Uh, no it’s not.

It is. As a result of the Epic Games v. Google, Android builds with the Play Store are required to allow users to install apps without any warning at all. They obviously can’t allow any app to be installed without a warning because this would be a boon to malware authors, so this is now enabled with verification. You can now even share apps you build with your friends without requiring them to go through an unverified apps flow with a scary warning. Additionally, Google is not allowed to take a revenue cut from those installs.

You’re confused because the install process for apps that are not verified (a path that didn’t exist before at all) or installed from a system app store has changed. This now has to be done with adb, which takes effect immediately, or via an on-phone process that takes a day to complete. Once it is done, this setting is copied to new phones, so the process actually becomes easier for most people who do this because they don’t have to go through the process repeatedly.

It is possible on every Google phone.

This change is the opposite. It makes it possible for a user to install the Epic Games Store from their website without seeing a scary warning, and Google won’t get a cut of any of the revenues from that store. The same with any other company. Netflix can now offer their app from their website, and people can install it without any warning, and Netflix won’t have to send any revenue to Google for people who subscribe in the app.

This change makes it so you can’t install software (such as F-Droid, NewPipe, Google Camera, Samsung Notes, etc.) from APK, unless you install them directly from Google’s Play Store [without going through unnecessary hoops and 24-hour delays].

This change was precipitated by a change that allows you to install an app outside the Play Store without the user seeing a scary warning or going through the existing hoops, as required by the Epic Games v. ruling.

After these articles, the “free area” was defined to include just the areas that ROC controls, so the parliament no longer has representatives for mainland Chinese provinces. Based on that, the parliament no longer claims to represent all of China, and the ruling DPP asserts that Taiwan is a separate sovereign state from China. https://jhulr.org/2024/06/12/taiwans-constitutional-battle-the-case-for-the-republic-of-china-roc-constitution/

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And the “history” of the event you were taught was a fantasy cooked up by McCarthyist acolytes to spread atrocity propaganda.

The history I was taught is backed by documentation. The history you were taught ignores the documentation and takes the word of a government that tried to destroy any documents that existed of the event.

Took me all of 1 second to realize that the massacre happened after the 1940s.

Then it took me all of an additional minute to read what happened after the 1940s in the Wikipedia article:

“The Chinese Communist Party re-organized the Red Cross organization in Beijing and was admitted to the International Federation in 1950.”

Not since https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Additional_Articles_of_the_Constitution_of_the_Republic_of_China

The “history” you will be taught in that course won’t include the reports of the journalists who were there at the time and whose film was confiscated. The famous tank man picture only survived because the journalist who took that picture hid it in a toilet.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/why-photos-of-tiananmen-squares-tank-man-were-hidden-in-a-hotel-toilet/

The Chinese Red Cross estimated 2,600 fatalities. That’s a lot of fishermen.

ROC doesn’t claim to legitimately rule China anymore. That was just KMT’s delusion, and they’re no longer in power.

Calm down. You’re tired, so I’ll keep it short. I quoted Greenwald. Does Greenwald’s quote make sense after what I explained and after reading the articles I linked? Yes or no. That’s all the work you should do.

You think I’m a conspiracy theorist because you’ve read conspiracy theories in forums online. Most people get their news from sources like The NYT and The Week instead of those forums, so what I’m telling you is mainstream belief. It just happens to match the beliefs of people in the tech industry at the time like me.

Yes, they could. As soon as he landed in Russia, he was under Russian jurisdiction. There is a legal fiction that he doesn’t have to go through immigration, so he doesn’t need a visa, but Russian law still applies to him, and he can be detained for questioning without charge indefinitely under Russian law. This happens so frequently that it happened just yesterday. https://www.jpost.com/international/article-893628

His passport was revoked while he was still in Hong Kong. You don’t need a passport to be deported. He’s in Russia because Putin wants him there, not because of passport issues.

That dude was never a good investigative journalist. https://reddthat.com/comment/26181758

articles like this one

Do not support Snowden’s claim that the NSA could read any American’s emails or listen to any American’s phone calls. Greenwald (through Snowden’s insistence) thought that DITU was an NSA computer inside American Internet companies. That’s the source of the misconception, which resulted in Greenwald’s sensational claim, “But the Prism program renders that consent unnecessary, as it allows the agency to directly and unilaterally seize the communications off the companies’ servers.”

The article itself is a misreporting of this WaPo article that said half of the communications contained references to American residents. This makes sense of course, because the foreign accounts being surveilled were thought to have national security importance for the U.S.

In truth, entire teams of journalists from multiple outlets worked on different parts of those stories

And the ones who knew what they were talking about disparaged Greenwald’s reporting that was based solely on Snowden’s ignorance. The first newspaper to get the story right was the New York Times. Then CNET’s Declan McCullough repeatedly called Greenwald out on his poor reporting. ZDNet quite reasonably asked why neither Greenwald nor his editor bothered to consult a subject matter expert. The tech blogosphere ripped it apart at the time, to the point that Greenwald kept responding in an unhinged way to open source tech celebrities on Twitter. But you didn’t need to be in tech at the time to understand this. This got picked up in mainstream news summary sites like The Week.

You didn’t even address the fact that the US forced the plane of the president of Ecuador to land in Europe due to pressure from the US, because it flies in the face of your narrative that the US is a righteous place where you can trust the law

That’s because it was Bolivia, and each country has a right to police its own airspace. France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy can choose which planes they allow to fly over their countries, and that is their right under international law. The US didn’t unlawfully down a plane over a European country’s airspace.

You know how they got around not being able to spy on Americans? They got the brits and other countries to do it for them. That is what the Five-Eyes organization is all about

This is a conspiracy theory that isn’t supported by any documents at all, especially nothing in Snowden’s documents. This agreement started as BRUSA, which was a no-spy agreement, which Germany requested access to after the Germans and the Americans had been caught spying on each other in the early 2000s. This no-spy provision is alluded to in the WaPo article I linked to above: “At one level, the NSA shows scrupulous care in protecting the privacy of U.S. nationals and, by policy, those of its four closest intelligence allies — Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.”

Snowden claimed PRISM lets the NSA read any American’s emails and chats. Greenwald believed him because he didn’t know any better. It turned out not to be the case. Instead, the US government could request real-time copies via Section 702 orders (used for data for specific accounts belonging to non-Americans outside the US) that would be ingested by the FBI’s existing wiretap integration for requesting data for Americans under court ordered surveillance, and PRISM was just the data ingestion system that integrated with the FBI for that non-American data. It’s clearly shown in the slides, but neither Snowden nor Greenwald had enough smarts to Google the word, “DITU” on the slide and came up with wild conspiracies involving NSA computers running in Google’s data centers requesting any data they liked.

The only illegal domestic surveillance program in the entirety of the leaks was a system that collected phone metadata about who called whom when for how long. The leaks showed that it could only be queried in a very particular way. Snowden thought the NSA could listen in on any American’s phone calls and read any American’s email, but nothing of the sort showed up in his leaks.

Why should he trust US whistleblower laws? Because they work. The guy who leaked Trump’s call to Zelensky asking him to investigate Hunter Biden was protected by whistleblower laws to the point that you don’t even know his name. After he filed a whistleblower complaint and the investigation began, multiple other witnesses came forward. None of them have been prosecuted, and this was even under Trump, who is unafraid to file meritless lawsuits. If Snowden just blew the whistle on the single illegal program in his leaks, he would be in the U.S. earning royalties from his book deal.

Indeed, defenestration is making a comeback in Russia. The Prague tourism industry is in shambles. Nobody wants to see the second best.

That dude has a history of not understanding what is going on. The only thing the passport revocation did was give Russia an additional excuse to tell him to keep him in the airport instead of allowing him to meet people outside the airport while they figured out what to do with him. They could have let him out of the airport or onto an airplane at any time. There is no requirement for travel documents to deport someone from your country.