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AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

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Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#611

Why 10 minutes? Why not "until tomorrow", which is how disconnecting from Wi-Fi and Bluetooth works from Control Center?

It says on the tweet: the aim of the update is to prevent people from sharing protest materials at protests. If you set it "until tomorrow", then they would still be able to share materials

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#612
post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine you want to invite a lot of people you don't know, to a protest. This is generally really difficult to do in China without being spotted for re-education. In contrast, Airdrop was previously a good way to do this discreetly. Now it's useless. That is censorship.

Doesn’t seem useless, seems like a good way to make sure people aren’t broadcasting PII by default if they leave “everybody” on.

Your phone is always brodcasting PII when the goverment has unfettered access to cell logs.

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#613
post #291
post #73

I have to admit that when you actually look at the details this is a rather perplexing change. Ditto for reading the comments here. Is Apple being Pro-CCP with this change? If you open airdrop to everyone, your device can be tracked and identified individually. When this setting is disabled, this becomes far harder. I'm of the opinion that this change is good and actually increases security across the board, includin…

> 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.

> compromising your ethics

My more cynical view is that there are no ethics to compromise. The ethic is make money. Any appearance of ethics is there as a marketing gimmick.

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#614
post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And my point is that the protests have been going on for months. This story seems like it's probably related to them and it's just getting proper attention on HN this week.

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you expand on what you mean by this? Outside of video games I feel that any operating system can do 99% of tasks I need it to.

secure boot with keys outside your control, mandatory TPM chips, remote attestation, etc

Secure boot can largely be turned off at least for now, and TPM is mostly a passive thing, but the seriously real threat to freedom is remote attestation --- unlike the others, it's something that you can't get around by "simply" building your own platform, by design. External entities will have the power to compel "your" computer to do what they want, or else you will be denied access to many services. Unless we act quickly to fight against it, this will be the beginning of an authoritarian dystopia unlike anything we've seen in the past.

You can already see attempts at dissolving the rebellion against RA by Big Tech and the propaganda they disseminate. They don't want people to know this until it's too late. This warning should be taken in the same way as Stallman's "Right to Read".

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#616
post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well yes, that's the privilege of being a world power and all. If "the west" could just sanction China leaders would have done so already but "we really do need them as a trading partner" makes it infeasible.

There are many steps in between. Warning about TikTok. Discouraging Chinese drone purchases. Changing priorities around chip sourcing. And so on.

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#617
post #563

Any Apple employee (or really, any large-company employee) would agree that this change is months of work. From the original problem statement (people get spammed when they leave AirDrop set to Everyone), to many strongly-opinionated discussions on how to solve (There's not a problem; Pop up a reminder to disable after an hour; Enable only for some period of time [5 minutes, 10 minutes, 1 hour, user-configured]), and…

Normally it would be several months of work, but if it was a top level company directive (e.g. from the CEO) it would probably take 3-4 weeks at minimum. Note that protests have been going on sporadically for this entire year. See this article about a protest from Peking university from May 2022: https://apnews.com/article/covid-health-shanghai-china-cbcac... and Shanghai in April 2022: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/w…

> it would probably take 3-4 weeks at minimum

Maybe even less than that. I can't imagine the prototype would take longer than a day.

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#618
post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The gun emoji became a toy on all major platforms everywhere several years ago. This is surely related to the political climate but I believe the entities involved applied that change worldwide.

I would love to learn more about backroom emoji politics. It sounds foolish on the surface but emojis have a big reach.

I watched this documentary https://www.dutch-core.com/programs/documentary/backlight-be...

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#620
post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is over simplifying matters. The technologies used to be optional , but in many cases is now mandatory to use an OS. Windows 11 mandates a TPM, for example - Windows 10 did not and works fine on any system without. There has been a huge amount of discussion here and elsewhere about the Windows 11 mandatory security changes, which themselves are similar to the changes Apple have made to how their own systems boot…

I don’t mean to oversimplify, but you’re also conflating “PC” with “windows”. Linux and BSD are viable alternatives as well, in my opinion. Do they lack the user land polish of windows? Sure! But really at the end of the day you’re storing files and opening applications, and the eternal web browser. (Of which, you have 2 engine choices!)

Say that again when the impending doom of remote attestation forces you to use a single (and constantly changing) version of Windows in order to interact with any mainstream services.
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