Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

631–640 of 743 posts

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#631

Post by brigandish »

firecall wrote: post #509
latexr wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember how Tim Cook’s Apple handled HKmap.live¹, Telegram², and the Navalny app³. Maybe you shouldn’t fight every battle, but he fights none. The richest company in the world has at the helm a person who quotes Martin Luther King Jr on the importance of doing something for others⁴ yet he always kowtows to authoritarian regimes. He’s in a stronger position than most people in the world to make a stand but he never d…

> Maybe you shouldn’t fight every battle, but he fights none. All we know is what has been reported. It would seem improbable what a multi trillion dollar company with it's manufacturing base in China wouldn't be dealing and negotiating with the Chinese authorities as part of day to day operations. To say Tim Cook fights no battles seems unlikely. We cannot make that statement because the reality is that we just don'…

If you can point to a positive change that Apple have made, in this regard, under Cook's watch, then your argument has some merit.

If you can't then you'll have to rely on the "it would've been worse but for his efforts" but I doubt you're going to provide evidence for that.

What we do know is that Apple have repeatedly sided with censorship, I can certainly provide evidence of that.

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#632

Post by pessimizer »

hellfish wrote: post #461
kelnos wrote: 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.

Quoted post unavailable.

Apple doesn't love China in particular. It would gladly cripple protestor communications in the US if threatened, too.

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#633

Post by lazyeye »

xpe wrote: post #592
lazyeye wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I note the downvotes on this post. Silicon valley people are not our friends.

Or perhaps your comment is not considered useful. Be open to the possibility that you can share interests with people that criticize you. > I guess this is the kind of blind obedience to an authoritarian regime that 275 billion dollars gets you https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/07/apple-chi ... But never mind, they have rainbow hashtags and censor pepe memes so they are the good guys... Speaking for mys…

Can you provide examples where Apple has taken a stand (at their own personal cost) against China?

Doesn't seem to be such a "complex power dynamic" at all maybe?

Maybe some "dumbing down" might be useful to a crowd that is disconnected from reality and likes to hide behind language?

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#634

Post by riobard »

jsnell wrote: post #8

This seems to have been announced a couple of weeks ago, so we don't need to just trust the tweet: https://www.macworld.com/article/1377200/apple-to-limit-aird... Having it open to everyone for only a limited amount of time actually kind of seems like the right thing, but it's hard to come up with a legit explanation for why they rushed that change to China first.

> hard to come up with a legit explanation for why they rushed that change to China first.

Not hard at all.

On Oct 13, 2022 this protest happened (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing_Sitong_Bridge_protest), which the CCP considered a serious offense, potentially on the same level of the 1989 protest.

At the time people, especially college students around that area (lots of universities nearby), were using AirDrop to share photos of the protest, because social medium was heavily censored. University administrators were tasked to make sure iPhone-carrying students to disable allowing AirDrop from everyone to stop the spread of the images.

A few weeks later, iOS public betas were found to come with the change to limiting AirDrop to 10 minutes, and nothing about it was ever mentioned in release note.

Was Apple pressured by the CCP to rush this? I don't know. Look at the evidence and judge by yourself.

But there's a more nuanced perspective.

It is rumored that CCP has the ability to actually track and uncover the identity of iOS devices sending AirDrop. Think about it: how else AirDrop can limit to receive from contacts only? If so, AirDrop would provide a false sense of anonymity and deniability, and Apple would put some of its customers in jeopardy if they do nothing.

By limiting AirDrop from everyone to 10 minutes, Apple achieved three objectives:

1. They showed compliance (they have to, if they want to keep the business in China); 2. They avoided the potential reputation damage in the scenario where protesters are caught AirDropping offensive materials (e.g. “iPhones aren't as secure as Apple advertises after all”); 3. They closed a loophole in which people get spammed (yes, allowing AirDrop from everyone gets you mostly spams anyway).

The “mistake” Apple made was that it did not a) rush the change to all regions, and b) mention it explicitly in release note, therefore completely exposed them to the first objective and failed to convey the nuances.

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#635

Post by Terretta »

simion314 wrote: post #512
Terretta wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Commuting in NYC on Subway. My wife's phone is actually "Heather's iPhone" and it happened any time she accidentally left "Everyone" after e.g. a conference. While she's more amused than offended, she thinks it's a good idea this promiscuous mode will now turn itself back off if she forgets.

Do you think your wife could handle one extra option that is not the default where some users could change the 10 minutes to 1 or more hours? Or is that too many options for the average users?

She's got no problem with settings, but it's preferable if it remembers for you to turn it back off.

What Apple does for a lot of things (see Focus, or DND) is "until I leave this place" (or event if in a calendared event) and "until tomorrow", those make more sense to me than a particular time frame.

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#636

Post by altairprime »

ed25519FUUU wrote: post #118
2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #97

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.

If you don’t believe this is in response to protest then how do you explain it being rushed out ONLY IN CHINA?

No one can explain the confidential-NDA internal workings of Apple in this forum, but here’s a constructed, plausible, scenario that contradicts the claim “Apple implemented this for China”:

If Apple was planning to release this in a point release of iOS 16, and then the Chinese government asked them to do something, then they could have said: “We have a feature in testing that we’d planned to ship later this cycle, so we’ll push that up and soft launch it in China first and then roll it out worldwide once any bugs are hammered out.”

This constructed example both satisfies the condition “why China first?” and also contradicts the assertion “it is certain that Apple implemented this at China’s request”. It is not known whether or not, and to what degree, that Apple considered and/or acted upon a request from China.

(It is also very unlikely that China requested this “after 10 minutes” option specifically. China would rather not have unmonitored peer-to-peer communications, and Apple tends to include temporary timers in their UI for RF/GPS features.)

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#637

Post by foepys »

lancesells wrote: post #151
foepys wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? With the Android Open Source Project you can create your own completely Google-free Android distribution that you can install on quite a lot of devices. Not that I like Google, I actually actively dislike it and hate all the anti-competitive things they did (with Android, too), but let's stay with the facts here.

> Project you can create your own completely Google-free Android distribution that you can install on quite a lot of devices This is like saying you can eat for free for the rest of your life by just starting a farm. Sure, it's possible but it's out of the reach of most the population.

You can download one right now, for free at lineageos.org. So I don't get your point

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#638

Post by Karunamon »

Spartan-S63 wrote: post #590
Karunamon wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You can argue they were doing it purposely for planned obsolescence, but evidence isn't really there to support it. This is not a court of law and I am quite comfortable believing this was planned obsolescence for the simple that behaving in this way was advantageous to their profits. Otherwise it would not have taken lies (they initially denied the existence of the throttling!), outrage and lawsuits to do the right…

I think it's simpler: there's general arrogance that Apple knows what's best for their customers. Their entire philosophy isn't about giving customers what they want, it's giving customers what Apple thinks they need. So, when you uncover phones crashing because batteries age and folks don't get their batteries serviced, you throttle the CPU in software to avoid the issue. It's pure arrogance. We also know that Apple…

That explains everything but the lying about the existence of the throttling. There are no ways I can square that circle other than Apple knowing what they were doing and wanting to hide it in a way that ever so coincidentally makes them more money.

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#639

Post by dang »

tonystarch wrote: post #136
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…

Quoted post unavailable.

I'd like to see links. I'll bet it's either a case of (1) the post was breaking the site guidelines; or (2) someone mistakenly concluded we censored it.

I say that because #1 is the reason we moderate HN posts and #2 happens all the time in the fervid internet imagination.

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#640

Post by shagie »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #630
frosted-flakes wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Maps also does this when the border is under contention. Selecting a country with a contested border like Ukraine or Russia will only highlight the country name, but selecting a country with uncontested borders like Poland or Germany will draw a red outline around the country.

I heard Google also alters the drawn borders based on your IP (if you're in one with a contested border)

Yes they do - some examples:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/14/google-...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2016/aug/10...

https://www.wesa.fm/national-international-news/2014-04-12/w...

Post reply on HN