ByteWelder

The same goes for their analytics "IP anonymization": it's hardly anonymous. I wrote an article about it a while back: https://bytewelder.com/posts/2021/07/08/google-analytics-ip-...

Perhaps not a blowback, but NOS has been good to show both sides of the argument pretty well. Every article so far has shown a balanced, with critical notes added. It's more than I expected from them. It's just one outlet though - I have no clue about the other outlets in NL.

https://nos.nl/artikel/2393312-apple-benadrukt-dat-nieuwe-fu...

https://nos.nl/artikel/2392763-apple-wil-iphones-in-vs-scann...

https://nos.nl/artikel/2392894-apple-wil-iphones-scannen-op-...

While that is true, the security concerns are much wider than child abuse scanning. From the article:

> "Though these capabilities are intended to protect children and to reduce the spread of child sexual abuse material, we are concerned that they will be used to censor protected speech, threaten the privacy and security of people around the world, and have disastrous consequences for many children,"

Many people and organizations fear that Apple's plans are paving the way for governments to scan for more than just child abuse images. (e.g. https://appleprivacyletter.com/)

In that light, FISA is relevant. My statement was to show that not all dealings of the US government are public, because not all courts and legal proceedings are available to the public. So "serious risk of leaks to journalists" won't likely happen in that case.

You wouldn't test this with child abuse images. You would likely test it with a set of legal images, for which you generated your own hashes.

> And it's hard for me to imagine the US government doing that without some court battle with serious risk of leaks to journalists.

Anything going through a FISA court (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court) could come with a gag order, preventing anyone involved to talk about it.

I'm already using Emacs, so that's alright :D

I noticed a couple of comments where people were wondering what the alternatives were. With this thread, we can possibly save people some research time, as I've spent quite a few hours in the past week or so.

In terms of power usage versus CPU performance, nothing beats M1 indeed. In terms of pure performance, Ryzen 7 5800X beats M1 in nearly every benchmark. That's ~200W versus ~20-30W though.

In terms of SSD performance, the M1 SSD upgrade from 256 GB to 1TB cost about 500 EUR, while a 1TB Samsung 980 SSD (with very similar performance) costs about 120 EUR total.

It works well so far. Android Studio works just fine, and Emacs (doom-emacs in Evil mode) is obviously well supported in Linux. My professional development work still happens on a MacBook Pro, as my employer drives that choice.

For me, it was well thought-out. Apple betrayed my trust as a consumer and the response in the past week was plain gaslighting. I thought about it for a couple of days and then decided that I don't want to support a company like that anymore.

(edit)I was planning to buy a new MBP/iPhone/Watch in Q4, so this made it easier to decide on those purchases earlier.(/edit)

It's correct that the CSAM scanning is currently only effective when iCloud is enabled - and for US customers only. For me, this detail is irrelevant. The backdoor might be inactive for now, but there would still be a backdoor on my phone.

There are plenty of Android flavours that don't have Google apps, like https://lineage.microg.org/ In my limited experience so far, LineageOS works much better than it used to on my HTC Desire. Battery life has been better than any of my iPhones (3G, 4S, 5S, 7 and XS) ever had.

That said, if I had to chose between a Google Android phone and an Apple phone, I'd still pick the Apple one. Luckily there are more choices these days.

Thank you! I've updated the title.

I'm an Android developer myself, and Samsung is universally hated among devs due to the bloatware/adware.

Manjaro Linux has rolling releases, so you get updates more swiftly than with other Linux flavours. LineageOS (regular or microG variant) get weekly updates if I recall correctly.

Pixel is a solid hardware choice in my book.

I'm not the one you responded to, but did something similar and feel like sharing:

- Desktop: Manjaro Gnome, for that amazing macOS-like desktop. It even does the 3 finger swipe up to see all your apps with Apple's Touchpad.

- Phone: OnePlus 8T with microG variant of LineageOS (alternatives: Pixel line-up), because that allows me to still receive push notifications. I have over 40 apps and only found 1 that didn't work so far (which is Uber Eats, because they seem to require Google Advertisement ID). I pushed a modified Google Camera app to it, so my camera is better supported. I think only 3 out of 4 cameras are working, but I don't care.

- Watch: Amazfit GTR 2e with the official app. Alternatively it should work with Gadgetbridge if you don't want to use the offical app ("Zepp"). Amazfit GTR 2 is a better option if you want it to have WiFi and want to store music on it.

You're welcome! If you want more features, the GTR 2 (regular, not "e") is only ~20 EUR more and gives you WiFi and some storage for music and some other extra features. The GTR 2e supposedly last much longer on a charge though. I've got the "always on display" feature activated and I project to have 7-10 days of battery life.

If you're still in doubt about the phone, I recommend OnePlus devices, because they seem to generally work well with the microG variant of LineageOS (https://lineage.microg.org/), which allows you to break free from Google too. Alternatively, Pixel devices also support a wide range of ROMs, including LineageOS. With microG to replace Google Services, you still get push notifications, but without having to log in with a Google account. I've got a OnePlus 8T for 3 days now. The OnePlus 9 sadly isn't yet supported by LineageOS, and the 9 Pro has some downsides that I don't like.

Even if they end up canning the idea, they have been gaslighting their user base in the past week or so. Their CSAM implementation betrays their earlier statements on privacy, so they are dead to me already.

Since a few days, I have finished switching over from a Mac Mini (M1), iPhone and Watch to a desktop (with a proper graphics card, unlike the M1), a phone with LineageOS (and microG, so no/little Google) and an Amazfit GTR 2e watch. Apple is missing out on 3-4k in purchases from me in this year alone.

It's not bad at all, in fact: it's great! I just switched from an M1 mac and an Intel MacBook Pro to a Manjaro desktop with Gnome 4. In several ways, I found the Gnome 4 user experience to be better than macOS Big Sur. Even 3 finger swipe gestures with the Apple Trackpad work fine to switch between desktops. And my PS5 DualSense controller? Even the touchpad works, in a Wine/Windows application under Linux of all things!

With proper cooling, the machine is near-quiet on light loads like browsing. The background noise in my house is generally higher than the idle fan noise. It's obviously noisier with higher loads, but that's what you get with a beefy graphics card. (the CPU cooler has a 24 db upper limit).

I also had no issues with BlueTooth or AX WiFi. Resume-after-suspend works solidly too. The only hickup I had was that my graphics card is too new (Radeon 6700 XT) and that I had to get a newer Manjaro ISO from GitHub, rather than the main website.

They cannot publicly fight FISA court gag orders. They can't even so much as mention those.

The problem with that is that the threshold is unknown, so it could be 2 or 3.

I'm currently considering a Pixel phone with CalyxOS. It might be the good in-between choice.

Thank you for that insight! My comment was based on some (older) Reddit comments. I'm glad to hear there are working apps.

On phones: I'm considering a Pixel device with https://calyxos.org/ The main limitations will be the featureset of MicroG (no ~maps~/wearOS/auto). Possible issues with important apps like those for banking.

On cloud: Synology Diskstation is amazing. Only use it through a local VPN though.

edit: maps work (see reply)

A better title would be: Apple to scan iPhones for banned images.

SwiftOnSecurity:

> Just to state: Apple's scanning does not detect photos of child abuse. It detects a list of known banned images added to a database, which are initially child abuse imagery found circulating elsewhere. What images are added over time is arbitrary. It doesn't know what a child is.

(from https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/14233832560037478...)

Native is not a tool, nor a goal. Native is an implication of a user experience and performance. Very few non-native applications provide the same experience and performance as native applications (although there are exceptions and it's not always black and white).

"Native" is the implication that a certain level of comformity is present: the user generally gets an experience that is similar to other native applications.

As you develop with native APIs, and when you follow the best practices for the platform, you end up with a product where the UX is much easier to grasp for the user. Non-native solutions very often have different UI/UX patterns, which leads to users having to learn these patterns before the application becomes understood by them.

I read it as "Linux had free updates for 6 years and the manufacturer was negligent to apply them".

If all other fingerprinting techniques would magically disappear, then FLoC is an improvement.

If other fingerprinting techniques stay, then it's actually worse, since there is now an extra data point to better identify users.

If your browser has a no-script extension available, this will fix the issue.

As a former ProtonMail customer (for several months) and current Fastmail one (~ 4 years): If you have more than 2 domain names, you'll pay 30 EUR/month for your ProtonMail account. I think that's ridiculous. The 5 alias limit for the "Plus" tier is also too limited in my opinion.

I doubt that very much. Consider these scenarios:

1. Call for free from home/couch with a regular camera in the privacy of my home.

2. Go to some location and pay a third party to do a less private call, and have a better visual experience.

The most obvious choice would be number 1 in 99.9% of all cases. In theory, privacy can be increased by creating a sound-proofed environment for your call, but in practice, that would easily become very expensive.

The "never use null" policy doesn't work across your third party dependencies, unless those dependencies coincidentally use the same policy as you.