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AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

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Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#331

Post by kelnos »

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #265
lopkeny12ko wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you work on software available globally, it's very normal to deploy or roll out features region-by-region. This seems par for the course.

The article I linked says "The setting was reportedly added after protesters in the country used AirDrop to spread anti-government material." Most other articles also mention this. I'm not unconvinced this had nothing to do with the feature. I'm just pointing out that this was already in the works. This was not a fast reaction to the current protests. I don't think this is good. But Apple didn't just roll this out at…

I'm curious what they mean by "was reportedly added". "Reported" by whom? What is the source for this information?

I think the timing and China-only bit is eyebrow-raising, but it'd be nice to know if this is just speculation, or if there's a credible source within Apple that's saying this is the reason why it was rolled out in China right now.

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#332

Post by Dylan16807 »

NaturalPhallacy wrote: post #130
elicash wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of twitter, it's weird Musk hasn't commented yet on the protests in China. Looking forward to him taking on censorship and standing for free speech around the globe, particularly in China.

> Speaking of twitter, it's weird Musk hasn't commented yet on the protests in China. Tales about what people haven't done are pure propaganda. I first noticed this under trump. News outlets constantly decried him for things he didn't do. That isn't news. News is fundamentally what did happen. Everything else is propaganda. It's a particularly insidious way to malign someone that seems rational, but with absolutely n…

It depends on how many related topics they are talking about and usually talk about. And "weird" is a weak implication.

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#333

Post by baxtr »

blamazon wrote: post #260
baxtr wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry. That’s not convincing. How can a 10min limit suppress protests? You’re not answering the question, just telling a story.

Okay. Let's make it more concrete. Imagine theres a bus full of people and you want to invite them to a protest, discreetly. Before state: some of them have airdrop set to open always and you can just airdrop to them. Move on to the next bus. New state: some of them may have had airdrop set to open always, but it timed out. You cannot airdrop it to them. Protest quashed. I'm still telling the same story but perhaps t…

Thanks for getting back. That explanation makes more sense now.

I can see how this limit would make free data exchange much more difficult. I am still not convinced that by this protests are “quashed”. We’ll see about that I guess.

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#334

Post by MerelyMortal »

macinjosh wrote: post #52

When I signed up for this site 12 years ago I was a huge Apple fan and almost steered my web dev career into iOS dev. Really glad I didn't do that, but also wish I could change my HN username now!

Likewise. People should watch Apple's famous 1984 commercial.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIE-5hg7FoA

Apple is not the same company it claimed to be back then. Dare I say Apple today is now the company they were against back then.

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#335

Post by yamtaddle »

horsawlarway wrote: post #283
yamtaddle wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nothing is stopping people learning about computers. Hell, it's easier and cheaper than ever. You can run Linux in your browser on an iPad, just by visiting a URL. Or shell into various free-tier VMs, for... free. Maybe a one-time cost for an SSH/Mosh client if you're on iOS I suppose. Swift Playgrounds and a hundred other learn-to-code apps and sites exist. And that's if you're "stuck" with a locked-down device ru…

But hey - I'm free to send multicast packets from that iphone on a network I own, right? Because part of the learning is the doing things with the skills you learn later. I'm free to install software I write on that iphone, right? I'm free to sell the software I write using those skills to those other people, without risk of Apple arbitrarily shutting me out, right? Or much more malicious, moving me down below their…

My point is that broadly speaking, learning computing is something like 100x more accessible than it was in the "good old days", and that mostly holds even on an i-device.

I couldn't (practically) develop for my NES, either. But it'd have been rad if I could at least write software on it that'd run somewhere else. Or in a sandboxed environment on the NES, also allowing me to share it, even if the capabilities were a slightly nerfed. Way the hell better than nothing. ("Well yeah but you could have bought a Commodore 64"—OK, cool, sooo.... why are we worried about iOS devices when the same 'so get a different device' counter applies there, and also you actually can learn a great deal of computing on them?)

Meanwhile ordinary computers are practically free. Like you can probably go beg around and make a couple Reddit or Craigslist or Facebook posts (use the library computer I guess if somehow you live in the developed world and don't own or have access to any other Web-capable device?) and land one (maybe not a great one, but hundreds of times more powerful than what many of us learned on) for $0 in a matter of weeks, at most. Or scrape together $100 or so and go to Goodwill. Not $0, but it's very cheap. Your library probably even has free computer classes. So might your community college. Learning how to "really" use and program a computer is vastly more accessible now than it's ever been, and i-devices aren't harming that a bit.

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#336

Post by themacguffinman »

tananaev wrote: post #35
mhoad wrote: post #9

I don’t ever want to hear again how Apple is some champion of privacy and ethics. I’ve lost count of how many scandals have come out of their relationship with China from the suicide nets to the repeated investigations showing their supply chain was riddled with slave labor that they would later campaign against protections that would prevent it. Now this. They are fucked as a company, I can’t get out of their ecosys…

On one hand, yes, it's not ideal. On the other hand it's still probably a better alternative to a Chinese phone that spies on you. What is the alternative? If they take a stance, they will be banned from China completely. You need to pick your battles instead of being idealist. Look at Russia. There was an opposition back in the day, but they couldn't agree between each other because of smaller differences. And now w…

> If they take a stance, they will be banned from China completely.

Google did, and they were. Is it too much to ask that Apple be as courageous and idealistic as Google on privacy?

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#337

Post by esskay »

HardlyCurious wrote: post #46
tananaev wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On one hand, yes, it's not ideal. On the other hand it's still probably a better alternative to a Chinese phone that spies on you. What is the alternative? If they take a stance, they will be banned from China completely. You need to pick your battles instead of being idealist. Look at Russia. There was an opposition back in the day, but they couldn't agree between each other because of smaller differences. And now w…

Getting banned from China shouldn't be looked at as something a business can't consider. If so, it gives tremendous leverage to China to control western corporations. What we need is govt sanctions against china before this goes any further. Take china off the table so companies don't have to make these hard choices that impact their competitiveness.

> Getting banned from China shouldn't be looked at as something a business can't consider.

It shouldn't but the fact is that if China decided right now that they were done with Apple the company immediatly loses all ability to make every single one of its products.

Even the ones that arent given final assembly in China still rely on chinese produced components.

It would obviously be a very foolish move for the CCP as it would be an instant red flag to the worlds tech companies who would all start the ball rolling on moving out. Meanwhile Apple would be all but dead in the water for a good few years, with no ability to manufacture anything at all for a fairly signficant amount of time.

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#338

Post by bombcar »

andreysolsty wrote: post #227
Maximus9000 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting that this was rolled out a few weeks ago, however the article also says: > Apple won’t admit why this change is being made in China, but the peer-to-peer nature of AirDrop has made it popular for spreading anti-government protest material, and hopping into your settings every 10 minutes to re-enable the ability to receive AirDrop from strangers makes it a lot less useful for that.

Looking at it from a users perspective, people constantly trying to airdrop me stuff is not something I want, even though I want to use “everyone” at times. I’ve had this happen in public before and it’s annoying but maybe it’s become so widespread that it’s a UX issue in China?

The fix for your use case is an easy to enable "next hour/ten minutes/whatever" from the control center buttons.

Then it can be default "contacts only" and you can turn to everyone with a single press, and it turns itself back off.

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#339

Post by xwdv »

mhoad wrote: post #9

I don’t ever want to hear again how Apple is some champion of privacy and ethics. I’ve lost count of how many scandals have come out of their relationship with China from the suicide nets to the repeated investigations showing their supply chain was riddled with slave labor that they would later campaign against protections that would prevent it. Now this. They are fucked as a company, I can’t get out of their ecosys…

If you think they’re fucked, you don’t know what a fucked company is. Twitter is fucked. Apple is thriving, selling massive amounts of products and sitting on a huge cash horde. Get a grip.

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#340

Post by throwaway09223 »

snoot wrote: post #142
jackmott42 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their ethics are terrible. You pay $1000 for a computer, and you are only allowed to install software on it that Apple says you are allowed to. You can only pay for software on their own store. Complete bullshit, and it makes me sad that so many here on HN and elsehwere, tech people who learned to program because their 8088 was completely open and free to let you actually create things and learn about computing, so m…

> tech people who learned to program because their 8088 was completely open and free to let you actually create things and learn about computing, so many of you will defend this terrible situation. There is nothing terrible about Apple making devices my 80+ year old mother can safely and easily use. I have a Mac, and I also have Linux machines. Nothing is stopping people learning about computers. Why would anyone spe…

"There is nothing terrible about Apple making devices my 80+ year old mother can safely and easily use."

There very clearly is something terrible about this level of control. You're arguing that there's also some benefit -- yes of course there could be. But the point is that there are also massive problems with this level of control, some of which pose existential threats in areas far more important than (entirely debatable) usability improvements.

These problems can be solved in other ways. You can do what I did and remove administrator access entirely. You can create a curated list of appropriate apps without the totalitarian aspect. You can let people opt-in to various levels of filtering and control over software without excluding people who want to ahem think different.

You're presenting a pretext, not a credible and necessary conclusion.

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