AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes • Hacker News Board

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#431

Post by stcredzero » Mon, Nov 28, 2022, 9:52 PM UTC

ThePhysicist wrote: post #127

jsnell wrote: post #8

This seems to have been announced a couple of weeks ago, so we don't need to just trust the tweet: https://www.macworld.com/article/1377200/apple-to-limit-aird... Having it open to everyone for only a limited amount of time actually kind of seems like the right thing, but it's hard to come up with a legit explanation for why they rushed that change to China first.

The timing of the change seems quite conspicuous [1], and it's also weird that Apple would introduce this in China first and only roll it out to the rest of the world next year. The same article mentions that Apple blocks the Taiwanese flag emoji in China, for which it's hard to come up with an explanation other than bowing to censorship. 1: https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/11/netizen-voices-apple-r...

it's hard to come up with an explanation other than bowing to censorship

If one believes Elon Musk's view of the Twitter situation with the app store, Apple seems to be for more censorship!

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#432

Post by fleddr » Mon, Nov 28, 2022, 9:53 PM UTC

Think Differently...and we will erase you.

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#433

Post by jdmoreira » Mon, Nov 28, 2022, 9:54 PM UTC

rurp wrote: post #409

jdmoreira wrote: post #99

are people really surprised the world biggest corporation has to cave to the worlds second largest economy? What do people expect really? Do people even understand the kind of incentives at play here? What does this have to do with the quality of their products? Apple is an artificial entity, a corporation and it's only loyalty by design is with the wallets of it's shareholders. What's surprising about this?

Well for one thing, many people seem to believe Tim Cook and other individuals at Apple when they say things like "We believe privacy is a human right". It's worthwhile to point out some of the examples of their actions being contrary to their words.

Those people are naive and have never heard of PR and "spin"

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#434

Post by vel0city » Mon, Nov 28, 2022, 9:54 PM UTC

bigfudge wrote: post #312

vel0city wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you happen to use Firefox? I've found a lot of my stability issues on my 6a were related to Firefox on my phone. Installing firefox beta, going to about:config, and setting apz.overscroll.enabled to false seems to have fixed all the stability issues I was having.

This is exactly the sort of reason I don’t think I could ever switch back to android.

For what its worth, this is the first time I've had such an issue with stability on Android going back to a Moto X 2014, my first Android phone.

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#435

Post by zerocrates » Mon, Nov 28, 2022, 9:55 PM UTC

throw7 wrote: post #426

whimsicalism wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple certainly tailors the emojis available to the local political climate. They don't, for instance, have the flag of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, instead using the flag of the former Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.

Truth. And it's not just apple, on android we (U.S.) get a "water gun" for gun and no emoji shows up when you search for rifle.

The gun emoji became a toy on all major platforms everywhere several years ago.

This is surely related to the political climate but I believe the entities involved applied that change worldwide.

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#436

Post by _jal » Mon, Nov 28, 2022, 9:55 PM UTC

snoot wrote: post #229

johnbellone wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're both saying the same thing.

Nope. They were taking about Apple cracking down. That’s not the same as being forced to make a software change at the governments demand.

Whatever "Apple's" feelings (really, the executive team's; a corporation does not have feelings) about it, Apple is the entity that made the change.

And it is a weird kind of "force" they face. Apple, over the course of decades, has willingly made a huge investment in a state with an authoritarian government in order to pursue their goals. They did this knowing full-well that China's suppression apparatus would take great interest in Apple's pocket bugs, and that China shows little hesitation about using their leverage. Apple knew they would be asked to make these sorts of concessions. There's no chance they didn't think this over.

So when people say they "Apple doesn't have a choice", what they mean is Apple made the choice some time back.

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#437

Post by miguelazo » Mon, Nov 28, 2022, 9:55 PM UTC

ChicagoBoy11 wrote: post #163

miguelazo wrote: post #81

How does this actually limit the dissemination of information? You have 10 minutes, and then can reinitiate? Seems like a reasonable security precaution.

I'm an educator and one thing that's actually been happening is some of our older kids will see school buses out on the road and will just try to airdrop obscene content to kids ON the bus. We had literally talked about hoping there could be some default "off" behavior for airdrop, so this actually will (at least for me) be a welcome change in behavior!

Yes, this has been a problem on public transportation for years.

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#438

Post by joosters » Mon, Nov 28, 2022, 9:56 PM UTC

lovvtide wrote: post #412

rchaud wrote: post #213

Time for a new operating system (if we didn't already hit that mark with the 2013 NSA leaks). Apple, Google, Samsung, Huawei: they all exist at the pleasure of the state. Please ignore their glitzy PR-laden presentations about protecting people's privacy and upholding human rights. They will sell you out in a second if it's convenient. On the mobile side of things, we need, at the barest minimum: - a web based OS wit…

I would add: - The ability to send push notifications without replying on GCM/APN - Support for mesh networking (multiple low power peer connections) - Convenient "lockdown" mode that encrypts your phone's contents for international travel - Included hardware wallet/keystore for signing all data that you upload to social media

Is it even possible to do push notifications without relying on a centralized system (Google, Apple, or whoever)? Sounds like a very difficult problem to solve while preventing privacy leaks, spamming, DOS attacks and still being reliable and globally available. Who would pay for the infrastructure?

(Please, no 'blockchain will solve this' answers!)

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#439

Post by concinds » Mon, Nov 28, 2022, 9:56 PM UTC

noncoml wrote: post #379

jsnell wrote: post #8

This seems to have been announced a couple of weeks ago, so we don't need to just trust the tweet: https://www.macworld.com/article/1377200/apple-to-limit-aird... Having it open to everyone for only a limited amount of time actually kind of seems like the right thing, but it's hard to come up with a legit explanation for why they rushed that change to China first.

Quoted post unavailable.

See this article from November 10th, from the China Digital Times, a news website which is considered trustworthy.

https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/11/netizen-voices-apple-r...

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#440

Post by pc86 » Mon, Nov 28, 2022, 9:57 PM UTC

mmmpop wrote: post #383

whimsicalism wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple certainly tailors the emojis available to the local political climate. They don't, for instance, have the flag of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, instead using the flag of the former Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.

I can still see the Iran flag in all of its unaltered glory here in the US. I guess they missed the memo?

Iran and Afghanistan are different countries.