Many jurisdictions do have hardship licenses that allow people too young for a standard license to drive when circumstances require it.

People lose their faculties at vastly different times. There should be mandatory re-examinations for older drivers with increasing frequency, not a hard maximum.

I’m sure the obvious answer is tariffs, but the US phone market has been rough for anyone who isn’t Apple or Samsung due to the outsized role carriers play in phone selection in that market. Google has made some inroads by being Google, but HMD is not Google.

Airports in Europe do not make most passengers remove shoes, but nobody has blown up a plane there with a shoe bomb. It’s probably not a serious threat.

It’s likely their priority is continuing to collect all the fees they can for as long as they can rather than the fine itself.

This is not one of the claims made by the ICEBlock developers; their claims are only to do with notifications.

If you want to claim that a locked Android device is substantially easier for law enforcement to break in to than a locked iPhone, please cite up-to-date (from 2025) sources.

It makes me suspect they’re not talking about the stock systems OEMs ship.

The developers of GrapheneOS, an independent, security-oriented Android distribution are probably not only talking about stock OEM Android. What they’re saying is true about stock OEM android though.

That’s a separate issue from whether users are forced to get all their software from a specific source, which is also separate from whether users will actually use other sources when given the option.

On Android, developers can offer users a way to install an app that isn’t easily traced to their identity and on iOS they can’t. Furthermore, an Android app can be both on the Play store and available from other sources; there’s no exclusivity.

It’s true that FCM will result in more reliability and a better UX than other ways to implement notifications. Doing something else is still the right choice for certain use cases, such as those where privacy or keeping the entire codebase open source are top priorities.

Maybe they want that, but the statement on their website is not wrong on a technicality because it’s oversimplified; it’s wrong because it asserts a privacy difference between the two operating systems that does not exist.

The link in the comment you’re replying to says which part is not true, but since you seem more willing to comment than to click a link and read, I’ll summarize:

The part about the Apple Push Notification service requiring less information that can identify an individual user than Google’s Firebase Cloud Messaging is not true. Both use a similar token system. Furthermore, it is possible to build android apps with notifications that do not use FCM.

I think generating and sharing sexually explicit images of a person without their consent is abuse.

That’s distinct from generating an image that looks like CSAM without the involvement of any real child. While I find that disturbing, I’m morally uncomfortable criminalizing an act that has no victim.

I’m sure there are several I would consider fine for me.

I’m skeptical that they can be fine for someone who doesn’t know what federation means, isn’t especially upset that a handful of megacorporations control most human communication, and already finds the fact that I’m asking them to use anything different from what they’re used to annoying. XMPP has more things for the end user to think about than Signal does even if a client is very polished.

That’s a risk, and a reason I’d like to see something federated succeed in this space. Unfortunately neither Matrix nor XMPP has managed to achieve quite the level of UX necessary for mainstream adoption, nor have the average person’s tech skills and comfort level improved.

Signal’s status as a well-funded nonprofit gives me hope that the current situation is reasonably stable.

No. WhatsApp came first, but later adopted Signal’s key exchange and encryption. WhatsApp was an independent company for years and had rejected several acquisition offers, but $19 billion is a big number.

One of WhatsApp’s founders is now chairman of the Signal Foundation and a major financial backer of the project.

Mastodon’s federation is not at all consistent even when it could get much closer with a little effort.

Servers don’t remote fetch old posts from recent follows for example, nor replies to off-server posts from people on a third server. There’s work being done on both, but I’m surprised it wasn’t prioritized much earlier. Some other Fediverse software handles these situations better.

I think the fediverse has a built-in legal risk in that any time someone posts, data is sent to a large number of servers when then make it available via the web or sometimes push it to additional servers (e.g. by user boosts or community subscriptions). This is currently done without any explicit license for the IP contained in that post.

I’m inclined to think that irrevocable permissions are the right thing here, in large part because it’s impossible to guarantee that any subsequent signal from the original poster propagates to everyone who has a copy of that post, or that the server software responds how someone else expects it will.

There is a legal basis: congress passed a law, the president at the time signed it, TikTok sued, and the Supreme Court unanimously ruled against TikTok. That’s a legal basis by definition.

Perhaps you mean that there is no rational basis. That’s a reasonable position you can argue for.

And that is what I would recommend against, even on a server that does not ban that age. If someone’s (young) age is relevant to a discussion they wish to participate in, I would suggest a throwaway account.

How were they revealed?

Why do you care?

If it’s just about following the rules as a matter of principle, I suggest not doing that. Nobody is checking, and saying your exact age on public social media is oversharing anyway.

If it’s about content moderation being strict enough to satisfy some comfort level, I wouldn’t rely on that, but I also think 13 is old enough to start learning there are shitty people online and how to deal with them, preferably with some adult support.