I'm confused about the read on this too. It reads like a "I don't want the government involved in my healthcare" type of statement, but it's posted in the discussion section of an article about private companies mishandling data.
> Verbatim, who owns M-Disc, doesn't even manufacture discs anymore. They just slap their brand on other peoples discs.
They're owned by one of the other disc manufacturers (CMC Magnetics), so I think they're technically putting their name on their own discs. But, "they" is CMC now.
Yeah, we let big tech go to far. I think a foundational poor decision was letting algos use big data to figure out what triggers our engagement in online platforms, which has spread to more industries, notably from social media to news media.
Keeping younger students away from computers is dumb, but we do need to go back to the basic computer literacy classes of the early/mid 2000s, e.g. typing, basics of desktop operating systems like the filesystem, using word, powerpoint etc. It's appalling how lacking high schoolers seem to be in these kinds of skills.
> Keeping younger students away from computers is dumb
No. There's proven research that shows reading a book or writing with a pen or pencil is much more stimulating and beneficial compared to looking at a screen or tapping/typing on it.
But they also need to have computer skills if they're going to survive in this world... it's too late to teach them once they're old enough to have the safeguards removed.
Yeah, I suppose we should hold off on teaching them everything that isn't critical thinking, lest they develop skills other than what is deemed acceptable by people like you.
Maybe we should have them live in 15th century lifestyle towns! Wouldn't want them having any contact with this awful world!
I think young exposure to real computers (where you create, and have to figure things out; not consumption machines) provides access to a level of fluency that is otherwise difficult or impossible to achieve, just like many other skills (language, music...)
I'm pretty sure we ran these experiments in France in the late 80s/early 90s, it was pretty clear that exposure to real computers was useless in elementary school, and even in middle school technology teachers weren't a big fans of teaching computer skills before 14 (basically around the same time as they taught tin soldering).
I think that can be done without having them sit in front of a computer or even really using a computer, though. Lots of kids have stories about wandering over to a college campus when they were in middle school, wandering into a room with the keypunch machines, and learning about computers that way. Very few of those kids directly used a computer, but they learned it anyway.
Colleges with key punches? Probably pretty close to zero.
My point was more that, I think it's incorrect to assert that it's necessary for kids to directly use a computer in order to effectively learn about them. We have tons of concrete evidence of kids learning to be excellent at programming and understanding computers without directly using one. It happened with the kids I described.
Unfortunately, the headline is somewhat optimistic compared to the reality, I think.
The thread makes it sound like it could have been disabled due to errata or performance issues. Basically, it looks like the software Google is shipping intentionally doesn't use MTE on the Pixel 11 hardware. That raises the question of...what does Google know is wrong with MTE on the Pixel 11?
> it looks like the software Google is shipping intentionally doesn't use MTE on the Pixel 11 hardware. That raises the question of...what does Google know is wrong with MTE on the Pixel 11?
Apple replaced MTE with an upgraded version that can run in synchronous mode all the time without the performance hit.
> Consider that MTE can be configured to report memory corruption either synchronously or asynchronously. In the latter mode, memory corruption doesn’t immediately raise an exception, leaving a race window open for attackers... We believe memory safety protections need to be strictly synchronous, on by default, and working continuously.
> Google may just be getting ready to follow suit.
That may well be, but it's a regression for the time being, since Advanced Protection mode presumably no longer uses MTE (or a replacement for MTE), whereas it did on the Pixel 8, 9, and 10.
It seems like they should've continued to offer MTE until the replacement was ready.
There's only a significant cost to synchronous MTE.
MTE ships two modes. synchronous mode and asynchronous mode. SYNC is slower but gives you far better traces and throws an SEGV_MTESERR as soon as violations happen. ASYNC however is async so there's a bit of a delay between a violation and the "catch" that throws SEGV_MTEAERR.
Strictly speaking async is worse for security because there's a brief window of time where the process "gets away with it" but the main differentiator is that because things don't stop the moment the violation occurs, SEGV_MTEAERR traces tend to be some degree of "out of date" vs SEGV_MTESERR which capture the exact state of the world the moment the error occurs.
The main tradeoff here is that async MTE has basically negligible cost. Something like 1-5% in practice but in microbenchmarks you can see up to 50%. Vs synchronous MTE where the penalty is on average closer to like 10-15% but in microbenchmarks it can be like 5-6x slower.
So yeah the perf cost is there but it's really not a major issue.
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The main issue is that apps and services crash when an MTE segfault occurs. So this means that to the uninformed end user apps appear spuriously unstable with no meaningful context. And it's not just apps. On graphene I see MTE segfaults semi regularly from various system daemons (mainly related to GPS/nav) and occasionally in Google Play Services itself.
From time to time I get them in Youtube and I constantly get them in the Twitch app. It's very annoying and the apps just crash when you happen to do some particular action leaving you walking on your toes to avoid accidentally tapping whatever magic pattern happens to invoke a MTE SIGSEGV until the next update. Doubly so since most apps provide no meaningful interface for uploading log traces to report these issues.
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If Google wanted to roll this out without the spurious crashes they'd need to deploy it and eat the minor perf hit but they'd need to register a global signal handler to capture these MTE SIGSEGVs and report them back to the services in question without crashing the app.
And most app devs don't care so they'd be taking a minor (or major) perf hit in exchange for logging errors that developers always ignore. Doubly so in the modern day of "just have AI fix/do XYZ and who cares about the consequences as long as it runs".
I'm not surprised they dropped it but I do honestly wish they'd forced the issue and just deployed it and forced apps to fix their shit.
Given the current use of AI tools I would think that SEGV_MTESERR crashes would be low hanging fruit to fix. AI tools do ok with identifying memory corruption issues, given a smoking gun, in my experience.
SEGV_MTESERR is reasonably low hanging fruit until it's in a binary blob and the IC manufacturer said service interfaces with refuses to do anything to fix it.
Likewise if it's because a language is being lazy with how it handles memory (see: wireguard-go SEGV_MTESERR because golang's string implementation was being overly permissive with pointers).
And of course this only applies to SEGV_MTESERR. SEGV_MTESERR has a much higher runtime overhead that Google and co would not tolerate (but Graphene does) so they'd likely only be willing to use SEGV_MTEAERR which provides traces that point at a completely different place than where the fault occurred (but still provide a little bit of useful info).
Nothing is wrong. They just don't use MTE yet, they probably have other priorities. They wanted to save some costs until they will use MTE, so they removed some hardware acceleration and downgraded the GPU. Simple as that.
AFAIK the other Pixel devices, going back to the 8, do use MTE in the stock OS. Some MTE features are only enabled when "Advanced Protection" is turned on in the OS settings, but the stock OS on those devices does make use of MTE. In the Android documentation, MTE is explicitly called out as one of the protection features enabled in the Advanced Protection mode.
So, I don't think it's accurate to say they don't use it yet. They were using it, and then they stopped. I think that's one of the reasons the linked GOS thread says they're concerned that "MTE may actually be broken due to CPU errata".
Is 2010 when people started to like it? I remember, in 2008, being in a computer science course at university when Chrome launched. It was not liked at that time, at least within the computer users I knew. I remember it being mostly described as "that awful browser that Google made".
> Well the current Motorola Signature (2026) is 3 times the price of a Pixel.
I understand the sentiment, certainly, but the price difference depends a lot on which model we're comparing to. The Signature will be the flagship from Motorola, and I'll be very, very surprised if it's 3x the price of the Pixel flagship.
Presumably someone who was planning to buy something like the Pixel 10a would be more interested in the non-flagship Motorola devices with GOS support, which are expected to launch later.
Sure. But we're talking about a phone with GrapheneOS. If I need to choose a phone with GrapheneOS, there are cheap to expensive Pixels, and it is not clear at all if there will ever be cheap Motorolas. The Signature is very expensive, just like the most expensive Pixel.
> not clear at all if there will ever be cheap Motorolas
They've indicated that support will eventually be added for midrange Motorola devices, which I believe are historically price-competitive with the a-series Pixels.
> If "thinning down the population" was the intent, shouldn't the US reverse their anti-abortion bullshit laws?
There can be more than one motivation, of course.
Also, it's very possible that outlawing abortion can result in a decreased birth rate. E.g., if a woman is scared that she'll have a problematic pregnancy, she may decide to just not have a child instead of risking needing and not being able to get an emergency abortion.
I wonder if practices will change any of there's ever a device that ships with GOS. Right now, many companies are happy to shrug off GOS, because they don't support "modified devices".
If any of the Motorola devices have GOS as a pre-installed option, now the companies don't have the excuse that the device is modified.
I'm guessing the companies will continue to be difficult, but it'll be amusing to watch, at least.
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