flatdeviant

Yet nobody in Alabama wants to secede. A significant chunk of European citizens are against the European Union.

Plus, the cultural, historic, linguistic similarities between Alamaba and Woyming are infinitely greater than between the UK and Croatia. A person visiting Alabama from Texas isn't a "stranger", and wouldn't be treated or considered as one.

Nope, I've had to reinstall iOS several times recently and I can confirm that every time, it was turned off. Maybe this depends on your SIM/carrier?

Nope. PRISM has do to with "direct access" to Apple's servers. This is according to NSA's own documents, and Apple may either be aware and forced by law to lie (Yahoo-style [0]) or unaware of this (i.e. they got hacked by NSA). Nothing to do with SSL being broken, especially as iCloud didn't run on Apple software but on Azure and AWS back then[1], and therefore iCloud wasn't itself vulnerable to goto fail.

[0]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/how-the-government-could-have...

[1]: see iOS security white paper from Feb 2014, iCloud was the same back in 2012.

> I know I have to trust them to do what they say they do, anyways, but if they do not have the keys, they cannot change their mind (say in response to a visit from the NSA)

Apple absolutely holds the keys to everything stored on iCloud. See their iOS security whitepaper [1], in the iCloud section:

> iCloud

> iCloud stores music, photos, apps, calendars, documents, and more, and automatically pushes them to all of a user’s devices. iCloud can also be used by third-party apps to store and sync documents as well as key values for app data as defined by the developer. An iCloud account is configured via the Settings app by the user. iCloud features, including Photo Stream, Documents & Data, and Backup, can be disabled by IT administrators via a configuration profile.

>The service is agnostic about what is being stored and handles all files the same way. There are two components for each file. The first is the file’s metadata, which consists of its name, extension, and filesystem permission settings. The second component is the file’s contents, which are treated by iCloud simply as a collection of bytes.

> Each file is broken into chunks and encrypted by iCloud using AES-128 and a key derived from each chunk’s contents that utilizes SHA-256. The keys, and the file’s metadata, are stored by Apple in the user’s iCloud account. The encrypted chunks of the file are stored, without any user-identifying information, using third-party storage services, such as Amazon S3 and Windows Azure.

[1]: https://www.apple.com/ipad/business/docs/iOS_Security_Feb14....

> I'm amazed at the reaction

And I'm baffled by yours, and others' in the thread. With the PRISM/Snowden revelations, Apple still refusing to encrypt their data center links, not using perfect forward secrecy, etc, the cloud simply doesn't seem like a good default.

They could make this opt-in, as it's supposedly linked to Continuity, but it's very clearly unintuitive, as evidenced by others in this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8511115 for one). If even HN people (probably at least the 95th percentile in tech literacy compared to the general pop) didn't know this, then what about your typical PEBKAC user?

And, sorry to be incendiary, but I'm sure the NSA isn't displeased by Apple's UX choice here.

It actually did upload stuff silently. Here's what you can do to reproduce:

Have TextEdit enabled in the iCloud System Preferences panel. Open TextEdit, create a new document, type stuff in it. Now press cmd + O to display the iCloud document picker, and you'll see your new document got uploaded to iCloud, without you ever hitting Save or explicitly agreeing to save it on iCloud.

The only way on Mavericks to have 100% local data was to:

a) disable Documents in the Cloud for all apps or a specific app, or:

b) save documents to the local drive immediately after creating them, before typing anything.

I'm surprised this isn't more commonly known, and that everyone seemed totally fine with it. Doesn't seem like intuitive or expected behavior for an average user IMO.

I don't see how you can think your beliefs are the product of "independent thought" while theirs are just an attempt are "feeling important". This is awfully arrogant and dismissive. For the record, I support gay marriage, but that doesn't mean I'm ready to let go of rational thinking: conservatives' opinions are not inferior to mine simply because I disagree with them, and I hope you can understand that. There is no such thing as a "moral high ground", only self-deception.

I was about to make the same comparison.

To me, this is enabled by social media. This uproar against Eich wouldn't have been viral if it weren't for Twitter, Reddit, and others.

The people who complained used tactics akin to bullying: "do what I want (fire Brendan Eich), or else I'll make much noise as I can, and drag your brand through the mud".

The backlash was driven by self-righteousness ("my beliefs are superior to Eich's") and contempt ("his beliefs hurt people, so he isn't entitled to them"). These feelings are timeless and have been common throughout history. The problem is that it's easy for them to quickly spread on Twitter, and then get blown even further out of proportion, either by being mentioned on 24/7 TV channels, or, here, because of OKCupid pulling a marketing move by supporting the backlash.

And overall, the effect is that some opinions and subjects are sadly becoming taboo, and people have to be politically correct or risk having their lives ruined. This happened to Eich, it happened with Donglegate [1], and it will happen again. The common theme in these stories is social media.

[1]: http://arstechnica.com/staff/2013/03/donglegate-is-classic-o...

This is hindsight bias. You can compare this to racism: back in the 18th and 19th centuries, racist and antisemitic people were in the overwhelming majority, and this only changed recently.

And yet, applying 21st century moral values to the 18th century is completely meaningless, as every historian who studied these time periods will tell you.

Posted 1 hour ago, with 38 up votes, and it's on the bottom of HN's second page? This was on the front page minutes ago. HN's ranking algorithms seem to get abused whenever a submission is even remotely critical of Google, I assume because of people "reporting" the thread. What's happening?

Definitely black propaganda. None of this comes from GCHQ. The original for the first part of the document is on DailyPaul [0], published in 2008 (before the alleged Cryptome 'leak' in 2012.

Reddit user /u/itsnotlupus found more sources for the rest of the document. [1]

[0]: http://www.dailypaul.com/60831/techniques-for-dilution-misdi...

[1]: https://pay.reddit.com/r/conspiratard/comments/wzg2i/i_think...

Apple has also changed the behavior of the power button on notebooks. Previously, pressing the button made the Mac instantly go to sleep. Now, just pressing it doesn't do anything. You can still hold the power button for 3 seconds to get the usual "Are you sure you want to shut down your computer now?" dialog box.

Awesome for those of us using FileVault who have to enter their login password each time they wake up their computer.