Canceled my accessibility meeting today because, I’m just really not in the mood to put pants on, and explain to a marketing executive that, no actually, your dog shit accessibility toolbar solution doesn’t work and here is 90 reasons why. They tried to follow up and say, it’s only just a few pages, bullshit. but I just really don’t have the patience and I looked at their website, which was designed using Shopify, and they need a new theme but they don’t want to install the accessible theme I pointed them to. They said, but we really need someone to review our website for accessibility, and I can’t express how much I hate doing work like this. Makes me want to retire from freelancing early because this is ridiculous. I’ve seen their website. It’s a giant e-commerce website with over 300 links, and they use AccessiBe. I’m perfectly happy in my nice warm bed, writing a romance scene where a protagonist and a love interest share a cookie together. #Rant
As an experiment, I am quite literally #vibeCoding an #accessibility mod for a game. I'm about 90% of the way there (AI is making a mess of things but even a broken clock is right twice a day), and so far, I have spent a grand total of six dollars, and maybe about a half an hour of work. But sure, keep telling me making things #accessible is too expensive, takes too much time and doesn't need priority. Want to force #developers to use #AI? Do me a favor, force them to use it for this as well while you're busy making their lives miserable :P #rant
Are you allowed to run whatever computer program you want on the hardware you own? This is a question where freedom, practicality, and reality all collide into a mess.
Google has recently announced that Android users will only be able to install apps which have been digitally signed by developers who have registered their name and other legal details with Google. To many people, this signals the death of "sideloading" - the ability to install apps which don't originate on the official store0.
I'm a fully paid-up member of the Cory Doctorow fanclub. Back in 2011, he gave a speech called "The Coming War on General Computation". In it, he rails against the idea that our computers could become traitorous; serving the needs of someone other than their owner. Do we want to live in a future where our computers refuse to obey our commands? No! Neither law nor technology should conspire to reduce our freedom to compute.
There are, I think, two small cracks in that argument.
The first is that a user has no right to run anyone else's code, if the code owner doesn't want to make it available to them. Consider a bank which has an app. When customers are scammed, the bank is often liable. The bank wants to reduce its liability so it says "you can't run our app on a rooted phone".
Is that fair? Probably not. Rooting allows a user to fully control and customise their device. But rooting also allows malware to intercept communications, send commands, and perform unwanted actions. I think the bank has the right to say "your machine is too risky - we don't want our code to run on it."
The same is true of video games with strong "anti-cheat" protection. It is disruptive to other players - and to the business model - if untrustworthy clients can disrupt the game. Again, it probably isn't fair to ban users who run on permissive software, but it is a rational choice by the manufacturer. And, yet again, I think software authors probably should be able to restrict things which cause them harm.
So, from their point of view it is pragmatic to insist that their software can only be loaded from a trustworthy location.
But that's not the only thing Google is proposing. Let's look at their announcement:
We’ve seen how malicious actors hide behind anonymity to harm users by impersonating developers and using their brand image to create convincing fake apps. The scale of this threat is significant: our recent analysis found over 50 times more malware from internet-sideloaded sources than on apps available through Google Play.
Back in the early days of Android, you could just install any app and it would run, no questions asked. That was a touchingly naïve approach to security - extremely easy to use but left users vulnerable.
A few years later, Android changed to show user the permissions an app was requesting. Here's a genuine screenshot from an app which I tried to sideload in 2013:
No rational user would install a purported battery app with that scary list of permissions, right? Wrong!
There is no UI tweak you can do to prevent users bypassing these scary warnings. There is no amount of education you can provide to reliably make people stop and think.
It emerged that, in this case, Lloyds had done a really good job of not only spotting the potential fraud but alerting James to it. The bank blocked a number of transactions, it spoke to James on the phone to warn him and even called him into a branch to speak to him face-to-face.
Android now requires you to deliberately turn on the ability to side-load. It will give you prompts and warnings, force you to take specific actions, give you pop-ups and all sorts of confirmation steps.
And people still click on.
Let's go back to Google announcement. This change isn't being rolled out worldwide immediately. They say:
This change will start in a few select countries specifically impacted by these forms of fraudulent app scams, often from repeat perpetrators.
…
September 2026: These requirements go into effect in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand. At this point, any app installed on a certified Android device in these regions must be registered by a verified developer.
The police in Singapore have a page warning about the prevalence of these scams. They describe how victims are tricked or coerced into turning off all their phone's security features.
It is absolutely rational that government, police, and civic society groups want to find ways to stop these scams.
Google is afraid that if Android's reputation is tarnished as the "Scam OS" then users will move to more secure devices.
Financial institutions might stop providing functionality to Android devices as a way to protect their customers. Which would lead to those users seeking alternate phones.
Society as a whole wants to protect vulnerable people. We all bear the cost of dealing with criminal activity like this.
Given that sideloaded Android apps are clearly a massive vector for fraud, it obviously behoves Google to find a way to secure their platform as much as possible.
This is quite obviously a bullshit powerplay by Google to ensnare the commons. Not content with closing down parts of the Android Open Source Project, stuffing more and more vital software behind its proprietary services, and freezing out small manufacturers - now it wants the name and shoe-size of every developer!
Fuck that!
I want to use my phone to run the code that I write. I want to run my friends' code. I want to play with cool open source projects by people in far-away lands.
I remember The Day Google Deleted Me - we cannot have these lumbering monsters gatekeeping what we do on our machines.
To be clear, developers will have the same freedom to distribute their apps directly to users through sideloading or to use any app store they prefer.
This is a lie. I can only distribute a sideloaded app if Google doesn't nuke my account. If I piss off someone there, or they click the wrong button, or they change the requirements so I'm no longer eligible - my content disappears.
I also don't see how this is going to help. I guess if scammers all use the same ID, then it'll be easy for Android to super-nuke all the scam apps.
Perhaps when you install a sideloaded app you'll see "This app was made by John Smith - not a company. Here's his photo. Got any complaints? Call his number."
But what's going to happen is that people will get their IDs stolen, or be induced to register as a developer and then sign some malware. They'll also be victims.
I should love Matrix. It is a decentralised, privacy preserving, multi-platform chat tool. Goodbye Slack and your ridiculous free limits. Adiós Discord and your weird gamification. Suck it IRC with your obscure syntax and faint stench of BO. WhatsApp and Telegram can stick their heads in a bucket of lukewarm sick and sing sea …
There is a really pervasive trend in video these days where people will use (usually auto-generated) open captions (sometimes called “burned captions”), where the text for the narration or the like is baked into the image of the video.
My imaginary children aren’t using your streaming service
Whenever I start up Netflix, I'm asked if I want to create an account for my children.
I don't have children. I don't want children. I find most children annoying - not yours, obviously, yours are lovely. But I resent being asked every single time whether my imaginary kids want an account. It's ju
With web forms, for birthdate, a text input should be used for the best usability. A dropdown for the year is bad, but this is ridiculous! Sorry, but no one will be born in 2055 for another 32 years. Found multiple instances in the same painful process to sign up my son for a sport. #rant #UX #UXfail #UIDesign #UIFail #usability #forms 😖
