somerandom2407

Just a warning to any publishers who might want to force me into an alternative app store - I will stop using your app long before I'll install another app store.

I have a reasonable amount of confidence in Apple's due diligence around vetting apps on the app store. I can't think of another major brand that I would trust on this matter.

It's terrible news for anyone who has some responsibility for the security of environments in which these devices are used.

Right now we have a relatively high confidence that as long as the devices are not jailbroken and are kept up to date they are relatively secure.

What this change means for people like me is that either there is some capability to detect whether third-party app stores are in use on a device and we will set a policy that disallows anyone using such things from accessing company data/services, or we have to lock out the devices altogether.

I'd only be interested in a platform I could trust completely, with no proprietary firmware or software blobs required. Short of that, if I have to trust someone, I'm probably just going to trust Cisco or Ubiquiti given they're western and have been around for a while with a relatively good track record and a lot of money to lose if they're found to have been negligent or malicious.

I think there's a market there for a fully open platform, but it's probably not very easy to pull off given how secretive the chip vendors seem to be.

That's not correct - more than 1/3 of initial access is by phishing at present, according to Cisco Talos (and others major security publications largely agree with this). Ref: https://blog.talosintelligence.com/ir-trends-q1-2026/

What you may be confusing with is the number of incidents involving token theft, which is often facilitated by phishing.

The change to 1Pass is annoying and I don't mention these to discount your valid concerns with it, only to make people aware of the options that can help with this and make it less taxing than continuously entering a password:

* On Windows you can enable Windows Hello for biometric authentication.

* On Mac, as shit as it is, you can buy Apple's magic keyboard with TouchID (for crazy money, but still) and use it while the notebook is shut.

I hope 1Password can eventually consider adding something like face recognition from a webcam as an alternative method.

Unfortunately, without this they are not compliant and it gives a false sense of security to claim it is multi-factor when it's actually only one factor. You'll find the same with other Passkey stores like Kevault that require biometrics as well.

Actually it's kind of the opposite. Right now the banks know how easy it is for someone to end up getting scammed, so they try to be really strict on picking up on potentially fraudulent transactions precisely because they can't trust endpoint security.

If they have something like this in place, they will have greater confidence in the transaction being genuine and less likely to block it. In this case, for such a large amount of money, relative to the size of your account, they might still be very cautious about it, but it would be less likely to cause an issue.

The concern you're raising here is that the government might secretly force big companies like Facebook or Google to require attested passkeys that restrict usage to only approved first-party keystores right?

Passkeys exist now and there's no taking them back. However, even if they did not, the government might well just develop its own authentication system and require that it be used under policies that require age verification for social media, for example. Hell, they might end up doing that anyway, and that would be no different. If the government wants to force tracking/verification on certain websites, it won't simply be something they walk away from if Passkeys don't exist. You can only fight this with your vote and by not using those services once they implement such controls.

The people don't care enough to bother, and that's fine - it's not your (or my) place to force other people to do anything.

My point was not about getting critical mass, it's that the service can already do anything they like to lock people into whatever they want and gatekeep their service. They can do it with Passkeys, or they can do it with a proprietary alternative and if they're big enough, they'll get away with it. Neither of us can sway them at all - I wasn't saying they should do this, only that they can.

Blaming Passkeys is aiming at the wrong target. Passkeys rightly offer features that have valid use-cases, even the attestation in the right context. Can they be abused? Probably, but so can just about anything. Passkeys do, on the other hand, offer some real tangible benefits that other mainstream solutions do not.

And if the bank implements the best form of Passkey (and implements it well) in this case it would require the user to biometrically authenticate before sending money (perhaps based on dollar amount or transaction volume) to a new account. The user would hopefully learn over time that the biometric requirement is aligned with money transfers and would grow suspicious if they were prompted for it during a scam session.

Any site/service could easily implement their own proprietary solution to force compliance around usage of said service. Whether they can abuse Passkeys or not is irrelevant. If the service does something inappropriate, you can stop using it and, if necessary, build a competing service that is not abusive.

To suggest that people should stop using Passkeys over this is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. All of these features of Passkeys are appropriate in a given context. The only concern is where a service that might not need/justify "high security" Passkeys starts demanding them anyway, and no-one is forcing you to use said service in that case.

Your brain, your values. Only you can know why you ascribe less value to things that AI readily produces, but it is fundamentally a choice you get to make.

In the beforetimes, a lot of people didn't value software, but many software developers still did.

You don't have to jump through hoops of your own making to justify the things you want to enjoy and, outside of the workplace, people won't value you as an individual based on any set of performance criteria.

What do you think should happen if an artist views a lot of arts over their lifetime and then themself generates something similar to another artist's work? I would argue that collectively humans have been standing on the backs of other humans all throughout history. An artist today does not simply come out of the womb knowing how to make great art - they learn it by observing other art, learning about art and practicing (not altogether dissimilar to model training) over many, many hours.

Is it fair to say, then, that artists who have trained on the work of prior artists should also not be able to protect their works unless they have directly received consent and have compensated all the artists whose works they have viewed and potentially learned from over their lifetime?

And this is one of the reasons some people are up in arms about Anthropic's recent inclusion of watermarking against anything Claude models touch. It will even take human-generated code that it works on and apply watermarks to it which can be then used to prove it was AI processed and perhaps invalidate any copyright on even human-written code.

I don't like it and I wasn't consulted about it. Given it is supposed to be representative of a united humanity or something like that, I'd be interested to know what proportion of the 8 billion people were consulted in its creation.

I think it starts with social coercion, intimidation, exclusion, economic pressure and ostracism long before it builds into the confidence to take more overtly violent measures. I don't know him, but it certainly appeared as though he succumbed to these pressures, given the timing of things. I hope people doing these things take some time to reflect on their actions and how closely they follow a dark path we've seen before.

I just want to quickly jump on what you said about Linus. I know a lot of people look at his change and see it as a "growth moment", but my view is that he was forced to change by a growing body of people who take relatively extreme actions against those not seen to be towing the line. There was another group of people like this in history. We rightly condemned that evil group and their actions, and we were once more tolerant and open-minded towards one-another as people. I miss those days.

You're coming across as a bit of an idiot here, arguing with legitimate criticism. You have titled your article starting with "macOS becomes iOS", which is reflected on hn, explicitly referencing the merging of the platforms. I don't know whether you framed it as such for clickbait or out of genuine obsession, however, this is the key point that drives people to view your article - people aren't clicking that link because they're interested in a darkening video on hover. If you don't want any negative commentary about your article or opinions, don't post them on the internet.

I too feel that your evidence is substantially lacking, along with similar claims by others. The changes they have made generally make a lot of sense, and you should expect some degree of overlap between related platforms. However, the merging that people were concerned about, and which was refuted by Apple, is fundamental merging that would make macOS less useful to people through either inappropriate UI choices (removing fine interface elements to support touch) and locking down the platform entirely to third-party software ecosystems.

You have every right to take the content offline, or to put any technical barriers you desire in place to access it - but that's about all you should be able to do.

If you don't want to lose money and don't feel confident that you can protect your content with technical measures, best to take your stuff off the internet.

In a lot of circumstances, that is exactly the case. What the open source license stops is redistribution under terms that violate the license, not usage itself. An individual can very well take your open source code, make any changes they want, compile and use it for their own purposes without adhering to the terms of your license - as long as they don't redistribute it.

Sure, you'll never get rid of all misleading information; however, without advertising the volume of shit will reduce radically, as much of the modern internet is built around profiteering and get rich quick schemes (influencers), which breed swathes of hopeful emulators.

I think most sensible people are quite competent at ignoring the bullshit, so I would love it if there was less bullshit to wade through to get to the nuggets of useful information which are out there. For those too stupid to look past misleading information, there's no helping them anyway.

Back in the old days, people would share useful information in the internet of their own accord. That still happens a lot today, too! In my opinion, most of the stuff that's ad-supported is not worth my time, as the "content creator" is trying to sell something or otherwise has an angle they're pushing. How can I trust what they have to say when I know they're only doing it to make some money? They will be less interested in helping me than helping themselves!

I think if you take ads away from the internet, you'll also take away a lot of the bullshit and inaccurate or misleading information. If no-one is making any money off of it, you'll be left with largely relevant information.

The internet today is like a free to air television network, but I remember a time when it was nothing like that.

You might have a wider audience if you put in on the app store. I only install very well-known software outside of the app store. For anything more niche, I need it to be on the app store to offer some assurance that it is not malicious and that sandboxing is enforced.

You couldn't be more wrong about me. In-fact I did not vote for Trump and have always been in the centre, between the republicans and the democrats. Shockingly I'm considered right wing by the left and left wing by the right, albeit moreso by the left. I'm exactly who both parties should be targeting when they want to win an election and while I couldn't bring myself to vote Trump, the democrats certainly didn't sell me on Harris.

I have observed from the sidelines how both sides behave towards one another and while there are some extremists on the right whose behaviour is utterly shameful, I have noticed that a significant number of moderate people on the left have grown utterly intolerant of conservatives over the last decade and they'll vocalise their disgust and even go as far as lodging complaints with employers or writing negative reviews about businesses, outing and harassing people whose views they disagree with. While the extreme right tend towards violence, what those on the left do is equally disgusting, yet they do it with a false sense of righteousness.

I think the other poster was just being polite, trying to have a discussion about the left's misuse of the term fascism, yet failed to account for the degree of intelligence required to understand such nuance. So let me spell it out for you all, you are misusing the term and on the odd occasion that one of you actually checks the definition, you view it through your own biased lens, rather than reading the complex description thoroughly. You cherry-pick some terms and twist others around to suit your own dogma, with the intended goal of using it to villainise the enemy.

If you replace nationalism with partisanship, in very many ways the modern left is far more closely aligned with the vile components of fascism than the republican party, or even Trump supporters. The left have done everything they can do vilify anyone who disagrees with their core beliefs, which they hold are a matter of morale superiority and to which, in their minds, no person of moral substance could ever find disagreeable.

By very definition, conservatives are conservative. When they disagree with someone, they continue to treat them respectfully and move on with their lives, comfortable in the reality that there exists people around them with very different beliefs than their own. The left, on the other hand, do no such thing and yet look in the mirror and convince themselves that they're the better people in all this.

Trump less won this election than the democrats did lose it by arrogantly putting up a candidate with strong ties to the current unpopular administration and whose other policies and attributes did not appeal to the swing voter.

Why cherry-pick per-capita when what matters to the climate is actual output, not output per capita. Lets take Australia, as an example, their total co2 output is around 1% of the world's co2 output. If Australia ceased producing all of its co2, it wouldn't make much difference at all. Per capita figures are just a waste of everyone's time.

Have you heard of Brave? It's a great browser with a built-in ad blocker founded by Brendan Eich, one of the co-founders of Mozilla and the creator of Javascript. I'm not a shill, I swear - I just think it's a great initiative that should be more well known than it is.

The unpaid dev who produces something of value to users of Firefox. Removing the addon doesn't hurt him, and may hurt Firefox if people switch to Brave over this. Mozilla need to make changes to their review process or risk losing users.

And problems like this could still have been avoided if their system required review by a second party before blocking an addon by a developer of good standing who has addons with a huge number of users.

Sure, the individual doing the check might be incompetent, but that doesn't mean that Raymond needed to be bothered by Mozilla about it - they could have handled it internally instead.

I care. I'll probably just switch to Brave instead of either installing this manually (risky) or using the full-blown addon (risky). The value proposition for Firefox has just diminished.