Anyone can have an Apple Account whether or not they own an Apple Device.
In this case, too, you can create Invites on icloud.com on non-Apple devices. Including the webpage seems nicely responsive and can probably make them in an Android Chrome tab if you wanted.
The only remaining obstacle is that it isn't a free feature of an Apple Account, but requires an iCloud+ subscription. But that's useful for Apple Music and Apple TV+ and other products, too, many of which work just fine on non-Apple devices as well.
A company creating a useful tool that encourages people to buy their product is incredibly boring, typical, and not at all controversial until it's Apple doing it.
I suspect it has a lot more to do with the concentration of mobile devs and FOSS types here, along with people who really can't understand that not everyone wants their phone to be something other than "Working out of the box."
Ah yes the classic false dichotomy, that it either has to be closed/proprietary/locked down and "just works" or it can be open but unusable. In reality the two are completely orthogonal. There's nothing magical about publishing the source that suddenly changes the code or the product and breaks it. If Apple open sourced ever line of code they have tonight, would iPhones suddenly stop working?
So, what's stopping you from becoming Apple's competition? If a significant number of people crave your idea of FOSS and you have ideas to make a superior product, I'm sure the market will reward you.
Did you ever see any Linux laptop in a store? They do have some market share but never existed to the ordinary people.
Also, GNU/Linux phones exist (Librem 5 is my daily driver). However without Apple's budgets, you can't create the same smooth experience. You just can't compete with the duopoly.
So what you're saying is that alternatives do exist, but they aren't popular... that doesn't sound like a "duopoly" exists, it just sounds like Android and Apple cover the needs of the vast majority of people. I'm sure it's difficult to be part of a niche, but that doesn't mean that there's some conspiracy against you.
> I'm sure it's difficult to be part of a niche, but that doesn't mean that there's some conspiracy against you.
Yes, it does: https://puri.sm/posts/breaking-ground/. Purism tried to created their own smartphone not relying on Apple and Google and it was almost impossible to find the necessary chips. Nobody wanted to share the schematics or open the drivers. People are just locked-in into the duopoly. It's impossible to use popular apps without it, like Whatsapp or even Signal (!).
I think that's preferable to them being totally unable to RSVP but you're still going to be the friend that can't make the invite. It's comparable to iMessage. You can still talk to Android users but it's a notably worse experience.
Non-Apple users cant contribute to the playlist. No mention on the impact to the shared photo album. If its just a normal shared Photos.app album, non-apple users are locked out there, too.
But in Germany you need an actual address. If you are homeless, you almost legally don't exist. You are prohibited from opening a bank account, for example, or having a job, because you do not exist.
You’re wrong, you have a legal right to a bank account (Basiskonto) if you live in the EU, even if you don’t have a fixed address. The bank literally can’t deny you ( https://www.bafin.de/DE/Verbraucher/Bank/Produkte/Basiskonto... ). You need to give them an address to send mail to, but that can be any address where you can get access to the mail (friends, family, homeless shelter…). Do you have a source for the claim?
I'm not seeing what the "catastrophic" issue is. A site can include a link to install an app from a third-party marketplace and, when the user affirmatively acts to proceed with the install, that marketplace can see which site the install request came from.
It looks like they basically created an immutable identifier that gets exposed. Sort of like a persistent third party cookie, but with fewer access controls as it isn’t domain bound.
That’s just my read of the article, I haven’t reviewed the code myself.
However, I will say that the way SV companies tend to operate is they refuse to do any compliance work until forced by circumstance, then they have to do a rush job and a bunch of stuff gets fucked up that would have been fine if they planned ahead based on statutory requirement.
So from a human/corporate behavior perspective this is exactly what I’d expect.
Likewise, Apple in particular has a holier than thou attitude, especially in regards to privacy, so I think there’s a bit of them being blinded by their own arrogance in this case.
Sweet, UE can now legitimately take 4% of Apple’s global income for uniquely identifying all users on Earth, having undeletable cookies and not having the cookie banter and thus, breaking GDPR.
Having worked in this sector for a very long time I just don’t think GDPR is an effective regulatory tool. Primarily because Ireland is a regulatory/tax haven for American companies and they have to enforce GDPR…and they refuse to.
Whereas DMA was written to totally avoid that problem; so I think a DMA action is WAY more likely as the Irish can’t block it.
Where do you get "affirmatively acts to proceed with the install"? The original advisory suggests that any website can fire off these marketplace requests in response to any user action.
According to the advisory the user can click on a button and the event handler issues the request. There isn't a link. The user has no indication of what's going to happen beyond whatever the page chooses to tell them.
Have you seen the queries an ORM generates? Pretty sure they have data engineers beat in query volume, and there's more web developers using ORMs than data engineers.
The conversation here is focussing on industrial espionage, but that's only one use case for this kind of active measure. An association with an opposition political party could easily get one on a surveillance list.
Yep, imagine an international postgrad student from an NSO client-state who criticizes their home country's leadership online, or is perceived to be a political activist is likely to be targeted by their own government for additional on-device monitoring via spyware. This could provide a springboard into monitoring other groups the victim may be a member of.
> BPP is the complexity class for decision problems that a randomized algorithm can solve in polynomial time, in the sense that on every input (worst-case), the algorithm is right with at least 2/3 probability (over its own randomness).
What's the theoretical significance of the 2/3 threshold?
None, it can actually be any constant > 1/2, because you can always run the algorithm a non-exponential number of more times to be more convinced (approaching prob 1) of the answer. 2/3 is just convention.
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