121–130 of 131 posts
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Call screening has saved me so much time that it's one of the main things stopping me from switching to iPhone.
iPhones have had speech to text for voicemails for years. Long enough that I can't remember a time without them.
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Google pixel 3a, reading your comment: "for me it seems like Google voice typing is getting worse and worse. It capitalizes random words in a sentence like this. It's specifically ignores the word o clock."
See! I don't know who at Google has this personal vendetta but it has to be on purpose. You say "We start at three o'clock" and it just types "We start at 3" when what you want it to type is "We start at 3:00". You can sit there saying "one o'clock, two o'clock, three o'clock, four o'clock" and it just types out "1234". It knows the word I'm using but ignores it on purpose. It's a real issue for me as "4:00" has thre…
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>Apple has brought its hardware microphone disconnect security feature to its latest iPads. The microphone disconnect security feature aims to make it far more difficult for hackers to use malware or a malicious app to eavesdrop on a device’s surroundings. The feature was first introduced to Macs by way of Apple’s T2 security chip last year. The security chip ensured that the microphone was physically disconnected fr…
As someone who uses his laptop in clamshell mode most of the time, this was an anti-feature for me. Having to literally lift the lid and MacOS readjusting the display every time I want to have a meeting was frustrating. It got to the point where I just bought a cheap USB microphone just to be done with it. I support having a hardware switch for it so that I can have the choice.
I mean, the microphone is under the lid anyway so you are not doing whoever you are talking to any favours by using it in clamshell mode anyway.
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Laptops urgently need to have a hardware switch for the microphone. A mobile phone should have one too - but that will never happen. At least the laptop is large enough that one little switch is not a problem (unless you are Apple and even essential peripherals are a problem).
>Apple has brought its hardware microphone disconnect security feature to its latest iPads. The microphone disconnect security feature aims to make it far more difficult for hackers to use malware or a malicious app to eavesdrop on a device’s surroundings. The feature was first introduced to Macs by way of Apple’s T2 security chip last year. The security chip ensured that the microphone was physically disconnected fr…
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Those are different things than what most people talking about iOS privacy mean by “privacy.” The thing people usually mean by privacy is “security of personal data and metadata”—i.e. being able to use your phone to break the (perhaps unjust) law, without a state actor being able to then prove you broke the law by forensically analyzing your phone. Phones already leak a lot of circumstantial forensic evidence just by…
> In that regard, iOS is usually considered the winner. That, too, is based in myth. More iPhones have had malware than Android phones available for purchase in Europe and the US by an order of magnitude, and Android vulnerabilities are more expensive than iOS vulnerabilities, so if your standard of privacy is protection from state actors, you should prefer Android devices. > If I’m e.g. a Canadian diplomat in China…
I'm assuming here that you're taking "standard precautions":
1. You get new phones from a trustworthy source, e.g. the official storefront of the relevant company.
2. You buy in person, so that the phone can't be intercepted in transit because some watchlist redirected it based on who you are.
3. You get someone likely to not be on any such watchlist to buy your phone for you (i.e. you hire some kid off the street to go into the store for you, and hand them a wad of cash to pay with.) This is to ensure that, for as long as possible, the phone's MAC address doesn't end up automatically associated with your activities. (It will eventually; but that's why you burn your phones pretty often.)
Under such rules, you won't get any "bonus with purchase" rootkits on the device. The device will only have a rootkit if all such devices in the current market have rootkits.
> Just get a Blackberry, Nokia, Google, or Android One device
You actually cannot buy Android phones in China—even from these brands—which haven't been passed through the hands of a Chinese distributor at the "OEM customization, root-of-trust-not-yet-signed" stage. (Heck, you can't even buy a Nintendo Switch in China without it going through the hands of Tencent.) Every one of these phones has a "Chinese edition" with different firmware, and that edition is the only one available for sale in China.
(How does it work for Android One phones? IIRC, the phones with these editions hit a different Android One firmware-update server, one run by the Chinese government. They still get "stock" Android firmware... in the sense that the only changes are a potential rootkit.)
The reason iPhones are trustable in that situation is that Apple has constrained their infrastructure such that they only have one firmware. That means that any China-specific customizations have to be built into that single global firmware, and activated by software (i.e. by choosing your "Region" in the phone setup.) And that means that your own diplomatic home office can inspect all such customizations using the full resources of your own state counterintelligence apparatus, and then give you the go-ahead (or not) for using the phone with such customizations.
The Chinese Android phone firmware is only distributed within China, so it's much harder to be sure you capture every version of it for security-analysis. And, even if you do, it may not tell you much about what they can do to specific people, as it may just contain "generalized backdoors" (e.g. cellular-carrier-triggered automatic firmware-update push) such that any code that actually spies on people is only pushed to the devices of People of Interest (likely with additional logic to delete itself if the phone leaves the country), such that it's nearly impossible to exfiltrate the device from China back to your own counterintelligence.
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But the larger consideration, if we're talking about e.g. populist recruitment into civic-action groups, is that none of those Western Android phone brands are popular in China, compared to Chinese-owned brands. Both because the state controls the advertising (so the Chinese brands get product placement on Chinese TV, and the Western brands do not); and because the Chinese phones are just plain cheaper for the same level of features (which mostly is down to vertical integration and simplified logistics with component manufacturers.) So, sure, you can try to buy one; but it'll be hard to find anyone carrying one. And you can't just rely on a random stranger to have one. Heck, just buying a phone from a Western phone-brand probably puts you on a watch-list.
...other than Apple, because Apple is unavoidably still seen as a fashionable brand in China, despite the Chinese's government's best efforts to quash this sentiment.
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> In that regard, iOS is usually considered the winner. That, too, is based in myth. More iPhones have had malware than Android phones available for purchase in Europe and the US by an order of magnitude, and Android vulnerabilities are more expensive than iOS vulnerabilities, so if your standard of privacy is protection from state actors, you should prefer Android devices. > If I’m e.g. a Canadian diplomat in China…
> More iPhones have had malware than Android phones available for purchase in Europe and the US by an order of magnitude I'm assuming here that you're taking "standard precautions": 1. You get new phones from a trustworthy source, e.g. the official storefront of the relevant company. 2. You buy in person, so that the phone can't be intercepted in transit because some watchlist redirected it based on who you are. 3. Y…
Under the standard of "standard precautions," iOS has had multiple orders of magnitude more malware infections than Android instead of just one or two due to Xcodeghost.
Also, my statement was about people outside of China, as you can see by the end of the quoted sentence, so many of your reasonable precautions don't apply.
> You actually cannot buy Android phones in China [snip]
You misread my point. My point was that if you're in China, you're already screwed, no matter which device you legally purchase in China. For the rest of us outside of China (including you in Canada and me in the US), Android devices are clearly superior for privacy as I have shown earlier.
> IIRC, the phones with these editions hit a different Android One firmware-update server, one run by the Chinese government.
Android One phones are not legally sold in China because the update server is run by Google, which has no servers in China.
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See! I don't know who at Google has this personal vendetta but it has to be on purpose. You say "We start at three o'clock" and it just types "We start at 3" when what you want it to type is "We start at 3:00". You can sit there saying "one o'clock, two o'clock, three o'clock, four o'clock" and it just types out "1234". It knows the word I'm using but ignores it on purpose. It's a real issue for me as "4:00" has thre…
It's a pain, but can you say "four colon zero zero?"
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iPhone is doing it on device as well.
Fairly certain that isn't true. On my wife's iPhone, she was never able to use voice to text while in airplane mode. Maybe that's changed with the latest 11 but it definitely didn't work on the X.
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So this is google's product on both devices? I thought this is a demonstration of apple's built-in speech-to-text vs android's built in speech-to-text. If it's the former this is less interesting except for the observation that speed of conversion really is valuable.
You missed mwest217's reply above explaining that it is indeed Apple's speech-to-text engine being used here.
I'm curious about the privacy policies behind both engines and their development. Google's gotten an advantage in many fields by simply trampling over user's rights. Apple has been more respectful of user rights, and that's kind of made life harder for them too.
Here's my controversial post of the day: I'm okay with Google trampling on my rights, in exchange for the things it gives. Personalized search results, better ad hoc translation, all of these things work well only because they have my data. And for me, I like these things enough that I'm perfectly okay with the trade.
That's fine, you're a consenting adult renouncing your right to privacy, and that's perfectly fine.
The problem is, Google is trampling on the rights of _all_ users by default, without any consent (consent, by definition, must be an INFORMED choice).