sparky

sparky, 6 months ago

Depends on the country but mostly WhatsApp followed in second place by Telegram

sparky, 6 months ago

I doubt it’s about paying Apple or Google, so um much as their ability to extort car owners to pay them. Nobody in their right mind will buy the $10/month Bullshit Subscription ™ from GM when they can just plug in their phone and use Waze.

Edit: seems Apple doesnt charge automakers so it’s definitely about extorting you for money.

sparky, 6 months ago

Cool, then I’m dropping GM from my list of cars that I’ll buy or rent. CarPlay is a must have in 2023, just like a backup camera. Literally nobody wants your shitty car OS thing, it’s guaranteed to be way worse than iOS and Android.

Seems like this ought to be a dealbreaker for many.

sparky, 6 months ago

Former Apple engineer here. This architecture isn’t ideal if you intend the service to be portable - but we didn’t! Knowing the messages can only originate from a sealed application on a first party device eliminates a whole class of spam and security problems.

Beeper’s implementation spoofs Mac keys and requires you trust them with your Apple ID credentials if you want to be able to take full advantage of iMessage.

It’s just pointless. A huge security risk for Apple users and to zero benefit for Android users. Let Apple implement RCS as they promised and move on. Isn’t everyone on Telegram or WhatsApp anyway…?

sparky, 6 months ago

Well, none. One assumes the aspiration is to implement Cocoa, to allow GUI apps to run.

sparky, 6 months ago

Well, none. One assumes the aspiration is to implement Cocoa, to allow GUI apps to run.

sparky, 6 months ago

Did you read the article? It says the federal government compelled Apple to comply and gave them a gag order.

sparky, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

Actually, you can, with Lockdown for iOS or Lulu for macOS. There are other alternatives available, these are just a pair of FOSS examples. You can totally block *.apple.com if you really want to.

sparky, 6 months ago

I want to see Linux and macOS chip away at Windows as much as the next guy but calling a rise to 2% a “surge” seems laughable

sparky, 6 months ago

Fair point, I hadn’t even considered that. I wonder what percentage of these Linux users are in fact Steam Decks.

sparky, 6 months ago

I think it’s kind of a slippery slope; but I don’t think the search itself being login walled is apocalyptic. As long as anonymous users can clone the repositories and browse the code, I can kind of understand why they don’t want to pay to run an elastic search cluster for bots’ benefit. Presumably in-repo search could be done locally by scrapers’ hardware.

But if it turns into “login to view this repository” then GitHub will have turned evil.

sparky, 6 months ago

Gul is a rank IIRC and Dukat is a villain, haha

sparky, 7 months ago

In theory anyone can host an RCS endpoint but in practice that means carriers (historically) or OS vendors (in modernity). So in effect yes all RCS messages will pass through Google servers, but mostly because Apple to Apple texts will remain on iMessage. But any texts starting or ending on Android will go through Google. Note that this doesn’t really change much as Google’s privacy policy for Android users already discloses the bulk ingestion, scanning and processing of communications, including text messages.

sparky, 7 months ago

iMessage is a rich communication layer backed by HTTPS and web sockets so think something like WhatsApp or Telegram; you can send 2 gig files, embed maps and other rich content, etc etc. SMS is well… SMS. So the blue versus green bubble is a dumb reductionist view but the practical impact is visible in say video messaging, where an iMessage can attach a 50mb 4K H.265 clip same as a real messaging app, whereas an MMS will be a 256k 3gpp potato.

sparky, 7 months ago

Nothing doesn’t have anything real - it’s a Mac in the cloud with some janky scripting puppeting Messages.app. They haven’t figured out how to plug in at a protocol level or anything.

sparky, 7 months ago

Some do, but what Google rolled out in Android Messages is their own implementation unrelated to the carriers. Ostensibly so it works regardless of carrier, but what they rolled out is a semi-proprietary implementation that only works on their app. Ergo if you use a third party texting app, no RCS. So it’s a sort of “Android iMsssage” thing anyway. Apple plans to implement Google’s version, again sidestepping the carriers.

sparky, 7 months ago

This is a really disingenuous argument even for /c/android. iOS has many pitfalls with the walled garden effect but it also has many advantages with regard to software quality, consistency and performance (particularly at an API level, speaking as a developer for both platforms). If we write them off as bad, dumb or irrelevant then we forego the opportunity to improve our own apps and Android as a platform. Google does not have a monopoly on good ideas nor on technical users - one could note that Android itself is developed on Macs, as Silicon Valley developer workstations are almost universally Apple hardware…

sparky, 7 months ago

Former Google and current Apple engineer here; this is definitely an insecure workaround with a lot of flaws. I think Beeper is basically doing the same.

The reality is that while we do have a lot of walled garden policies for business reasons (which I don’t love), iMessage and FaceTime are a bit more complicated than that, tightly coupled around the hardware encryption and keystore in the TPM in our devices. Unwinding this would be undesirable from a compatibility perspective as it would break any Apple devices not updated immediately to new OS versions that change the encryption scheme.

So the only way to plug into iMessage per se is a weird workaround like this where you basically AppleScript automate the Messages app on a Mac with its shields down.

There’s not a great way to fix this problem which is largely why we are bringing RCS support to iOS 18 to hopefully make such things moot.

But that said even as an employee I don’t think iMessage is a great example of a modern chat app. I mean, it’s better than SMS which is what it sought out to replace. But compared to an actual chat app - something like Telegram - it doesn’t hold up.

sparky, 7 months ago

Tbh I wonder if flashing an aosp rom changes that at all

sparky, 7 months ago

What? My point is that I wonder if there are hardware and bootloader level back doors that survive flashing a new ROM or if you can be truly clean flashing a trusted AOSP one.

sparky, 7 months ago

Im Kontext von Feddit.de ist es mehr ein Kilometerstein, oder? (Sorry)

sparky, 7 months ago

Haha!

sparky, 7 months ago

Half right. They all need to be installed, as in run from the hard drive and not directly off the disc. Some games require you to also download even more content, as in, the disc doesn’t have all the data needed to run the game.

sparky, 7 months ago

There is basically no other choice now as optical drive speeds haven’t kept up with hard drive and SSD speeds. The PS5 for example can read blu ray discs at around 35 MB/s, compared to its internal SSD speed of 7100 MB/s. Doing the math that makes reading the disc over 200 times slower. Imagine the loading screens.

sparky, 7 months ago

As the proverb says, imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. It would seem Valve has truly defined a new category of device, given the rush by other OEMs to make clones!

sparky, 7 months ago

Clickbait headline, and stupid article. At no point are they making the claim that EVs are worse than combustion engines. The author posits that bicycles and walking are even more climate friendly than driving a car of any kind (duh). This entire article could be replaced by the sentence, “We should keep building trams and bike lanes in the EV era”.

sparky, 7 months ago

I think this is a failure of imagination on the part of the author. Norway is, on a whole, much more rural; a large portion of the population lives in small towns and villages in areas with difficult terrain (think fjords), where public transport beyond a bus is impractical due to population densities.

The public transport in Oslo and Bergen are fantastic - Norway’s only two large cities. Keeping in mind that over a quarter of the population of the entire country lives in these two, it’s not as bad as it sounds.

sparky, 7 months ago

Fair enough, I guess. But seems like a zero-sum-game attitude, especially given Norway’s stark urban/rural divide. Certainly Oslo should be preferring mass transit, but out in the many rural villages of the fjord-laden countryside, where density precludes mass transit, EV subsidies seem appropriate.

sparky, 7 months ago

I agree. Having no diplomatic communications at all is a bad idea especially during times of crisis. Regardless of your feelings of the behaviour of a state, the phone line should always exist for governments to speak to each other. Whether we’re talking about Israel or Iran or Russia or North Korea or whatever. When your own citizens need help, or a crisis is ongoing, or a natural disaster occurs, or whatever, you want someone on the other end to pick up the phone.

sparky, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

Being able to talk to a government is a far cry from supporting it or agreeing with it. Even if you dislike Israel, you should want there to be diplomatic relations - that is how other countries can exert influence and attempt to steer them off more radical courses, after all.

Case in point - if the West had no diplomacy with them, then the opening of the border crossing into Egypt would never have happened.

sparky, 8 months ago

You may want something like porteus-kiosk.org

sparky, 8 months ago

I feel like a lot of the tension now is due to a failure of the system post arrival. Germany and Europe were good to open their doors to these refugees but they then failed to integrate them. There wasn’t enough support around cultural assimilation, language training, etc - they weren’t blended into our communities so much as allowed to set up parallel ones without any positive interaction. And the wound has just festered now.

sparky, 8 months ago

This is basically the million dollar question and also the source of confusion, when one person thinks of socialism they could be thinking of either social democracy, like modern Germany, or a communist state like the DDR… so depending on your point of view, you’ll have a different answer

sparky, 8 months ago

No different than the situation with iPhones and Android phones, really. Apple has made their money once you buy the device, and views your personal data as a liability. Google is an ad company that happens to make hardware, and views your data as necessary monetisation potential.

sparky, 9 months ago

Irgendwann werden sie es auch herausfinden, denn nach mehr als 6 Monaten täglicher Roaming-Nutzung wird dir die Verbindung unterbrochen.

sparky, 9 months ago

Yes but the owners of the OS and app stores are, which is I believe the original commenter’s point. And the text of the bill is not “TikTok you shall pull your app”, it’s “Apple you shall disable the App Store listing”.

sparky, 9 months ago

For those of you wondering how this is useful, tobacco is often used as a model organism in botany. The utility of this technique is less obvious in tobacco but more obvious in fruits, vegetables, etc. think seedless grapes, etc

sparky, 9 months ago

I really like Telegram generally, including for voice and video. Having native desktop clients too sweetens the deal, even on platforms like Linux. Plus it feels fairly native on each platform, so that makes it easier to get people to switch, versus “this app feels too foreign/clunky on my OS”. Signal is a pretty lousy experience on iOS for example.

sparky, 9 months ago

Apple engineer here, from what I understand most of Unity’s competitors in the we space are significantly better paying and performing. We keep hearing from developers that nobody wants to use Unity’s product because of that. AppLovin, the one named here, outperforms Unity Ads by as much as 800% in some titles, according to a contact of mine at a game studio. With a difference like that it’s hardly surprising nobody is choosing Unity Ads.

This reeks of desperation, but one wonders how effective it could be - because this demand to drop AppLovin is basically cutting off the revenue faucet for these same developers they’re now trying to extort. No Unity fees but no good income either…

sparky, 9 months ago

Apple engineer here, you don’t need the physical port for that either. You need only plug in your device once, to pair it with Xcode, and from then on out you can run and debug the app over the network.

sparky, 9 months ago

Ridiculous. Time to switch to Safari or Firefox, folks.

sparky, 9 months ago

Because Safari is chock fill of strong privacy features, just like Firefox. It’s a very good browser, if you’re using Apple devices, especially with the forthcoming OS updates.

Apple may be a greedy corporation, however, as they make their money selling you expensive hardware and a premium experience, they are not incentivised to monetise user data.

Google has the opposite incentive given they make money at all from Chrome or Android, other than advertising. Arguably they barely make any money at all, other than advising… so of course they’ll track you.

sparky, 9 months ago

Fair, although I personally use Safari on macOS/iOS and Firefox on Windows/Linux. If you’re interested, it’s fairly easy to sync between them with addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/…/icloud-bookmarks/.

sparky, 9 months ago

If you needed a nudge to ditch Chrome and its derivatives in favour of Firefox or Safari, this is it.

sparky, 9 months ago

As much as that would annoy me if I owned one, it’s somewhat understandable I think given those games were designed before this card or its GPU family existed, and they can’t possibly test a huge back catalog from 5+ years ago

sparky, 9 months ago

Whoa there, of course this is Brazil’s fault! Their plane couldn’t even withstand a few anti-aircraft missiles. How can Russia be blamed for that? /s

sparky, 9 months ago

I think due to the custom designs involved in making it modular / repairable, combined with the niche appeal, it’s expected that these devices will be produced in low volumes and therefore will always cost more than the equivalent Pixel, due to missing out on economies of scale.

sparky, 9 months ago

32m, American - No I can’t, as except for a short stint on a leased automatic gas car, I’ve owned only electric cars. And EVs are by definition automatic!