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Apple vs the Law

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Re: Apple vs the Law

#281

Post by spogbiper »

resource_waste wrote: post #216
jb1991 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am certainly not surprised that Apple is employing a lot of legal tricky to work around judgments. But what does surprise me is that there’s a very common attitude in forums that somehow Apple is the only company doing this, or they’re doing it worse than any other company.

Apple is a very stylish kind of company. Their public perception matters more because when you use an Apple product, it creates an image of you. If I buy a Google phone, no one is going to comment on it. If I buy an Apple, or a Tesla, or luxury vehicle, people are going to comment on it. If Apple is known to be scummy and you buy it, it makes you look bad. I think we are seeing that with Tesla now, I doubt too many l…

maybe true in some parts of the world. where i live, literally 50% of phones are apple phones. they are commonplace. nobody comments on them.

Re: Apple vs the Law

#282

Post by interpol_p »

EMIRELADERO wrote: post #16
interpol_p wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s extremely complex. I’m not debating whether they should comply - they should. But it’s gonna cost them years of engineering effort, and maintenance far into the future. See, for example, BrowserEngineKit https://developer.apple.com/documentation/browserenginekit They needed to engineer, maintain, document and support a whole class of APIs so that third parties can create their own competitive browser engines (th…

Somehow, Android manages to do it. Not only for browsers; all apps have JIT access without any entitlement/review needed. It doesn't seem like the average Android user is worse-off because of that, security-wise.

You missed my point. My point is that if Apple wants to add this now, it's going to cost them engineering resources.

You think side loading on Android cost Google "nothing" to implement and maintain? No, it costs them engineering resources to support that feature. It's a good feature to support and it's beneficial to users. But it's not free, it doesn't magically insert itself into the Android codebase if they "comment out an `if` statement" as the GP suggested.

Also, Android is gradually adopting many iOS-like permissions and security models. We recently updated our Android apps related to reading and writing to the file system. Why is that? Because the free-for-all they shipped with was heavily abused by developers.

Re: Apple vs the Law

#283

Post by carlosjobim »

vladms wrote: post #41
jb1991 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am certainly not surprised that Apple is employing a lot of legal tricky to work around judgments. But what does surprise me is that there’s a very common attitude in forums that somehow Apple is the only company doing this, or they’re doing it worse than any other company.

For me personally they seem to be more expensive than competitors and have a more aggressive stance on openness (ex: compare PWA support on Android vs iOS, not to mention the multiple other things like no multiple stores, the browser engine discussion, etc). So, I am not amazed that people think "on top of all the other things that you annoy us with you also try to avoid the law?!".

Openness is not a concern for the people who buy Apple devices, and probably not for the public at large. It certainly is no concern to me, I need a machine which works so I can get stuff done. For a MacBook that means opening the lid. For a Windows laptop that means plugging it in, opening the lid, waiting for half an hour for the system to update while it is unusable and hogging all the bandwidth at this time, etc.

Smart phones took over from personal computers, because people want something which works and they hate having to fiddle with their device, trouble shoot and fix things. They don't care that they can't install an Arch Linux terminal on it or download torrents. And if they need something more pro, they go for an iPad or a Macbook when they can choose. Openness is only important for programmers and people who love to mess with their device, not for the public at large.

Re: Apple vs the Law

#284

Post by pjmlp »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #254
pjmlp wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy, on the car companies that already exist with much better build quality. We don't need cars from fascists.

>We don't need cars from fascists. Really? Because look up on the history of VW, BMW, Porsche, Fiat, etc and their founding families, some of who still own a large part of the shares of those companies today. Most of them worked with fascists no problem, some by force of the era some by opportunity but none of them opposed them. You see this is the typical European hypocrisy that I dislike. Pointing fingers that Elon…

Yes, everyone played a role in WW 2, that is why we try to learn from history, instead of supporting those eager to repeating it.

Re: Apple vs the Law

#285

Post by interpol_p »

grishka wrote: post #33
EMIRELADERO wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somehow, Android manages to do it. Not only for browsers; all apps have JIT access without any entitlement/review needed. It doesn't seem like the average Android user is worse-off because of that, security-wise.

And Android apps can be installed from apk files without any Google involvement whatsoever. All apks are self-signed anyway and signing identity only comes into play for updates , not initial installation. As in, when you first install an app, it doesn't matter who signed it, but installing an update over an existing app requires the new apk to be signed with the same certificate as the initial one. This is to protec…

Google engineered and maintains the system that allows you to install APK files. This is my point. The fact that they have developed a security model around APK updates is exactly what I'm talking about.

If Apple wants to offer something similar, now, they are going to have a lot of work cut out for them.

You're not thinking this through, it's not a magic button Apple presses. They are going to have to develop a ton of frameworks just to get something like installable APKs.

Apple allows developers to use iCloud and Maps for free. Presumably because you distribute through the App Store. So if they allow for side-loading they're going to have to lock down and split their App Store "services" into a separate framework — hey, sounds familiar? Just like Google Play services.

Separating out all of Apple's authentication layers, paid and cloud services, and ensuring apps can be cleanly distributed without dependencies on those things it not a trivial engineering exercise.

I'm not trying to imply that Apple should not comply with the DMA. I believe they should. I also believe that it would be a seriously complicated thing to extract their App Store services from their developer APIs in such a way that people could develop against a baseline SDK sans Apple services.

Re: Apple vs the Law

#286

Post by nntwozz »

xandrius wrote: post #173
nntwozz wrote: post #147

I dream of an alternate reality where Steve Jobs makes snide remarks about politics, sets things right with the App Store (worldwide), Siri, Ai and the lackluster UI and quality control of software lately. Steve would get on top of things and speak his mind and we were all better off for it. There's a severe lack of character in Tim Cook, I think the best thing to come out under his reign is the M-series hardware and…

Sane computer design, in what way? I still see unopenable devices, batteries glued to death and even more closed systems. Next they reverted to liquid glass UI, is that sane?

Not silly thin and overheating is the main way, your criticism is still valid though.

Re: Apple vs the Law

#287

Post by csomar »

quitit wrote: post #269

I'm interested to see what this will all be in ~20 years time. Policies with protectionist side effects (even if they're not marketed as such) have historically led to local businesses being less capable and less competitive over time. Whereby there is no need to compete or innovate as the business is insulated from genuine competition. My assumption is that the EU believes this will lead to local businesses having t…

We are seeing this, kinda real time, with autos. Americans manufacturers were shielded from Chinese competition and in the last couple years had nothing to show for it. Meanwhile Toyota, in this very short time, came up with the BZ3X (cost around $15.000) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_bZ3X

All of that being said, the EU rules can be good (ie: usb-c); the problem is that often they get co-mingled with bad protectionist policies.

Re: Apple vs the Law

#288

Post by interpol_p »

idle_zealot wrote: post #14
interpol_p wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s extremely complex. I’m not debating whether they should comply - they should. But it’s gonna cost them years of engineering effort, and maintenance far into the future. See, for example, BrowserEngineKit https://developer.apple.com/documentation/browserenginekit They needed to engineer, maintain, document and support a whole class of APIs so that third parties can create their own competitive browser engines (th…

Or, they could just let their pocket computers run the software users download and install, like every single other computer ever made and sold, rather than special-case engineer padded cells for every use-case, application class, or bit of interoperability.

That is an oversimplification of what I stated.

Apple has a significant engineering challenge to turn their current operating system into something that allows side-loading similar to what Google offers. It's not a matter of "commenting out an if statement"

The current developer SDKs Apple offers are strongly tied to their services, which cost them money to run. So first thing is, they have to decouple that so developers can implement applications using a baseline SDK that does not use Apple services (no iCloud, no Maps, no HealthKit and so on)

I think it would be great for users if they did do this. It would be akin to what Google does by shipping and updating Play Services separately from the base Android install

The reason I linked BrowserEngineKit is because if you want to do this properly, you have to build something like Apple has built with that framework (which was built to comply with these policies). Take for example, implementing your own JIT: because arm64e uses pointer authentication, the system uses PACs to ensure that pointers into executable code have not been tampered with. Apple now develops and supports a whole slew of APIs like `be_memory_inline_jit_restrict_rwx_to_rw_with_witness()` in order for developers to manage this themselves.

You saying "just let their pocket computers run software users download and install" is not like every single other computer ever made and sold. This is a gross oversimplification of the modern state of computing, both on mobile and on desktop. There are reasons you don't want random developers loading code into your OS kernel, and Windows and macOS both have protections for this (though the CrowdStrike crashes recently shows what happens when those protections are lax!)

Re: Apple vs the Law

#289

Post by msgodel »

interpol_p wrote: post #288
idle_zealot wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, they could just let their pocket computers run the software users download and install, like every single other computer ever made and sold, rather than special-case engineer padded cells for every use-case, application class, or bit of interoperability.

That is an oversimplification of what I stated. Apple has a significant engineering challenge to turn their current operating system into something that allows side-loading similar to what Google offers. It's not a matter of "commenting out an if statement" The current developer SDKs Apple offers are strongly tied to their services, which cost them money to run. So first thing is, they have to decouple that so develo…

If Apple gave the users root and let them run arbitrary software and just didn't sign certificates for their infrastructure (for push for example) this wouldn't be a problem. Supposedly they've already even developed a VTE for iOS. All they need to do is have a toggle under settings to disable signature checking and ship the VTE so people have an escape hatch and everyone would probably calm way down.

Re: Apple vs the Law

#290

Post by thewebguyd »

Disposal8433 wrote: post #141
cm2012 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. As someone who has worked with 100+ funded start-ups, roughly 85 in USA and 15 in EU - the EU ones have such a harder, trudging climb due to regulations.

Good. I would hate for my country to become like the USA.

> Good. I would hate for my country to become like the USA.

Yeah, there's a whole lot of American exceptionalism going on in this thread, assuming the way things are done over here in the states is the best and only way. I live here and let me tell you, it's not. Just the fact that we have gigantic tech monopolies with more money than several nations combined is proof of that - that's not a thing that should ever happen.

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