It was only through external review that the problems with the project were discovered, and the blog post was clearly written for marketing as it hardly shared any actual details about the result other than an unexplained video they called a screenshot. Good faith research would have pointed out the limitations of their system
Every time Android gets worse and less open, especially with recent ID verification for APK installs, I think Canonical's 2013 comment on closing Bug #1 ages even more like milk: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1
Bug: Microsoft has a majority market share
Almost always, a majority of PCs for sale have Microsoft Windows pre-installed. In the rare cases that they come with a GNU/Linux operating system or no operating system at all, the drivers and BIOS may be proprietary. [...] A majority of the PCs for sale should include only free software.
Closing comment:
Android may not be my or your first choice of Linux, but it is without doubt an open source platform that offers both practical and economic benefits to users and industry. So we have both competition, and good representation for open source, in personal computing.
Even though we have only played a small part in that shift, I think it's important for us to recognize that the shift has taken place. So from Ubuntu's perspective, this bug is now closed.
Looking at the automatic first email and the network tab, this appears to be just wrapping around guerrillamail which is a classic disposable email website, and polling their API (doesn't seem to use websockets). Can you clarify what relationship you have with guerrillamail, if any, and whether or not the encryption and zero persistence claims extend to guerrillamail's service?
You're right that the current beta uses Guerrilla Mail as the upstream provider for mail delivery. My 'Zero-Persistence' and 'No-Cookie' claims specifically apply to the Mephisto layer: we don't store your data in our own DB, we don't use tracking cookies, and we purge all session metadata from our RAM.
Regarding polling vs WebSockets: The frontend currently polls the Mephisto proxy to ensure maximum compatibility with strict corporate firewalls, but a native WebSocket implementation for our own mail-server node is the long-term goal. I’m being transparent about the proxying—Mephisto is designed as a privacy-hardened 'frontend wrapper' that adds an extra layer of anonymity between you and the upstream providers.
What is legitimately the expected use case for Copilot on a TV?
TVs are for consuming video. As far as I know, Copilot doesn't generate videos yet, and it certainly won't be possible or cheap enough to generate anything on the level of TV shows or movies any time soon. So are they expecting people will sit in their living room home theater to... chat with Copilot... instead of doing it on their phone?
I genuinely can't come up with any realistic use case where it would be convenient or useful to use Copilot on a TV. It feels utterly deranged that they would put it there.
It's certainly not the case that you can just buy something outside of Amazon and it'll magically be 40% cheaper. For a long time Amazon pursued aggressive strategies to drive out competition and physical stores, leaving Amazon the most convenient or sometimes the only option.
Having built an extremely strong position, they can now increase prices and fees, and leverage power over sellers to stop them from listing lower prices off-Amazon, if they want to also sell on Amazon. See page 42 of https://web.archive.org/oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/... for an example of this
So, a competitor could also invest a lot, drive out competition, be the most convenient, build themselves an extremely strong position then reap the rewards ? This strategy can be replicated, thus is subject to market forces
The market today is extremely different to what the market looked like at the time Amazon worked their strategy, it was dominated mainly by physical retailers that may have required a long drive, things were not always stocked, limited choice on what's stocked on shelves. And ordering over a phone from paper catalogs had long delivery times and limited information beyond just a picture and short description. Amazon disrupted the industry by changing all of this and becoming the first major online retailer.
You won't be able to just replicate their strategy, and they've spent ridiculous amounts of money on next-day/same-day delivery infrastructure that nobody's gonna be able to invest that much. But if you do have any ideas on how to disrupt Amazon and be more convenient than them in 2025 let me know :)
Plenty of people do want to make the efforts and have tried. Physical retailers like Walmart have opened online retail but adoption remains limited. Startups like Jet.com, Quidsi, Fab.com, Rakuten/Buy.com, Woot and many others have tried and failed to take on Amazon, leading to bankruptcy or being sold. The reality is that nobody can take on Amazon due to their slimy tactics but also nobody can realistically provide something to customers that Amazon doesn't already provide. Fees will keep increasing and costs inflating as much as Amazon wants, while customers are none the wiser and sellers can do nothing about it.
What you say is contradictory.
If fees and prices are increasing on Amazon it means more potential for the competition if they can operate with lower margins.
Amazon is winning because they toe the line, not because of an innate monopoly.
If you read the parent comments we've already established that Amazon punishes sellers for pricing lower on other platforms than Amazon, and Amazon's margins affect item pricing everywhere. You could have zero margins, you could have negative margins, Amazon will see that Seller X's items are available on your Amazon competitor for $2 while it's $20 on Amazon and say that they're in violation of policy. Unless you make it worthwhile for Seller X to abandon Amazon you will not be able to compete.
You can't realistically compete with a Monopoly like Amazon. They'll buy you out way before you can be an inconvenience to them, or drown you by artificially lowering their price until you go bankrupt if you refuse their deal. And even in the off-chance you somehow replace them, then great. We're back to square one.
Sure, "a competitor" with hundreds of billions of dollars and a few decades to burn could, in theory, do that.
But what would be the payoff? Getting to compete head-to-head with Amazon? Amazon, that's a well-established incumbent, with a well-known pattern of ruthless dealings, including leveraging their ties with governments, to protect their monopoly?
No one's going to be able to make a profit doing that.
"The market" is not a real entity with desires and opinions.
"The wisdom of the market" only works with an ideal free market, or something close to it.
Such a thing has a number of requirements, such as low/no barriers to entry, perfect information, elasticity of demand, etc.
Those do not exist here. No useful information on how things "should be" can be obtained from the fact that Amazon cannot meaningfully be challenged.
Your position, essentially, boils down to "however things are right now, if they're even remotely stable, that's how things should be, because that's what the market wants." Worship of the status quo.
I’m only criticising Varoufakis point of view and some people arguments here. Of course I have some things to say about Amazon… and yes information is never perfect
The sentence immediately after that would imply sarcasm
> Note: please help, because I'd like to preserve this website forever and there's no other way to do it besides getting Claude to recreate it from a screenshot. Believe me, I'm an engineering manager with a computer science degree. Please please please help (sad emoji)
EVs are not intrinsically complicated as some sibling commenters say, but the issue is that EVs are new and mostly made after the point when automakers started building cars as computers. And it's also a good excuse to put even more computers inside because an EV has to look modern with big screens and cool chimes right?
I think this genuinely hampers EV adoption and governments should take some sort of action if they want to transition the market to EVs. Not that the average consumer chooses cars based on how many computers are inside it, but this builds a general impression of fragility and creates such negative stories. We need simple, reliable, serviceable EVs, but the incumbents are not going to build it on their own. (Government excessive regulations for safety, backup cameras, speed limiters, etc arguably created this problem in the first place)
This is a drastic misrepresentation of the situation. All Android apps already have code signing, you cannot install an app unless it has a signature, and any future updates are blocked unless the signature matches. This is how it's been practically since the start of Android, it's part of the security model to prevent something like a malicious Firefox APK stealing your cookies.
What's new is that they were gonna block installations outside of Google Play, unless the developer has signed up for Google Play Console and has gone through a verification process there, whitelisting their signing key fingerprint. However, they've walked back on this and said they'll create a new "advanced flow" for "advanced users" that's "designed to resist coercion" to bypass this restriction. Door in the face technique IMO, the existing 12-step process to installing an app was already complicated enough.
So effectively the result is that file based installations will be blocked unless Google has specifically whitelisted their key through the Google Play Console verification process, or the user goes through this "advanced flow" which we're yet to see any details of
