181–190 of 261 posts
The article's premise does not make sense. This stuff happens despite the tight control, not because of it. If it was uncurated, it would be a cesspool like the Google play store (or ...shudder... the "competing" stores). Having a paid app that reads QR codes is not necessarily a scam. The article admits that 2/3 of the apps they reported were taken down. The article claims: "If consumers were to have access to alter…
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This discussion is definitely about Apple's monopoly on Ios app distribution. If Apple were to let others distribute apps on the platform, people wouldn't complain as much about their broken store. They'd just use the store that they liked better.
Soooooo by opening up the store the scammers would disappear. Makes sense to me.
Of course, that wouldn't be good for Apple: Apple would inevitably have to throw out some of the legit apps in the course of QA and weather more criticism; Apple would lose that revenue and their vig; and Apple would no longer have as many apps in the app store.
Like Amazon, Apple has demonstrated that they prefer that some of their customers get fleeced, as long as they get their cut.
"1 million apps and untold billions in revenue, but only 2% of the top apps are scammy... you can figure out which ones, because we didn't bother.."
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> I also think it would open a whole can of worms Absolutely. Apple should be afraid of holding the gatekeeper position. Anyone should. When people can install and use whatever they want, safety becomes their responsibility. They should open up their platform and let people do their own due dilligence. If they assume that responsibility and then neglect it, they absolutely can and should be blamed for any problems.
Yes and likewise, car manufacturers should remove seatbelts and airbags. They simply encourage reckless driving, and by giving the false sense of security / assuming the gatekeeper role, they should be liable for any accident.
https://www.theverge.com/2015/10/7/9470551/volvo-self-drivin...
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The Apple review process is not in any way equivalent or even similar to seat belts and airbags. Not even the government can be fully blamed for bad drivers since people don't actually need a driver's license in order to drive.
Punishing companies for adding protections to their products is an insanely backwards incentive. May as well turn off sandboxing, and lock screens. If they ever break, it’d be a liability!
Protections? Encryption is protection. Address space randomization is protection. This Apple review process? This is just humans failing to do what's expected of them. Also known as negligence.
The worst thing is, people have this belief that Apple is somehow protecting them, so they offload the critical thinking to Apple and lower their own guards. For example, a person thought he was getting a legitimate Bitcoin wallet app, but turns out it was a fake and he lost his life savings [1]. edit: to be clear, I'm not blaming Apple for not stopping these scams, at their scale, it's just practically impossible to…
I have sympathy for the person in this story, but I think shifting the blame to Apple in this case is ludicrous. I'm still somewhat shaking my head that someone went through all of the trouble of using a hardware wallet, and then entered his key words into the first app he downloaded. If anything I think this story is just a prime example of why irreversible crypto transactions are an absolute nightmare for the gener…
The worst thing is, people have this belief that Apple is somehow protecting them, so they offload the critical thinking to Apple and lower their own guards. For example, a person thought he was getting a legitimate Bitcoin wallet app, but turns out it was a fake and he lost his life savings [1]. edit: to be clear, I'm not blaming Apple for not stopping these scams, at their scale, it's just practically impossible to…
> I'm not blaming Apple for not stopping these scams Why not? You should blame them. They have positioned themselves as the gatekeepers. Why? To extract profit from application developers. However, such a powerful position also comes with expectations and responsibilities. They should absolutely not be allowed to get away with gross negligence. We absolutely must blame them every single time they fail to keep malicio…
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I agree, I think they should help him, but I also think it would open a whole can of worms. The fact is, no matter how much time/energy/effort they spend, they will never eliminate all scams, scams would just become more and more sophisticated. This doesn't mean, they should just give up, but having been through the review process, they are already doing quite a bit. So that would mean, they will make it much harder…
> I also think it would open a whole can of worms Absolutely. Apple should be afraid of holding the gatekeeper position. Anyone should. When people can install and use whatever they want, safety becomes their responsibility. They should open up their platform and let people do their own due dilligence. If they assume that responsibility and then neglect it, they absolutely can and should be blamed for any problems.
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Because Trezor doesn't control the iOS app store?
What purpose does a hardware wallet serve? What security does it offer?
It also enables you to export those private keys so that you can keep a backup in the event of a hardware failure, because all hardware eventually fails.
It doesn’t lock you into their platform / ecosystem exclusively. It doesn’t prevent you from using that backup elsewhere.
> Simon Willison, a software engineer and a former iOS developer [...] owns a Samsung television and went to the App Store on his phone to install the accompanying Samsung remote control app called “SmartThings.” An app called “Smart Things” popped up, claiming to be a remote for Samsung televisions. Willison paid $19 for the app. It turns out the app was pretending to the be the genuine Samsung product. His mistake,…
I've met quite a number of developers that somehow barely have the skills of my grandma using a PC outside of their daily development tasks. Ive seen multiple help desk tickets back in my help desk days where developers got someone to email saying their PC was broken when it was just turned off. My point being a developer does not necessarily make this person somehow less susceptible to app store scams.