Question for geopolitical nerds and tech nerds.
If you have a stock android phone, it's almost impossible to use it without a Google account. If your nation becomes what is essentially at war with the US, or is under sanction. Does the whole country get their Google accounts blocked, thus rendering their phone almost unusable (without rooting it or reflashing the os etc?).
@quixoticgeek Theoretically yes. Although what would actually happen who knows. It's a step nobody has really tested
But in theory
- Every Android phone stops doing Google services, and any US managed one gets turned into a brick
- Every iphone is a brick
- Every windows PC ransomwares itself
- Every home appliance with a US connection is destroyed or worse
- Every US controlled home battery and solar device stops working
and so on. This is why in reverse the US is scared of China
@quixoticgeek oh and needless to say those nice Tesla cars won't be going anywhere but nor will any US controlled ICE car either or anything with a US cloud based security system
- replies
- 0
- announces
- 0
- likes
- 0
@etchedpixels @quixoticgeek Most of the streaming media (Netflix, Amazon, Spotify) gone. No AWS. No Azure..
Nobody is going to test that..
@quixoticgeek
I have been wondering this and pondering the Fairphone with Murena OS as my next phone when the current Samsung dies.
It isn't dying, and I keep fixing it when needed.
@Maker_of_Things I have a fairphone, but I have stock android on it because lots of stuff like banking apps only work on stock android...
@quixoticgeek
Grrrr, that would be quite an issue!
@quixoticgeek
I can really see why Mum tells me I should be withdrawing cash and hiding it away.
She is expecting war, having lived through WW2 and the revolution in China.
@tony @quixoticgeek more likely the non US operations would be seized. There's a mutually assured destruction aspect not unlike nukes involved
And it's easier to sell US bonds and put the US borrowing rate up to 20%
@quixoticgeek What's the status of Google and Apple accounts in countries already under sanction by the U.S.? I'm genuinely curious. I know that some people sanctioned have been individually targeted, but I dunno if whole countries are locked out.
@jzb @quixoticgeek I remember things like GIthub disabling account from Iranian users (because sanctions). Or Adobe disabling account of Venezuelan users (because sanctions). So I could totally see this happening. This could totally happen.
@etchedpixels @quixoticgeek Almost every fibre of my being is hoping that this madness passes soon and we never find out.
But I have to admit to having some curiosity about how it all would really play out. Again, I don't really want to live through it, and I certainly don't want the U.S. to go down this road and upend our relationships (further) with the rest of the world. But I do have a morbid fascination about what would happen... because if it did, it would be one hell of a shitshow.
@etchedpixels @quixoticgeek It's a damn shame this isn't a movie and not real life. Then again, if you made a movie of this, critics would tear it to shreds. Who would possibly believe the villains are real-life people here? A sex criminal puppet of Russia gets into the White House and has the support of more than 30% of the country? Bannon and Miller? They're effing cartoonishly evil. Absolutely two-dimensional. Roger Ebert would come back from the dead to give it two thumbs down.
And this is our life...
@jzb @etchedpixels @quixoticgeek remember what depends on Google / Amazon / Apple. I'm in Canada and our Governments host everything on US infrastructure. Quebec Healthcare? Azure. BC elections ? Azure. Etc. (that's for the one I do know) Filing taxes? Intuit. The PC in offices ? Microsoft.
Our F35 (overpriced fighter jets)? The remote kill switch is american. The maintenance can only be done by the US company.
Yes, as a nation we are THAT stupid.
@hub Humans in general are not real good at this kind of planning and threat detection. They're just not.
A lot of sci-fi imagines the human race encountering alien life and civilizations that are more advanced than we are. I think we've already invented technology, systems, and structures that are too complex for us to control. And we've let the worst possible people take the wheel.
Sigh. Is 9 a.m. too early for Scotch? Asking for a friend...
@jzb @hub @etchedpixels @quixoticgeek
If it helps with the scotch, it's mid afternoon over here in the UK.
@jzb @etchedpixels @quixoticgeek If it wasn't for the loss of life and bodily harm, the chaos engineer in me really wants this to happen once so the tightly coupled and largely unnecessary dependencies get fixed.
It's not that we can't, it's that we rather deem prevention "not cost effective".
It'd certainly be worth doing a large civil catastrophe drill on.
@hub @jzb @quixoticgeek don’t forget when Israeli intelligence turned pagers into actual bombs. It seems they didn’t incur any negative consequences for this action either.
@etchedpixels @quixoticgeek Teslas work reasonably well offline, unless Tesla specifically decide to kill them (which, knowing musk, isn't impossible).
Phones similarly work OK offline until you actually need to do something that needs google, like installing new apps (I imagine that'd be worse for ios devices as they don't have fdroid to fall back on).
A lot of cloud based stuff would be fucked... xbox would be dead (playstation would likely survive).
It would make a great disaster movie..
@jzb @quixoticgeek already happening to international criminal court judge who is Canadian
https://www.irishtimes.com/world/us/2025/12/12/its-surreal-us-sanctions-lock-international-criminal-court-judge-out-of-daily-life/
Can't use payment cards, more book hotels through things like Expedia.
@etchedpixels @quixoticgeek Properly configured Windows shouldn't brick or ransomware. But they've made it increasingly hard to properly configure. And there may be unknown backdoors by which it could be done more intentionally.
@claralistensprechen3rd @dalias @quixoticgeek Not if they pushed an update to erase it, or if you've got bitlocker dependencies.
@quixoticgeek Worse, a lot of core functionality isn't in Android itself but in Google Play Services which requires a Google account to get and isn't available except for Google-approved phones. That's making AOSP increasingly problematic.
A phone can be replaced. I care less about the phone than about my data.
@CppGuy @etchedpixels @quixoticgeek timely reminder back up all your cloud data locally. Google extracts are a bit of a pain to navigate but better safe than sorry.
@etchedpixels @quixoticgeek I think the Teslas will keep rolling. You just might see a lot more data traffic going back to the US. I mean, the things are rolling sensor platforms. Excellent for information gathering.
@ArtHarg @quixoticgeek look at what happened with some fancy cars getting remote killed in Russia
@jzb @etchedpixels @quixoticgeek The difference between fiction and reality is that reality doesn't have to be plausible.
@etchedpixels @claralistensprechen3rd @quixoticgeek A properly configured Windows doesn't install updates until you run out of "shut up and remind me later" and fail to find the way to bypass that.
@dalias
Nah, a properly configured Windows is called Linux. 
@happyborg @etchedpixels @claralistensprechen3rd @quixoticgeek Never change, fedi.. 🙄
@quixoticgeek I have been using Android and Android based phones for years without a Google account. It works just fine. You definitely do not need to have a Google account to run Android with all of its features.
@jzb
I hope the world can learn about the problems of centralization even without this going much further.
There was some talk by the US government of splitting out Chrome from Google. My dad and I discussed this a bit...
I think Google is too big. But I think the way it needs to be split is not by taking out one product that isn't high friction to switch.
IMO The change we need is making it easy to move across services/platforms + smaller service providers.