Comment by realusername | Hacker News Reader

Comment by realusername | Hacker News Reader

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> You may be not be aware of or simply have forgotten ever visiting a friend or family’s computer where all kinds of AskJeeeves toolbars are installed from god knows where.

And how are you going to make those OS-wide popups with the iOS sandbox exactly?

Be sure that if apps could make it, they already would, appstore reviews or not.

There's some very strange communication on Apple side saying simultaneously that their phone is the most secure thing in the world on their website and pretending to the EU that it's Swiss cheese and that manual reviews kind of save the day instead. They have to pick one.

> I’m not worried about you or me. The EU is just wrong on this one.

No, I believe the EU is right here but very late to the party and not even pushing far enough if I'm being honest. There's some talks need to allow OS reinstalls and I don't see any yet.

I’ve seen tracking apps that prompt the user to enable a vpn on iOS so all their traffic is routed through them (this was not a vpn app, this was a user tracking app - not malicious. Now imagine a malicious one that doesn’t go through App Store review). The vpn thing on iOS is concerning. The user may not even know or remember they allowed it and it could just be sitting on their phone indefinitely.

I’d like it if Apple restricted VPN access for only App Store approved apps.

Again, it’s not you who I’m concerned about. It’s everyone else. It’s not hard, watch:

here you go dumb teenager, download this crypto app and hit accept on everything and get mining this new alt coin

Boom, vpn enabled and traffic intercepted.

Even on the web, those are blocked with a malware list, I'm not sure that's the best argument for the appstore.

The contribution of the review here (which this kind of malware would easily pass with a server side trigger anyways) doesn't seem that important.

I don't think Apple should restrict which VPN can go though anyways just because of the privacy issues in a lot of dictatorships, they're aren't the best party to do that and are subject to dubious requests, as seen as in China or Russia.

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