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Ask HN: What Apple alternatives are you switching to?

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Re: Ask HN: What Apple alternatives are you switching to?

#211

Post by istingray »

ravenstine wrote: post #46

Is the CSAM an issue for macOS? That would be my only concern since I do not own an iPhone. Honestly, as much as I go to extreme lengths to limit invasions of my privacy, short of going full Stallman, it would take a lot for me to chuck my M1 MacBook Air. I know people say they have a non-Apple laptop that is as good, but that has not been my experience. Every PC laptop I have owned has ended up being a pile of crap…

Yes, an issue for MacOS

"These features are coming later this year in updates to iOS 15, iPadOS 15, watchOS 8, and macOS Monterey."

https://www.apple.com/child-safety/

Re: Ask HN: What Apple alternatives are you switching to?

#212

Post by scoopertrooper »

IncRnd wrote: post #191
scoopertrooper wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, I think people are just getting a little too worked up over this whole thing. Apple computes a hash of each image you upload to iCloud then check it against a list of CP hashes. Of all the things in the world to get worked up over, this is ridiculous. I get it, the mechanism they're using has apparent flaws, and maybe some whacko could somehow get access to your phone and start uploading things that trick th…

> Exactly, I think people are just getting a little too worked up over this whole thing. Apple computes a hash of each image you upload to iCloud then check it against a list of CP hashes. If that is what is supposed to happen, then it makes no sense for any new code to run on the device! > Of all the things in the world to get worked up over, this is ridiculous. Well, it is not crazy to get worked up over Apple sayi…

> If that is what is supposed to happen, then it makes no sense for any new code to run on the device!

The new code calculates the hash as part of the upload process. The comparison of the hash against known CP hashes happen on the server.

> Well, it is not crazy to get worked up over Apple saying they will check uploads to iCloud by checking what's on your phone - instead of simply adding code to iCloud.

They're still doing the checks in iCloud, but the hash is being computed on the client.

Re: Ask HN: What Apple alternatives are you switching to?

#213

Post by bengale »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #194
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #26

To be honest... None. It's a choice. You might wholly disagree, but recent events aren't enough to get me to switch yet, because I think the competition has too many tradeoffs. I can get my photos scanned against a CSAM database... or I can have Google tracking my location constantly regardless of what they say (as they've been proven to be misleading in the past)... or I can use a Linux phone and say goodbye to batt…

It's only a matter of time before Google starts doing the same thing. I can't imagine Google wont do it eventually.

I don't think they will. They already scan it all in the cloud, and the benefit of doing it on device is for user privacy, that's not something google gives a shit about.

Re: Ask HN: What Apple alternatives are you switching to?

#214

Post by withinboredom »

sigmar wrote: post #94
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has been scanning photos for CSAM for... what, almost a decade now? Also, as an iPhone user, contrary to the recent Hacker News fight, I actually view this CSAM scanning with a sign of hope, because this hints that we could get end-to-end encryption on iCloud Storage. The CSAM scanning is rumored to be just a prerequisite to get the government to shut up with their biggest critique of E2E, so that Apple can th…

Oh yes, I'm sure the FBI will be satisfied with using the backdoor to only find CSAM, they definitely will not use the access for 'anti-terrorism' and drug enforcement. That sounds just like the FBI. What good is E2E encryption when they can scan your client with a backdoor? All Apple is doing with this hashing is giving themselves plausible deniability when this access gets abused down the road. "Oh we didn't know t…

Yes, we are one warrant away from just sending all data to the FBI using this system.

Re: Ask HN: What Apple alternatives are you switching to?

#215

Post by Yeri »

zepto wrote: post #146
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of people at this company, and my news feed doesn't diverge enough to account for all of their varied google searches.

No, but it would be easy to tell that you associate with your co-worked by correlating Bluetooth beacons, which many apps do for exactly this purpose.

More realistically, your co-worker googled it on their phone. They also email/chat/sms/call you once in a while, so they know you're connected.

Now, it's only logical that you may share certain interests, so why not show ads for things they bought/googled for to their contacts?

Re: Ask HN: What Apple alternatives are you switching to?

#216

Post by macksd »

imwillofficial wrote: post #184
system16 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's less about privacy and more about what the invading actor will/can actually do. People are less concerned about the Chinese government's reach vs. the NSA or other three letter agencies in the US. I suppose if you are important enough to the Chinese government whatever they have on you could be used as blackmail, but most 'regular' people don't fall into that category.

> People are less concerned about the Chinese government's reach vs. the NSA Wait what? You’re 180 degrees wrong.

Of the two, which government do I think is more evil? China's. Which government do I, a permanent resident of America, think could more immediately make my life harder by being able to invade my privacy? America's.

Re: Ask HN: What Apple alternatives are you switching to?

#218

Post by hkt »

I've never used Apple stuff, but my setup is this:

* Dell XPS 13 running Manjaro/GNOME3. When this XPS dies, I will use the Framework laptop instead.

* Fairphone 3 running /e/OS (degoogled android) with Aurora Store and Aurora Droid.

* Withings Scanwatch, which doesn't have much in the way of regular smartwatch functionality but does monitor my heart rate, provide ECGs and checks my blood oxygen saturation as well as pulse, steps etc.

* Contactless payments just through my bank card. Sometimes I try to remember cash is probably the safest and most ethical choice for payments, but I'm not good at this.

Re: Ask HN: What Apple alternatives are you switching to?

#219

Post by gjsman-1000 »

rvz wrote: post #203
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a reason why that's 98%+ of the market. There is a dichotomy between the two camps in the smartphone market, everyone else is fringe. On the fringe, good luck using banking apps, transit apps, vehicle rental apps, or other apps increasingly necessary and useful. I don't think you know what you are talking about when you mentioned Xiaomi as an option. That would be among the dumbest options you could possibly…

> Linux on the desktop is a valid choice, but as I said above, don't tell me to switch to it, it's just not practical in my life. For Desktop, if I have to choose between macOS CSAM spyware of paying users or the Linux ecosystem and its tiny userbase of unpaid users I would go for using and targeting the paid users since they are the ones paying the bills and thats where the money is. For smartphone alternatives, the…

> Likewise, with the GUI software I'm writing, 'Defining Linux support' is something that is not worth doing given that there are tons of distros out there and by selecting one or two distro's there will always be an endless amount of people asking to support X distro or Y distro.

There was a major game developer (sadly forgetting the name) who decided to support Linux as a test around 2018ish. The Linux users were only a few percent of their users but ~20% of the support tickets. They said never again.

Re: Ask HN: What Apple alternatives are you switching to?

#220

Post by Drybones »

Ironic, I just switched to the Apple iPhone ecosystem 2 years ago after a decade of using exclusively Android, to rid myself of Google and to get better made apps.

- Phone: There is no phones anymore that interest me from the Android ecosystem and iPhones satiate my desire to upgrade every year from getting updates and not turning to shit from use over time. Plus there isn't much more I'd want other than a TouchID option besides FaceID. After moving my (big) whole family to iPhones, we iMessage and FaceTime a lot. I can't re-teach my mother all over again to use something else.

- Watch: My first and only watch was a year ago. Android ones don't interest me. Looking at the Amazfit GTR 2e and that looks good, but if I had to, I'd probably consider the PineTime watch cause it's cheap and obviously not sucking my information or reliant on an app.

- Laptop: I had a MacBook Pro 15 2017 that I recently traded for a MacBook Air M1 that is working better in every way. I don't use laptops much at all but I like it as an Apple dev environment when needed.

- Desktop: I have a custom built Ryzen+Radeon PC. I recently switched from Windows 10 when rumors about Windows 11 leaked. I currently use Ubuntu 20.04 (GNOME) at home and KDE Neon (Ubuntu 20.04) at work.

Linux Desktop Rant: But let me just say that Linux is a fucking disaster on the desktop still.

GNOME (GTK specifically) doesn't have an icon/thumbnail view mode when selecting files (GTK File Chooser Module) and they have refused to fix this. Every GTK base DE has this issue (GNOME, XFCE, Budgie, Cinnamon, Pantheon, LXDE Switching to a different unique DE like KDE doesn't help much either cause apps BUNDLE GTK in them and force you to use the GTK File Chooser module

The most promising unique and usable distro (elementary OS) for the average user still has 3 major flaws: GTK based, Ubuntu dependent, and buggy releases. Elementary OS 6 still has a LightDM bug that makes it so that if you lock the screen or it goes to sleep, you can't get back into your desktop session unless you force reboot.

The app ecosystem is splintering and some of the new options are just as bad or worse than regular package managers. I despise Canonical's Snap stuff. Everything about Snap sucks to use. Makes apps 3x slower, spams my volumes list with loop devices, has flawed sandbox security, and apps can't respect my OS's theme so everything looks like shit.

I tried this weekend to get Arch (gave up due to complex issues) and Manjaro i3 (I also tried various other Ubuntu distros) setup on my work laptop this week only to have the issues with my installs. Kubuntu doesn't allow me to encrypt my drive at installation. Arch and Manjaro fail to find my NVMe drive UUID at boot via GRUB EFI so it can't even get to the decrypting LUKS which I have to do manually. And now I find out OpenWebStart doesn't even support anything not Ubuntu/Debian even for it's compiling. IDK what else to use for launching JavaWeb applets. I ended up on KDE Neon cause it's KDE and Ubuntu and allowed encrypting my drive at installation, so that works I guess but boy am I not happy with this compromise.

Oh and guess what, KDE Plasma doesn't work well on Wayland. I already had it freeze and lock up on Wayland within just an hour of using it and now I'm running it on Xorg.

It's all so tiring.

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