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Comment by neilalexander | Hacker News Reader

Users don’t read warnings. Most scams capitalise on urgency. When given more time to stop and think something through, it often becomes obvious what’s happening.

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> Users don’t read warnings

Why should that be a concern to a phone OS provider? A concern so important that they are willing to cripple couple billions of devices.

Courts make you liable for results, not intentions, like the way Quad9 is now an illegal piracy operation in France because it doesn't block pirate sites.

So why don't courts make knife manufacturers responsible for murders?

Only because they've chosen not to

If you had a big corpo being affected by every knife murder, you'd be sure that they would be liable. Since murders usually "only" affect an individual nothing is being done

First, courts do hold manufacturers responsible for manufacturing or design defects.

Then, generally, "software is just a tool like a knife" doesn't hold because software today is more a service than a tangible good. Companies continue to update the programs and things can happen in the cloud with limited user control.

Courts do take in consideration intention. The law however does not. And the law here doesn't exists

To be fair, this likely only affects millions (if that many) devices -- most people don't sideload apps, and of those that do, most of those users are more than capable of reenabling it through developer tools. The vast majority of Android users don't want to sideload (and shouldn't sideload since they don't know how to validate the safety of the app and they'll sideload anything a website tells them to)

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