261–270 of 458 posts
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The discount for what? There are no ads on the Mac.
> If the option was a mac with privacy vs a mac without privacy but $10 cheaper OP was comparing the Kindle with ads discount to an imaginary Mac without privacy discount.
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> has "the market" shown any serious signal that it cares about privacy? Depends on what you consider a serious signal of care. If 'voting with you wallet' is the measure, increasing levels of income inequality, stagnant wages, weakening employee rights through the gig-economy, etc. are effectively taking away that choice, as most market participants cannot afford to make the choice. Also, what is the paid alternativ…
Income inequality and stagnant wages etc are not the consequences of Apple and Google.
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You mean bad certificates rather than applications. OCSP can be locally cached, and Apple's implementation does exactly that. But eventually you'll have to refresh the cache and then the implementation needs to be fault tolerant (Apple's wasn't). OCSP leaks what vendors your installed applications are from. The list of leaked certificates changes daily, so any good implementation is going to check again at least seve…
> OCSP can be locally cached, and Apple's implementation does exactly that. In the earlier HN thread when the server was offline, it was said that Apple only cached OCSP results for 5 minutes. Is that not true? If it is true, I don't think that's what GP is asking for as far as local caching.
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>that's been known for a while now Ask a representative sample and I wager only a very small percentage of people are actually aware of (1) the breaches of privacy that are happening (e.g. your TV sending mic dumps and screenshots of what you're watching), and (2) the hard consequences of those invasions (that is, beyond the immediate fact that you're being snooped upon), like higher insurance premiums on auto and he…
To be honest I would expect if you told people "your TV will report what you're watching" they will think "wait, doesn't my cable company already know what I'm watching???" If you tell them it's the manufacturer this time in addition to the cable company, I'm not sure how many would freak out over the extra entity.
I'm not sure how you'd measure it, but there seems to be a huge disconnect between techie privacy advocates and the rest of the world. The former keeps claiming the latter just doesn't understand, or needs to be informed, but I just don't think that's realistic.
I think it's pretty common knowledge that these companies are harvesting all imaginable data to serve users more / better advertisements and to keep them on the site, yet usage continues to grow despite all the scandals. I think advocates need to make more convincing claims to everyone else that they're being harmed.
It kind of feels like there's a bit too much noise around this topic. I'm getting the same feeling I did years ago when it was discovered that the iPhone had a historical database of all the locations you'd been to. There were rather a lot of articles about how Apple were "tracking you everywhere you went" and so on. The reason it's similar – they are both dumb, technically bad, and privacy-compromising decisions, an…
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They are, but the difference is that we can fix technical issues, or at least improve them. We can (mostly) agree about what's right and wrong and what's better or worse. Political issues on the other hand, just end up antagonizing us ever more. We argue endlessly, go on countless tangents and nobody agrees on anything because we see the very issues under different lights, experiences, values and cultures. I am tired…
I think this is a terrible attitude. We can improve political issues and we do it by defending our opinions in the public sphere, which has the power to change others' opinions. If you don't work to present your ideas to the world in the best possible light then you will just allow other, weaker ideas to become more convincing in comparison, thus doing a disservice to anyone who could have been convinced otherwise. I…
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Since they don’t identify specific apps you use, so what’s your point?
As far as I understand it, most vendors ship a single digit amount of apps. If you start the Tor browser, everyone on your network will know. If you start Firefox, everyone on your network will know you started a Mozilla product, most likely Firefox. If you start the Zoom client, everyone on your network knows you started the Zoom client. I don't think the "it's only the vendor" defense of Apple is any good.
FYI -- Both Firefox and Safari use OCSP to check server certificates. Anybody sniffing your network could figure out which websites you visit. Chrome still uses CRL; it trades precision for performance.
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> syncing what page you've read up to in a book (a feature many people find crucial!), cannot really be divorced from having the raw data to create server-side metrics about people's reading habits. Sure it can. You encrypt the data so the client can read it and the server can't. When you add a new device, you e.g. scan a QR code on your old device so that it can add the decryption key to the new device, and the serv…
That scenario is addressed in the next few paragraphs.
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Coulda woulda shoulda isn’t evidence.
I'm having trouble figuring out your meaning in this context. Care to explain?
I sometimes wonder if the mods won't end up banning "political" talk on HN. Because these days everything becomes political, even if it really is a technical issue. Case to the point: online signature check was a technical decision, to fight malware. It was implemented similarly by other OS vendors (Microsoft) and it's been this way for years. Now we discover that it has the unfortunate side-effect that it lessens pr…
Computers have become a gateway to the digital world, which makes up a large part of our lives. And Apple is a huge player that has the power to shape the future of computing. Apple's vision of computing is on a trajectory where the end game is clear: Users have no control over their devices and will only be doing what Apple allows them to do. This is the case on iOS already, and macOS will be there in a few years.
Some say: Decide with your purse. If you don't like Apple's vision, then don't buy their products. But this argument is like saying "This is how we handle things in country X, if you don't like it, move somewhere else." Some of us have invested lots in tools and software in Apple land, so changing platforms will take some time. But even if we can change, Apple is shaping the future of this industry, in a way that it restricts freedom and limits options. And this is not a future we should accept. Instead we should be opposing and fighting it.