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AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

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Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The timing of the change seems quite conspicuous [1], and it's also weird that Apple would introduce this in China first and only roll it out to the rest of the world next year. The same article mentions that Apple blocks the Taiwanese flag emoji in China, for which it's hard to come up with an explanation other than bowing to censorship. 1: https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/11/netizen-voices-apple-r...

it's hard to come up with an explanation other than bowing to censorship If one believes Elon Musk's view of the Twitter situation with the app store, Apple seems to be for more censorship!

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Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#602
post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you open airdrop to everyone, your device can be tracked and identified individually. That can already be done using cell towers (especially with 5G) and GPS enabled state-supervised apps like WeChat, etc. So that's not a good reason.

If only iPhones had a way to turn off its cellular radio, some kind of “airplane mode” or something

if people started doing it in mass it would be pretty strong and obvious signal in and of itself due to the manual and intentional nature of the action

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#603
post #371

We heard about this over 2 weeks ago https://www.macrumors.com/2022/11/10/airdrop-10-minute-limit... This is not in response to this particular protest. iOS16 just dropped, so the timing was coincidental I guess.

Right. It was a response to a previous protest. But it gets far more clicks today than weeks ago.

I'm not an expert on China, but my understanding is that there has been a wave of protests over the past several months/weeks in which Airdrop has been used to disseminate protest materials. The intensity of the protests has ebbed/flowed, and they are happening in many different locations. Even "the current protest" is not well defined: there are currently many different protests that share a common grievance, happening in different cities across China.

Being pedantic about whether this was was a response to "a previous protest" is like arguing about which specific mosquito caused you to put on bug spray.

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course the zero-covid protests were also around a couple weeks ago..

But it wasn’t until today that Musk decide to start a propaganda war against Apple.

Which was very foolish given he's already in a propaganda war with most of the news media and an entire political movement.

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#605

The apple apologists in this thread is weird. Sure the timing of this tweet is weird, as people pointed out, that the change actually happened a few weeks ago (there were tweets about it then, but those are mainly in Chinese). But protesting via airdrop has been happening in China for months before this change. Even if we give Apple the benefit of doubt, that they actually planned this change long time ago unrelated…

No post body was provided.

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#608
post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. It was a response to a previous protest. But it gets far more clicks today than weeks ago.

I'm not an expert on China, but my understanding is that there has been a wave of protests over the past several months/weeks in which Airdrop has been used to disseminate protest materials. The intensity of the protests has ebbed/flowed, and they are happening in many different locations. Even "the current protest" is not well defined: there are currently many different protests that share a common grievance, happen…

My point was that this wasn’t something Apple just did in the last 2-3 days. It was done weeks ago.

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#609
post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is Apple being Pro-CCP with this change? I don't think Apple is Pro-CCP, Apple is Pro-Being-Able-To-Do-Business-In-China, which means doing whatever the CCP tells you to do, even if it means compromising your ethics.

At the risk of being an Apple apologist, their manufacturing is effectively held hostage by China. Yes Apple is taking the "make more profit" choice, but the alternative is pretty devastating to the company. Long term, Apple needs to diversify their manufacturing footprint. (Note that I still think Apple would adhere to the CCP's requests/laws just to be able to sell in China. China would ban Apple products if they b…

All tech companies that rely upon China for manufacturing are in this situation -- not just Apple.

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#610

How are they using it? Airdrop is based on proximity as measured by NFC and/or Bluetooth (?), and you can't use it as an ad hoc network mesh to route messages across it.(?) So Activist Organizer 1 can't coordinate with Activist Organizer 2 3 km away using Airdrop unless activists in the space between forwards / routes messages in the right physical direction. If they are well organized from the beginning, then each p…

core organizers typically work in small cells, when an event is decided, that infor needs to filter out first artists/promoters which make the materials then to general public. airdrop is used for the last step, helping an event go viral by spreading material horizontally at high traffic areas like transit hubs and malls with some palusible deniablity. after a recipient recieves that info, they can then airdrop it to their own circle/cell or via word of mouth like normal.
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