dewme

Marvin said:

AppleInsider said:

Apple users facing such an attack have a few opportunities to ward off the attack. But, at this time, the notifications cannot be stopped from coming through. 

iOS should really have a feature to stop notification bombing. Even for incoming emails, it can be overwhelming. It should have an option to do aggregate notifications every few minutes and an option to suspend notifications from a particular source. Not to mention Apple's password reset mechanism shouldn't be able to be abused like this, nobody spams resets to themselves over and over so Apple should block the service for the spammer when it's being used like this.

I don’t know why all messaging systems (excluding some VPNs and private links), including emails, texts, phone calls, FTP connections, P2P connections, update services, etc., don’t use some form of a certificate based authentication system to verify the sender’s authenticity. Yeah, this would put a big demand on authentication servers, certificate management (everyone would need a unique PKI certificate), and introduce a small delay in the communication process, but we’ve gone too far with the primitive systems currently in place. The performance of most communication systems has improved significantly in the past few years. Even if you’re still stuck with a slower connectivity service, the extra delay of receiving a message is nothing compared to the massive suckfest you’ll encounter when you’ve been hacked. I’m sure they can find ways to optimize the process, perhaps modeling the certificate processing using a distributed model like DNS.  

On a similar topic, I’ve been struggling to find a way to filter out Apple mail messages based on spoofed sender identifiers that follow a similar pattern, like “PayPal ©”. I’ve been getting numerous emails that follow this pattern, mostly for subscriptions I don’t even have but some I do. Using Apple Mail’s filtering feature is of no avail since the “From” filter doesn’t interpret the spoofed identifier but uses the hidden sender address, which is a randomized address. Sure, I can simply Block each one individually, but I’d like to have a bigger hammer to crush all emails that follow a pattern in the spoofed identifier. I already have hundreds of Blocked senders. To add insult to injury the message content in these phishing emails is one big image that contains a single link to the phisherman’s nefarious website. These images all contain what looks like text, but it’s just an image of text so you can’t filter based on the text either. I know Apple can pull text out of images, but that functionality isn’t part of Apple Mail or the filtering mechanism.

This never ending game of whack-a-mole is getting tiresome. 

I’d be interested in this if it contains all of the sensors needed for sleep tracking. I currently use AutoSleep for sleep tracking. It’s an amazing app. 

Apple's update process is one of the crown jewels of the company. Sure, I'd like to have a little more control over when updates are performed and how they are managed on my devices, but the reliability of Apple's update functionality itself is enviable and without equal for anyone who's had to provide similar (but never quite as good as Apple's) product firmware and software updates for deployed and in-service products. It's been about 16 years since an Apple update "bricked" one of my devices, an iPod Touch. Since it was my first Apple product I wasn't aware of some of the recovery options available to me at the time. I probably could have fixed it myself, but when I brought it into the Apple Store they looked at it, took my case off my iPod, and slapped my case on a brand new replacement iPod. I was in and out of the store in 5 minutes.

The only other time an Apple update failed me was when I installed a Beta 1 version of macOS with APFS on a Fusion drive equipped Mac before Apple had officially recognized that APFS didn't play well with Fusion drives. But that was a Beta thing and the only one you can blame for messing up your machine with a Beta version is yourself. Time Machine rescued me after a total rebuild of the Fusion drive. It took at least one more major release of macOS for Apple to get APFS working correctly with Fusion drives. I've since had no problems. The up side is I learned a lot about Fusion drives in the process, which allowed me to add several more years of useful life to my 1 TB hard-drive-only Mac mini (2014) by adding a 500 GB M.2 SSD and rebuilding the two drives into one 1.5 TB Fusion drive. Huge, huge improvement.

I'm sure Apple considered potential heat issues of running an update on devices that are still in their packaging. Apple has significantly lightened up on their packaging over the past few years. They  don't cocoon their devices in foam or Styrofoam that would seriously trap the heat. The fact that they can power up a packaged iPhone using MagSafe tells us that the gap between the phone and the charging pad must be fairly thin and trap less heat.

Bilking money from US technology firms is proving to be a major for-profit industry in the EU. When are they going to ask SAP to open up their business to third party control?

It’s pretty clear that the ultimate goal of the EU is to drive all of these highly successful US businesses to say F-It to doing any business in the EU. This will allow them to install their own homegrown EU businesses to serve the needs of EU citizens. I’m sure EU citizens will be more than happy to own a Europhone, gather all of their apps via the EuroStore, browse the web using the Eurobrowser, and hook up with their fellow Eurocitizens using Eurobook and Eurotweet. 

mpantone said:

dewme said:

If using all caps is shouting, does no caps mean whispering?

No, it just means you don't care enough about your readers to make your statements more legible and easier to read. The rules of capitalization were developed over centuries for concrete reasons. To mark the start of a sentence, highlight given names, et cetera ad nauseam. These rules weren't just spuriously generated for fun.

These basic rules of written language are even more important when communicating with non-native speakers. It really helps out those people whether it be in business or social communications. Many people who don't have any foreign business dealings or international partnerships don't get this.

Many of today's writers (especially younger ones in casual settings like online interaction) don't particularly have much respect for these rules and their readership. Casualness? Careless? Sloppiness? Disdain? Discourtesy? A combination of these? I have no idea.

However I do know that some people on this planet will judge others by first impressions and that writing is part of these impressions. The discipline needed to learn and follow basic rules of spelling, punctualization, capitalization, correct grammar, etc. really need to be taught at a young age and encouraged by a person's parents not just their teachers.

My first college English professor gave everyone in our "class" a Harbrace College Handbook, 8th Edition, hardcover. I say "class" because it was taught at-sea onboard a Navy cruiser while we were on a long deployment. We were somehow fortunate enough to get a civilian college professor to join us for the entire cruise, which was kind of amazing in itself. That little yellow book never let me down throughout my career when I needed trusted guidance on anything grammar related or pretty much any facet of correct/proper written communication. It was the closest thing to ChatGPT for English that we had back in the pre-Internet and largely pre-general purpose computing days.