61–70 of 95 posts
So, if I send you a QR code via iMessage the URL in it will automatically be hit, using your IP address and browser/OS details . Wow that's quite an attack vector.
If you send me the URL directly it will be hit. A QR code wouldn't even add anything. And it's worked that way for many years, iMessage showing link previews.
Apple should be proxying and caching these results to avoid the risk of exposing client devices, prevent incidental DDOS, as well as the obvious privacy issues.
"Background scanning" sounds more nefarious than what's probably really going on -- which is probably either generating thumbnail previews (for Finder) or indexing (for Spotlight), both of which are desired. Or maybe malware scanning to put files in quarantine if they point to dangerous content? macOS is also becoming more intelligent about text in images, e.g. it OCR's images so you can select text. I don't know if…
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so you are saying apple is doing something they already knew is a bad idea?
No. I’m saying your information is outdated and wrong.
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I feel like there are better ways to do this, to the point that this 'feature' actually looks really out-of-place. Why wouldn't you get these thumbnail previews when you actually scan the QR Code? You're going to be fetching/caching the favicon and framebuffer for the page anyways, there's literally no reason not to get that data at runtime rather than 3 hours later. It's not exactly malicious, but weird "we know bet…
> Why wouldn't you get these thumbnail previews when you actually scan the QR Code? These aren't scanned, they're located inside .png image files you can download or generate locally on your computer. > You're going to be fetching/caching the favicon and framebuffer for the page anyways, there's literally no reason not to get that data at runtime rather than 3 hours later. No one asked the OS to fetch the favicon/fra…
In general, these things frustrate me just as much as they did on Windows. I don't want random processes jumping up to use 100% of my CPU for no reason. I can't even count the number of times my Mac gets pinned by mdworker processes running in the background. It's reminiscent of pulling my hair out trying to understand why OneDrive or Edge is pinning one of my cores even though it isn't open.
My overall gripe is this pattern of behavior. I'd rather spend 2-5 seconds waiting for my QR code to load instead of my OS deciding to randomly cache it at some indeterminate point. Maybe other people disagree, though. Us HN users don't really tend to reflect the opinions of Joe Shmoe and his feelings towards modern computing.
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If you send me the URL directly it will be hit. A QR code wouldn't even add anything. And it's worked that way for many years, iMessage showing link previews.
If I send a URL directly it will be hit from my phone. Big difference there.
Messages on my iPhone shows me link previews for links sent to me via SMS, not just via iMessage. I just checked to make sure. Those are necessarily generated on the recipient's end.
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Scanning your images and followong links in them without user consent is pretty malicious.
How is it malicious? “Malicious” doesn’t mean “unwanted behaviour”. You are saying that Apple intend to do harm with this. How?
...on the other hand, this is the exact same technology Apple lets China use to hunt down their religious and political minorities. Maybe they don't intend harm to Americans, but one thing is for certain; Apple doesn't treat privacy as a human right. If you can live with that, then more power to you.
Question is, can you disable it?
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how can you be so confident that it's "closed"? the last time apple announced the high protection mode for state sponsored targets in new ios (whatever it's called), they disable all auto previews in that mode. if they are as confident as you are that it's "closed" that doesn't seem necessary?
I’m confident that it’s closed because they claimed to have closed it. As for the high protection mode - of course that reduces the attack surface.
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How is it malicious? “Malicious” doesn’t mean “unwanted behaviour”. You are saying that Apple intend to do harm with this. How?
On the one hand, I get where you're coming from and I agree that this specific example isn't malicious (as I've highlighted elsewhere in the thread) ...on the other hand, this is the exact same technology Apple lets China use to hunt down their religious and political minorities. Maybe they don't intend harm to Americans, but one thing is for certain; Apple doesn't treat privacy as a human right. If you can live with…