Posts by Tessier-Ashpool 312 posts • joined 6 Feb 2016
It’s not a question of what an individual may - or may not - do. And neither you or I could possibly know this. It’s a technical/legal question of how Apple could provide the option at the same time as complying with forthcoming EU legislation.
If someone happens to have a third party browser engine installed, something that many have clamoured for, Apple cannot then provide a lockdown radio button without substantial qualification on the settings app. Something like “If you have installed any of a long list of 3rd party apps, this feature will not work as described.”
Throttling is a reasonable technical solution to a problem, the problem being that certain older phone models with degraded batteries would unceremoniously shut down. Better that your phone runs a bit slower than just crap out on you.
But Apple implemented throttling on the quiet. Unannounced, with no option to disable it (at that time). That’s what upset users, and quite rightly so.
Indeed. I've seen users complain that Safari doesn't work at all well with certain websites. Very often such websites are very poorly written, as you can easily determine by running a URL through an online HTML validation tool such as https://validator.w3.org/
It seems that Chrome is more forgiving (if that's actually the right word) of rubbish developers who don't know how to construct HTML properly.
The main reason that Jobs banned Flash was, I distinctly recall, because the code was a resource hog that flattened an iPad's battery.
In the article it says "Apple won't let you use anything else. There is no good reason for this."
I can think of one good reason: if an alternate browser has free rein to interact with the device (in the same way that Flash did) its browser engine could behave in a similarly bad way. I'm not saying it would; I'm saying that it could. For that very reason alone, I imagine that if Apple are forced to accept this, they would only do so with the user's explicit permission to absolve them of performance responsibility. There's a monetary cost to bodgers turning up at an Apple Store for help. Also, Apple won't want people waving a phone around in a pub saying that its performance is crap, dissing their products.
But there is an “expanding substrate”, space itself. AFAIK, it’s reckoned it will expand forever. Who can say.
I don’t know about a black hole being a “glitch”. I favour the notion that they are just exceedingly expensive computational resources for a mathematical God. Just imagine if you were God, troubled with the onerous task of driving the universe forward. You’ve got to individually compute the forces between all atoms in the cosmos to change the universe from one instant to the next. Quite a task.
That gets all the more burdensome when you have mind-bogglingly large numbers of particles close together in a compact object like a neutron star or black hole. So what do you do with your available resources? You reduce your computing clock rate to put a limit on how quickly things can change.
Funnily enough, this is exactly what happens in the vicinity of a black hole: time slows down.
Spare a thought for God. He / she / it has a lot of number crunching to do.
2025: I install a random browser and its own custom engine on my iPhone. It kills iPhone performance, just life Flash did. Even worse, it steals my data and makes my navigation app slow to a crawl.
Since this *could* happen, I would expect Apple to have a checkbox (ticked by default) that installation of such software voids my warranty.
Fair enough that you are allowed to do this, but don't expect to install such software willy nilly without agreeing to caveats. And don't expect to be able to take your phone into an Apple store if it goes tits up.
Apple provided Hide My Email functionality for exactly this reason. No more mucking about managing email aliases; just click the option to generate a new hidden email alias when registering on a website. Because it’s so easy, I imagine a lot of people are using this, myself included.
Why? Because there is implied trust. You can’t even start a Visual Studio web project these days without it importing a plethora of third party nuget packages first, like certain JavaScript helpers.
From a security perspective, this is far from ideal. But it’s what happens routinely. Huge numbers of packages get downloaded millions of times by developers.
Let’s say you want, by this time tomorrow, to have an app that will compute distances between postcodes in a spreadsheet. Do you write the bulk of that code yourself taking weeks or months, or do you use one or more of the numerous helper packages to do the job? The vast majority of developers do the latter, and do trust by numbers. Package A has been downloaded a million times; must be safe, right? Of course not, but it’s what is practical. You have no easy way of knowing for sure that a package is benign.
Meddling regulators shouldn’t put too much weight on the opinions of moaning developers who are slap happy eager to embrace each and every Chrome standard everywhere. Funnily enough, the Developers Alliance agree (somewhat ironically) that the status quo should essentially be preserved.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6229aba98fa8f526cf29aa2e/Developers_Alliance.pdf
“We come to the ironic conclusion that we cannot support the CMA’s narrow developer objective even though it is couched in developer self-interest because it ignores the health of the ecosystem, its critical role in market creation and stewardship, and its role in connecting consumers to market participants.“
No, it doesn't mean that. It's more like peering through an unfrosted window to see a door's key code written on the wall.
For a long long time, huge numbers of websites accepted a user's login on a form that is used to compute a crappy SQL command. e.g.
"SELECT TOP 1 * FROM [Users] WHERE [User] = ' " + $User + " ' AND password=' " + $Password + " ' "
which, if jbloggs 1234 is entered, maps to a string
SELECT TOP 1 * FROM [Users] WHERE [User] = 'jbloggs' AND password = '1234'
But what happens if someone, instead of typing jbloggs, types ' OR 1=1 ;
A crap website will, from this, construct a SQL command:
SELECT TOP 1 * FROM [Users] WHERE [User] = '' OR 1=1; AND password = '1234'
which will successfully find the first user in its [USERS] table, regardless.
Oops.
Decent websites won't do things this way, and certainly those that engage in penetration testing. But I daresay there are still quite a few around that are exposed to SQL injection of this kind.
I use iCloud email in conjunction with its custom email DNS feature, meaning I can easily direct emails for someone@somedomain.com to iCloud mail. I already pay £2.49 a month for iCloud storage, so the emails and custom email DNS come at no extra charge. That's nothing, really, considering the whole family can share this feature, and a domain can be registered for around $15 per year.
https://9to5mac.com/2021/09/07/how-to-set-up-an-icloud-mail-custom-email-domain-video/
Indeed, you could fry an egg on the intel chip.
I wouldn't use the M1 Pro for video encoding. I'd use its bigger brother the M1 Max, which has a ton of GPU cores available for that kind of work.
Or, of course, the M1 Ultra, if you have a few quid to spare.
The first I knew about this particular vulnerability was the day that the fix became available. Like most onlookers. Even then, the actual mechanics of the vulnerability were not announced, making life difficult for would-be miscreants.
I’d like to know the kind of world (in the absence of a functioning time machine) you imagine where a fix for a zero-day vulnerability is released ahead of its discovery and announcement.
All those other browsers rely on iOS webkit, which is the source of this particular vulnerability.
Depending on your point of view, that’s a good or a bad thing. Personally, given that numerous other iOS apps and services depend on webkit, I’d say that centralising core code this way is for the best, even if the occasional howler surfaces.
"Is there anywhere in the those licenses that they are bound to the lifetime of the owner?"
Yes. To take the example of movies purchased via iTunes, the rights owner of the movie grants a sub-license to Apple, which is transferred to the *purchaser* when they "buy" a movie. The purchaser has no right to transfer that license to another party.
But... it's worse than that. If the rights owner removes said movie from the iTunes Store, Apple are obliged to withdraw said sub-license from the purchaser. It doesn't happen that often, but your purchased iTunes movie can be disappeared. Nice.
This is sufficiently aggravating that a court case is ongoing, disputing the use of the word "Buy". I, like many others, do not consider a movie to be "bought" if it can be arbitrarily removed from the user's movie library.
I did read the article.
What the article fails to mention is that the scope of the increased charges are far greater for Visa Credit.
"Visa has announced similar changes to Mastercard, but with a larger scope. More specifically, the Visa changes will have significant impact on consumer card-not-present transactions, consumer refund transactions, and commercial transactions between the UK and the EEA."
You should know. For sure.
EU regulation (2015) caps credit card fees at 0.3%
Outside the EU, Visa have chanced it and whacked up their prices way beyond that limit, something the EU put in place to protect consumers.
Rather like phone companies reintroducing exorbitant roaming charges now that we don’t have EU price protection.
Good old Brexit.
Of course, the amusing twist here is that Visa have effectively priced themselves out of the market by getting a little too greedy. Nice job, Amazon. You are under no obligation to accept payment methods that charge exorbitant fees.
I got an iPhone 13 mini a couple of weeks ago. The facial recognition is really fast and reliable. Whether I’m holding it, or using in a holder in the car. No complaints from me.
Slight Fanboi alert: I also have an iPad Pro with facial recognition. Far less reliable because I typically need to go out of my way to look in the right direction. With its much smaller angular diameter, look in the general direction of an iPhone and you’re going to be looking at the faceID scanner.
Your toy universe emulator will never be as good as the simulation we already inhabit. And ours runs as a proper virtualisation close to the metal.
But the Zuckerverse will have way way more advertising and whiney American accents.
So thanks, but no thanks.
I find the Touch Bar to be reasonably useful. It's a snappy way to change the brightness and volume with a sliding finger. Or to quickly lock the machine. I don't use daft features like the words that auto-appear when I write.
When I earn my debugging crust switched and I'm switched into a Windows VM, the Touch Bar shows the regular function keys you'd expect of Windows. So that's pretty good.
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