Today Google bricked my Chromebook by force-installing a hidden extension

You can read the source for the integration, it lines up exactly with what I said.

You can make up any conspiracy theory you want, but there's no evidence for it.

> but it’s not some evil data slurp.

Not yet anyway. We’ve just seen Amazon change how all Echo’s/Alexa’s operate. It has been local-only for years and years, but now they want the audio data, so they’ve changed the Terms of Service. There’s no reason to believe Google won’t do the same thing sometime in the future.

> it’s not some evil data slurp

This puts a dangerous amount of trust onto a company which has very clearly and explicitly signaled to everyone for decades that they do not care one iota about you, your privacy, or your safety.

Assuming that Google isn't doing anything malicious is a very unwise and ill-informed stance to take. If it isn't malicious now, it will be very soon. Absolutely no exceptions.

Learned helplessness is a common symptom of abuse. Not surprising that we would see it here as well.

It’s a stupid feature for Google to enable

Enter Google 2025!

No longer just terrible search due to lack of care, and conflict of interest.

Instead, now terrible search due to AI, terrible everything due to AI, pushed everywhere and everyplace, degrading and reducing capabilities ecosystem wide.

Ridiculous and just often wrong AI gibberish on search pages, Android camera apps that blur people's faces when trying to "enhance" pics you take, and of course replacing OCR stuff that works well, with some half finished buggy AI junk.

From their doctored and made up AI demos, to an inability to make anything stable or of quality, Google has turned from world class to Nikola in a short couple of years.

> One of the most obnoxious things about enshittification is the corrosive effect it seems to have had on technical users’ curiosity: instead of researching and fixing problems, people now seem very prone to jump to “the software is evil and bad” and give up at doing any kind of actual investigation.

There's little here worth being curious about. Tech companies made sure of that. They mostly aren't doing anything particularly groundbreaking in situations like these - they're doing the stupid or the greedy thing. And, on the off chance that the tech involved is in any way interesting, it tends to have decades of security research behind it applied to mathematically guarantee we can't use it for anything ourselves - and in case that isn't enough, there's also decades of legal experience applied to stop people from building on top of the tech.

Nah, it's one thing to fix bugs for the companies back when they tried or pretended to be friendly; these days, when half the problems are intentional malfeatures or bugs in those malfeatures, it stops being fun. There are other things to be curious about, that aren't caused by attempts to disenfranchise regular computer users.

And what were you doing when they took over, dad? Oh, i was intestinal villian, secreting liberal free choice messages for a cooperation that didn't even pay me.

In other words, tech companies have lost the benefit of doubt.

That's what a decade of enshittification gets them.

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Yes, NZ does. The Consumer Guarantees Act is pretty strong - goods must work for a "reasonable period", which is similarly not defined but has generally been upheld as you'd hope by the courts. Companies can't contract out of it.

Democracy doesn't work as it should when Big Tech and Big Business pull the strings to get what they want.

When entities other than ordinary citizens get their way—as they do—then citizens are disadvantaged. That ought to be pretty damn obvious, if not then take a look at the world around you.

For starters, examine the myriad of legislation that's beneficial to ordinary citizens that has been blocked or neutered by Big Tech/Business. Citizens may have the vote but they don't hold the power.

This may make sense if the extended warranty is limited to defects introduced by the remote change. I.e., if they remotely break your device, they should be responsible for fixing the damage. A full warranty extension doesn't seem reasonable to me, though.

With regards to your last sentence, I think a good first step would be to require at least security and other critical updates to be provided within the full warranty period. And this would make sense even without the (limited) warranty extension, and I actually consider it more important.

I don’t think relying on new laws as the primary incentive is going to get far, especially when big tech has the outsized influence they do on government. This then just leaves a strong incentive to stop updating things.

Sounds like a good way to make sure that companies drop SW support as quickly as possible.

"could" being the point here - as Joe Bloke, you're not going to get yourself into a legal dispute with Google, but it's not very hard to return an electronic device as an ordinary end consumer when it's still under warranty.

GPDR forbids local OCR? Can you be more specific

Exactly!

Well, kind of, I don’t think it’s that crazy. This service does two things:

* Performs image OCR on images, generically. This is then used for several features: “I type a word in the search box and it can look through my screenshots and photos,” “I’m in one of those horrible scanned image-only PDFs and I want to search,” and so on.

* Performs “main content extraction” on websites by using a screenshot of the website _alongside_ the accessibility tree for that website’s structure. It basically says “given this tree of elements and screenshot, can you prune the tree to just the elements a user would care about.” The fact that this is necessary is more an indictment of the DOM than this feature, IMO :)