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My Mac contacted 63 different Apple owned domains in an hour, while not is use

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Re: My Mac contacted 63 different Apple owned domains in an hour, while not is use

#181

Post by msgodel »

al_borland wrote: post #17

While this seems like a lot, in some ways this is what user's expect. Push notifications should be coming all the time, assuming the system is on. Most users expect various maintenance services to run when the system idle so it doesn't interfere with their active use of the system. When users open apps like Weather (or view a widget), they expect it to already be up to date without having to manually refresh or wait…

Should push really be going through Apple on a laptop? I kind of understand it on a phone (although users should be able to switch push providers if they want to eg use open source software that apple won't allow) but on a Laptop there's no reason to not just have the application manage the toasts/sockets itself.

Re: My Mac contacted 63 different Apple owned domains in an hour, while not is use

#182

Post by msgodel »

nothrabannosir wrote: post #61
jjmarr wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it even a push notification if you have to fetch them from a server?

Is there mobile push technology which is actually fundamentally push, all the way down to the transport layer? Like open socket, listening for incoming packets only, no notifications-> no traffic? I was under the impression it was all polling if you go down far enough, but at least because of central registration the phone only needs to poll one single pubsub service instead of a separate server per subscription. Cou…

In theory you could do that, that's how I had push set up on my Pinephone. Often the ssh connection that was used for it was still live after rtcwake came back up. It's kind of a moot point since the WiFi radio couldn't wake the CPU up on its own though.

Re: My Mac contacted 63 different Apple owned domains in an hour, while not is use

#183

Post by al_borland »

thesuitonym wrote: post #131
dev_hugepages wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a story to tell us?

I don't have a story but Little Snitch is the kind of tool most corporate users don't need, but that many malicious actors love to use. Sort of like running nmap on your computer, yeah there are legitimate reasons to do so, but you will get a call from IT if you try it.

I jokingly told a coworker to try nmap when he was trying to figure out a port to use for something legitimate. He was on the phone with the security team seemingly within 90 seconds. I was actually pretty impressed.

Re: My Mac contacted 63 different Apple owned domains in an hour, while not is use

#184

Post by al_borland »

amelius wrote: post #87
al_borland wrote: post #17

While this seems like a lot, in some ways this is what user's expect. Push notifications should be coming all the time, assuming the system is on. Most users expect various maintenance services to run when the system idle so it doesn't interfere with their active use of the system. When users open apps like Weather (or view a widget), they expect it to already be up to date without having to manually refresh or wait…

> Which then becomes a question of how much time/money to they invest in features for 1% of users? The problem with Apple is that __anyone__ sits in a 1% group of users in one way or the other. But they try to make a one-size-fits-all product. This is in contrast to Linux where everybody can do whatever they like, and most things are opt-in rather than opt-out.

Apple ships to satisfy the 80%. 3rd party devs generally fill the needs of the 20% in various ways.

This is no different with Linux. How many Linux users use a desktop environment as-is without any plugins or tweaks? How many Arch users don’t have a single package from the AUR?

There are tools like Little Snitch on macOS to monitor and block all kind of network traffic.

Re: My Mac contacted 63 different Apple owned domains in an hour, while not is use

#185

Post by al_borland »

ath92 wrote: post #57
al_borland wrote: post #17

While this seems like a lot, in some ways this is what user's expect. Push notifications should be coming all the time, assuming the system is on. Most users expect various maintenance services to run when the system idle so it doesn't interfere with their active use of the system. When users open apps like Weather (or view a widget), they expect it to already be up to date without having to manually refresh or wait…

Regular users don’t think of push notifications as something that needs to go through some central server owned by Apple. If Alice sends Bob a message, shouldn’t that require only their phones to communicate with one another, without some third party?

In the Alice and Bob scenario, what happens if Bob’s phone is off or doesn’t have a single when Alice sends the message? Does the message just get dropped? Does Alice’s phone keep trying forever to send the message until it gets a response back that Bob got it? How long does it try before giving up? What happens if Alice and Bob are far apart and the phones can’t directly talk, how does Alice in LA send a message to Bob in NY without a 3rd party to relay the message?

If regular users don’t think about these things, it’s because they’ve never thought about these ideas at all. If they did, and they are able to think, they should come to the conclusion that a 3rd party is necessary in some form.

Re: My Mac contacted 63 different Apple owned domains in an hour, while not is use

#186

Post by mcphage »

sitzkrieg wrote: post #161
snehk wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the things mentioned in the post above yours have nothing to do with telemetry. They're more like core functions to make the system work at all.

take a look at fbs.smoot.apple.com and argue that isnt telemetry? why does an os need to hit the internet AT ALL to work? osx doesnt of course

> why does an os need to hit the internet AT ALL to work?

Does it actually need to hit these to work?

Re: My Mac contacted 63 different Apple owned domains in an hour, while not is use

#187

Post by DrBenCarson »

ffsm8 wrote: post #163
DrBenCarson wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that is how Apple split them. There is no ad revenue in any segment outside of services. “Belief” is not necessary, this is accounting I’m a shareholder, I read the reports. Apple make 70%+ of their revenue from direct device sales (no one else comes close to them)

I can see where you're coming from, but I still feel like you might be putting too much trust into how apple splits their revenue in documents as they're provided to the public. I'm not saying that the numbers are false, but apple can ultimately freely choose how to categorize their revenue itself. From my point of view, their advertising revenue inherently cannot be split from their app store revenue. It's akin to m…

App Store and ad revenue are part of the same category

Re: My Mac contacted 63 different Apple owned domains in an hour, while not is use

#188

Post by simondotau »

lapcat wrote: post #33
simondotau wrote: post #11

The way I see it is either you trust Apple or you don’t. To be clear, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to arrive at either conclusion, as it relates to your own needs and security posture. Personally I choose to trust them. My trust is not blind, and they could lose my trust very quickly. But as it stands right now, they have my trust. If you say that you don’t trust Apple, I don’t see how you could tolerate running…

> The way I see it is either you trust Apple or you don’t. That's so obviously a false dichotomy.

That’s what you disagree with? If anything, I was expecting someone to insist that it’s not unreasonable to run software from a company you don’t trust. That’s an easy argument to steel-man, because there are many ways to run untrusted software safely.

But if you think that trust itself is a false dichotomy, I’d love to hear what that sounds like. I’m struggling to think of a good faith steel-man of this assertion.

Re: My Mac contacted 63 different Apple owned domains in an hour, while not is use

#189

Post by simondotau »

bell-cot wrote: post #144
simondotau wrote: post #11

The way I see it is either you trust Apple or you don’t. To be clear, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to arrive at either conclusion, as it relates to your own needs and security posture. Personally I choose to trust them. My trust is not blind, and they could lose my trust very quickly. But as it stands right now, they have my trust. If you say that you don’t trust Apple, I don’t see how you could tolerate running…

> The way I see it is ... That's one way to view it. One might also view the large number of Apple-owned domains here as evidence that Apple's infrastructure is a sprawling mess, and reduce trust accordingly.

Really? I would’ve thought that lots of small self-contained systems feels very UNIX-like, and not a trust modifier.

Re: My Mac contacted 63 different Apple owned domains in an hour, while not is use

#190

Post by nothrabannosir »

baby_souffle wrote: post #130
nothrabannosir wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there mobile push technology which is actually fundamentally push, all the way down to the transport layer? Like open socket, listening for incoming packets only, no notifications-> no traffic? I was under the impression it was all polling if you go down far enough, but at least because of central registration the phone only needs to poll one single pubsub service instead of a separate server per subscription. Cou…

Yes, sms is "actually push" all the way down to the transport layer. As far as I know, this is still what push notifications are built upon for an idle/sleeping device. Carrier infrastructure knows which tower you last connected to, instructs that specific tower to broadcast a message telling your phone to wake up and fetch the remaining 80% of the notification content (the sms bit is usually just enough for your dev…

iOS or Android push notifications (can) use SMS for notifying the client that a new message is available ? That’s lovely. Do you have any links or any keywords to find more ? All I can find online is that iOS uses TCP (XMPP in fact :o TIL. )
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