uroshnor

asdasd said:

kimberly said:

I'm not a USA citizen so just interested to read about the negative views on congressional hearings generally from several other contributors rather than specific discussion about privacy breaches.  What I take from the posts is that there is a bunch of senators on one side of the 'table' that are calling out the 'contrite' person sitting on the other side of the table (but everyone knows which side of the table has the real power).

Where real power sits at a table doesn't really change between countries ...

Years ago, arguably the most powerful man in Australia, media mogul Kerry Packer was in the spotlight for the tax practices of his company, Australian Consolidated Press.  MPs could hardly contain themselves when they finally managed to get him to appear before a parliamentary committee (equivalent of a congressional committee).

Mr Packer stared down committee member after committee member.  Not much about the tax practices of Australian Consolidated Press was elicited except Mr Packer's now infamous statement that "of course" he tried to pay less tax.

"I don't know anybody that doesn't minimise their tax.  I'm not evading tax in any way shape or form.  Of course I'm minimising my tax.  If anybody in this country doesn't minimise their tax they want their head read.  As a government I can tell you you're not spending it that well that we should be paying extra."

I still think that old media has far more power than FB, which is basically a collection of people individually posting stuff. Yes the data breach was bad, but CA had no measurable or provable  influence on the election or Brexit. 

In fact the war against FB is part of a larger war against non MSM opinion in the West. A war against the internet in general. 

Over a really long period of time, literally hundreds of years, rules around MSM behaviour were established. Limitations on cross media ownership, opinion pieces versus journalism , libel laws etc Not uniform globally , but most western democracies fell in to a band of these actual and defacto/convention limits on media power.

Facebook, Google and modern social media are less than 20 years old - and that framework has not caught up with them yet. They are just as unruly as 19th century propaganda pamphlets , just as unregulated, but far more effective at reach and engagement. Facebook is barely 10 years old - it’s not crazy that it disappears - plenty of businesses fail, and Facebook is not too big to

I don’t see it as a war on the internet, just on a few robber barons who are using the internet 

cropr said:

Owning an app developing company I do understand the argument of France.  The complaint is that app developers for iOS and Android are forced to accept the rigid rules of these stores.  If you develop for e.g. Mac you can choose to use the Mac app store or you can choose you own pricing policy and distribution channel.

The technical rules for an app development are not the issue: they ensure that the user experience is great.   The commercial rules are a different story.  As an app developer I cannot give discount during launch (to create a critical mass for my app), I cannot use coupons,  I cannot do cross selling (you bought my first app, now you can a discount on my second), I cannot freely define prices, I have stupid currency restrictions ...  These limitations can seriously impact the profitability of an app. 

Off course there are ways to circumvent this.  Since 2016 all my new apps are free to download.  They use data that is stored on a paying cloud service where I have full control.  Very similar to the web based client I developed for PC and Mac.  In this way I even get rid of 30% cut Apple and Google are asking.   I do have to provide my own paying service, which I did anyhow for the web based clients and which costs about 2.5% iso. 30% Apple and Google are charging.   But this scheme is only possible for cloud based services where the real value is in the cloud data.

If France would go to Vestager, the famous European Commissioner in charge of competition, France might have a point.  If the EU commission finds that a mobile app developer has no choice but to accept the commercial rules of the App Store and/or the Play Store, these commercial rules might be perceived as anti competitive behaviour.  The fact that App Store and Play store have very similar commercial rules, might even be interpreted as forming a cartel, which is not allowed

So some of the things you assert do not seem to be true based on my experience:

- yes you don’t set an exact price, you select a price tier 
- you can change pricing , and change it for specific time windows, so if you want to offer a launch discount you can
- you can bundle apps into a discounted bundle
- you can cross sell to new versions , although IAP is the most effective way of doing this

The 30% is not a card processing fee, that covers App Review, hosting, download bandwidth and a bunch of other things a credit card transaction does not provide.

cropr said:

Once a month I go with the team mates at work to a nice restaurant to have our lunch.  One of us pays the total bill and the others pay him/her back.  Currently we use the person to person payment functionality that is developed by a consortium of all Belgian banks and that is built in the different mobile banking apps of these banks.  This is a great solution: it is free of charge for the user, it works with any Belgian bank account on any smartphone (iOS, Android and even Windows Mobile). 

I don't see any added value of a system that will only work with iOS devices and with the banks that subscribed to Apple Pay.  Although I have an iPhone, and iPad and Macs, I will never consider a person to person payment system where I am not sure I can use it versus a system where I am 100% sure that I can use it, even if the user interface of the latter might be not as smooth.

One of the things to keep in mind is that compared to the rest of the world , in many areas of  the US is one of the most technologically backward countries on the planet - because their labor laws are so “flexible” - labor is cheap, competition is nonexistent, and there are many many jobs that are just manual paper shuffling/ticket stamping , that no longer exist in other countries due to higher minimum wages making digitization & automation worthwhile. 

eg when I was at uni in the late 80’s , our student ID cards functioned as a virtual cash card in the cafeteria, printing, room access etc with a proprietary RFID system , but the UX was not very far from today’s contactless systems - it’s just 30 years earlier 

The US is still stuck in some user hostile, inefficient bizzaro world ; eg I tried to buy something at Starbucks at the SFO international terminal , and found out they don’t support payment by foreign cards. At the international terminal of an airport.

if you are from outside the US, many of these things are somewhat Meh, but yet are real innovation in the US market

boltsfan17 said:

wizard69 said:

Given that Apples phones are also made in China they aren't anymore secure.    It might take a bit of work but installation of compromised chips is entirely possible

It's more than just selling phones for Huawei. They want to get into the lucrative telecom equipment market in the U.S. as well. Carriers here spend over 30 billion a year in telecom equipment. 

wizard69 said:

Given that Apples phones are also made in China they aren't anymore secure.    It might take a bit of work but installation of compromised chips is entirely possible

I’ve forgotten the exact number, and it probably varies by model, but iPhone components are made by over 200 suppliers in over 40 countries.

Sure, final assembly is done in China, but that represents $5 -$10 of the final price. By $ value of the final product, it would arguably be more correct to describe the iPhone as Japanese or American.

given Apple is not using someone else’s spare parts bin, and is cutting its own silicon, and for critical components like Secure Enclave and TouchID/FaceID the communications between modules are internally encrypted on the logic board as a defence against physical attacks, it is incredibly difficult for a bad actor to make compromised parts and inject them to the manufacturing process, without them failing QA.

its much easier to do this to other vendors using generic parts.

keep in mind Apple’s building 200-250 million phones a year, and the QA process for that had to be very very automated. This makes it hard to inject fake parts, Most other vendors are making < 10% of that volume of their high end models (GS8 was being outsold by iPhone by about 9:1 last time I checked) and likely have more manual processes that are more vulnerable to subversion.

Kuyangkoh said:

Well well, Apple its time to buy the company that built parts for Iphone....ie oled, memory etc and see how Korean corrupt govt reacts

Apple can’t afford it. Samsung’s component business is just another part of a sprawling, massive conglomerate - finance/banking/construction/cars/healthcare/Ships/etcetc .The whole thing is something like 15% of South Korea’s economy . All in the 4 big chaebol in SK are something like 40% of their economy - such concentration of ownership does not happen much elsewhere and there is a whif of truth to what is good for Samsung is good for SK, that enables behaviours that elsewhere would be viewed as corrupt or protectionist