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"Amazon announced it" in some back alley press report and certainly not in a proactive outreach way to tell these folks they were listing their products. At the very least there's a trademark issue here because these sellers in no way gave Amazon permission to reuse the images and descriptions of their products.

If I announce in my local paper (you get to guess which one) that you'll be throwing a party outside your house, I don't think you'll be on the side of "just tell them to go away and my neighbors will totally understand it wasn't really me"


Reminiscent of the Vogon plans for the highway through Arthur Dent's house being on display in Alpha Centauri for 50 Earth years.

> “Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’.

Using images of something you are selling is nominative use of the trademark. Whether their actual listings contains something that falls outside the nominative use test I don't know.

But at the end of the day you can't stop someone from reselling your stuff no matter how much you hate it, that has been clearly established by the First Sale Doctrine.

> If I announce in my local paper (you get to guess which one) that you'll be throwing a party outside your house, I don't think you'll be on the side of "just tell them to go away and my neighbors will totally understand it wasn't really me"

The comparison here would be that you are selling tickets to a party outside your house, which I don't think anyone would bat an eye at if the local newspaper announces?


>there's a trademark issue here because these sellers in no way gave Amazon permission to reuse the images and descriptions of their products

Good luck claiming damages with an "and then I sold more of my things at the advertised price" kind of argument.


I've always wondered at the company cultures between Google and Microsoft - Gcal supports ending meetings five minutes early while Outlook supports starting five minutes late.

At Microsoft it was obvious how five minutes late was optimal - meetings usually dragged on past their end time anyhow, but never started early so it gave folks time to eg get to their next meeting (in person), coffee, bio break, etc.

Does Google have a culture of meetings ending on the dot with finality? I just don't see that working with human nature of "one last thing" and the urge to spend an extra few minutes to hammer something out.

It's just laughable to me to bother with a "ends five minutes early" option. It just doesn't work - you know you're not cutting into anyone's next meeting by consuming those last five minutes. But you can't know that if you push into the next half hour block - maybe they have a customer call up next that starts on time, so you have to wrap up.


> while Outlook supports starting five minutes late

This contrast is an incorrect assumption. Outlook does allow starting meetings late as well as ending meetings early, with somewhat arbitrary durations. [1] I have definitely seen these options in Outlook settings (on web, since I hate Outlook).

However, I haven’t used it because the teams one works with need to be alerted and reminded of it before it sticks in their minds (if nobody else is using such settings).

[1]: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/end-meetings-earl...


Our corporate IT managed to enable that setting for everyone, which made the transition easier. Doesn't stop people from overriding it, alas.

Yes, outlook supports both. At Microsoft though we only ever used "start five late".

> Does Google have a culture of meetings ending on the dot with finality?

Whenever I'm having remote meetings with people using a Google meeting room, right at the hour they'll say "I'm getting kicked out", because the next person is waiting to use the booked meeting room.


The solution I like best is to "pin" issues that would cause the meeting to run long, with select personnel needing to stay late to address the pinned issue but everybody else leaving on time.

I was unsure of the licensing, so happy to take it down if it's not open - but I forked this to test some agent features on GitHub mobile and was happy with it. https://hpsin.github.io/SphericalSnake/ and the PR I single shotted for testing https://github.com/hpsin/SphericalSnake/pull/1

Thanks for a fun mobile friendly test run!


Nice :) TIL you can use an agent on GitHub mobile. And this reminded me to add an open source license. I added an MIT license.

You've got an extra actor in the mix that makes for a different argument and actually supports the idea that it's racist, I think.

Namely - I think most agree that it's racist to mindlessly assume race and poverty are correlated. The argument here is that the AI companies made that assumption - in other words, they're being called racists.

I don't think it's racist to speculate that a corporation, that made choices that specifically impact black neighborhoods, is racist.


Expanding the timeline a bit, CRISPR was known as a possible gene targeting/editing tool by 2008 at least - I distinctly recall learning about it then in a guest lecture.


Are you saying those are additional possible meanings of Pennsyltucky, or that you've heard people use it to mean all of those?

I have only ever heard it used to mean the rural areas between the two cities, in keeping with the saying "Pittsburgh on one side, Philly on the other, and Kentucky in between", which has of course confused people not familiar with the stereotypes or geography.

The other famous use of Pennsyltucky is the character in Orange is the New Black, which I've always taken to mean "she acts like she's from Pennsyltucky".

I guess we need to wait for the term to be used enough to get into a dictionary to get it well defined


They're not even serving the file. That cost is born by the external provider.

The four dollars is for providing the platform that the user used to navigate to the link and download the zip file.

That's a fun bit of argument from the owners of Chrome.


I’m not sure what you’re referring to here. Google are the file distributor for content from their store.

These rules aren’t for linking out from the store to a third party site, but rather for installing an app from the store and then linking out to a third party payment.


Yep, I misunderstood that key point here but can't edit anymore.


> The four dollars is for providing the platform that the user used to navigate to the link and download the zip file.

And does not include showing up first in search results for your app's name. That's a separate fee you'll need to pay.


The apparent information gathering and brutal review process is unbelievable here. If I'm understanding this correctly, the requirement is that eg Epic Game Store must register and upload every single APK for every app they offer, and cannot offer it in their store until Google approves it, which may take a week or more - including every time the app updates.

Meanwhile they get full competitive insight into which apps are being added to Epics store, their download rates apparently, and they even get the APKs to boot, potentially making it easier for those app devs to onboard if they like, and can pressure them to do so by dragging their feet on that review process.

> Provide direct, publicly accessible customer support to end users through readily accessible communication channels.

This is an interesting requirement. I want to see someone provide the same level of support that Google does to see if it draws a ban.


Google and accessible customer support should not be put in the same sentence. Their history of automated neglect is beyond reproach.


their Play store review practices are such a joke. Apps review is a completely obscure process, no clear way to see that the app is in review state, if they reject - amount of information why it was rejected is minimal and you have to second-guess; appealing is not trivial; most of the reviews are done by AI which gets triggered in totally random places from time to time (e.g., in my case, some pictures which looked fine for kids for years and went through many previous reviewed, suddenly seem too violent).


I have healthcare apps. The review process for me consists of some reviewer deciding what set of healthcare features I should have picked from their list and rejecting on that basis. But subsequent reviewers have different opinions. In one app version release I got rejected 5 times for picking the wrong set of healthcare features as either the reviewer changed their mind or I got different reviewers. The app has been on Google play for 13 years.


I wish there were laws against their practice.


I'm not subscribed to too many Youtubers. But it's insane that I still need 2 digits to count how many of those creators tried to work for over a week to address some urgent issue brought upon by one of Google's automation tools. Then simply resorted to Twitter to get their fanbase to rile up YouTube for them.

If it wasn't a hack, Google moves like molasses.


This page only applies to apps distributed by Google Play. Not apps installed by third party stores. It's still outrageous, of course.


Ahh that's a really good call out, thank you. Basically negates most of what I wrote.


Hmm, does this mean that large swaths of people publishing apps are going to flock to distribution platforms like f-droid?

(Yikes)


F-Droid only accepts open source apps.


absolutely, i get this. i assume it's going to be a relatively small subset that go open in order to jump to an open platform. i'm not super familiar with the f-droid publishing ecosystem (or mobile publishing at all, admittedly).

i do wonder if there's regardless going to be some kind of (perhaps overwhelming) inundation.


This is probably why they killed installs that dont have attribution, specifically to undercut f-droid.


I want to see what the EU anti-trust organization will make of this.


Isn't this limited to the US?


Yes, but you can bet that if they succeed with this in the US they will try something similar in the EU. They're constantly testing the waters.


Probably for the same reasons


This has been Apple's stance for years and has been routinely brought down in courts across the globe. Why are you guys surprised.


At this point I'm going to assume that anyone pushing datacenters in space wants to host child pornography. That's the only realistic workload that ticks all the boxes for orbital datacenters.


I don't think it would "solve" little any of the legal issues with Child Pornography (not if the owner lived on earth, at least), but it would make a great and politically convenient target for space to earth weaponry.


Oh, fully agreed. Orbital datacenters don't solve many to any engineering problems either, so I figure its adherents are as much into legal problem solving as they are engineering problem solving.


Authz overhead for graphql is definitely a problem. At GitHub we're adding github app support to the enterprise account APIs, meaning introducing granular permissions for each graphql resource type.

Because of the graph aspect, queries don't work til all of the underlying resources have been updated to support github apps. From a juice vs squeeze perspective it's terrible - lots of teams have to do work to update their resources (which given turnover and age they may not even be aware of) before basic queries start working, until you finally hit a critical mass at some high percentage of coverage.

Add to all that the prevailing enterprise customer sentiment of "please anything but graphql" and it's a really hard sell - it's practically easier and better to ask teams to rebuild their APIs in REST than update the graphql.


I mean, the use of GraphQL for third party APIs has always been questionable wisdom. I’m about a big a GraphQL fan as it gets, but I’ve always come down on the side of being very skeptical that it’s suitable for anything beyond its primary use case — serving the needs of 1st-party UI clients.


Strongly agreed.


GitHub search is among the worst out there, is this why?


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