What are the nags? I also don’t use Apple TV and don’t recall being nagged to use it.
The only thing that annoys me is the prompt to “finish setting up” my phone when I don’t want to turn on Siri. I get the prompt a few times and then it gives up trying to get me to turn on Siri and stays happily disabled.
If Apple News keeps advertising to you after you uninstall News then Apple has overstepped and should be held to account. I don’t hold it against them showing Apple News content on the Home Screen / Notification Tray iff Apple News is actually installed.
On the contrary, it's exactly analogous to Windows start menu ads as they are just icons that you can tap/right-click and uninstall, exactly like on Apple.
But I do love the HN double standards here:
Apple ads: "Pfff, just tap and uninstall, nothing newsworthy here."
Windows ads that you can also right-click and uninstall: "OMG, the audacity from Microsoft, let's up-vote every single FUD blog post about this while frothing at the mouth."
That doesn't happen to me when I use the cheap earbud things that Apple sells (I use a Subsonic client app for music); do you have any idea what triggers it?
Having said that, I love subserver more than any other media server options.
I think with Apple this ship is slowly sailing, and the tracking will soon be just as bad as Google.
The amount of money in advertising is staggering. Can it actually work that well? Or is this a category of spending that just tends to be greenlit in big companies?
How are you the product, when you’re giving money? That’s like saying, when you buy a ticket to Black Panther, you are the product Hollywood is selling, not the movie.
Why can't you be both? After all, an advertiser's best target is someone who already has a propensity to spend. Companies can and do sell you stuff then also target you for ads.
I’m not sure why nerds are still litigating this sort of thing years after the who gnu linux thing.
Like Android?
>I’m not sure why nerds are still litigating this sort of thing years after the who gnu linux thing.
Because most Linux users are no longer interacting with GNU/Linux.
4.4BSD however was released in 1993, so iOS would've had decades to diverge from it.
It consists of "massive" changes such as:
> Enable writable clock debugfs files which are required for debugging and testing
and
> Allow drivers to register hooks when IPIs are sent and handled. The statistics of these IPIs are helpful in predicting CPU idle states
In case its not clear, Linux the operating system typically means the Linux kernel plus a set of unix-inspired GPL-licenced userspace tools. Some (still) call this GNU/Linux, although that is a bit of a mouthful.
Android has a completely different userspace to "Linux". The kernel is not the issue.
But if you want, you can totally install all the GNU userspace tools on Android. Nothing is stopping you from doing that.
Just semantics.
Marricks's comment simply does not make any sense if we're to use that definition of "Linux".
"No one is going to spend billions of dollars to get you to buy Linux.", Marrick said. Perhaps they were including the resources required to make something that is recognisably Linux that is compatible with phones, and polished enough to be appealing to the average consumer?
They could just have not known this, it's not obvious if you've never tried to open a terminal on an Android phone.
But how is Android not recognisably Linux? You can natively run all the Linux stuff you'd like on Android.
Could Apple conceivably be spying on my every move? Well... they really don't need to to make App Store recommendations so I doubt it.
When, and if, ever launches its own web advertising client which they bill as "privacy focused" I'll start being skeptical but until then there's way better things to throw tin foil at.
People talk about Android like it is the "do anything you want device marketed at end users", but it is the "do anything you want operating system marketed at device manufacturers". One of the many things you can do with such a device is lock it down, and that's what companies who make devices that run Android, like quite-notably Samsung, have largely decided to do.
Google's first-party devices are often quite open, and that's cool and all, but they do not have much marketshare because, in the end, they kind of suck with the various limited hardware tradeoffs they make. Users, generally, are unable to provide a very strong purchasing signal preference on "is an open device" because they are too busy optimizing for having good cameras or screens or whatever it is that they consider the primary point of owning the phone in the first place is.
At the end of the day, Android then become more of a coalition of brands herded by Google--but led by Samsung, whom at least used to make the vast majority of the actual profit, disproportionate even to their marketshare--in attempts to reign them in on what crazy changes they make, but those limitations do not enforce the device to be open... far from it, really! And so we have seen Google also the target of lawsuits for anti-competitive behavior with their store (including by Epic, whose argument almost made more sense against Google than Apple).
Ability to root and sideloading are two different but similar issues on the topic of freedom.
wait what? It's basically the most used/desired tablet, afaik, at least in Canada/US
And of course forget about anything that isn't iOS or Android. I don't expect banks to support alternative OSes anytime soon.
I probably won't root my next phone, not worth the hassle for a daily driver.
What could be nice is if phones could run VMs, so you have your stock ROM with all your "important" apps, and a VM where you can run anything you want: hacked Android, Linux, maybe even a desktop OS. Modern phone hardware should be more than powerful enough to do that.
The easiest daily driver to root is Sony and Google phones. You simply unlock the bootloader and flash. There's no nonsense to deal with.
That said, they have locked bootloaders on some devices. Predominantly in the US market, I believe at the request of carriers. However, it's traditionally been the minority of devices.
Kiss some multimedia apps, payment apps, and enterprise security features goodbye...along with a bunch of random features like private mode in their browser.
Samsung at least don't require personal details for you to take control of your device. Sure, you lose access to some multimedia, but don't blame Samsung for that, blame Widevine DRM certification. Knox goes out the window, but the entire point of Knox is to (try) guarantee a device isn't tampered with. At least you can remove it!
I would consider a device tampered with if someone besides me (the owner) did something with it, without my authorization. But anything short of that is surely just me using the device. I mean, I have physical possession after all.
It's like your laptop's motherboard detected you installed another OS in place of the OEM-provided Windows installation, and overvoltaged your NVidia GPU to burn it out. "We have every right to not support high-performance graphics on any other OS other than our own - if you want to install your own OS, you can still use the integrated Intel GPU".
In other words: there's no way for me to just take the phone to my workshop / local hackerspace, and fix it with a soldering iron. Even if I could source the right parts, it's going to be a PITA to make them work. I didn't investigate it further, but I assume that these days, cryptography is used for critical parts to attest each other as genuine (similar to what new iPhones do, which is why you can't just replace the "home" button if it breaks).
Additionally, since I haven't heard of people doing software workarounds, whatever in Knox is reading the state of the eFuse, cannot be trivially patched. I recall reading somewhere that triggering the eFuse somehow overwrites Knox itself - if that's correct, then they may not even be anything left to enable afterwards.
----
I'm going to concede here that my example was somewhat hyperbolic - burning a single eFuse isn't the same as overvolting the whole GPU. But only somewhat - the reasoning/intent behind the two cases is the same. Additionally, cryptography blurs the line between what's hardware damage and what's a software limitation. Take, for example, secure erasure of data: you can smash a hard drive with a sledgehammer and then microwave the remains to slag, but you can get the same result by keeping the data encrypted, and then... losing the keys.
Would I like to have an unlocked bootloader? Sure. Is having a locked bootloader equivalent to only being allowed to install Apple approved apps? Of course not.
Please, you can sideload apps by selecting a single option... Not to mention you have all the options to make alternative apps default like any Google device.
That alone is significantly more open than Apple devices...
The Mac defaults to signed apps. And you need to change a setting to allow unsigned apps.
iOS could easily default to what we have today, but allow the installation of non App Store app after users change a setting and confirm after reading a scary earning pop up, that tells users they may be exposing themselves to data theft, hacking, viruses and money theft.
No more Apple Pay, for starters. Maybe no iMessage. Things where they can argue they have to turn them off to protect the user, and/or themselves, from rogue apps.
And then you could have a kind of freedom, but it wouldn’t be a very useful one. You can already load whatever you want on your own phone if you have the source and do the build yourself. I can pretty easily imagine Apple making it so you can side load closed apps but almost nobody ever does.
Support is expensive. Apple spends a lot of money to provide what is generally very excellent support. It’s a huge component of the overall brand for many users that stay in their ecosystem.
Apple has gone a long way by sticking to the safest paths, meaning they do things that cause the most customer satisfaction, and don't do anything that can go wrong. That's why Apple abandoned the iCar project because while many would like the concept, a car experience is not something that Apple can have control over; if users get into car accidents, for example, that hurts Apple's brand no matter the cause of the incident. In comparison, making phones, Macs, tablets, etc. is fairly safe as long as Apple retains its full control over the experience (which must be perfect for most consumers).
Because of this, I don't really see Apple allowing app sideloading, even though I personally like it. I think the more pressing issue right now is the 30% cut on AppStore.
I beg to differ.
Apple is becoming an ad company despite privacy claims
> Apple monitors your every move in the App Store and its News and Stocks apps and then uses that data to sell ads targeting you in those same apps. To meet its growth forecasts, experts expect Apple to start selling ads in its Maps, Podcast, and Books apps, meaning it could replicate this model across more of its services. Much more of your activity could be monitored in the future.
Tracking every click in the App Store/News/Stocks is not great but it is in NO WAY similar to tracking every website I view and reading every email I send.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303
Is there any evidence that Apple is lying, and is actually decrypting them and using them for advertising purposes, rather than for the "coherence" feature?
I don't actually want browsing sessions to be unified across devices, so I do wish that it was turned off by default. (Though being able to close tabs remotely is a sort of interesting capability.) However, it doesn't seem to be actual spyware used for advertising or tracking purposes.
And it’s not going to google first. If you type an address the “link” at the top is to Apple Maps. They seem to do a similar thing with place names. I’m not sure but one can be fairly certain they’re using the phones location to help….
Is it? How exactly are encrypted payloads to a secure, opaque and generic endpoint easy to distinguish?
For spotting it going to Apple you'd have to do more fancy correlation over time and such, but you can find people out there who are researching this stuff... so that's who I'm waiting for to hear more from.
This's on Gmail's homepage:
"We never use your Gmail content for any ads purposes. Gmail uses industry-leading encryption for all messages you receive and send. We never use your Gmail content to personalize ads."
On a different note I attended an apple event for IT Government and Education in Chicago. Eye opening.. Apple's "privacy" stance is all just a horse and pony show for marketing. Unbelievable how open they were about tracking everything at the event.
I'd not be surprised to learn there was some level of phoning home though.
Apple knows that I bought the app (they charged me for it).
In order to charge Clash of Clans for the conversion, my phone needs to connect to Apple and send them a record of the ad click. What if clicking on that ad and buying the app are the only thing I ever did on the phone? There’s nothing to aggregate locally, and Apple knows they got the conversion data from me.
Perhaps the claim is that my phone is going to send all these records to Apple, and Apple is just going to do the right thing and run programs that do the business without letting any of their people look at anything they aren’t supposed to look at (they could internally accomplish this by differential privacy, rigorous internal controls, etc). That’s the same claim Google and everyone else is going to make.
Even the ads can be anonymously downloaded using a shuffler/mixer, such that nobody knows which ads out of the universe of ads the device chose to target the user with.
The ad still has to come from a server, unless the phone downloads all possible ads the person might be interested in (which I doubt).
The transfer would at a minimum include the IP address of the phone.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federated_Learning_of_Cohorts
FLoC is definitely more anonymous than "davidlumley visited nytimes.com twice on December 1st 2022". However, that particular usage information was previously only available to nytimes.com, any ad/data vendor using third party tracking cookies that were present on nytimes.com at the time of my visit, and finally any company that purchased data from the ad/data vendor.
My FLoC was theoretically available to any website and had much of the same intent data that intent ad/data vendors were/are selling.
If my understanding of Apple's ad platform is correct, advertisers don't know which cohort the user davidlumley belongs to, or that their ads are being served to me because that's all handled on device.
This is a distinction without a difference. Do you regularly share your phone with other people, to the extent that "device data" can not be correlated back to you?
Typing this from a Pixel running GrapheneOS, and it's a great experience.
So, yeah, I did.
1) Apple's freedom from inspection: they control your device and their ecosystem because they make money off the ecosystem. The take a cut of the phone/computer/watch you buy then anything you buy in their ecosystem because the ecosystem is their production. Your data is (mostly) safe from advertisers because that's not their business.
2) Google's device freedom: you can do whatever you want with your device because your are the product. Sure you can load a complete separate system of mail and chat clients and not sign into google, but really, will you?
Of course there's option 3, linux. Neither the ecosystem or you is the product, but where's the money in that. No one is going to spend billions of dollars to get you to buy Linux.
Whether Apple or Google (or MS or w/e) is the arch villain is really just a matter of perspective. Is two or three options a great place for consumers? No, of course not it all sucks, I think a system built around who-gets-the-most-money-wins is the real problem.