selectively

You posted a giant, AI generated block of junk science.

Anonymous in terms of it not being possible to derive the real world identity of the human from the value, sure. Anonymous in terms of providing no durable way to ban that human from the platform? No.

Social Media is not a thing at all. Social media is a website. Websites are not health or unhealthy. Food is healthy or unhealthy. Websites are light and potentially sound, not something with health effects.

An attestation-like system to detect humanity at time of post is absolutely for useful online spaces in the era of AI slop.

The writing style of the author is very annoying.

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Google will not accept prepaid cards for verification.

Google's identity requirements serve basic security needs and are fine.

GitHub is fine.

Yup. The specific scam here is built upon preventing the victim from talking to trusted individuals. A cooldown breaks the spell.

Complex, multi-day pig butchering stuff is not what Google is going after here or would have any hope to defeat. But they can deal with banking malware.

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Google's identity verification system relies on multiple factors, not solely drivers licensees or other national identity documents.

This is correct. The people who will refuse to pay $25 and sign their stuff are people with a political objective, not businesses.

The way you give your non-technical friends an APK and they just install it is by you signing it.

Yes! That is because banking malware is specifically what is being targeted here: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2026/03/android-de...

Well, the very good news is that Google is not seeking your trust. You have no say at all. This is the new system, it benefits actual real people over HN commenters and you will just have to deal with it.

Google doesn't have the ability to change the way banking apps work with regards to transferring money from one account to another in Malaysia/Brazil/Thailand. That would be a matter for the national Governments. This is the best approach available.

Scammers cannot talk people past a 24 hour wait. This attack is built upon pressure and operates at a scale that makes stealing many identies, building different-enough apps to avoid getting flagged by Google and signing them all non-viable.

Yes. That attack is a very real attack. The attacker gets access to the victim's phone and sideloads additional apps that appear to be the victim's legitimate banking application. The victim logs into it and sees a fake balance (as the app is fake). Pressure and other social engineering tactics are invoked and the scammer walks away with all of the victim's money.

Revocations are for apps being malware and nothing else, much like macOS Gatekeeper (Apple doesn't even revoke certs used by Warez groups to sign cracked apps).

Automated bans can be an issue, but that's an edge case. Google already had the functionality to 'revoke' an app if ordered to do so by a legal authority.

It is much more important to make a real world attack - something that is draining wallets of ordinary people across Thailand/Brazil/SEA in general - harder to achieve. One thing is a political goal of some people in the west, the other is an ordinary person not having the money to feed themselves because a scammer stole it all.

Google doesn't want millions of people to have every cent of their money stolen.

This measure is about making it harder to pull off a specific type of scam that is plaguing South East Asia. No conspiracy.

For actual information on the purpose of this change rather than conspiracies, I refer you to https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2026/03/android-de...

Since the victims of these scams do not typically own a traditional computer/cannot be pressured to get to one quickly, ADB will remain a thing.

F-Droid is not a safer app repository:

https://privsec.dev/posts/android/f-droid-security-issues/

And most Android banking malware is distributed through unsafe sideload installs (as opposed to much safer Gatekeeper-style installs, which is what is coming) and are fed to victims through complex attacks involving obtaining a victim's personal information and calling them while credibly pretending to be a local authority or a bank representative. You can read about this wherever you get news about cyber crime.

This is a scourge in South East Asia and Google can do some good here. The only cost is whining from non-technical people. Everyone else will go pay $25 or whatever and sign their app.

Those developers will pay $25 for identity verification and have no issues.

Howard Zinn was a hero.

Political posturing that will never actually occur.

Yes.

Open Control Panel. OneDrive is in it. Click the 'Uninstall' button. Then click yes.

It is on by default as of the last time I went through new Mac user setup, which was during....Sequoia, I think.

Nope. This is an officially supported function, required under law. Edge WebView remains present for functionality that requires it.

The way iCloud Desktop works is that it uploads your stuff to the cloud, using your iCloud Storage quota.

The way that OneDrive works is that it uploads stuff to OneDrive, using your Microsoft 365 storage quota.

OneDrive seems pretty clear to me. It works identically to the way the same functionality works under macOS.

When an awful post gets botted to the top of HN and I see it, I will call out the awful post if I so feel like it.

Open the screen where you remove apps and click the uninstall button.