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Comment by golangnews | Hacker News Reader

You can't use 3D touch to turn off wifi. According to Apple you have go into settings to do so.

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT208086

The problems with this change are:

It is surprising - grey buttons usually mean disabled permanently, not disabled except for some uses or for some indeterminate length of time.

It changes established behaviour without a clear warning to the user.

It is inconsistent - disabling bluetooth now disconnects from all devices (except Apple ones!), and it says 'Not Connected' when it is in fact connected to an Apple Watch say.

It is inconsistent - other buttons like airplane mode or mobile data do turn off permanently.

It's not a huge deal and everyone will adapt, but you shouldn't be apologising for Apple here - this was badly done and not well thought out.

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> You can't use 3D touch to turn off wifi. According to Apple you have go into settings to do so.

Indeed, the detailed block of controls does not present the three possible states to the user. In the same zoomed in block, the Airdrop toggle does. Conversely, going to Settings is binary and allows only for On/Off, not that very practical Disconnect state. The difference between Off and Disconnected is a light bar across the icon, which is inconsistently not the case for the Off state of Mobile Data and Airplane mode.

The "dumbed down" UI concerns are valid, yet the intersection between security minded folks that will proactively act to disable WiFi/BT upon a security advisory and the ones who won’t know the difference between the two ways to toggle that is close to zero. To me it looks like people are up in arms without even defining the personas and threat models. Get real, this feature is downright awesome and the slight UI hiccup is certainly no ShellShock.

I agree it's not a huge security vulnerability, just bad design by Apple.

There are also a few other reasons for disabling wifi - battery life, tracking, debugging connections, and of course security as well (not in response to specific vulnerabilities, but on the principle of less attack surface being safer).

> I agree it's not a huge security vulnerability

Until the next Broadcom WiFi radio vulnerability.

If that's our threat model then we're already hosed. It's not like "turn off your wireless" is a solution to vulnerabilities like this outside of security circles.

Sure we're already hosed, but turn off your WiFi is a fair suggestion. By making it more difficult to determine if the WiFi radio is off and more difficult to disable, Apple is further pushing this solution into "security circles".

But people who know about that will disable it in settings, and the majority of the world will go on using WiFi fully oblivious.

Before the command center existed people weren’t saying having a WiFi toggle hidden in the settings app is a security vunurability.

Manually managing your radio state is almost certainly going to have a net negative impact on your battery life.

Your smartphone screen uses several orders of magnitude more energy lighting up than btle and wifi use while idle.

> It is inconsistent - disabling bluetooth now disconnects from all devices (except Apple ones!)

I was surprised by this, so I just tested it. Tapping the button immediately disconnected from my Apple bluetooth AirPods.

The exceptions are listed in that Apple article.

I also just tested it. When I click off the bluetooth button it says "disconnecting from [apple watch name]". I don't know if the writer of that article actually tested this stuff, but it clearly disconnects from my apple watch (and says so) when I turn off bluetooth from the slide up menu.

You can 3D Touch the Settings icon to jump to the WiFi settings.

I'm on an iPhone 6, before 3D touch was introduced. Usually a long press is equivalent, but not here apparently. I just cannot get to this setting.

I noted the same thing in another thread, and was downvoted for some reason! Why should this be 3D touch only, if a long press also brings up a menu?

Only if you are using a phone with a 3D Touch sensor, which the SE does not contain.

not the point, the talk is about the control center options.

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