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atanasi

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Airpods use AAC-ELD for better microphone quality. While the codec is an open standard, activating it with Airpods is proprietary.

If the app wants to take advantage of mandatory hardware attestation, it has to require Android 13 or later. This would undermine somewhat the promise that the app supports a wide range of devices. Even banks don't currently enforce Android 13+.

The current policy trend in the EU is definitely not based on the principle of each user evaluating their own risk. On the contrary, service providers like financial institutes and identity providers have the responsibility to keep users safe, and more and more regulation will be made. The natural consequence is restricting which platforms are supported.

Bad money drives out good money only if there is a legal tender law such that both have to be accepted for the same nominal value. In this case, good money is hoarded because it cannot be traded for its true value.

It's the security of the ecosystem, where the interests of app vendors are fundamental: content distributors can count on enforcing DRM, and banks are relying on the camera used for KYC actually being a camera and not a virtual device.

FSF has published a commentary: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation

GPL licenses have allowed so-called "mere aggregation", where separate programs are distributed together. Such programs don't have to be all covered by GPL.

On the other hand, if parts are intimately tied to each other such that they are effectively a single program, GPL applies to the whole.

The FSF commentary explains that the judgment depends both on the mechanisms and the semantics of the co-operation. Technical implementation details don't make programs separate if they are intimately designed to work together: "But if the semantics of the communication are intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger program."

Certificates are precisely for authentication, but the simplest form employed by automatic systems like letsencrypt only tries to verify domain control. It does not bind the certificate to any legal identity, unlike stronger forms of certificates.