#Google #Gemini admits it will be "increasing lethality" for Defense
Department

QUERY: Will Google make public the number of people Google helps to murder via their partnership with Hegseth and the defense department for more efficient warfare and killing?

GEMINI:
The information available indicates a recent partnership between Google and the Department of Defense (referred to as the "War Department" by Secretary Pete Hegseth in the search results) to deploy Google's **Gemini for Government** AI model on a new platform called **GenAI.mil**.

* **Purpose of the Partnership:** The primary stated purpose is to
increase efficiency, productivity, and lethality within the Department
of War by using the AI for tasks like deep research, formatting
documents, and analyzing video or imagery at unprecedented speed. Secretary Hegseth explicitly marketed the platform as a way to make the fighting force **"more lethal than ever before"**.

Google is experimentally replacing news headlines with AI clickbait nonsense

Keep it up #Google, destroy the little trust anyone has left in you. -L

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/835839/google-discover-ai-headlines-clickbait-nonsense

Report: Gestapo ICE facial recognition reporting app removed from #Google Play Store -- Maybe

My information on this is sketchy. Apparently this horrific Nazi app to use facial recognition to "find and report" immigrants to Adolf Trump's Gestapo ICE squads was removed from the Google Play Store. It's not clear why or for how long. I'm told there have been internal protests at Google regarding this app.

I'll emphasize again that by and large, Googlers (Google employees) are great. Google's embrace of fascism is being driven from the top, from Trump loving billionaire CEO Sundar. As the old saying goes, the fish rots from the head.

L

I'm a Google Workspace admin, and a team member sent me a screenshot showing that a message they wanted to send was being blocked because it violated an organizational policy-- which was news to me-- I hadn't put in place to block messages based on their content.

Turns out Google Workspace now warns by default when the message content mentions gender identity.

#google #privacy #politics

#Android is dead and we’d better all leave the ship before it sinks entirely.

Earlier this year #Google already took bold steps in moving the development of several AOSP components behind closed doors, removing the open-source foundations of the project one component at the time.

Options to unlock bootloaders on Android devices are also narrowing down. Xiaomi removed the ability to unlock the bootloader entirely in MIUI in August (after months spent making it ridiculously difficult), same for OnePlus, Samsung did so in July, and probably Google devices will soon follow suit.

And let’s not mention the nightmare of the Play Integrity API that forces all Android developers to register through the Play Store and use Google’s signing keys, even if they don’t intend to distribute their apps through it.

Sure, officially Google has taken a step back and has pledged to provide a way for developers and power-users to bypass those restrictions. But we can all expect it to be a cumbersome and change-prone process filled with ridiculous amounts of frictions at every step - and I wouldn’t even expect such a morally bankrupt company to keep maintaining this “sideloading” option.

Google once competed with Apple for customers. But in a world where Google walks away from the biggest antitrust trial since 1998 with yet another slap on the wrist, competition is dead, and Google is taking notes from Apple about what they can legally get away with. And the EU, the biggest opposer of its anti-competitive acts, is also becoming softer with Big Tech - both because Vestager has left the job, and because being soft with trillion-dollar monopolist tech titans is seen as a sign of being “technologically competitive”.

Your best bet is to purchase a Pixel 9a now, before more manufacturers decide to block bootloaders, and immediately flash it with #GrapheneOS.

The long term plan would instead be to throw all of our efforts and energies on Linux phones. The folks at GrapheneOS are doing an amazing job and fighting against all kind of pressures, but at some point we should probably all just acknowledge that anything that is tainted with Android, or runs on a device intended only to run Android, is a liability, and we should no longer build solutions on top of hardware and software that we can no longer trust.

Sailfish, PostmarketOS, UBPorts, MeeGo or whatever comes next must succeed. No matter the cost.

More on #Google and Fascism

I'll add something here to my previous note about Google and SMS/RCS message retention, etc. In an "ordinary" world, these changes could at least be reasonably analyzed in terms of conventional business practices, absent the total lack of trust that Google has now earned with CEO Sundar's embrace of Trump's fascism, even donating to his fascist causes.

All the excuses in the world won't change the fact that ANY feature capable of being abused by Google is now potentially subject to this abuse with one email or phone call from a Trump minion. This is (in my opinion) pretty much ALL on Sundar. It's a trap (an understandable one) to think these things through in terms of a normal world, not the U.S. with an authoritarian federal government and willing billionaire CEOs.

The world is different now.

L