uroshnor

Johan42 said:

Radio_Signal said:

ARM processors on Macs in 5-4-...

ARM sucks donkey balls so I don’t know why you’d want that in a Mac. All y ou’ll ever gain, if anything, is a small increase in battery life over Intel’s more powerful X86.

The A12X in the iPad Pro , is faster than the intel CPUs in about 90-95% of the x86 PCs sold at the moment. There are only 4 Mac CTO configs faster than the iPad Pro.

elijahg said:

DuhSesame said:

elijahg said:

lkrupp said:

Painful ride ahead for those who don’t accept change well. I’ve been riding the Apple rollercoaster since 1982. The worst change for me was the move to Intel processors in Macs as I had bought into the RISC vs CISC propaganda and Intel was the enemy. But I got over it. 

It's not about "accepting change," some things have no alternative; perhaps you could try being less arrogant occasionally. People have setups that require things like the hardware RAID, and may have spent a lot of money for such a system. There are plenty of places still using PPTP too, and "accepting change" means those people will no longer be able to connect to PPTP VPN servers, often company ones. This again just results in a worse experience for Mac users.

Yeah, Microsoft did that a lot, look how much a pile Windows is.

There's a difference between keeping cruft like 16-bit compatibility and dropping features a number of people use. PPTP support was actually dropped in Mojave, and students at the entire university campus had to hold off on upgrading while they tested some third party Forticlient system, which they now use. I'd much rather a first party thing than traffic travelling across some unknown third party's servers. Yes there was a few months warning that Apple would drop it when they should have tested it, but a couple of months isn't really that long for a big organisation like a university to fully test something entirely new.

Specifically regarding PPTP...

you need to pull up out of the weeds and take a bigger picture view than “Apple dropped support in Mojave and only gave 3 months notice”.

Whilst that’s true, they announced deprecation of PPTP 2 years prior with Sierra.

its irretrievably broken as a VPN protocol, and there are complete, prebuilt tool chains that can crack PPTP traffic.

The theoretical problems were identified nearly 20 years ago, and by 2013ish, people had built simple to use tools to bust it wide open.

These are fundamental flaws in PPTP, not simply implementation bugs.

Using it in 2019, is not defensible from a security perspective, as it’s been broken for so long, and known to be broken at a theoretical level for even longer. Using today is arguably worse than doing nothing, as you a pretending something is secure for theatric purposes knowing it just isn’t any use at all.

Positioning it as “Apple did not give organizations enough time to migrate” when they have a 2 year lead time before dropping it, the thing they need to migrate off is a dumpster fire that is well known to be deeply flawed & vulnerable to widely available attacker tools for the better part of a decade is not a reasonable criticism of Apple, but actually a very deep criticism of that uni’s IT team. 

k2kw said:

sflocal said:

My first thought when I read the headline was "Are people really buying this POS?!"..

Then I realized it was just reviewers, who didn't have to pay for them... thank god!  Seriously... who is the sheep if anyone buys this crap, especially at $2K?

Samsung already is a cesspool occupant as far as I'm concerned, yet even I am surprised that they put out such garbage - and expensive garbage - expecting it to be anywhere near ready for the masses.

I cracked up when Marques Brownlee mistaken part of the screen as a screen protector and ruined the display after attempting to peel it off!  LOL!

Pure shit.  Watch Samsung quietly remove it from market in a few weeks.  But hey, they were first!!! /s

Samsung is evidently good enough that Apple uses their OLED displays in the X series which they spent years developing.   I hope they become a supplier of folding displays to Apple but it will take at least 5 years.   

As a component vendor, Samsung are fine. Why ? because as the client buying the components at scale, buying say millions of screens, or millions of DRAM chips, you can set the balance between quality and price, and hold their feet to the fire if they can't meet it. Samsung isn't going to say "like it or lump it" to a single, multi-billion dollar customer. In this kind of situation, you see the best work out of Samsung.

Many of Samsung's products are designed/optimised to look great at the point of sale - sometimes at the expense of how they work in practice (eg over-saturated screen colour, or features that only work in specific demo Apps for Samsung's version of Android)

If you buy a TV from them, or a smartphone from them, they can totally do that, and play the edge of what is allowable under consumer protection law (because most people won't exercise their rights). This is the situation in which you typically see the worst out of Samsung (unless you are an employee and then we get into working conditions and carcinogens in the workplace)

So the article does not really describe likely what’s is happening.

Right now , iOS reads NDEF format over NFC, and can respond in a few other formats. (And its pretty strict, it doesn’t do Smart Posters for example, which are a modification of NDEF).

E-Passports can be encoded in as few different ways, but most are BAC encoded. This means the NFC data is an encrypted blob, and the encryption key is derived from the data on the photo page.

That’s why at a check in kiosk, you usually put your e-Passport face down and the photo page is being scanned concurrently with reading the chip.

If you try it today, the Phone realists the epassport is there, but it rejects the encrypted data as invalidly formatted.

Apple doesn’t need to open up access to the NFC subsystem to read an e-passport, they just need to add an API that supports reading the common encrypted passport formats (eg reading a BAC e-Passport with a supplied key). If they were being super slick, they’d have an API that extracted the key material from an image of the photograph page in the vision framework, and you could pass that straight on to the CoreNFC code.

If they can do that its super-slick flow, and may even enable Apple Wallet to hold government grade identity cards.

lkrupp said:

So is this for iPhone and Watch owners only or are Android users included? If it’s Apple only will there be claims of anti-competitive collusion between John Hopkins and Apple. I say this only with semi sarcasm because these days Apple seems to be in everybody’s crosshairs. So it wouldn’t surprise me if such a claim was made.

It’s Apple only at the moment.

Android does not have a generalised high level framework to do this with - you’d have to code something specific to the NFC implementation on each specific Android device you wanted to support. Not all of them have NFC, so you’d only be able to target some Android vendors anyhow.

The plus side is that Android vendors don’t impose the control on NFC that Apple does, and you can likely put pretty much anything you like in an NFC subsystem tomorrow.