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Apple to kill Epic’s accounts on Friday the 28th

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Re: Apple to kill Epic’s accounts on Friday the 28th

#641

Post by gpm »

floatingatoll wrote: post #627
kelnos wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Epic expressly snuck code through the door to activate a user-visible feature in direct prohibition to App Store rules. I don't think "snuck" is accurate. They did intentionally do it, but it was likely pretty obvious to the app reviewer. This was necessary, because you can't sue a company because they'll harm you for something you'd like to do, but haven't done yet. You have to do the thing, get harmed, and then s…

In two weeks, when the developer access goes away, so will all in-app purchase. I'm not sure whether Restore Purchases will work or not at that point. I don't think they're trying to avoid complaints, or they wouldn't have taken this step at all.

> so will all in-app purchase.

Well, presumably only in-app purchases made with apples payment system.

Re: Apple to kill Epic’s accounts on Friday the 28th

#642

Post by [deleted] »

askl56 wrote: post #89
0x402DF854 wrote: post #23

From a preliminary statement of Epic's motion: > Just over two weeks ago, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook was asked during a Congressional hearing whether Apple has “ever retaliated against or disadvantaged a developer who went public about their frustrations with the App Store”. Mr. Cook testified, “We do not retaliate or bully people. It’s strongly against our company culture.”

https://twitter.com/slasher/status/1295434558112960519?s=21 This may have consequences for Unreal Engine too. Without a dev account, how can they maintain it?

[deleted]

Re: Apple to kill Epic’s accounts on Friday the 28th

#643

Post by nyolfen »

krapp wrote: post #607
skissane wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A much more recent quote from his website[0]: 14 September 2019 (Sex between an adult and a child is wrong) Many years ago I posted that I could not see anything wrong about sex between an adult and a child, if the child accepted it. Through personal conversations in recent years, I've learned to understand how sex with a child can harm per psychologically. This changed my mind about the matter: I think adults should…

To be fair, that disavowal came after his former behavior and views - which went not only accepted but defended by his peers and followers for years (including on HN following his "cancellation") finally became too much for people around him to bear. No other public figure with a history like his would be given even a shadow of a benefit of the doubt over nothing but a brief blog entry. If he were a politician or a c…

> If he were a politician or a celebrity HN would want to see him hanged with the rest of the degenerate elites.

you may be surprised at some of the names here:

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/French_petition_against_age_of_c...

Re: Apple to kill Epic’s accounts on Friday the 28th

#644

Post by nathansoz »

ryandrake wrote: post #449
_qulr wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Notarization is about protecting users who are not capable of making an informed decision about code safety from developers who refuse to comply with Apple's terms of service. No, notarization is about preventing malware. That's all. This has been promised to us by Apple many many times. Malware prevention only. Fortnite is not malware.

An application that suddenly changes behavior due to no action taken by the user, triggered remotely by the developer, is getting very close to the "malware" line in my book.

A feature flag. You're describing feature flags.

Re: Apple to kill Epic’s accounts on Friday the 28th

#645

Post by burnte »

grishka wrote: post #280
amaccuish wrote: post #97

What took me aback was the withdrawing permission to notarise their apps for Mac. That was only meant to be a check for known vulnerabilities/malicious software. Apple was more within their rights to kick Fortnite until the dust has settled from the iOS store, that was the retaliation, but now a mechanism supposedly for security has been repurposed as punishment. That's a pretty nasty move and I feel the mask has sli…

And so that's why I never liked nor trusted this whole idea of code signing with non-self-signed certificates, especially on desktop OSes. This notarization mechanism introduced a single point of failure: Apple. And now there is concrete evidence of how exactly this is bad. On a device I own, there should be no parties that are trusted more than myself. It's ridiculous I even have to write this.

> On a device I own, there should be no parties that are trusted more than myself. It's ridiculous I even have to write this.

This is only true if you contain at least the minimum amount of knowledge to built said device yourself. If you cannot design the type of CPU required, you must trust the vendor. If you cannot design the RAM, you must trust the vendor. If you cannot design the motherboard, you must trust the vendor.

You must also have the ability to supervise every step of construction. If you don't have that ability, then your knowledge is worthless.

You can only be the most trusted party in your system if you can be personally 100% certain nothing was inserted into the system without your knowledge. This is not restricted to the software, which theoretically you could inspect the source code to.

Maybe there SHOULD be systems where you are the most trusted party, but realistically, there are almost none. You have to trust the engineer who designed the road, the worker who delivered the package, the maker of the chips that go on the board, the company who makes the air filter in your home HVAC, etc.

Society is built on trust.

Re: Apple to kill Epic’s accounts on Friday the 28th

#646

Post by enos_feedler »

kbutler wrote: post #501
enos_feedler wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I trust the device maker more than myself to keep my data safe and secure.

Do you then agree with the decision to prevent installation of Fortnite or any other software from which Apple wants to extract more revenue? Because Apple has shown that they will use that mechanism to exert commercial control, not just to secure your data.

Apple is the curator of the product. They can do what they want. Maybe at some point I won't buy it. But totally agree they have every right to do this.

Re: Apple to kill Epic’s accounts on Friday the 28th

#647

Post by sciurus »

VectorLock wrote: post #544
Waterfall wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you find him wrong about?

His public image has been degraded from toe-jam eating and supposedly outrageous riders for speaking engagements (which I think everything in was pretty level headed but some people think it was 'nuts')

For anyone who hasn't read the rider: https://github.com/ddol/rre-rms/blob/master/rider.txt

Re: Apple to kill Epic’s accounts on Friday the 28th

#648

Post by [deleted] »

ernst_klim wrote: post #435
grishka wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So let them install that malware and have their data stolen despite all warnings because they deserve it? We can't have safety nets everywhere, and we, in fact, don't. We allow everyone to drive, use knives and handle all kinds of potentially dangerous stuff every day, but for some reason can't trust them with their own phones. Some mistakes are costly, but people learn from them. Such is life.

> We allow everyone to drive, use knives Ah, these are pretty simple things. We don't allow to sell any drugs, or some drugs without prescription, because drugs are hard and require education. So do computers.

[deleted]

Re: Apple to kill Epic’s accounts on Friday the 28th

#649

Post by baddox »

waterhouse wrote: post #583
count wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it doesn't. It just means it's users have to take extra steps. I use non-notarized software every day on a Mac.

For the sake of argument, is there a limit to the number or kind of extra steps before you'd call it unusable? If "downloading VirtualBox and running a VM of an earlier MacOS version" became necessary at some point, would that be over the line? I suspect there are corporate users who have policies that forbid running non-notarized software. That probably shouldn't apply to a game like Fortnite—most companies wouldn't…

> For the sake of argument, is there a limit to the number or kind of extra steps before you'd call it unusable?

Surely this comes down to what reasonable expectations are held by the customer. There are microcontrollers you can buy that require a soldering iron and USB breakout board in order to run your own software on them. I think that's pretty reasonable, but it would be a ridiculous requirement for a desktop PC purchased at Best Buy.

The question becomes: what are the reasonable expectations for installing third-party software on an iPhone. Personally, I think the overwhelming majority of iPhone owners expect and even highly value the fact that Apple (supposedly [0]) vets all third-party software on the iPhone, and it's generally more difficult to accidentally install malware or break your device than it is on other computing platforms.

[0] As I've said before, I think Apple actually needs to be more restrictive, because a lot of useless/broken/scammy stuff makes it into the App Store.

Re: Apple to kill Epic’s accounts on Friday the 28th

#650

Post by enos_feedler »

grishka wrote: post #408
gruez wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That advice might be feasible for the average HN reader, but what about the average person? How resistant do you think they will be against a social engineering attack telling them to disable code signing?

So let them install that malware and have their data stolen despite all warnings because they deserve it? We can't have safety nets everywhere, and we, in fact, don't. We allow everyone to drive, use knives and handle all kinds of potentially dangerous stuff every day, but for some reason can't trust them with their own phones. Some mistakes are costly, but people learn from them. Such is life.

We shouldn't be allowing everyone to drive. Autonomy will fix this. Apple will bring it to us, just like they have kept our phones safe.
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