Apple extends live-at-work to at least January 2022 Apple has again pushed back the date for its staff to return to their offices, this time from October until at least January 2022, as the COVID-19 coronavirus continues to spread in America and beyond. The news was broken to iEmployees in an internal email circulated by HR and retail supremo Deirdre O’Brien, Bloomberg first …
Start looking for a new job. Apple's primary marketing point, privacy/security, just got undermined.
Apple iPhones are just another backdoored US device now. One of many. Likely now that *every* other US made device has similar backdoors, if Apple, the last holdout, caved, the rest already did.
It wouldn't surprise me, if in a few years we get an 'ANOM' like announcement, "its all fake we've been running a warrantless search here for years", or a Blackberry announcement, "its' all fake we've been slurpring down and datamining your messages since 2010 with zero evidence and zero suspicion, aye".
Sure it's the "for the children" wedge issue in Apple's case and for Blackberry it was "criminals might use encryption, so people who use encryption are criminals, ergo we can blanket monitor their users with a masterkey". But the wedge is the wedge, can you find a court that threw out ANOM prosecutions on mass, as the warrantless suspicionless searches they are? No you cannot. Can you even find a court case where the evidence was cited?
You likely won't be able to find an encrypted messaging app in the Apple store or Google Play that isn't backdoored and actively watched, if Apple's own system is backdoored and watched.
The actual act of trying to use a secure messaging app, marks you as a criminal. All your private conversations, watched by somebody with zero warrant and zero suspicion, keen to prove themselves right.
Watch what you say.
What how your words, could be misconstrued and turned against you.
And if you work for Apple, you're the third largest phone marker now, soon you'll be the 4th and after that the 5th, 6th and so on. Even Americans don't buy that backdoored US made kit. Nobody wants it. Apple were the last major US manufacturer of handsets.
"all smartphones are made in Taiwan, sometimes with child labor."
Not all smartphones are made in Taiwan, and there is very little child labour there. Just ask the International Trade Union Confederation:
"in general the [Taiwan] government enforces the law effectively on issues of child labour, and although child labour and forced labour occur, they are not serious problems in Chinese Taipei."
https://www.ituc-csi.org/workers-rights-in-taiwan
@The US makes nothing anymore
Not true, it makes highly successful porn sites, like Tumblr, erm like Patreon, erm like OnlyFans... well they were successful for a while.
Notice how OnlyFans was put in a position where it would have to pre-review every video and have names and ids for every person in every adult video, *before* publishing, as part of a credit card companies new policy (which also prevents live streaming as a consequence).
The illegal content on Onlyfans, you're supposed to think is child porn, was porn that was not reviewed prior to going public, for which the participants details were not already on record.... i.e. porn.
Apple's filter will soon be repurposed, Apple will not have a choice in the matter.
https://www.engadget.com/onlyfans-big-banks-war-adult-content-174041161.html?src=rss
"This crackdown is part of a broader alliance between banks, lawmakers, right-wing pressure groups and religious extremists. As The New Republic explained late last year, these groups have been able to use the cover of sex trafficking to push an anti-porn, anti-sex agenda. The movement’s most successful victory was the passing of FOSTA-SESTA, a US law designed to tackle human trafficking by neutering the safe harbor provisions of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act 1996. Despite contravening the first amendment, the move has not shut down many groups of human traffickers, but has closed safety services created for, and used by, sex workers, and even forced Barnes & Noble to purge its ebook store of erotica."
"Naturally, OnlyFans became a clear target of those campaigners both because of its success and because it contradicted their narrative. By enabling individuals to sell their material to consumers without intermediaries, it was allowing people to make a living. [i.e. it removes the claim that sex workers are exploited by human traffickers]"
If Apple is backdoored, they all are. They're the only one who at least do not want to have a backdoor (conscious or otherwise).
The flip side is that if they are the least compromised, they'll do even better.
So if your prediction is that nobody will buy a smart phone (that's any smartphone), you'd have a point.
I doubt that, facebook and whatsapp would have died a long time ago.
The least compromised here is the Chinese phones. You dropped the "US" from my quote to intentionally deceive.
"Buy our iPhone, it's the LEAST BACKDOORED [usa] PHONE!"
Apple is 3rd behind Xiaomi in the world. Line is way more popular that Whatsapp across Asia.
Soon Apple will be 4th, then 5th, then 6th.
This is a common effect, the numpty guys backdoor US tech and destroy what they touch in the process. Trust gets broken.
You see Google Store?
I notice that Google are insisting they get your private app keys, as a condition of being listed on Google Play store. That would let Google roll out apps with spyware added, signed as if from the developer. The developer can no longer ensure their code is their code, and only their code, on all devices across the world. Trust is fragile.
You see Cloudflare? ... You see Sonicwall....
So many US tech companies rely on "trust". Once they pop that trust bubble with their customers, they cannot claw it back.
Oh Covid may hurt us
You must work from home
Oh we can’t see you and micromanage you
You must come back in the office it’s impossible to work from home
Oh if you do work from home we will need to reduce your pay
American tech companies really are the pits to much power in the hands of greedy people.
It’s like some Netflix series
"Oh if you do work from home we will need to reduce your pay"
It can be that people are paid a premium due to the poor choice in office locations of the company. The Silicon Valley or SF or NYC are stupid amounts amounts of money to live in. If an employee is being paid extra so they can afford housing costs that are 3x-4x the norm, the company may want to claw that back. Some people have moved never intending to return to save money. They are happy to continue working remotely until that's no longer an option and then they'll look for a new job. It's not that hard to figure that a lower salary is fine if your cost of living drops like a stone. I'm out beyond and have a nice chunk of space around my home rather than being surrounded on all sides by others. I love it. I can even go in the garage (I have a garage) and bang the drums without somebody calling the cops.
The problem is that the workers are no longer paid for the value they provide but literally enough for them to show up and not leave.
This is why companies like Apple were able to amass such unimaginable wealth (apart from avoiding taxes). Most of the money they have is effectively stolen from their workers.
The time workers wake up, is not going to be pretty as history taught us.
But your comment rules out the possibility that the employer sees value in office presence (or co-located working in a general sense)?
How are you ruling this out? How do you know, for a fact, that there is absolutely no value that should be attributed to office or colocated presence?
>> Most of the money they have is effectively stolen from their workers.
We're talking about Apple's Cuprtino office, so do you seriously mean the silicon valley workers being asked to return are underpaid??? Or do you mean that the underpaid factory workers should be allowed to work from home?
If apple need to share their profits, it is for those factory workers. I'm not shedding tears for "underpaid" Valley workers.
Pretty sure people are buzzing through COVID about the AAPL holdings in their pension plans though.
But your comment rules out the possibility that the employer sees value in office presence (or co-located working in a general sense)?
Yes, bums on seats look great for PR and give a release for micro managers. But that's not what company is making money from.
We're talking about Apple's Cuprtino office, so do you seriously mean the silicon valley workers being asked to return are underpaid??? Or do you mean that the underpaid factory workers should be allowed to work from home?
I am saying that all their workers are underpaid (and that's understatement).
I'm not shedding tears for "underpaid" Valley workers.
Why, are you jealous that they are less rear ended than yourself?
Your response is childish.
You seem to think that every employee contributes equally to the bottom line in a mega corp.
Most employees are generic drones.
If you are a website widget programmer, making a button on Apple Music vs the billion other website out there, makes more money at Apple Music. That’s not because your button was special, it’s because others, a few, transform the value of your button. Not you..
You’ll get the pay for your generic button programming skills. Regardless of whether your button ends up in a site making billions, because *others* are doing the work to make the website service a billion earner.
And those few employees who make the difference to the top line are early plenty.
Just because the company does well, does not entitle extra pay for generic skills. That is the crux of your logic. It has no connection with the value contributed.
My rear end is plenty clear and regular. I don’t pity my colleagues who earn less than me, they can’t do what I do. The company and they know it.
"But your comment rules out the possibility that the employer sees value in office presence (or co-located working in a general sense)? How are you ruling this out? How do you know, for a fact, that there is absolutely no value that should be attributed to office or colocated presence?"
A good question, but there is a way. Let us assume a company which allows workers to choose to work remotely or not. If a worker chooses to be remote, but to remain in the same expensive location, how much will the company pay them? Any reduction in value they expect merely because they work remotely should be factored into that value. Therefore, if the company would not reduce that person's pay, but would for others further away, they are not paying for the value they receive.
Let's leave Google's exceptional policy out of this - they are the only ones I know of linking remote work *location* with pay.
This is different from my point of remote work role pay vs in-office role pay.
Again let's set aside the exceptional contracts, which most remote work roles today are.
The earlier poster's point is that there *should not* be value attributed to office presence in a salary, they claim there can never be value in it, it is only coming from corporate greed. They are bringing in emotion to the reasoning, as evident from the childish response. Everyone pays for value, I don't expect a billionaire to pay £1000 for a glass of supemarket milk, just because they have the money, but that seems to be their logic.
I can happily see contracts in the future, where the full time remote pay would be a lower salary, than the hybrid/full time office ones. After all the available labour pool for a full time remote job role is vastly, vastly more. Literally the world becomes their oyster.
If Americans were complaining about immigration depressing silicon valley salaries, what then, when all of those foreign employees don't even have to move an inch?
So the corollary is there has to be value in office presence, already factored into today's salaries.
Yes, but they've decided that they still want to be operating. You can move people out of an office and have them still work, but you can't move the store staff out and still get anything from them. They want to reduce the risk, but they don't want to lose money while doing so.
Is this mis-reporting by El-Reg, or have Apple dropped the "You must have the job before you come back into the office" or are they using this as another facet to distance themselves from google
Refs https://9to5mac.com/2021/07/29/apple-reportedly-asking-employees-for-their-vaccination-status-in-some-locations/ and https://9to5mac.com/2021/07/28/apple-considering-requiring-employee-vaccinations/
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