341–350 of 851 posts
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They would only have access to the photos that are being reviewed. And you can either choose between (a) someone having to see your photos or (b) relying on an automated but imperfect process. You have to pick one.
Uh, can't I choose not to have my private images scanned? I think that's still a choice, right?
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Not really. Google wants black people to buy their phones because a featured they developed works better for their skin tone. Should companies who make smaller handsets be barred from advertising to women?
Do you think black people striving for equality are looking for companies putting black people on their ads? They want equality, not their struggle to be washed away by bullshit empty posturing. "Want to end racism? Stop talking about it. I'll stop calling you a white man if you stop calling me a black man." - Morgan Freeman
They literally acted instead of talking about it.
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But a manual reviewer in Cupertino or elsewhere still gets access to your personal (possibly very intimate or otherwise private) photos. Privacy from law enforcement is hardly the only privacy that people value.
If you desire privacy, never upload your images to any cloud service that doesn't offer true end-to-end encryption of the data (that is, one where they do not have the key). Use a service where data is only decryptable on your own devices or devices that you personally authorize. Which is, presently, none of the popular services that I'm aware of.
Full E2E encryption is going to trigger nightmare "I lost all my photos" customer-service stories when people forget their passwords... which is acceptable when you deliberately signed up for a service where security was the selling point, but not great for someone who bought a mass-market phone.
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https://www.asus.com/Mobile/Phones/ZenFone/Zenfone-8/
The Zenfone is still significantly larger and heavier than the iPhone mini, which for me is already at the upper limit for one-handed use.
The launch of this phone was utterly botched. There's a hilarious dissonance between the talk of SoC design, AI, computational photography and ambient computing and the inability to handle a website with a relatively simple purchase flow for a phone that, let's be real, probably has about 1/10 th of the interest and web traffic of the iPhone. From the moment the store website went live with these phones there were al…
People will never learn. You don't preorder Pixels, there are always better deals on Black Friday (literally in few weeks, just a week after Pixel start shipping). Never take preorders, especially with Pixels. (learned that hard with Pixel 3).
Probably the same thing with the Pixel 6/6P this year.
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Oh, I totally know all cloud providers are scanning photos in their cloud and I totally accepted that (hence why I mentioned I do manual photo drops from the phone and upload them to private cloud storage). What no one has done before and what I totally don't accept is someone scanning photos on my device , which is what Apple is doing. The in the cloud vs. on your device aspect of this debate is the most important p…
> The in the cloud vs. on your device aspect of this debate is the most important part and cannot be glossed over. I really do think it's a weird aspect to fixate on, though. So long as Apple is only scanning the photos that're being uploaded to its servers, it genuinely doesn't matter to me where that scanning happens. It's a scan that could have happened in either location, and the version where it's happening loca…
You can already do that today (I do).
> But it doesn't
Maybe, maybe not. Even if I were to trust Apple 100% it's again a matter of principle (no local scanning).
Imagine the uproar if Microsoft Defender (which comes in-box enabled-by-default on all Windows 10/11 PCs) were to suddenly start scanning photos (it already scans executables and Office documents), hashing them against some opaque "database" and attaching tokens to suspicious ones that would be analyzed when uploaded to OneDrive (again, enabled by default for your Documents\Photos on Windows 10/11 if you use a MS Account).
Then on top of that, imagine Windows was a walled garden a-la iOS and you couldn't uninstall / disable / replace Defender with a different tool (which you totally can today).
I think there would be massive outrage in the press with MS being dragged through the mud for months, and droves of users switching to alternatives (like Linux) overnight. Yet (except for a few privacy / freedom organizations and a little press bleep) Apple gets to shake it off scot-free; I don't understand the dissonance.
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Samsung announced 5 years of Android updates months ago. Before that, it was 4 years of updates.
Unless you have more recent info (please correct me in that case), that's not quite correct. Last I heard was that Samsung's promise has been 4 years of updates [1]. I recognize Samsung as being well clear of the rest of the pack of Android vendors. Other Android vendors are outright negligent, whereas Samsung seems to generally try to fight their bad incentives and come up with some decency. Where I think Samsung fa…
I'm a huge fan of operating my phone with styluses in general, but I think Samsung is the only Android vendor (other than Apple with their pencil) that actually cares about the benefits of adding a stylus to a phone/tablet.
For instance, last week I discovered that you can annotate your calendar with the S-pen. Your annotations stick to your calendar like post-its would to a computer. At first I thought I was drawing on a _picture_ of the calendar application view, but I was writing inside of the app itself.
Samsung's Note os is full of these niche-but-useful-when-you-actually–need-or-want-them kind of features.
Taking macro photos of that little insect on a hard to reach life in the forest? You can point it right where you need it with your right hand while you snap pictures with your pen in the other. It's a neat little remote.
Use your phone for presentations? The pen is your clicker to go through your slides.
Like keeping a digital journal with handwriting? Samsung's (and Google's too) keyboard has great handwriting recognition built-in. Nobody except me seems to use it, but it's actually great!
Need to quickly quickly take a note to make sure you won't forget to do that one important thing? Take out your pen while phone is locked and you can write on your screen directly, this is saved instantly to your device.
Samsung has clearly put a lot of thought into this over the years. The integration is excellent and is available in places where you would never expect it.
TL;DR: I like my note, not only is the hardware great, the software is great too
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The Zenfone is still significantly larger and heavier than the iPhone mini, which for me is already at the upper limit for one-handed use.
Bit larger yes, just under 1oz heavier... not too significant. And headphone jack, no notch (dealbreaker in 2021), no CSAM.
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Unless you have more recent info (please correct me in that case), that's not quite correct. Last I heard was that Samsung's promise has been 4 years of updates [1]. I recognize Samsung as being well clear of the rest of the pack of Android vendors. Other Android vendors are outright negligent, whereas Samsung seems to generally try to fight their bad incentives and come up with some decency. Where I think Samsung fa…
> Where I think Samsung falls short is execution. Samsung is fundamentally a hardware company and their software has always been mediocre in my view, even to this day. I disagree. I really like Samsung's take on Android and appreciate features like Dex. With some first-party software from the company, they also make Android extremely customizable. The long tail of Android features that exist only on Samsung devices w…
We have different tastes in phones, which is okay. I wouldn't really normally respond to this, but I think this quote highlights _why_ our tastes differ.
"Having more features" is not a selling point to me, it's probably the opposite. I want a simple OS with a strong set of core features, with a small selection of apps relevant to me. Smartphones have been reasonably mature products for a lot of years at this point, I know what I want from them.
That's why Samsung is quite unappealing to me despite their best efforts - I have owned and used multiple Samsung devices in the past. They're trying to give you everything and the kitchen sink, wow you with a bunch of features. Don't bother me with that stuff, I just want something more basic - software wise, at least.
One interesting thing to note is how much more high-budget Hollywood style Apple's event feels in comparison to Google's event. Having watched the two events on successive days, some things stand out - Apple throws numbers repeatedly at you through out the presentation and you end up remembering quite a few useless statistics (55.7 billion transitors in M1 Max) Apple makes a much bigger deal about each device with lo…
Is this also a difference in audience though? Yesterday's event was geared mainly towards creative professionals who are both more technical than average as well as have specific technical needs. Today's is towards the average consumer for a consumer device (even though it's called the "Pro").