331–340 of 419 posts
The mobile landscape presents a very difficult choice. Choose Android, get actual access to your device and install what you want but have your privacy completely trampled upon by Google Choose Apple, get marginally better privacy but no ownership of your phone and no possibility to install what you want. I wish we had a reasonable alternative, it's so frustrating to have to choose between two bad alternatives and th…
If they put half as much effort into eliminating real scams as they do in eliminating proven useful software , what a different platform it would be.
There is a sort of numeric tragedy of perception that happens with app stores and other environments where a curator is filtering fraud but also sometimes nuking some good apps in the process. As users, we only have any visibility into three numbers: A. The number of good apps that make it through the filter. (True positives.) B. The number of good apps that are caught by it. (False positives.) C. The number of fraud…
I spent a lot of time cleaning computers for friends and family, and often times they would have viruses because users were looking at porn or downloading games.
Well, it turns out most users like looking at porn and downloading games. Most users want to play indie games (that may be garbage) or read not-licensed foreign comics. Users enjoy being able to boot up old programs and play with fan made mods.
Let's not pretend cracking down on all of this is for the user. Honest computer security would give the user a clear and readable label ("hey, this free game is going to send off your personal data including browser history") and let them make the choice. Users are not farm animals to be kept in neat little pens.
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> People are stuck in their ecosystem. The monetary coat of changing platform is quite high if you’re already invested in that ecosystem. What are the costs? I can buy an iPhone or an Android phone and switch pretty easily can’t I? > Not in favour of more laws, but forcing the hands of these platforms so they provide more control to their customers is not a bad thing. Maybe more control isn’t a good thing? But even s…
> What are the costs? I can buy an iPhone or an Android phone and switch pretty easily can’t I? Software would need to be repurchased if it's even available on the other platform. Maybe you could but I know I couldn't easily or cheaply switch.
Microsoft in the late 90s/2000s: Tells OEMs that they can't sell their own PCs with alternative operating systems. Gets forced by the government to stop. Hackers everywhere cheer. Apple since 2008: Tells people that they can't install programs on their own devices. Any mention of asking the government to force them to stop this is met by Hacker News users vehemently defending their right to let Apple (and only Apple,…
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Based on what’s happening with Windows, I don’t think Windows mobile would be any better for privacy than android.
WebOS? BB10? Meego?
webOS 6.0 on the LG TV is surprisingly pretty damn good. I think they even opened it up for other TV manufacturers to adopt webOS.
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I have a latest gen iPad and file management is a disaster. Apps are so sandboxed that either every app needs access to my dropbox or you have to go through the atrocious files interface - assuming your app even actually supports the files dialog. God help you if you actually want to browse a network share or use a non-standard cloud. The iPad is just barely, barely capable of downloading a document from email, openi…
> either every app needs access to my dropbox To be fair, on a PC every app has access to your Dropbox.
Every app on my ipad needs oauth access. That means those credentials can sit on a remote server and be leaked or used at will, and no firewall or filesystem permission is going to help me.
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Privacy is actually behind on Apple, as long as they 1) don’t allow proper adblocking and 2) actively boicot webapps in favour of installed apps that can spy much more efectively
They allow VPN and DNS-based blockers, request interceptors in Safari (so-called Content Blockers) and are adding support for WebExtensions to Safari in next iOS release. Plus there are 3rd-party browsers with build-in content blockers, like Brave and Firefox Focus. Safari itself is doing clever stuff with Tracking Protection ( https://webkit.org/tracking-prevention/ ). All apps I run use SafariViewController for in-…
Yeah, DNS based blockers misses a LOT of ads and webannoyances. And if you think that the content blockers are good enough you probably havent been using youtube lately on safari as they are now able bypass all current content blockers that I tested (adguard[1], 1blocker, wipr).
> ... and are adding support for WebExtensions to Safari in next iOS release.
Yeah, but I'm not holding my breathe that they will allow extensions similar to uBlock and noscript (hope to be wrong).
> I'd say they are very close to Android or desktop macOS.
Anyone with experience using uBlock/NoScript/uMatrix can attest that content blockers on iOS is not close at all, it's just a skeleton of uBlock Origin capabilities.
[1]adguard created a shortcut extension to bypass the content blocker restriction but its utterly annoying to do it everytime some random video.
The mobile landscape presents a very difficult choice. Choose Android, get actual access to your device and install what you want but have your privacy completely trampled upon by Google Choose Apple, get marginally better privacy but no ownership of your phone and no possibility to install what you want. I wish we had a reasonable alternative, it's so frustrating to have to choose between two bad alternatives and th…
I agree with most of your points. > Choose Apple, get marginally better privacy I disagree with the word “marginally” here. Compared to Android, it’s far better and keeps staying ahead (while Android may try to catch up for certain features and controls).
That's fcking my mobile. I paid for it. I own it. If I want to install something on my owned device, who the f is Apple to stop it? Think about it this way: A chair supplier telling Apple to only allow it's employees to sit a certain way. Or architects telling it to only build their HQ's a certain way. Not as an advice, but, enforced. How ridiculous is that!
Apple has always been like this. Better hope they dont decide to throttle down your current hardware when they release a thinner one next year and deem yours obsolete.
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We had a third option but developers very publicly refused to support it and Google worked tirelessly to hamstring it in every way they could. Now we're all crying for a third platform because Apple is too restrictive and Google, surprise (to no one least of all WP users), turned out to be evil and I feel absolutely no sympathy for the tech community, particularly developers who decry the current paradigm. We chose t…
For anyone that remember the 90s it is utterly bizarre to hear Microsoft talked about as some type of potential savior that was unfairly muscled out of the market. I don't disagree that having a third player in the space would improve things, but it is just weird how the perception of some companies change.