyboard for Android devices with Voice to Text feature.
The early full release version of the keyboard application is available.
Uses local transcription machine learning (Whisper AI) for voice to text, without the use of internet or cloud or data collection.
FUTO Keyboard is intended to be an alternative to Google and Samsung Keyboard on Android devices, since the defaults collect user data.
Video by Louis Rossman of FUTO (posted on July 1, 2024):
youtube
FUTO Keyboard Website Link
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vavuska · 2 months ago
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Screw Frenzy ASMR Home or Screw Frenzy ASMR by Digital Kingdom PTE.LTD. - Basically game developers stole this video from a YouTuber or Tiktoker who does speed build of The Sims 4 and used it for their ads, implying that THIS is what their game looks like. I'm really pissed.
One star as rate on Google Store isn't enough to shame this people. Pathetic.
Please, if you recognize the video and can tell me who is the oroginal creator, I would be glad. Feel free to report this to him/her/them. They need to know some shady Corp is using their content to scam and fraud people. This is both intellectual property right violation than false advertisement.
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https://www.tumblr.com/vavuska/762312442141360129/lucky-fortune-games?source=share
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bettsfic · 5 months ago
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does anyone have a crossword puzzle app they'd recommend? preferably one without ads, even if it costs money
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yelloworangesoda · 20 days ago
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i dont think theres a way to prevent an ai from being able to promote suicide in any way and i know this bc cai already does NOT want to tell you to kill yourself. its incredibly rare they will do anything but be incredibly supportive without like serious talking to and “training”
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justinspoliticalcorner · 5 months ago
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Alex Kaplan at MMFA:
Google and Apple’s app stores have been hosting an app for Scored, a message board site dedicated to hosting far-right forum TheDonald — which was previously banned on Reddit and rebranded as “patriots.win” after January 6 — and other far-right forums pushing extremism and conspiracy theories. The site, which researchers have called “an alternative Reddit platform that shelter[s] banned fringe communities,” is supposedly owned by the lead moderator of TheDonald who apparently “made the site” for the forum.
TheDonald originally began on Reddit as “r/The_Donald,” with the subreddit dedicated to supporting Donald Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign and subsequent presidency. It was known for spreading and promoting far-right misinformation, conspiracy theories, far-right campaigns, bigotry, white nationalism and white nationalist events, and calls for violence that violated Reddit’s rules. Reddit officially banned r/The_Donald in 2020 but many of the subreddit’s users had already moved to another site, known at the time as “TheDonald.win,” which became the home of what was called the “.win” communities. After the January 6 insurrection, which TheDonald was used to help coordinate, “TheDonald.win” rebranded as “patriots.win.”
In early 2022, an administrator on the “.win” communities’ central hub site announced that “going forward, we will be known as Scored” instead of .win. “Doggos,” who is TheDonald’s apparent lead moderator and seemingly “made the site” for the forum, claimed on the message board that “I own Scored,” and advertised donations to Scored as “supporting this community’s existence.” The announcement on the communities’ central hub site also noted that “in the short term, our focus is on … working on our Android and iOS apps.” Media Matters has now found that since at least 2022, both the Google and Apple app stores have carried “Scored Communities.” The app leads users to numerous far-right forums, including TheDonald, which has continued to push extremism, rampant antisemitism, and racism after being banned from Reddit, as well as calls to violence. (Doggos has said that TheDonald on the app has “a little bit more content-level censorship due to app store policy.”)
Google App Store and Apple App Store are hosting an App called Scored to host far-right forums that were banned from Reddit, such as Patriots[.]win (formerly r/The_Donald).
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mostlysignssomeportents · 8 months ago
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Subprime gadgets
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I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me THIS SUNDAY in ANAHEIM at WONDERCON: YA Fantasy, Room 207, 10 a.m.; Signing, 11 a.m.; Teaching Writing, 2 p.m., Room 213CD.
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The promise of feudal security: "Surrender control over your digital life so that we, the wise, giant corporation, can ensure that you aren't tricked into catastrophic blunders that expose you to harm":
https://locusmag.com/2021/01/cory-doctorow-neofeudalism-and-the-digital-manor/
The tech giant is a feudal warlord whose platform is a fortress; move into the fortress and the warlord will defend you against the bandits roaming the lawless land beyond its walls.
That's the promise, here's the failure: What happens when the warlord decides to attack you? If a tech giant decides to do something that harms you, the fortress becomes a prison and the thick walls keep you in.
Apple does this all the time: "click this box and we will use our control over our platform to stop Facebook from spying on you" (Ios as fortress). "No matter what box you click, we will spy on you and because we control which apps you can install, we can stop you from blocking our spying" (Ios as prison):
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar
But it's not just Apple – any corporation that arrogates to itself the right to override your own choices about your technology will eventually yield to temptation, using that veto to help itself at your expense:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/
Once the corporation puts the gun on the mantelpiece in Act One, they're begging their KPI-obsessed managers to take it down and shoot you in the head with it in anticipation of of their annual Act Three performance review:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-james-hill
One particularly pernicious form of control is "trusted computing" and its handmaiden, "remote attestation." Broadly, this is when a device is designed to gather information about how it is configured and to send verifiable testaments about that configuration to third parties, even if you want to lie to those people:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08/your-computer-should-say-what-you-tell-it-say-1
New HP printers are designed to continuously monitor how you use them – and data-mine the documents you print for marketing data. You have to hand over a credit-card in order to use them, and HP reserves the right to fine you if your printer is unreachable, which would frustrate their ability to spy on you and charge you rent:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/hp-wants-you-to-pay-up-to-36-month-to-rent-a-printer-that-it-monitors/
Under normal circumstances, this technological attack would prompt a defense, like an aftermarket mod that prevents your printer's computer from monitoring you. This is "adversarial interoperability," a once-common technological move:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability
An adversarial interoperator seeking to protect HP printer users from HP could gin up fake telemetry to send to HP, so they wouldn't be able to tell that you'd seized the means of computation, triggering fines charged to your credit card.
Enter remote attestation: if HP can create a sealed "trusted platform module" or a (less reliable) "secure enclave" that gathers and cryptographically signs information about which software your printer is running, HP can detect when you have modified it. They can force your printer to rat you out – to spill your secrets to your enemy.
Remote attestation is already a reliable feature of mobile platforms, allowing agencies and corporations whose services you use to make sure that you're perfectly defenseless – not blocking ads or tracking, or doing anything else that shifts power from them to you – before they agree to communicate with your device.
What's more, these "trusted computing" systems aren't just technological impediments to your digital wellbeing – they also carry the force of law. Under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, these snitch-chips are "an effective means of access control" which means that anyone who helps you bypass them faces a $500,000 fine and a five-year prison sentence for a first offense.
Feudal security builds fortresses out of trusted computing and remote attestation and promises to use them to defend you from marauders. Remote attestation lets them determine whether your device has been compromised by someone seeking to harm you – it gives them a reliable testament about your device's configuration even if your device has been poisoned by bandits:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/05/trusting-trust/#thompsons-devil
The fact that you can't override your computer's remote attestations means that you can't be tricked into doing so. That's a part of your computer that belongs to the manufacturer, not you, and it only takes orders from its owner. So long as the benevolent dictator remains benevolent, this is a protective against your own lapses, follies and missteps. But if the corporate warlord turns bandit, this makes you powerless to stop them from devouring you whole.
With that out of the way, let's talk about debt.
Debt is a normal feature of any economy, but today's debt plays a different role from the normal debt that characterized life before wages stagnated and inequality skyrocketed. 40 years ago, neoliberalism – with its assaults on unions and regulations – kicked off a multigenerational process of taking wealth away from working people to make the rich richer.
Have you ever watched a genius pickpocket like Apollo Robbins work? When Robins lifts your wristwatch, he curls his fingers around your wrist, expertly adding pressure to simulate the effect of a watchband, even as he takes away your watch. Then, he gradually releases his grip, so slowly that you don't even notice:
https://www.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/ppqjya/apollo_robbins_a_master_pickpocket_effortlessly/
For the wealthy to successfully impoverish the rest of us, they had to provide something that made us feel like we were still doing OK, even as they stole our wages, our savings, and our futures. So, even as they shipped our jobs overseas in search of weak environmental laws and weaker labor protection, they shared some of the savings with us, letting us buy more with less. But if your wages keep stagnating, it doesn't matter how cheap a big-screen TV gets, because you're tapped out.
So in tandem with cheap goods from overseas sweatshops, we got easy credit: access to debt. As wages fell, debt rose up to fill the gap. For a while, it's felt OK. Your wages might be falling off, the cost of health care and university might be skyrocketing, but everything was getting cheaper, it was so easy to borrow, and your principal asset – your family home – was going up in value, too.
This period was a "bezzle," John Kenneth Galbraith's name for "The magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it." It's the moment after Apollo Robbins has your watch but before you notice it's gone. In that moment, both you and Robbins feel like you have a watch – the world's supply of watch-derived happiness actually goes up for a moment.
There's a natural limit to debt-fueled consumption: as Michael Hudson says, "debts that can't be paid, won't be paid." Once the debtor owes more than they can pay back – or even service – creditors become less willing to advance credit to them. Worse, they start to demand the right to liquidate the debtor's assets. That can trigger some pretty intense political instability, especially when the only substantial asset most debtors own is the roof over their heads:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/06/the-end-of-the-road-to-serfdom/
"Debts that can't be paid, won't be paid," but that doesn't stop creditors from trying to get blood from our stones. As more of us became bankrupt, the bankruptcy system was gutted, turned into a punitive measure designed to terrorize people into continuing to pay down their debts long past the point where they can reasonably do so:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/bankruptcy-protects-fake-people-brutalizes-real-ones/
Enter "subprime" – loans advanced to people who stand no meaningful chance of every paying them back. We all remember the subprime housing bubble, in which complex and deceptive mortgages were extended to borrowers on the promise that they could either flip or remortgage their house before the subprime mortgages detonated when their "teaser rates" expired and the price of staying in your home doubled or tripled.
Subprime housing loans were extended on the belief that people would meekly render themselves homeless once the music stopped, forfeiting all the money they'd plowed into their homes because the contract said they had to. For a brief minute there, it looked like there would be a rebellion against mass foreclosure, but then Obama and Timothy Geithner decreed that millions of Americans would have to lose their homes to "foam the runways" for the banks:
https://wallstreetonparade.com/2012/08/how-treasury-secretary-geithner-foamed-the-runways-with-childrens-shattered-lives/
That's one way to run a subprime shop: offer predatory loans to people who can't afford them and then confiscate their assets when they – inevitably – fail to pay their debts off.
But there's another form of subprime, familiar to loan sharks through the ages: lend money at punitive interest rates, such that the borrower can never repay the debt, and then terrorize the borrower into making payments for as long as possible. Do this right and the borrower will pay you several times the value of the loan, and still owe you a bundle. If the borrower ever earns anything, you'll have a claim on it. Think of Americans who borrowed $79,000 to go to university, paid back $190,000 and still owe $236,000:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/04/kawaski-trawick/#strike-debt
This kind of loan-sharking is profitable, but labor-intensive. It requires that the debtor make payments they fundamentally can't afford. The usurer needs to get their straw right down into the very bottom of the borrower's milkshake and suck up every drop. You need to convince the debtor to sell their wedding ring, then dip into their kid's college fund, then steal their father's coin collection, and, then break into cars to steal the stereos. It takes a lot of person-to-person work to keep your sucker sufficiently motivated to do all that.
This is where digital meets subprime. There's $1T worth of subprime car-loans in America. These are pure predation: the lender sells a beater to a mark, offering a low down-payment loan with a low initial interest rate. The borrower makes payments at that rate for a couple of months, but then the rate blows up to more than they can afford.
Trusted computing makes this marginal racket into a serious industry. First, there's the ability of the car to narc you out to the repo man by reporting on its location. Tesla does one better: if you get behind in your payments, your Tesla immobilizes itself and phones home, waits for the repo man to come to the parking lot, then it backs itself out of the spot while honking its horn and flashing its lights:
https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/
That immobilization trick shows how a canny subprime car-lender can combine the two kinds of subprime: they can secure the loan against an asset (the car), but also coerce borrowers into prioritizing repayment over other necessities of life. After your car immobilizes itself, you just might decide to call the dealership and put down your credit card, even if that means not being able to afford groceries or child support or rent.
One thing we can say about digital tools: they're flexible. Any sadistic motivational technique a lender can dream up, a computerized device can execute. The subprime car market relies on a spectrum of coercive tactics: cars that immobilize themselves, sure, but how about cars that turn on their speakers to max and blare a continuous recording telling you that you're a deadbeat and demanding payment?
https://archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/09/24/miss-a-payment-good-luck-moving-that-car/
The more a subprime lender can rely on a gadget to torment you on their behalf, the more loans they can issue. Here, at last, is a form of automation-driven mass unemployment: normally, an economy that has been fully captured by wealthy oligarchs needs squadrons of cruel arm-breakers to convince the plebs to prioritize debt service over survival. The infinitely flexible, tireless digital arm-breakers enabled by trusted computing have deprived all of those skilled torturers of their rightful employment:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers
The world leader in trusted computing isn't cars, though – it's phones. Long before anyone figured out how to make a car take orders from its manufacturer over the objections of its driver, Apple and Google were inventing "curating computing" whose app stores determined which software you could run and how you could run it.
Back in 2021, Indian subprime lenders hit on the strategy of securing their loans by loading borrowers' phones up with digital arm-breaking software:
https://restofworld.org/2021/loans-that-hijack-your-phone-are-coming-to-india/
The software would gather statistics on your app usage. When you missed a payment, the phone would block you from accessing your most frequently used app. If that didn't motivate you to pay, you'd lose your second-most favorite app, then your third, fourth, etc.
This kind of digital arm-breaking is only possible if your phone is designed to prioritize remote instructions – from the manufacturer and its app makers – over your own. It also only works if the digital arm-breaking company can confirm that you haven't jailbroken your phone, which might allow you to send fake data back saying that your apps have been disabled, while you continue to use those apps. In other words, this kind of digital sadism only works if you've got trusted computing and remote attestation.
Enter "Device Lock Controller," an app that comes pre-installed on some Google Pixel phones. To quote from the app's description: "Device Lock Controller enables device management for credit providers. Your provider can remotely restrict access to your device if you don't make payments":
https://lemmy.world/post/13359866
Google's pitch to Android users is that their "walled garden" is a fortress that keeps people who want to do bad things to you from reaching you. But they're pre-installing software that turns the fortress into a prison that you can't escape if they decide to let someone come after you.
There's a certain kind of economist who looks at these forms of automated, fine-grained punishments and sees nothing but a tool for producing an "efficient market" in debt. For them, the ability to automate arm-breaking results in loans being offered to good, hardworking people who would otherwise be deprived of credit, because lenders will judge that these borrowers can be "incentivized" into continuing payments even to the point of total destitution.
This is classic efficient market hypothesis brain worms, the kind of cognitive dead-end that you arrive at when you conceive of people in purely economic terms, without considering the power relationships between them. It's a dead end you navigate to if you only think about things as they are today – vast numbers of indebted people who command fewer assets and lower wages than at any time since WWII – and treat this as a "natural" state: "how can these poors expect to be offered more debt unless they agree to have their all-important pocket computers booby-trapped?"
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/29/boobytrap/#device-lock-controller
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Image: Oatsy (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/oatsy40/21647688003
CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
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bellaug111 · 2 months ago
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Apusher mini-app telegram
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lilacs-and-memes · 2 months ago
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Animal Crossing Pocket Camp is closing down.
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They're promising an offline version that won't be free but also won't have microtransactions at all. A heavy blow for whales everywhere. More info on that next month.
Haven't played in a long long time but here's my friend code if you want to say goodbye to it together.
56913885338
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sweet-milky-tea705 · 7 months ago
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https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.infinitycow.eplay
Links dont work in asks also im not trusting that sorry.
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