111–120 of 254 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For private chats Telegram uses end-to-end encryption and they cannot read the chats. Of course, they control the clients though, so they could update their clients to also send the chats to Russian intelligence and it would be hard for anyone to notice.
Telegram isn't E2E encrypted by default. You need to choose an "encrypted" chat. They have been criticised over this for many years now.
This is presently an accusation by Telegram, nothing more. Sample of reasons why Apple may be doing whatever they are doing: 1) Telegram is prevalently used by Syrian fighters [1]. (Why they chose Telegram over Signal beats me.) As the Syrian conflict winds down, these fighters are returning home. That creates a security imperative for many governments, including in the EU. 2) Telegram recently ran an ICO that, at th…
Based on history, it’s by far more likely that it’s #3. Have we ever seen Apple prevent updates to an app globally due to government request (any government)? No... What we have seen are plenty of other reasons that Apple has rejected updates - like including new features that violate policies. This really makes no sense on its face - if this is real Apple responding to Russian demands, why is Televram even available…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Put a phone permitting side loading in front of my mom or half my friends and they’ll find a way to get a virus within a month. Broadly speaking, freedom a consumer doesn’t understand isn’t freedom to them. Apple’s products are reliable in part due to their tight control over the ecosystem.
I kind of don't understand this. Nobody is forcing anyone to use sideloading. Heck, Android phones by default have sideloading turned off in the settings so you can't even accidentally do it without going through a bunch of warnings. Unless Android phones have an extra side-channel I don't know about, I just can't imagine someone sideloading an app on one of them unless they explicitly have decided the benefits outwe…
I'd given this challenge some thought in the recent past, specifically the challenge that the big app store owners are each generally susceptible to coercion by large nation-state actors in spite of being multinationally distributed. There was a project I was involved in rather heavily (cyph // resulted in a pair of neat conference talks) where we'd accounted for the risks of apps being banned by making the entire ap…
I'd be interested to see any slides or "work product" containing your conclusions if it's available and you don't mind. I'm working for a startup that has had to pivot to web-only applications specifically because of Apple and their frustrating nervousness around anything involving applied blockchains.
If it is "applied blockchain", you don't have to tell everybody it's blockchain. App should look like natural (or, sometimes, magic) to non technical users. They couldn't care less.
Just show them what your app can do.
I'm surprised that nobody is talking about how Telegram raised pre-ICO of billions of dollars even when it was obvious that this type of censorship will be possible. Mobile apps should not do ICO, period. It's irresponsible for someone to try stealing uneducated people's money while promising something that's impossible to achieve. Realistically speaking there are only two players in the market: Google and Apple, bot…
You can side-load apps on Android. I'm afraid this makes your rant false.
This is a fundamental problem with the single DRM-enforced app store model that Apple innovated, and which has been widely copied and lauded. Once you implement that, you have to toady up to whatever governments exist, including oppressive/murderous regimes, to be in their markets. If your ecosystem is just console video games, say, it's not that big of a deal; you have to either censor some games or don't enter cert…
It doesn't matter too much if your videogame console is closed source, but it matters a lot if the software you use to read books, to write, to communicate with people is closed source.
Apple isn't going to do it, Google isn't going to do it. We must do it.
I'd given this challenge some thought in the recent past, specifically the challenge that the big app store owners are each generally susceptible to coercion by large nation-state actors in spite of being multinationally distributed. There was a project I was involved in rather heavily (cyph // resulted in a pair of neat conference talks) where we'd accounted for the risks of apps being banned by making the entire ap…
If users could install Telegram from third-party sources, without rooting their phones, this issue wouldn't be so serious. Or if users could install from trusted friends, even. That is, if iOS apps could be shared. There's a similar issue for Android apps. But it's my understanding that it's easier, and doesn't require rooting. But of course, this would break Apple's "we are the only app source, because you can only…
Alternatively on my phone when I try to install an app, it'll allow me to change that setting just for that single installation and then turn it off again.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Put a phone permitting side loading in front of my mom or half my friends and they’ll find a way to get a virus within a month. Broadly speaking, freedom a consumer doesn’t understand isn’t freedom to them. Apple’s products are reliable in part due to their tight control over the ecosystem.
I kind of don't understand this. Nobody is forcing anyone to use sideloading. Heck, Android phones by default have sideloading turned off in the settings so you can't even accidentally do it without going through a bunch of warnings. Unless Android phones have an extra side-channel I don't know about, I just can't imagine someone sideloading an app on one of them unless they explicitly have decided the benefits outwe…
I agree with you that it's a tricky line to walk, but the UX issue can't be dismissed as a triviality.
You can go through the process now with Amazon Underground, Prime Video, and several other Amazon apps for Android. The user is prompted to sideload Amazon's apps that contain functionality disallowed in Google's app store. Amazon shows step-by-step dialogs teaching users how to do it. It would be really interesting to know how many "non-power-user" users have actually stepped through that process at Amazon's behest.
This is a fundamental problem with the single DRM-enforced app store model that Apple innovated, and which has been widely copied and lauded. Once you implement that, you have to toady up to whatever governments exist, including oppressive/murderous regimes, to be in their markets. If your ecosystem is just console video games, say, it's not that big of a deal; you have to either censor some games or don't enter cert…
If Apple is based in the "right" country (that believes in freedom) -- and I think you and I seem to agree this is the case, because you don't mention anything bad about the U.S., mentioning only Russia and China by name, and with descriptions like "vile shit", "mass murder", "oppression" --, then the U.S. government should be doing whatever negotiations and interventions need to take place to keep foreign governments from forcing a U.S. company to do evil.
Here is an analogy. If you're CEO at a Fortune 500 American company, you don't have to make your life choices so that foreign governments can't blackmail you into doing evil, by kidnapping your family. Because the government protects you from that. If Tim Cook's family were abducted by China to force Tim Cook to have Apple do something... well this scenario is just completely implausible, the whole weight of the entire U.S. government would be all over it, it would be an international issue of immense proportions.
I think it's kind of up to the government to keep foreign companies from forcing American companies to do bad things.