tronald

This is exactly how all companies should have responded. It is so sad (and frightening) to watch so many companies crumble in the face of the new administration's absurdities. 

Now if only Apple Maps hadn't caved on "Gulf of America" or at least had said "Gulf of America (Gulf of Mexico)". 

maciekskontakt said:

lordjohnwhorfin said:

It’s facebook that should be deleted.

I understand your frustration, but your claim is not mature. What should happen is section 230 should be taken away from Facebook (liability protections) and new regulatory laws should imposed on all new BigTech companies. That includes Google, Twitter and Amazon, but also Apple (which may have least of problems to obey from all BigTech companies). Unfortunately, governments would use these regulations to completely uncontrolled political purposes, so it may not be feasible. 

Without section 230 the Internet would bifurcate between parts that would be an unusable mess of unmoderated content (without moderation, all user content forums devolve rapidly into angry crap that overwhelms everything else) and parts that would be essentially devoid of user content. Why? Because if moderation (which is necessary to prevent user content devolving into angry crap) causes the platform to be legally liable for user content, then moderated content will cease to exist so websites would have to choose whether to allow essentially everything (yielding angry crap) or essentially nothing. No company could realistic afford to implement the amount of moderation and the kind of analysis that would be required to include only content that could never open them up to a user-content-related lawsuit. 

It is ironic that someone would demand in a hosted comments section that section 230 should be taken away. 

There should be regulation on the gathering, use, and security of user data. I don't think the US (or the world in general) could ever agree on how to change section 230 into something that could work effectively, because there is no agreement on what "effectively" could even possibly mean. 

cndgoose said:

Just had a thought ... could apple offer an M1 iMac/iPad hybrid with detachable iPad screen?

Apple does kind of sell that. They sell a MacBook that can run iPad apps, and they sell an iPad that can operate relatively seamlessly with documents and applications stored from and running on your Mac. I go back and forth between my iPad, my MacBook and my iMac fairly frequently without all that much friction. Further, the iPad can serve as a MacBook second screen that supports touch (albeit poorly). It just costs $600 more than a MacBook alone. So, the minimum price to buy into that level of the Apple ecosystem is not light on the pocketbook. 

Applications still need to catch up with the model, but one of my primary uses for switching around between devices is Word, and Microsoft very much seems to get the gist of the Apple operating model (which is also very much in keeping with Microsoft's current cloud-driven and subscription-based model). Adobe is slowly getting there, too, but it still has a ways to go, and it probably needs a better way of sharing larger files between devices which is something Microsoft doesn't have to think about as much. Apple is of course already surprisingly seamless, with Safari, TextEdit, Notes, Reminders, Music, Documents, Desktop, passwords, copy/paste, its productivity suite, and plenty more all running about as well on multiple devices (and types of devices) as they run on just one. They probably need to think more about Logic and Final Cut (which also suffer from the file size problem), but even those applications have some nice features for utilizing both device types simultaneously with an iPad providing a virtual touch-based control surface. Further, Garage Band and iMovie work across devices pretty well (though the iPad variant of iMovie is currently pretty underwhelming), and both can serve as starting points for work that is eventually pulled in to Logic and Final Cut.

I do sometimes find myself wanting to touch the screen on my Laptop after spending a bit too long using my iPad for editing something, but the trackpad really is such a better experience for use with macOS that I don't find it that much of a bother switching back. I really don't want to see macOS itself burdened with having to have a compelling touch interface, but there are a few apps that would benefit. Those apps, though, could probably start supporting use of an iPad as a second display, perhaps even as keyword/touch-display combo. 

What I want to see is seamless use of multiple devices in my house for very large files or very large collections of files, without having to transfer through the cloud as an intermediary. That is the one place where hybrids have a serious advantage. It seems entirely fixable, though. Wi-Fi exists everywhere, is fast enough (it is at this point faster than disk drives) and Apple has figured out how to establish convenient and secure connections within a home network. Come on Apple! Solve this one!

Could Apple make a convertible that supports going back and forth between a macOS-style interaction model when a keyboard and touchpad are attached and an iOS-style interaction model when detached? Yes, and their current Xcode application development model could actually make that work surprisingly well sometimes. But, there is a lot more that differentiates a touch-friendly device from a lap or desk friendly one. A big one is that a touch interface probably shouldn't be larger than around 11 inches, but a laptop probably shouldn't be less than 13 or 14 and computer on a desk really shouldn't be less than 24. So, a compromise device is going to suck at one of its use cases. 

I run BitDefender which I presume will find any of these roughly as well as Malwarebytes, but literally the only malware it has ever found is some PC-only malware in some old (obviously junk) E-mail attachments which I would never have clicked on. 

Are there Mac viruses out in the wild that don't require affirmative overrides (including actively accepting security overrides) from the user to get them to run? 

DAalseth said:

JustSomeGuy1 said:

DAalseth said:

I’m very surprised that Macs would be impacted. OS-X/macOS forked off from BSD a very long time ago. This exploit must really go back into the dark ages.

No, about 10 years.

Just because OS X forked off FreeBSD (and NetBSD, which for some reason most people don't realize was a big part of the code base too) a long time ago doesn't mean it doesn't inherit bugs that are much much newer. It keeps up-to-date (or at least not more than a year or three old, sigh) versions of almost all the open-source code it uses, which is a huge part of the OS. And that's good! Older-version bugs are usually more dangerous than newer-version ones.

It may be that Apple hasn't patched it already because some genius there said to himself "hey, we don't even ship sudoedit, so we're not vulnerable!" That of course misses the point that an unprivileged attacker can just create a sudoedit link to sudo. I expect they'll get this fixed soon. It's egregious and easily corrected.

I am surprised that Apple would keep current with the OS packages. I figured once they split, they would keep things in house and proprietary. 

Why wouldn't they keep things up-to-date? The kernel is the primary thing that was forked, and at this point the macOS kernel (which is also used in all their other operating systems) is basically an Apple one-off. But, it produces a more-or-less standard Unix system call framework, threading and process model, and network stack. So, Unix and most Linux stuff can be compiled just fine. And, that stuff isn't Apple's differentiator. It is the graphical application layers that are Apple's differentiator. 

That said, Apple doesn't do that great of a job of keeping their open source Unix/Linux utilities all that up-to-date. They don't view them as a competitive differentiator, so they don't go out of their way to keep them forked and modified for their own purposes. But, they also don't seem to go out of their way to keep them up-to-date either. But that seems more of an attention issue than anything related to ideological or business motives.