Apple advances its privacy leadership with iOS 15, iPadOS 15, macOS Monterey | Hacker News Reader

Apple advances its privacy leadership with iOS 15, iPadOS 15, macOS Monterey

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72 pointsalwillis32 comments

I'm a little concerned about the new Safari interface [0], which very smoothly integrates the tab/address bar with page content. For example, the background color of the page flows behind the open tabs such that it looks like one unified interface, rather than browserchrome || pagecontent.

This is all great to experience as web apps increasingly take over the functions of native apps. It does help them feel more like first-class citizens, rather than plain documents pulled up through a program.

But it easily brings up new potential abuses by phishing sites, spammy notifications, and other bad actors. The new design seems to start breaking down the browser UI's Line of Death [1], at least in perception.

[0] https://www.apple.com/v/macos/monterey-preview/a/images/over... [1] https://textslashplain.com/2017/01/14/the-line-of-death/

I just installed iPadOS 15 beta tonight. It took a few minutes to get used to Safari changes, but now I like it.

I am currently hating the mobile Safari changes, alas. I love the idea of moving the address bar to the bottom because it's just easier to get to but ... you tap on it and it jumps to the top where it used to be. Then when you've got to a page, the address is right on top of the Home Bar which, I thought, you were supposed to avoid placing clickable items because the damn Home Bar gets in the way.

Also when you click the bottom address bar, it removes the page content in favour of your favourites. Really stupid if you're trying to go to/search something that you've seen in the page content.

Also, also, if you swipe the bottom address bar to change tabs - a really nice feature! - it disappears after a second or two (sometimes before the content has fully loaded) which means you then have to tap in a different place for it to come back.

Death by a thousand UX stupidities.

The address bar is on top on iPadOS. I am traveling right now, so I did not put the iOS beta on my phone.

A pain point for me is having things different on my iPhone and iPad: side for hardware volume controls, different address bar location on iOS vs. iPadOS, etc. I find a slight amount of cognitive dissonance when switching devices.

It is a risky move to mess with people's browser experience. It does look good though, I use Chrome and won't be changing for that but it does show thoughtful changes, perhaps even practical!

I'm also wondering how this UI will work when you have 30 tabs open in one window.

> I'm a little concerned about the new Safari interface

Having used it for a few hours, I'm hoping someone sees sense and gives this a good UX going over before release because it's currently unpleasant to use. The motion at the top with the tabs swiffing[1] about is distracting; some sites colour the whole top which is another huge motion flash; and finding the address bar requires scanning because it's not in a fixed position.

There's also an optical effect where switching between a site that's coloured the top and one that hasn't makes it look like the whole browser is jumping up at down due to the contrast boundary at the top of the page. All of this is going to make motion sensitive people even more unhappy.

[1] best way I can describe it.

> All the user’s requests are then sent through two separate internet relays. The first assigns the user an anonymous IP address that maps to their region but not their actual location. The second decrypts the web address they want to visit and forwards them to their destination. This separation of information protects the user’s privacy because no single entity can identify both who a user is and which sites they visit.

This sounds a little like a VPN but also like tor. I don’t really understand what it’s saying

It's a 2-hop TOR.

Tor fundamentally doesn’t work unless it’s 3 hops though, or am I mistaken? The anonymity comes from the middle-man node? That’s why I said it seems a bit like a VPN because you have to trust a server to not log your actions

I do not think Tor necessarily requires 3 hops. See https://tor.stackexchange.com/a/497. It's just that 3 hops provide significant incremental benefit over 2 hops.

I don't think there is anything magic about three hops. You need at least two so that no single node knows both the source and destination. With a third node you are able to isolate the first and last hop from each other to make it more difficult for collusion, but needing a third hop is probably outside the threat model for most people. With Tor what is usually more important is making sure the nodes span different providers and jurisdictions.

We are all guessing at how it works, but if I were to try to translate that description I would guess that the first hop is used to anonymize the source address and it relays with an address that provides a region or country (so things like web site language or geo restrictions continue to work) but that the actual destination is encrypted to a key held by the second hop. The second hop passes along the generic IP address as the source, decodes the destination, and makes the connection. Address anonymizer does not know the destination, exit node does not know the source and only sees a regional pool IP address.

At least for me geo detection is all over the place. Google thinks I'm in Bulgaria, rest of the ip2geo sites think I'm in SF.

I'm Turkey. You can actually pick if you want a close server or not but no country selection.

It also seems to use CloudFlare's network.

>It also seems to use CloudFlare's network.

So basically Cloudflare Warp+?

> Users can also find out with whom their data may be shared by seeing all the third-party domains an app is contacting.

Finally! Hopefully this sunlight makes some of the cockroaches go away.

Yes, data can be shared server-side, but that reduces the economics of the tracking industry because of the added cost of bandwidth and complexity of supporting different server types instead of just an iOS SDK.

unfortunately, with the rise of cdn's, it's become much more difficult to differentiate useful connections from tracking/nefarious connections. oftentimes, you just get a generic cloudflare or aws server node, rather than the actual 3rd-party. sometimes the reverse lookup goes a step further to determine the final recipient of a connection, but not often.

Safari gamble and UX oddities will take some time to go either way I suppose.

Privacy leadership? I don't think a good portion of Apple's userbase (iOS consumers) care really and are happy with whatever babyified UI updates they've released and living inside the walled ecosystem

how long before crony governments like India demand backdoor" into this network in the name of "national security" and "fighting heinous crimes of piracy" because now laws like DMCA don't really matter. a user watches a pirated movie on abc website. the lawyers of big movie company demand list of users who they want to go against for copyright strikes but the company now has no records a la lavabit.

same for india who has gone against cartoonists now because the ruling government is scared of its "image" being tarnished by cartoonists and they want to punish them wild west style. good luck sicking this against governments

The hiding of the geolocation of the user is going to be a nightmare for gambling websites and other websites who have regulations based on the visitor's jurisdiction.

These websites can still use the JavaScript GeoLocation API[1], can they not? The article just talks about removing the ability to ascertain a users Geo-location via their IP address (unless I've missed something which is very possible at this hour). I'm not at all familiar with these services or their respective regulations but it seems, however, if the need for Geo-location exists, it may still be had if the user allows it. (via the permission prompt displayed when activating the JavaScript API).

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Geolocation...

It's generally done via IP, the JS API is definitely a real option now for them but I've never seen it used (e.g., Poker sites, affiliate gambling blogs)

If spammers will use this feature too, won't this lead to websites displaying non-stop Captchas for every user coming via private relay, similar to VPN/Tor?

Private relay is only active when using Safari on iOS / macOS.

It's not a system wide VPN that can be used by spamming tools.

And it's a paid feature so I'm guessing Apple will limit the number of devices (per iCloud account) that can use it.

How would this work in China?

It wouldn't and it would be turned off.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27431691

How is it private if they can access all your data?

Craig Federighi: Because of this dual-hop architecture, neither Apple nor the relay station knows both who you are and where you are going. Apple knows who you are (because you are using iCloud Private Relay), but it doesn’t know where you’re browsing. Its third-party partner knows where you are browsing–but not who you are.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90643627/apple-privacy-wwdc-priv...

These are all great features. Wonder when Google will catch up? Seems like they are actually moving more in the opposite direction.

google is an advertisement company and advancing privacy features is against their self interest. this is the value of things like chrome to google

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