Monthly Archives: July 2025

Epic just won its Google lawsuit again, and Android may never be the same

Source: The Verge - All Posts

Article note: Still weird to me that Apple is (mostly, in the US, etc.) getting away with that kind of lock-in, but Google (who tried to make an open-looking platform then coerce behavior via play services/payment/store policy/etc.) is not. Gonna be interesting to see how the various things that treat google as an arbiter of device trustworthiness (...basically, part of that coercion scheme) deal with the situation.

Epic has won again. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals will not overturn the unanimous jury verdict from 2023 that Google’s app store and payments system have become illegal monopolies — and it appears to be pressing play on a previously paused permanent injunction that would crack open Android to undo those monopolies. “Total victory in the Epic v Google appeal!” tweeted Epic CEO Tim Sweeney.

Today, a three-judge panel affirmed the lower court’s decision in Epic v. Google, according to a full opinion you can read below — and Google will now appeal again, the company confirms to The Verge. It would likely appeal to the Supreme Court next.

Judge M. Margaret McKeown begins her opinion for the panel:

In the world of adrenaline-fueled survival that epitomizes the video game Fortnite, winners are decided in blazes of destruction and glory. By contrast, the outcome of this case—centered on Fortnite’s developer, Epic Games, and the Google Android platform—turns on longstanding principles of trial procedure, antitrust, and injunctive remedies.

Google will appeal. But the Google Play Store may not be protected from the consequences of its monopoly while Google tries to do so — it may need to start cracking open Android for third-party stores the way Judge James Donato ruled in his permanent injunction back in 2024.

Last October, Donato pressed pause on all but one specific piece of his ruling while Google appealed, but today, Judge McKeown writes “The stay motion on appeal is denied as moot in light of our decision” — and Epic has already announced it will put its own app store within Google’s app store.

“Thanks to the verdict, the Epic Games Store for Android will be coming to the Google Play Store!” Sweeney tweeted. “The stay is lifted,” Epic spokesperson Cat McCormack confirms to The Verge.

The consequences of the full permanent injunction would stretch far beyond Epic’s own store and its game Fortnite. They would force Google to effectively open up its app store to competition for three whole years. Google would have to distribute other rival app stores within the Google Play store, too, give rivals access to the full catalog of Google Play apps, and it would be banned from a variety of anticompetitive practices including a requirement that apps use Google Play Billing. You can read a summary of the details here.

“This decision will significantly harm user safety, limit choice, and undermine the innovation that has always been central to the Android ecosystem. Our top priority remains protecting our users, developers and partners, and maintaining a secure platform as we continue our appeal,” writes Google global head of regulatory affairs Lee-Anne Mulholland in a statement shared with The Verge.

Epic originally sued both Google and Apple in 2020 over the removal of its hit game Fortnite from both stores, though the case was more complicated than that. Epic intentionally used Fortnite as a wedge to challenge the app store monopolies, and in the case of Apple, it mostly lost.

The appeals court did recognize Epic’s gambit today, writing that “Google removed Fortnite from the Play Store after Epic embedded secret code into the app’s software” that bypassed Google’s payment systems. (Epic has never denied it.)

But Epic v. Google turned out to be a very different case, we saw when attending the trial in person and reading all the receipts. A jury saw secret revenue sharing deals between Google, smartphone makers, and game developers. The jury saw internal emails between Google execs that suggested Google was scared of how Epic might convince its fellow game developers to join or create rival app stores, creating unwanted competition for Google. Here are a few thoughts about why Epic won against Google, but not Apple.

Today, the Ninth Circuit rejected the idea that the decision in the Apple case should impact the Google case, at least in terms of the all-important question of market definition, aka “can Google really have a monopoly on Android apps if it’s competing against Apple?”

“The market definition question was neither identical to the issue in this case nor litigated and decided in Apple,” McKeown writes, adding that the “commercial realities are different”:

Apple’s “walled garden” is, as the district court in Apple noted, markedly different from Google’s “open distribution” approach […] Google admits as much, noting that “Android’s open philosophy offers users and developers wider choices” than iOS does, even as that openness “limit[s] Google’s ability to directly protect users from encountering malware and security threats when they download apps.” As a consequence of its business model, Apple does not license iOS to other OEMs in the way that Google licenses Android to Samsung, Motorola, and other smartphone manufacturers.

She also uses McDonalds and Chick-fil-A to make a point that markets can overlap:

McDonald’s might compete against Chick-fil-A in the fast- food market yet not compete against Chick-fil-A in the hamburger fast-food market (and instead compete with Wendy’s, Burger King, Sonic, and In-N-Out Burger. Although Google and Apple compete for mobile-gaming downloads and mobile-gaming in-app transactions, they do not compete in the Android-only app distribution and in-app billing markets.

Those two markets, Android app distribution and in-app billing, are where a jury unanimously decided that Google has illegal monopolies.

Posted in News | Leave a comment

Beware of Spindle Controller Ground

TL;DR: If you have one of those sketchy Chinese metal-cage 500W spindle speed controllers that uses a potentiometer for speed control, the potentiometer terminal block is probably referenced to a dangerous voltage, be careful what you connect to it and/or replace it with a less dangerous one.

Continue reading
Posted in DIY, Electronics, General | Leave a comment

RP2350 A4, RP2354, and a New Hacking Challenge

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Ooh, they fixed the internal pulldown bug that has made 2035s kind of sketch to design with, made the IOs fully 5V tolerant, and introduced a variant with onboard Flash.
Comments
Posted in News | Leave a comment

Windows 11 is a minefield of micro-aggressions in the shipping lane of progressl

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Microsoft has made Windows so bad you need to de-bloat it like the bad old days of removing OEM crapware - except now it's OS components that will perpetually try to reinstate and/or expand themselves during updates. I haven't routinely used a Windows box in the better part of two decades, but do regularly touch other peoples', and it's a shock how nasty Windows 11 is every time... usually the better solution is probably to _not use Windows_ but I'm sympathetic to folks trying to make it work.
Comments
Posted in News | Leave a comment

100X More Efficient Than ARM Processors – Electron E1

Source: More Than Moore

Article note: Someone takin' another run at a general purpose data flow machine. They have a real-looking C compiler. Their claim to differentiation is that it's a much more flexible fabric that allows feedback paths (eg. not one of the many straight-systolic-array designs). Flagship part has a control core (which happens to be a RISCV), small volatile and non-volatile memories onboard, and a good assortment of uC type peripherals in addition to the array. I can't tell from the article or any obvious public docs how static it is, that's usually what kills these things, because (Say it with me now), you can't statically schedule dynamic behavior. I think the product is closer to the FPSLIC market than the historical dataflow HPC stuff, which is probably more likely to pan out, since there are lots of static type things you want an embedded controller to do.
Comments
Posted in News | Leave a comment

A Professor’s Search for the MingKwai, a Lost Chinese Typewriter

Source: NYT > Education

Article note: Neat, the section about the MingKwai in Shift Happens was intriguing, VERY cool that it surfaced.

A historian went down an 18-year rabbit hole in search of obsolete machines. But there was one he thought he’d never find.

Posted in News | Leave a comment

NIH limits scientists to six applications per year

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Discouraging spray-and-pray tactics for grant processes is _globally_ beneficial, it makes it so researchers spend less of their effort spraying, it makes the review process less onerous, etc.
Comments
Posted in News | Leave a comment

An artificially complex XML schema as a lock-in tool

Source: OSNews

Article note: The long-held suspicion gets ever more concrete. There's a tenuous argument that it's a compatibility thing, but ... the degrees of complexity and shitty documentation don't really align with that.

The Document Foundation, which developers LibreOffice, is mad at Microsoft for the levels of complexity in the Microsoft 365 document format. They claim Microsoft intentionally makes this format’s XML schema as complex and obtuse as possible to lock users into the Microsoft Office ecosystem.

This artificial complexity is characterised by a deeply nested tag structure with excessive abstraction, dozens or even hundreds of optional or overloaded elements, non-intuitive naming conventions, the widespread use of extension points and wildcards, the multiple import of namespaces and type hierarchies, and sparse or cryptic documentation.

In the case of the Microsoft 365 document format, the only characteristic not present is sparse or cryptic documentation, given that we are talking about a set of documents totalling over 8,000 pages. All the other characteristics are present to a greater or lesser extent, making life almost impossible for a developer trying to implement the schema.

↫ Italo Vignoli

I feel like this was widely known already, since I distinctly remember the discussions around the standardisation process for the Office Open XML file formats. Then, too, it was claimed that Microsoft’s then-new XML file formats were far more complex and obtuse than the existing, already standardised OpenDocument file formats, and that there was no need to push Microsoft’s new file formats through the process.

These days, you might wonder how relevant all of this still is, but considering vast swaths of the private, corporate, government, and academic world still run on Microsoft Office and its default file formats, it’s definitely still a hugely relevant matter. As an office suite, you are basically required to support Office Open XML, and if Microsoft is making that more complex and obtuse on purpose, that’s a form of monopoly abuse that should be addressed.

Posted in News | Leave a comment

Vibe coding service Replit deleted user’s production database, faked data, told fibs galore

Source: The Register

Article note: Spectacular.

AI ignored instruction to freeze code, forgot it could roll back errors, and generally made a terrible hash of things

The founder of SaaS business development outfit SaaStr has claimed AI coding tool Replit deleted a database despite his instructions not to change any code without permission.…

Posted in News | Leave a comment

MakeShift: Security Analysis of Shimano Di2 Wireless Gear Shifting in Bicycles

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Nifty, someone RE'd the Shimano Di2 protocol. Pretty sane 2.479GHz GFSK scheme. It's susceptible to replay attacks and selective jamming. (1) I hope someone writes an NRF24 firmware or something to make compatible dingi, and (2) I bet this will lead to some srs bsns racing shenanigans, or at least accusations thereof.
Comments
Posted in News | Leave a comment