auxio

Follow the money. Look at who the biggest shareholder for Epic Games is (aside from Sweeney) and you'll realize who he's a mouthpiece for. Same goes for Musk and the biggest investors in his companies. No idea why people believe anything they have to say.

Mike Wuerthele said:

antiprotest said:

Why are even tech people so faint hearted as to find everything "creepy"? I see this word come up a lot in similar contexts. One might have no use for this product but it is far from creepy. This is nothing. 

Can't imagine why folks that have multiple decades in tech might have opinions on dumb tech.

Or folks who have seen the ideals of the internet being a place for free and open thinking turned into the same sort of agenda-driven, consent manufacturing machine for the rich and powerful as radio and television has been in the past.

The only time that real social change happens is when people are actually gathering face-to-face in groups and developing their own culture and ideas about the world. It's far  easier to make up things about other people when you don't actually speak face-to-face with those people. That's essentially what the modern internet is doing: keeping people isolated from each other, which allows prejudice and racism to abound (and be facilitated by bots and algorithms), and guess who has something to gain from people being isolated and fighting one another?

So yes, this is just another step in the "creepiness" and systems of control which are being used for power and profit. Moving it from social media platforms to direct personal contact.

Pauly75 said:

appleinsideruser said:

Great to read Chip. I love the detail of bodging an extra address line. Gotta ask, why though? ߘ⦬t;/div>

I agree. When I first saw the article's name, I thought upgrading would mean putting the core of a Mac Mini or laptop into the 1st gen Apple TV case or something similar

Agreed. While this looks like a fun project, and the result gives you something a bit sleeker, using an old Mac Mini with a Front Row remote would be a lot simpler. Wouldn't be surprised if someone has ported that old AppleTV media interface (or something similar) to MacOS.

coolfactor said:

ssfe11 said:

Yup a Wall Gardened type of security does have its advantages. 

The Walled Garden is not about security, but convenience. In computer science, it's well-known that the more convenience you have, the less security you intrinsically have. There's a direct correlation between the two. This is why Apple's business model has been so noticeable, because it flies in the face of that correlation. Apple users enjoy both increased security and increased convenience.

The security itself is rooted in the foundational architecture of the hardware and software.

Funny, convenience vs security was never a paradigm I ever encountered in any of my computing science courses. Aside from perhaps the inconvenience of passwords/authentication.

Security really boils down to analyzing all of the attack vectors on a given system and designing the architecture so that it protects against those. This is completely independent of how simple or complex the graphical user interface is, and speaks more to underlying architecture like sandboxing the different components, detecting buffer overflows, and similar. Obviously the larger the number of user/external inputs, the more attack vectors there are. But an iPhone and an Android phone would be nearly identical in that regard.

Someone mentioned UNIX, which indeed was designed to be more secure given that its origin comes from mainframe computers with multiple users that need to be protected from each other (as compared to DOS/Windows which had no such requirements). However, both OS X and Android have UNIX at the core (BSD vs Linux), so it's a bit of a moot point.

The real concern here is most likely to do with how much data iOS and Android collect. Including the bundled apps like the browser, email, maps, messages, etc. Almost every company I know is vetting software these days to determine what kind of data is being harvested, and where that data is going.

gatorguy said:

auxio said:

gatorguy said:

auxio said:

gatorguy said:

auxio said:

gatorguy said:

luxuriant said:

I understood that Apple's implementation of RCS won't initially do E2E encryption, as it's not part of the official standard, but, rather, a Google-proprietary add-on for Android. Apple says it will work to get some form of E2E encryption (maybe not Google's) into the standard, at which point it will implement it. If my information's out-of-date or incorrect, please put me right!

Apple made one comment about it, and it was not a clear commitment to getting encryption added to the RCS standard. Their comment only referred to improving the security of RCS and working with "GSMA members" to do so, not necessarily doing so within the GSMA standards group nor making it end-to-end encryption. In essence, they stopped short of committing, and as far as I know, they have not made a comment since.

Google, for their part, has tried working with GSMA for nearly a decade to set an E2EE standard, to no avail. Google had to take it upon itself to enable it for the benefit of Google Android users.

E2EE isn't on the GSMA priority list based on appearances, and I don't know why Apple would be encouraging it either since it would make RCS as a service across all providers as private and secure as iMessage and thus cost them a marketing point. 

And let's put all the information out on the table to avoid marketing bias. Google's implementation of E2EE is proprietary to Android, and thus isn't completely open for anyone to use either. So it's using the same marketing point against competing Linux-based phones.

Well, of course it is. GSMA won't implement it, so Google can do what it can at its own expense or wait. I can just about guarantee that if GSMA makes it a requirement in the standard, Google won't hesitate to drop committing its own servers and money to the "proprietary to Android" version. There's no love in covering at their response for what the GSMA and carriers should be doing.

Only one of the two duopolists considers E2EE to be a competitive advantage, and may not want to see it enabled on RCS. 

So why didn't they make it open source/open protocol and allow Linux-based phone manufacturers to be interoperable?

On Google servers at Google's expense? 

And there we go. Same reason why Apple doesn't just open up the Messages protocol and allow other manufactures to use their servers for free.

No one suggests they do. 

Beeper for one was making lots of noise about it. And I certainly remember plenty of people holding it against Apple over the past 10 years on these forums. I have no doubt I could find countless more in the Xitterverse.