Naiyas

I’m “technically” not opposed to this sort of action, forcing Apple (and by inference all others) to open up access to industry standard NFC technology to developers and other payment providers… however, there is potentially one critical flaw in the action.

It is only an antitrust violation if the NFC tech is actually industry standard. So far as I am aware, the NFC tech in an iPhone is integrated directly to the Secure Element in the SoC. It would therefore NOT be an industry standard implementation of NFC and by corollary not subject to antitrust violation legislation.

Either way, how it took 3 years to investigate something that could have been determined in less than a month tells you everything you need to know about the competency of the investigators. It is these needlessly long time lines that undermine public confidence in government of any sort.

rotateleftbyte said:

I see this as the carriers snooping on your internet activity is threatened by this. As they sell that data, they see a loss of revenue and want it banned. If that fails, they'll try increasing prices or throttling or something else.

I would tend to agree with this comment. I am based in the UK currently and my ISP is currently Vodafone. They require a user identifiable log in to access their broadband and it’s become abundantly clear over the last 6 months that they really do not like me running VPNs at all.

My employers laptop VPNs to the office - speed of the connection is capped (but not by my office or my router; I run a VPN network and I also have a few devices that will “relay” too, and I also select my own DNS servers at the connection level. All of these so called “enterprise level features” (as Vodafone support call them) result in speed / connectivity issues even on a “business line”. But use a device without any VPN / relay and the full bandwidth is available. So I’m 100% sure it’s Vodafone’s network and they will throttle any traffic that they cannot analyse and then sell the profile of to a third party.

Once my contract is up I’m moving to an ISP that doesn’t associate my connection with a username and password for access.

@OutdoorAppDeveloper ;
I recall reading that there was a drop in orders with suppliers for every iPhone in history around 3 months after initial release… it’s called the sales cycle and it happens every year.

I actually suspect, and am partially concerned, that certain APIs could become subject to usage commissions in future. There is already plenty of telemetry data that is sent to Apple from our devices and some of it is clearly around what APIs are used and how often so they know which ones to drop over time. It wouldn’t take much to modify this telemetry and add app ID information with it and merge this data into a billing system.

This would be largely transparent to the end user, just as the telemetry data is already today.

AppleInsider said:

The proposed class is vast and includes anyone who purchased an iOS app or app license from Apple, or who made an in-app purchase, from Dec. 29, 2007, through the present.

One pretty fundamental flaw in their argument is they don’t even know when the iOS App Store started. If they can’t get that date right then how many other holes are there in their arguments.

beowulfschmidt said:

AppleInsider said:

Lacking a replaceable battery is standard for smoke and carbon monoxide detectors.

Since when?  Both the upper and lower story smoke detectors in my house, and the CO detector upstairs have batteries that I replace about every six months.  Are new devices entirely disposable or something?

I believe the author of the article is writing from a UK/EU perspective. For many years now it has been a legal requirement that fire safety devices that contain a battery battery (smoke/CO alarms etc) are required to be sealed and have a warranted 10 year lifespan. This means that they cannot have replaceable batteries and therefore become disposable.

I don’t recall the exact details, but I believe it comes down to real world events that showed that such fire safety devices have been to blame for fire deaths as they have either not had their batteries replaced and/or their sensor become ineffective after 10 years. So to force fire safety improvements the batteries limit the life of the device naturally at the point it should be replaced anyway.

Not great for electrical waste (and kind of hypocritical of the EU that originally brought in the regulations) considering it’s views in other areas on the same subject.

The major downside (for me) is that it is almost impossible to find a smart smoke detector that is legally compliant for a 3-storey town house as the smoke detectors are legally required to be mains powered as the primary source with a battery backup and I’ve yet to find a single smart alarm that meets this requirement that is HomeKit compatible.