Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their privacy commitments align with their business, not their morals. They don't want an open internet primarily funded by advertising, so they make harder for advertising companies to track their users. What they want is an internet silod into apps you get from their app store, that are funded buy subscriptions and IAPs that they get a 30% cut from.
I like this comment because of its brutal honesty. “They don’t want so they choose ”
Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds
481–490 of 631 posts
Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds
#482Earlier quoted context omitted.
Malicious compliance is only illegal if it doesn't actually comply.
This is also wrong. Good faith is a requirement. Act in bad faith, and you can still be sanctioned. Do you have any background in this, or are you just asserting what you want reality to be? Because you are just spouting wrong information that, even for a non-lawyer, would take you 10 minutes to go find and read right information.
The key here is "reasonableness", but you can't read a judge's mind, so reasonable only means what a reasonable person would infer. That is completely subjective based on an individual's implicit biases and knowledge of all surrounding circumstances.
For example, the dev team tasked with implementing this may not be familiar with the entire case, so what they consider reasonable will be different based on that. They also know much more about technology and likely have strong feelings about what is acceptable, but the judge is NOT a subject matter expert (SME) in that area. Likewise, the judge is NOT a SME on UI/UX, so the judge's interpretation of "reasonable" may well be at odds. There is also an argument that directing to these third-party sites opens 1.4B people to exploitation, so it would be reasonable to allow them access, but also to protect those users (who also aren't SMEs and often have essentially zero understanding) from potential issues by framing things appropriately. I could go on with many other qualifiers about what would be reasonable.
The judge is qualified to make rulings based on the law, but utterly unqualified to decide what the details of a reasonable implementation would be. If she were a qualified SME, she could and should have written her reasoned decision and removed the need for interpretation. If the ruling were itself reasonable and clear, there wouldn't be meaningful room for debate about reasonableness which would in turn effectively render reasonableness a mute point. As such, you can see that "reasonableness" in these kinds of cases is a crutch to protect unqualified judges making rulings they should not be making which is ironically a very unreasonable approach.
As to "good faith", who is she to dictate that you must do what she says and be happily compliant or else? After all, unhappiness will almost certainly taint all actions to a greater or lesser degree, so anything less than perfect contentment would be "bad faith" to a greater or lesser degree.
Who is the judge to single-handedly decide these people's state of mind? Has all her study of law made her an expert on what happens in other people's minds and privy to their thoughts and experiences while ridding herself of her own biases? Such a task is impossibly hard for a jury even in broad terms with lots of facts and even less possible for a single person judging the actions of many people based only on a few chat messages.
How does she ensure that every single one of those hundreds to thousands of people involved is "acting in good faith" is an impossible task and you can be assured that at least one of them at any given time isn't acting in good faith about ANYTHING. This would imply that you must ALWAYS assume that bad faith was involved.
How do you determine how much bad faith is too much? Based on outcome is the only logical answer, but in that case, you could have been explicit about the outcome in the first place and skipped all the trouble and possible excuses of misunderstanding once again rendering "bad faith" as a crutch to protect the judge from their incompetence.
She passed judgement based on the law. As long as that judgement is fulfilled to the degree specified, the state of mind of the hundreds to thousands of people involved in carrying out that judgement should not matter.
"Good faith" and "reasonableness" is a faulty and fickle metric at its best when applied to a single person by a group of peers. It is a broken and unusable metric when applied to a group or corporate entity by a single judge not an expert in the matters at hand.
Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds
#483Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like this comment because of its brutal honesty. “They don’t want so they choose ”
We can have both, because they cannot kill the web. We can enjoy better privacy in the OS, the open Web, and better controls for the applications that should not be a website (which is still quite a lot of them).
Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds
#484Earlier quoted context omitted.
So it's spam in the eyes of everyone who doesn't happen to subscribe to their service of choice? If they want to read an article through their news app they are of course free to do so, but why spam that link?
Is it really spam if it was posted a single time? Just downvote it and collapse the thread if you don't want to see it.
Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds
#485I am concerned that the App Store has become the norm. For many young people, iPhones and iPads have been their only computer. Many have never seen a world where app developers can distribute independently. The NYT had an article out about ruling, and the number of people supporting the App Store was astounding. I think Apple has done a great job marketing the App Store as the reason for the security/UX of their plat…
> it's the OS. It's the OS that requires apps to get permission before accessing my location, it's the OS that isolates apps from each other, it's the OS that provides an easy way to install/uninstall packages. Sorry, you're just wrong. Only by analyzing the apps can Apple enforce several policies that many folks think contribute to users' security. The prohibition against dynamic code, lying about the reason that an…
Or they could secure the runtime and quit giving developers dangerous entitlements in the first place. Make no mistake, Apple doesn't need the App Store to develop meaningful security for their users. The Mac is living proof.
Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds
#486https://archive.ph/ZQLtD
The article is short enough that it makes more sense to quote it in full than to provide an archive link: > A federal judge hammered Apple for violating a ruling in an antitrust case that required the company to loosen certain restrictions it imposes on software-makers in its App Store. > Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ordered the iPhone-maker to allow developers to steer users to alternative methods of paying for serv…
Full article, works where archive.ph is blocked, no Javascript required, no tracking^1:
https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1DXcJN
1. Archive.{is,md,ph,etc.} puts the reader's IP address in a "spy pixel" URL.
Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds
#487Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems to depend on time of day
This is certainly the case. I have noticed this in voting patterns as well. I often comment strongly in favor of EU regulations (I believe capitalism is fairer and benefits consumers more with stronger regulations). During times the US is asleep such comments often get a lot of upvotes. During times where EU and the US are up, there seems to be much more contention in the voting, with votes swinging up and down a lot…
> IMO comments should be upvoted if they provide good insights (even if you disagree with them) and downvoted when they are low-content/trolling/full of fallacies.
Votes are not a popularity contest. Only you see your score, and it does not matter one bit whether you have 2 or 20 upvotes on a post. Even moderate negative scores don’t matter. The grey threshold is more important, and you have to post something quite bad to end up there. I think I read a good post that was dead once.
The system is working and the end result is what you want. Sure, it could be better, but we are never going to get a perfect implementation because humans are social animals, and not always very rational.
Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds
#488Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's cut to the fundamental argument here. Government should NEVER be allowed to dictate your state of mind and should NEVER be allowed to dictate based on feelings instead of facts. If the judge wanted "reasonable" in that sense, then they should have defined the limits of reasonable. The assumption that "reasonable is what I the judge consider reasonable" is bad in every conceivable way. You can't read the judge's…
The law isn't some objective truth. Reckless endangerment, harassment, etc. don't have every form of those outlined. But if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it's a duck. If the people involved don't have the brain cells to figure this out, maybe Apple should employ smarter people, because it's about to cost them a lot. And I don't even necessarily mean the UI people - anything would go through legal. I hav…
Basically none of that applies here. This is a civil case. It did not involve a jury. The group tasked with carrying out the ruling were not involved with the trial either directly or indirectly. The ruling was vague because the judge as I understand it wasn't a SME and wasn't qualified to write what she wrote. Rather than consult SMEs to reach a reasonable conclusion, she proceeded (unreasonably I might add as it is unreasonable for someone to pretend to be an expert in something they know little about) to pretend she was an expert anyway.
After her vague guidelines didn't get the results she thought it should, it seems that rather than discuss, she doubled down on SMEs needing to read her mind to decide what she considered reasonable rather than what other SMEs might consider reasonable then leveraged her position as judge to punish their lack of understanding (which seems very close to acting in bad faith to me) instead of reflecting on what could have been done differently and changing accordingly.
Regardless of how you feel about this particular case (personally, I'm in favor of opening up iOS to other stores rather than this third-party website bandaid), the court's actions and expectations are flawed in this case.
Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds
#489Earlier quoted context omitted.
If through Apple it is easy to cancel and all subs are listed in one place. If done through third parties directly the scammers will not make unsubscribing easy and it will not be as easy to find out where you are subscribing. Thus I expect the scamming to increase.
Easy from your point of view... This is the argument I mostly hear from Apple folks, but my experience (especially with less tech savvy folks) is that they have no idea where or how to cancel a subscription on IAP and they think that the multiple "Apple" charges are just some iCloud thing or something along those lines. With Credit Card flows the alarm bells go off waaaay earlier: when a website asks for their CC dat…
Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds
#490I am concerned that the App Store has become the norm. For many young people, iPhones and iPads have been their only computer. Many have never seen a world where app developers can distribute independently. The NYT had an article out about ruling, and the number of people supporting the App Store was astounding. I think Apple has done a great job marketing the App Store as the reason for the security/UX of their plat…
It was just asking for help getting stuff of a portable hard drive from work, so I tell him to plug it in and open up the file explorer.
He didn't know what the file explorer was, so I say "uh, the thing with the folders and shit in it, the little folder icon on the bottom". He eventually figured it out, and then I tell him to click on the drive on the left, which he figured out, and then I told him to open another file explorer window and drag the files from the first one to the second. The entire ordeal ended up taking him like ten minutes.
My brother in law isn't stupid or anything, he just didn't grow up with the typical desktop computer interface that most people who frequent HN did. He's been able to use a phone or a tablet for pretty much the entire time he's been using "computers", and those abstract away most of the lower level details.