SDF Chatter

No way :0

http://archive.today/2025.04.21-151945/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/21/technology/google-search-remedies-hearing.html

The Justice Department said on Monday that the best way to address Google’s monopoly in internet search was to break up the $1.81 trillion company, kicking off a three-week hearing that could reshape the technology giant and alter the power players in Silicon Valley.

Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled in August that Google had broken antitrust laws to maintain its dominance in online search. He is now hearing arguments from the government and the company over how to best fix Google’s monopoly and is expected to order those measures, referred to as “remedies,” by the end of the summer.

In an opening statement in the hearing on Monday, the government said Judge Mehta should force Google to sell its popular Chrome web browser, which drives users to its search engine. Government lawyers also said the company should take steps to give competitors a leg up if the court wants to restore competition to the moribund market for online search.

The outcome in the case, U.S. v. Google, could drastically change the Silicon Valley behemoth. Google faces mounting challenges, including a breakup of its ad technology business after a different federal judge ruled last week that the company held a monopoly over some of the tools that websites use to sell open ad space. In 2023, Google also lost an antitrust suit brought by the maker of the video game Fortnite, which accused the tech giant of violating competition laws with its Play app store.

The Justice Department’s actions signal that the Trump administration plans to maintain government scrutiny of the tech industry. Apple, Meta and Amazon also face antitrust lawsuits from the U.S. government, with Meta in the second week of a trial over whether it illegally stifled competition by buying Instagram and WhatsApp when they were young companies.

The case over Google search was filed in 2020, under the first Trump administration. In 2023, Judge Mehta oversaw an eight-week trial in which the government argued that Google had subverted competition by striking deals to be the preselected search engine in web browsers and on the home screens of smartphones. The company paid $26.3 billion to companies like Apple and Samsung as part of those deals in 2021.

The government said those deals locked in Google’s control, putting its search engine in front of consumers looking for information, which gave the company more data to improve its search engine. That then attracted more consumers, entrenching the company’s dominance, the government said.

One of our two senior developers has been forcibly detained and conscripted to participate in a war. When they first went missing, we revoked their repository access as a precaution. We soon learned their disappearance was completely unrelated to GrapheneOS. Our priority has been keeping them safe.

We've used our available connections to try to keep them safe. There's no way to get them out of the conscription. However, they're an incredibly talented security researcher and engineer and it would be extraordinarily misguided to send them to front line combat. This seems to be understood now.

GrapheneOS development and updates have continued and will keep going. We have substantial funds available to hire more people to work on GrapheneOS. We'll need to hire multiple experienced developers to fill their big shoes. They'll hopefully be safe and when they return we'll have a bigger team.

If you're an experienced AOSP developer interested in working full time on GrapheneOS in a fully remote position, see https://grapheneos.org/hiring. We can pay people anywhere in the world via Wise (local bank transfers), BTC, ETH or XMR. We need people who can hit the ground running due to the current situation.

Our near term focus is going to heavily shift to Android 16 porting, maintenance and continuing to do better patching than standard Android 15 QPR2. An OEM providing us early access to Android 16 sources would help a lot and we wouldn't need to slow down new feature development nearly as much.

We felt obligated to go public about this but waited a couple weeks to make sure they were safe and that us going public wouldn't harm them. We avoided specifying the country or war to avoid involving GrapheneOS in a debate on forced conscription in an existential defensive war.

GRAPHENEOS IS HIRING

Are you an experienced AOSP developer?

Interested in working full time, fully remotely on GrapheneOS?

Can you hit the ground running?

https://grapheneos.org/hiring

Global opportunity paid via Wise (local bank transfers), BTC, ETH or XMR.

http://archive.today/2025.04.03-150445/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/03/world/europe/russia-envoy-us-visit-trump-dmitriev.html

A Kremlin envoy said on Thursday that he was meeting with the Trump administration in Washington this week, the first time in years that a senior Russian official was known to have traveled to the United States for talks with American counterparts.

The envoy, Kirill Dmitriev, is the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and President Vladimir V. Putin’s special representative for investment and economic cooperation.

He said on the Telegram messaging app on Thursday that he had met with “representatives of the administration of President Donald Trump” on Wednesday and would do so again on Thursday.

There was no immediate comment from the Trump administration about Mr. Dmitriev’s post.

Mr. Dmitriev’s visit came despite sanctions imposed by the Biden administration that described him as “a known Putin ally.” It also came as President Trump excluded Russia from the roster of countries hit by the steep tariffs unveiled on Wednesday.

Mr. Dmitriev did not specify whom he was meeting with, but his main known American counterpart in recent weeks has been Steve Witkoff, the close friend of Mr. Trump who is the White House envoy for the Middle East and Russia.

Mr. Dmitriev, a 49-year-old former banker who studied at Stanford and Harvard and worked at McKinsey and Goldman Sachs, has emerged as a key emissary for Mr. Putin in the Kremlin’s efforts to build a close relationship with Mr. Trump.

Mr. Dmitriev’s message, tailored to Mr. Trump’s pecuniary mind-set, has been that the United States stands to profit from closer ties with Russia.

In February, Mr. Dmitriev worked with Mr. Witkoff to help broker a prisoner exchange that led to the release of Marc Fogel, an American teacher imprisoned in Moscow.

In talks with Mr. Witkoff and other American officials in Saudi Arabia days later, Mr. Dmitriev claimed that U.S. companies had incurred $324 billion in losses by pulling out of Russia after Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Mr. Dmitriev said in his social media post on Thursday that his meetings were about restoring the U.S.-Russian dialogue. The relationship had been “completely destroyed under the Biden administration,” he wrote, and the United States could benefit from cooperation “in international affairs and in the economy.”

“A real understanding of the Russian position opens up new opportunities for constructive interaction, including in the investment and economic sphere,” Mr. Dmitriev said.

He made no mention of the negotiations over the war in Ukraine between Moscow and Washington. Those talks appear to have run aground in recent days, with Mr. Putin having rebuffed the proposal by Mr. Trump and Ukraine for a 30-day cease-fire.

Mr. Trump said last weekend that he was “very angry” over some of Mr. Putin’s comments about Ukraine, raising the possibility that the American president could drop his efforts to rebuild ties with Russia.

But Mr. Dmitriev’s visit indicated that the Trump administration was continuing to reverse the Biden administration’s isolation of Russia on the diplomatic stage.

In another sign of continuing engagement between Washington and Moscow, Sergey V. Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, said this week that preparations were underway for a second round of talks aimed at easing the work of American and Russian diplomats operating in each other’s countries.

U.S. and Russian officials first met in Istanbul on Feb. 27 for talks on unwinding years of tit-for-tat restrictions that reduced the American mission in Russia and the Russian mission in the United States to skeleton staffs.

“We can see signs of progress and our U.S. partners’ willingness to lift these obstacles to the normal work of diplomats in our respective capitals,” Mr. Lavrov said.

The fingerprint reader issue introduced by Android 15 QPR2 in March 2025 has been resolved by the monthly Android update for April 2025. This issue caused the fingerprint reader to become unavailable after reboot for a small subset of users nearly entirely on the non-Pro Pixel 9.

Android 15 QPR2 is the 2nd quarterly release of Android 15 and was released on March 4th. Our initial release based on it was on March 5th:

https://grapheneos.org/releases#2025030500

Our users reported the issue during our public testing for this release but it was impractical for us to resolve.

On March 8th, we made our 3rd release based on Android 15 QPR2 (https://grapheneos.org/releases#2025030800). Prior to it reaching the Stable channel later that day, we posted https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/20636-workaround-for-android-15-qpr2-fingerprint-firmware-glitch-on-pixel-9 explaining how to work around the fingerprint issue and linked it across social media platforms.

Android's quarterly releases go through months of public testing. Despite all their internal and public testing paired with substantial development resources, they were unable to avoid this obvious issue shipping in March 2025. Their release engineering process is too inflexible.

It's quite likely that the issue already had a fix available prior to the March 2025 release. They require releases to go through weeks of internal testing/certification prior to publication and don't deviate from making 1 release per month, preventing shipping important fixes.

They have a strange approach where they have a bunch of important fixes ready to go but can't ship them because it would restart the final testing and certification process, delaying the release. It gets delayed all the way to the next month due to the inflexible release cycle.

There's a high chance this was a firmware-related issue where it wouldn't have been feasible for us to fix it. Our users reported it early in testing, but we couldn't reproduce it. Nearly every report we got was a non-Pro variant of the Pixel 9, only a couple reports elsewhere.

Changes in version 135.0.7049.100.0:

• update to Chromium 135.0.7049.100

A full list of changes from the previous release (version 135.0.7049.79.0) is available through the Git commit log between the releases.

This update is available to GrapheneOS users via our app repository and will also be bundled into the next OS release. Vanadium isn't yet officially available for users outside GrapheneOS, although we plan to do that eventually. It won't be able to provide the WebView outside GrapheneOS and will have missing hardening and other features.

Our initial highly experimental release for the Pixel 9a is now available for both CLI and web install via https://staging.grapheneos.org/.

We've tested both install methods and did basic testing of functionality including Wi-Fi, camera, audio, etc. Feedback is needed from users now.

We've tested the over-the-air upgrade path for the Pixel 9a internally via a sample update with no changes. We usually only use these sample updates internally for testing the upgrade path of each release. However, for broader testing, we're releasing it through each channel now.

First update from the initial 2025041200 release to the new 2025041201 release has no changes beyond build date and build number. The incremental (delta) update package is only 158KiB despite it shipping the full new firmware and OS images. We tested a full update package too.

Basic functionality has been tested for a while along with the upgrade path via both our System Updater app and recovery. It no longer needs to be considered highly experimental. Therefore, experimental Pixel 9a releases are now available on our regular production website too.

All of the standard Android and GrapheneOS functionality should already be working on the Pixel 9a including our hardware-based USB-C port control feature, hardware memory tagging, etc.

Main work was dealing with the temporary QPR1-based device branch (https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/114320149441258698).

GrapheneOS for the Pixel 9a support is no longer considered experimental. Since it's still based on Android 15 QPR1 upstream, it's missing some recent improvements in Android and GrapheneOS but we backported most post-QPR2 GrapheneOS changes and it'll be on mainline Android soon.

I had never heard of Lucas Deeco until working on these terminals. These two terminals are fascinating IP65 touch screen terminals for use in hostile environments. (Hostile to computers) Let's dig into what makes these tick and see if I can figure out why one of them is not working.

From National Fish and Wildlife Association

A resident of bottomland hardwood forests, the swamp rabbit has an unusual superpower. As the largest cottontail on the planet, their size and buoyancy make them excellent swimmers. When encountering danger, these clever floofs evade predators by hopping into water and swimming away. And they're just as speedy out of the water. Consider them the triathletes of the Mississippi Valley!

To thrive, the swamp rabbit needs large, contiguous forest patches and close proximity to wetlands. That's why we work to restore, enhance and conserve bottomland hardwood forest and wetland habitat to benefit wildlife in the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley.

Bonus little video from PBS supposedly capturing the first ever footage of one swimming.

We're working on completing GrapheneOS support for the Pixel 9a. If you have a Pixel 9a and are interested in testing experimental GrapheneOS builds later today, please join our testing chat room on either Discord or Matrix which are bridged together.

https://grapheneos.org/contact#community-chat

Boondocking site at 7,500ft in the Sandia Mtns. Just east of Albuquerque.

Forecast called for some precip, but I was't expecting this much. I've swept 9" off the panels so far.