StrangeDays

gatorguy said:

longfang said:

LexerArray said:

I’m not so sure I agree with the idea of barring them from their in app purchases, but the 30% commission has been unrealistic for a long time. When you think about companies like Spotify, Facebook Marketplace, and Netflix having to pay those, it’s understandable why there is consumer backlash. 

They have negotiated lower rates with certain companies such as Amazon, but even this practice opens the door to unfair practices that might benefit some companies over others. There is probably a solution that benefits all parties involved, and that probably involves opening the door for much lower commissions for those kinds of recurring subscriptions, which would reduce the demand for more sweeping legislation (as SK has done) to begin with. But regardless of what they do in response to this, I do think that deeper changes to the App Stores are coming. It’s pretty much inevitable at this point. 

The consumer doesn’t care about the 30%. The developer probably does. But to the consumer they don’t see the 30% and this it’s a nonissue as far as they are concerned. 

I guess that's not a universal feeling. There's a plethora of posts in this thread arguing in favor (or not) of the 30% and posted by non-developers. 

Kuyangkoh said:

lkrupp said:

9secondkox2 said:

Good 

the whole thing is wrong. 

“Oh. There’s a new disease. So we must track you. And we need to know your movements as well as those of your contacts.” RIIIIGHT… that’s going to end well… 

Forget HIPAA. Forget privacy. Not to mention potential abuse of something like this. 

This kind of thing did not happen with HIV/AIDS, note the flu, nor pneumonia, nor anything. All of a sudden, a née deadly disease is out and we are supposed to happily forget our humanity so that people who tell us a different story every day can monitor us like lab rats. 

No thanks. 

Yeah, right, whatever. Except that that attitude most likely killed tens of thousands of people who might have survived otherwise. Unless, of course, the pandemic is a hoax? Is it a hoax? Did Trump win the election?

I thought Trump acknowledged the Chinese virus first and he was belittled as racist?? When he cancels flights….and whats got to do the apps w elections

anantksundaram said:

tedz98 said:

The general public has no understanding of what a file hash is. So the techies at Apple have no understanding of how the general public perceives what they are doing. They just think Apple is scanning their phone. I’m not a huge Bill Maher fan, but I agree with him here. It’s a slippery slope that Apple is embarking on.

People wouldn't get so bent out of shape if Apple didn't wear the "privacy! privacy! privacy!" mantra on its sleeve. Cook kept shouting about it from every damn rooftop he could find. 

It's the sheer, seemingly blatant hypocrisy of it that rankles, rings hollow for a lot of people. Including me. Why? It's from a company that refused to break into a terrorist's phone despite all manner of strong-arming from the governments of the world (a stance that many of us, on principle, agreed with, even though that was not easy). 

ErikSomething said:

mcdave said:

ErikSomething said:

Apple’s story about calculating hashes of pictures doesn’t add up. If they, as they claim, only wants to target the photos that hit iCloud they could just as well have done that the cloud and nobody would have been the wiser. Yet they choose to do it upstreams on the users’ phones. -That is odd! I can see two possible reasons. One being that they want to save some CPU cycles from their servers. Hashing isn’t a big deal and I see little support for that option. The other is that, as everyone keeps pointing out, Apple is establishing a snooping platform that they willy-nilly can updated with a new iOS patch to do whatever kind of shady surveillance tasks they, or somebody else, wants them to do. Effectively turning an iPhone into an iSnoop. I find that to be the most likely reason. 

I don’t like private companies acting like law enforcement agencies because they are not subject to transparency, the bill of right, court orders etc. A framework that has taken us hundreds of years to get properly tuned. That is all being pushed aside with moves like this one where Apple just turns on the mikes. That irks me. I find it especially despicable when it comes from a company that continuously brag about how they value user privacy and I company I have admired for close to forty years. 

Your argument makes no sense as it would be easier to update server-side scanning than on-device scanning without the user knowing.
The privacy concern isn’t with scanning (as all devices scan libraries) it’s with reporting the results. The only thing Apple’s system will report is a large collection of verified CSAM images. Can the same be guaranteed for the other services?

That is exactly the point I was making. Apple has all the information required to carry out CSAM hashing in the cloud. They don't need to have it done on the device. Why on earth do they have to install these components on our phones? Unless of course there is more at play that the 'it's for the children' argument they keep pushing. My view is that they have received a combined governmental order and a gag order to install an on-device spying framework. What do you think? 

baconstang said:

Looks like they caught this jerk without installing spyware on his phone.

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2020/01/09/apples-scanning-icloud-photos-for-child-abuse-images/

…what they’re working on now is making the check happen on your phone prior to upload, so that your iCloud stuff is fully E2E, which it isn’t currently. The butthurts don’t comprehend this.