This is roughly along the lines of the vast majority of the people that would happily vote in a police state if it meant that they were safe.
Freedom is a good thing, even if it comes at the price of some risk, no matter what the context.
Freedom is a good thing, even if it comes at the price of some risk, no matter what the context.
Or how about it's along the vast majority of the people merely wanting the police to guarantee safe cities?
You don't live in your mobile phone: you use it.
>Freedom is a good thing, even if it comes at the price of some risk, no matter what the context.
"No matter what the context" is BS. I presume you lock your house doors or wear a safety belt -- sacrificing freedom of movement for more security.
> Or how about it's along the vast majority of the people merely wanting the police to guarantee safe cities?
Which more often than not includes being safe from the police, and that's where the problem lies. This sort of power is bound to be abused.
> "No matter what the context" is BS. I presume you lock your house doors or wear a safety belt -- sacrificing freedom of movement for more security.
Interesting. I've lived in places where unlocked doors were the norm, the village where I live (20 Km from Amsterdam) still has plenty of unlocked doors. People wear safety belts because there are no downsides and because they are required by law so that stretched analogy doesn't hold.
Did you count Android amongst Linux? It is after all...
The Android eco-system does everything it can to bury the fact that it uses Linux under the hood, and it is relegated to the role of a fancy HAL.
Android is all about Java.
The NDK is there as layer for implementing Java native methods, games and high performance audio, and general purpose native libraries from other OSes.
This is what you are allowed to call from C and C++ on Android:
https://developer.android.com/ndk/reference/index.html
https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis.html
Trying to call anything else terminates the application as of Android 7.
https://developer.android.com/about/versions/nougat/android-...
As of the upcoming Android 8, calling syscalls outside of what libc requires leads to application termination as well.
https://developer.android.com/preview/behavior-changes.html#...
Basically nothing really UNIX specific and could be implemented with any other kind of kernel (hence Fuchsia).
Think what? That Linux is malware-free? If you're addressing me only, I'm just asking for clarity on the dataset in question, not expressing an opinion about the safety of the platform.
Given the OS architecture Google can easily announce a version using other kernel, given that there is very little UNIX specific on what can be done with public NDK APIs.
Only those customising Android builds would be impacted.
An estimate 99.99% of the Linux software I use is from a curated repository. Yes, I could just download src.tar.gz and ‘make install‘ but I prefer the safer more convenient alternative.
It is the inability for mortals to install stuff from anywhere but the App store that causes the curation policy to be an issue.
Every human is mortal.
Thus unless you were implying non-human mortals, your point is stale and no longer valid.
When you are in a collision with out a seat belt more often than not your body becomes a 100 pound plus projectile going at non trivial speed that could easily kill some one.
Consequently even libertarians might be for seat belt laws (unless of course you are on private roads).
What was it people used to say about Apple and he perceived lack of viruses and malware issues? Security through obscurity.
> I've lived in places where unlocked doors were the norm, the village where I live (20 Km from Amsterdam) still has plenty of unlocked doors.
Arguably that experience is an edge-case, at best annecdata.
> People wear safety belts because there are no downsides and because they are required by law so that stretched analogy doesn't hold.
If they are required by law, does that not limit your freedom of choice? Does this not stretch your own limited analogy?
Besides the walled garden of Apple is not so walled - you can install any app you want on your iDevice, as long as you have access to Xcode (which is free). It is the access to the marketing and reach of App Store that Apple denies.
Yes, but the point was that people do not always realize the consequences of their choices, not that there were no differences.
> Do you support Amazon allowing sellers of counterfeit goods on Amazon Marketplace?
I don't support the Amazon 'marketplace' at all, Amazon should take full responsibility for anything sold through Amazon.com and if they allow counterfeit merchandise on their store that should be their problem, not the problem of their end users. And there is plenty of counterfeit merchandise on Amazon so I do not get what the point is, unless you wanted to make the point that in spite of being curated Amazon fails horribly at keeping their store in good shape.
> Besides the walled garden of Apple is not so walled - you can install any app you want on your iDevice, as long as you have access to Xcode (which is free).
That's fine, but for your regular end-user this has been made so difficult that it is something only developers will use.
> It is the access to the marketing and reach of App Store that Apple denies.
No, it goes much further than that. To all intents and purposes if your app is not in the app store then it doesn't exist because iDevices users think that that is the only way apps can go on their devices.
You want Amazon to take full responsibility for their merchandise, but yet okay with Apple not doing the same thing.
Amazon has to take the same responsibility with goods, as Apple has with apps.
Apple does not have the same kind of duties when it comes to apps in the Apple app-store, they have created a de-facto monopoly on the channel between the people programming applications for ios and their customers.
And comparisons with police states or monopolies are just ludicrous. With police state you have no choice, but with app ecosystems you are free to choose another (yes, with a different phone - but you don't buy a $700 phone by mistake or chance). And Apple is not a monopoly, there are plenty of other viable options.
This kind of hyperbole isn't helpful. The differences between voting in a police state and using a walled garden app ecosystem run by a private company should be obvious.
> Freedom is a good thing, even if it comes at the price of some risk, no matter what the context.
What about the freedom to choose an application platform?
Since I'm sure I need to make this disclaimer, I don't own any Apple (or Windows) devices aside from my work-issued macbook.
It is helpful in the sense that it points out that people will often do things that have far reaching consequences out of their free will because they do not realize the long term effects.
> The differences between voting in a police state and using a walled garden app ecosystem run by a private company should be obvious.
Yes, but in the one case people vote with their ballots, in the other the vote with their dollars. In both cases the long term effects are negatives but since those effects are still safely over the horizon we can pretend that they don't exist. By the time those effects are felt it is too late to change course.
> What about the freedom to choose an application platform?
That would be fine with me, but only if the hardware were 'open' enough by default that third party application platforms would have a chance of making it to single digit percentage penetration.
> Since I'm sure I need to make this disclaimer, I don't own any Apple (or Windows) devices aside from my work-issued macbook.
I don't care what you use or why, what matters to me is that there is - at least in the mobile space - the choice between Google on the one side and Apple on the other and that both of those have substantial shortcomings when it comes to the freedoms they afford their users.
With Google you'll be tracked from here to kingdom come and with Apple you're going to be handed a smart terminal. Neither of those choices appeals to me.
That's a shallow quote, though. You're right, on the face of it – freedom is a good thing. But we accept compromises on absolute, unbridled freedom all the time, in order to trade of some other desirable outcome.
I would be concerned if computers generally were locked-down. But they aren't – competitors to iPhones are freely available, and desktop & laptop computers are ubiquitous. I will continue to oppose restraints on what can be done with them, but the freedom to choose a curated garden is also a freedom that should be respected.
One could argue that no one was forced to install those apps that always tracked them, or that they could manually switch between the options. However the small minority of people who care about the privacy of their location will now have a lot more apps available to them with less hassle, because Apple is deciding to enforce a rule.
I don't think these new guidelines about executable code in education apps will be a problem, but I can imagine dropping the restriction altogether allowing developers to take advantage of users who aren't vigilant, or simply making people have to be much more suspicious about everything they allow on their phone.
This article [0] has made points that I'm not certain I completely agree with, but has done enough for me to suggest that my original position might need updating.
The point being, essentially, that at some point we might need to consider the trade off of who we're actually afraid of and where we can get the best protection as part of a trade-off, since things like "freedom", "risk", "security", and "privacy" aren't absolutes in any meaningful way.
[0] http://www.newstatesman.com/2015/11/coming-anarchy-john-gray...