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Aaronn

1,541 karma · joined April 8, 2013

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Aaronn··on Tell HN: X stopped requiring authentication, nitter works again
That's literally an instance of Nitter
Aaronn··on Apple users are being locked out of their Apple IDs with no explanation
Reporting the phone as lost does not wipe the phone. That is a separate step.
Aaronn··on T-Mobile employees across the country receive cash offers to illegally swap SIMs
This works for Charles Schwab too!
Aaronn··on New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking
Any app can get a general sense of your location from your IP address (unless you are using a VPN) since Apple's Private Relay feature only works in Safari and Mail, not in third party apps.

I would love the ability require apps to ask permission to access the internet, or even better, a way to limit connections to specific domains like Little Snitch can do on macOS.

Many apps don't have a legitimate need to access the internet such as a photo editing app or a single player game.

iOS shouldn't ask for internet permission by default but it would be great to have as part of Lockdown Mode or another higher security mode. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/07/apple-expands-commitm...

Aaronn··on Apple previews Lockdown Mode
The same is true on iOS (https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/10/17550316/apple-iphone-usb...). Lockdown mode just prevents you from enabling it.
Aaronn··on Each Firefox download has a unique identifier
Yes. This is a very similar idea to this recent post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30702660

> Our sacred cow was excellent US-based phone support. That is quite expensive. If there were bugs in our product, users would call in, and our call center costs would increase because we'd have to have more people working. So every week in our team meeting, we would look at summaries of calls, and take on engineering work to address the most common class of problems. That let us scale up the business and still provide friendly and competent phone support, because we were reducing the problems that people called in about.

> Because we had that "sacred cow", every obscure bug that we spent months fixing not only made the product better and were intellectually stimulating to finally figure out, but had a concrete impact on how costly it was to deliver the service.

> What most companies would do here to reduce costs is simple. Don't fix DERP bugs, just charge for it. Don't fix "black screen" bugs, just hide the phone number on your website so people can't figure out to call.

Aaronn··on Open Web Advocacy
Advocates for openness and yet uses Discord to communicate. Ugh.
Aaronn··on FBI used geofence warrant in Seattle after BLM protest attack, documents show
The Wikipedia article says Apple has received geofence warrants. It does not say they have provided data in response to them. I do not believe they can since Find My data and Maps search history is end-to-end encrypted.

https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/law-enforcement-guidelin... https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303

Find My:

> Device location services information is stored on each individual device and Apple cannot retrieve this information from any specific device. Location services information for a device located through the Find My feature is customer facing and Apple does not have content of maps or alerts transmitted through the service.

Air Tags:

> The interaction is end-to-end encrypted, and Apple cannot view the location of any AirTag or supported third-party products

Aaronn··on Woman discovers AirTag on her vehicle after receiving iPhone alert
It does that

> An AirTag that isn't with the person who registered it for an extended period of time will also play a sound when moved so you can find it, even if you don’t use an iOS device.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212227

Aaronn··on Woman discovers AirTag on her vehicle after receiving iPhone alert
They have a speaker that plays a sound randomly every few hours when it hasn't been near the owner's device in a while. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212227
Aaronn··on Firefox 94
It would be nice if the release notes could be updated to say that. Right now it says

> To better protect all Firefox users against side-channel attacks such as Spectre, we’ve introduced Site Isolation. We’ve got your back...errr...side!

Aaronn··on A patent troll backs off
Can you actually point to a sentence in the terms of use which say that? I see nothing like that on the PACER website.
Aaronn··on The Framework is the most exciting laptop I've used
He might have to. As far as I can tell they haven’t even started selling individual parts yet. They all just say “Coming soon” on the website. I’m not sure what they are waiting for.
Aaronn··on Brave Search beta
> in an low-friction, anonymous manner

Ah yes completely anonymous, unless you want to withdraw https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360032158891-Wha...

Aaronn··on Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps
They refreshed the iMac with new Intel processors two months after the Apple Silicon transition was announced, I think that is what they were referring to. I doubt any other computers will get new Intel processors at this point.
Aaronn··on We can do better than Signal
Another solution is for them to just delete that old device.

Settings -> Security & Privacy -> Check the box next to the old device -> Delete Session

Aaronn··on Signal is having technical difficulties
The whole point of Matrix is that you don't have to use matrix.org to use Matrix. Anyone can host a server and talk to anyone on any Matrix server.
Aaronn··on AirPods Max
If your devices are on iOS 14 / macOS Big Sur then you can just start playing music or a video on one device and the audio automatically switches to that device and pauses on the one you had previously been using.
Aaronn··on Twitter preconnects to the wrong domains
As a data point I've got 299 service workers according to about:debugging#/runtime/this-firefox

Time to remove these. Thanks!

Aaronn··on U.S. Accuses Google of Illegally Protecting Monopoly
Another place to get all of the documents in this case is https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18552824/united-states-...

Any time someone buys a document from PACER and has the RECAP extension https://free.law/recap/ installed in their browser it is uploaded so everyone can view it for free on the Court Listener website.

Aaronn··on We need physical audio kill switches
Yeah that is really annoying.

You can install https://github.com/MonitorControl/MonitorControl with uses Display Data Channel (DDC) to let you adjust volume and brightness on external monitors. It works for my monitor at least.

Aaronn··on Upcoming changes to Cortana
If you own Microsoft Surface Headphones you can get a $25 gift card from them: https://www.bing.com/surfaceheadphoneredemption

Also a $50 gift card if you own the Harman Kardon Invoke speakers: https://www.bing.com/cortanainvokeredemption

Pretty crappy that the links to these are buried in the FAQ

Aaronn··on Elon Musk threatens to move Tesla out of California
Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23127552

Apparently I can't delete this anymore.

Aaronn··on Cross-signing and end-to-end encryption by default
Actually this was all released a couple of days ago, just took a bit of time for them to write the blog post.
Aaronn··on Moznet IRC is dead; long live Mozilla Matrix
Bugzilla isn't an option. You can just use an email address, you don't have to link it to another account.
Aaronn··on Moznet IRC is dead; long live Mozilla Matrix
It actually is enabled, just a bug with the single sign-on which should be worked out soon. For now, click on Sign in and then you will be able to create an account.
Aaronn··on France fines Apple €25M for iOS software that slowed down older iPhones
It's at the top of https://www.apple.com/fr/iphone/
Aaronn··on Apple dropped plan for encrypting backups after FBI complained
The first list is stuff that is encrypted. Farther down the page is stuff that is end to end encrypted. It’s pretty misleading.
Aaronn··on Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web
Yes Firefox on iOS does already do that.
Aaronn··on Messages via JSON
I guess but that already exists https://jsonfeed.org/version/1
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