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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

#201

Post by DrBenCarson »

ffsm8 wrote: post #200
DrBenCarson wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

App Store and ad revenue are part of the same category

But in aggregate, it's 25%, right? I'd consider that a majority share, or would you say the term should only apply if it's over 50%? I considered it to be a majority share because it's a significant chunk of the total revenue and not just a minor footnote, but looking back, "a significant amount" would've probably been better

“majority share” means > 50%

“plurality” means it’s the biggest number

Neither apply in this case

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

#202

Post by yencabulator »

snehk wrote: post #62
neogodless wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Microsoft has telemetry: * Windows is a spyware machine - how can anyone use it? Year of Linux baby! When Apple has telemetry: * It's working as expected. So... to be fair, is there a thorough comparison of the two? How are they the same, and how are they different?

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.

The article, then again, specifically talks also about telemetry. The parent commenter conveniently chose to ignore them because of the Apple reality distortion field.

> fbs.smoot.apple.com - for crash reports, analytics, or user feedback.

> purchase pancake.apple.com - telemetry

> xp.apple.com - telemetry

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

#203

Post by yencabulator »

msgodel wrote: post #181
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.

Oh it's much more than that. Lots of 3rd party software vendors making macOS-only apps use Apple's CloudKit for state sync, all that data is stored by Apple.

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

#204

Post by yencabulator »

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…

> As far as I know, this is still what push notifications are built upon for an idle/sleeping device.

I thought so too, but can't find any evidence for it anymore, all I can find is mentions of the phone keeping a TCP connection alive and then some device driver level tweaks to make that power efficient. I think the older GSM-specific wakeup mechanism might have died when iPhones stopped being carrier-specific.

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

#205

Post by yencabulator »

nothrabannosir wrote: post #190
baby_souffle wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. )

It wasn't really SMS, it was another message type riding on top of the same lower-level protocol called SS7. But it seems that's no longer in use and it's all just TCP/IP now.

(Said differently, the radio firmware got good enough that it doesn't need a special "wake up" packet anymore, it can recognize a packet to itself in a low power state.)

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

#206

Post by yencabulator »

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…

Both Apple and Google mobile notifications are long-lived TCP/IP sockets where the server writes bytes to the stream when it wants to wake up the phone.

The TCP/IP and protocol-specific handshake is started by the phone, but then the phone just waits to receive data. That counts as fundamentally push, all the way down to the transport layer.

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

#207

Post by yencabulator »

yaris wrote: post #97
lapcat wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an extremely uncharitable interpretation of the article. The number was just intended to illustrate the amount of communication that occurs.

The amount of communications would be better illustrated by the number of connections made in a period of time, maybe complemented with the amount of data transferred up/down. Making a 1000 connections towards one domain name with different URLs does not fundamentally differ from making 1000 connections each towards a separate domain name (which names can be the same server, just with a bunch of IPs).

That's just the amount. The DNS names "leaking" the service in question is extra information, and interesting.

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

#208

Post by yencabulator »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #173

One of the things that really put me off about Apple's computers, namely their pre-installed OS, was how "chatty" they have become when attached to a local network, let alone the internet. As such, I stopped buying Apple. I have not owned a Mac since the G4 days. I never attached it to the internet. I would use TCP/IP and a crossover cable to move files. I always see a high vollume of traffic from other peoples' Appl…

I am often in remote locations with very little bandwidth and modern software is an utter pain. Silent 2 GB downloads starting in the background!

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

#209

Post by amy214 »

al_borland wrote: post #179
neogodless wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which then becomes a question of how much time/money to they invest in features for 1% of users? Now how much time do they invest in those same features when the 99% will stumble in there, turn a bunch of stuff off, then call support and ask why their weather widget isn't updating? That sounds like telemetry?

The features I was referring to would be a control panel to list all the various remote calls to let uses micromanage what calls they wanted and which ones they didn’t. Inside of those settings could be options to enable/disable telemetry, sure. But also push notifications, weather updates, virus definition updates, etc.

That's how it should be if all was fair, I feel like what we have here is a "dark pattern" whereby keeping all the telemetries opaque ... enables one to keep around the nasty sort of telemetry the company very much wishes to remain opaque.

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

#210

Post by sitzkrieg »

mcphage wrote: post #186
sitzkrieg wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

no, as i indicated above, and is patently clear to anyone who has turned off wifi
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