Yeah it's a v1.0, but even so when Apple already has all this infrastructure up strikes me as an odd omission that significantly detracts from the utility for no good end. Even a basic "ignore this tag for a day/week/year/permanently" would at least help sand down a bit of the most irritating notification spam. And worth noting that this sort of thing is a genuine security/privacy issue too: in real security systems, the human factor matters a lot. If people get spammed with noise, they will inevitably end up ignoring it when an actual signal turns up. We've known this forever.
This is the company which ran out a credit card and payments infrastructure with serious fanfare— and, incredibly, no provisions for married people having joint accounts.
None, they added it later when dhh and Steve Wozniak made a stink about it.
OS X has always supported multiple user accounts and I can’t see that ever changing.
The I-devices on the other hand are explicitly positioned as personal devices. And I don’t really see that changing either.
Nowadays the price of macs has dropped to the point where some of the iPads and phones (!) are more expensive than the cheapest (and perfectly capable) macs (I do my development on a baseline MacBook Air because it’s so conveniently light). So they are still selling (relatively) low cost, multiuser machines.
So, crystal-ball-gazing time: I don't think this part is true for iPadOS, but it's going to take them a couple more years to really get it right.
Here's where I think they're skating: watches and phones are personal devices, Macs remain what they are (personal computers, I could define this but it doesn't seem necessary on HN), and iPads (and HomePods) are family devices.
"Modes" and Family Sharing are both brand-new, and I can see effort to merge the two concepts so that you can put the family iPad in "Alice mode" or "Bob mode". Instead of separate user accounts (in MacOS each user sees a personal set of applications, that will never happen on i-anything), iCloud just manages all the login stuff in the background so that each user sees the subset of the system they're allowed, with their personal data and user accounts swapped out transparently.
This is a bad fit for how apps and logins work... right now. But Apple is clearly trying to fix that, like I said, I think this will take a couple years at minimum before we actually see it.
- Macs: no change.
- iGadgets (phones, tablets, headsets, watches): will remain per-person
- "shared" devices (appletv, homepod, carplay, home iot devices) will take their settings from the per-person devices and will allow multiple per-person devices simultaneously. So the speaker will play songs / respond to requests from people whose phones are on the LAN; the car will take its default settings from the driver (how will it know?) but the passenger can control the map etc.
Lots of problems like this.
I bought some Tiles and Trackrs and gave them to friends who agreed to help me test their usefulness, pretending that they had "stolen" these items from me. I would see if I could locate them a few days later when I "noticed them missing".
I got one ping from a Tile once when the friend had apparently stopped for gas, but none from their house. And zero at all from the Trackr. Apparently there just aren't enough users in my area for the networks to accomplish much?
By stealing battery from every iphone user and data from their cellular plan, Apple has built a find-me network that actually works. Therefore it also works for stalking. Therefore Apple is getting the criticism.
Isn’t this criticism a bit like arguing that binoculars/telescopes are bad because they allow people to peep into other peoples windows or cars deserve criticism because they allow you to tail someone(or run from authorities)?
Tools can basically always be misused.
Also tiles don't rotate their BT address so they're an ideal method for shops to track you.
Apple's method actually works because it doesn't need an app installed and they have mitigated the third party tracking problem.
B) I don't trust the longevity of infrastructure financed by a shitcoin
Not sure if you've seen but Apple opened the Find-My network to other vendors: https://www.apple.com/ee/newsroom/2021/04/apples-find-my-net...
Apple's marketing must train in the Matrix for how good they are at dodging bullets...
I'm able to see both sides. We all like free things, but free things cost some body some thing some where. If the vendor/maker of a thing needs to pay a license to make it look free to the consumer, that doesn't seem egregious to me. After all, they'll just roll that into the price of the product.
The entire thing works so well precisely because there are so many Apple devices in the wild, and Apple is looking to capitalize on that.
But think about it, how am I wrong? We set these companies up, by law, to put profit first, then hope they also do the right thing.
Those are misaligned incentives at the very least.
If they don't provide the network: what value do the tags, you bought with money, provide?
If you buy from 3rd party and 3rd party doesn’t pay Apple, why should Apple provide the network?
Are there third party tracking device manufacturers with free access to these systems?
Are you talking about stolen or bootleg goods?
The latter is a much more complicated topic, for sure.
What more information do you need?
My first response to the first version of that loaded question: "_I wasn't saying they should_..."
You respond with: "If Company A builds a product/service, why should Company B be expected to utilize Company A's work without compensation?"
Am I to believe you're being genuine here? Should I really repeat myself again, in text, to save you a scroll up?
I didn't say that. I never implied that. I stated the exact opposite.
Why are you asking me to rationalize and explain a stance I've never taken, and don't have?
Only charged money for big transfers and the high frequency traders.
Dunno why it stopped. Seemed sensible to reward hodlers and incentivize use for microtransactions. Ultimately, liquidity comes from being able to trade a big thing easily for lots of small things.
Miners used to include zero-fee transactions in blocks when there was space available. Nowadays, most blocks are full or nearly so, so miners have a financial interest in mining transactions with the highest fee-per-byte first and ignoring anything which has a low or zero fee attached.
There was never any special handling for "infrequent" transfers.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Miner_fees#Priority_transactions
Maybe I got it wrong: I thought it meant how long the coins have been sitting around, but maybe it means how long the transaction has been sitting unmined to make sure no transaction is left behind?
But it seems I'm on the right track, in that input_age was a measure of how many confirmations, which suggests it's about how long it's been since the last time they were moved:
note1 here: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/95407/what-were-...
Edit: spelling
Of course, regulation is a bad word for a good number of the electorate so this will never happen.
What are other examples where specific protocols (open or not) are mandated by regulation ?
The number of RFCs that are required for basic things like email, storage, security etc are essential standards primarily because USG required contractors and vendors to adhere to those standards.
An open protocol would mean trackers could be built right into things, like a keychain flashlight with a tracker.
You also wouldn't need a phone to pick them up, an ESP32 could handle the relaying to WiFi, so something like a school's lost and found could have a fixed base station for $5.
Even better, devices could relay microscopic amounts of data through nearby nodes. It would be like the Things Network, but at a quarter of the cost and with zero new hardware to get started.
no.
The problem with blockchain-based applications right now is that the blockchain is not scalable in its write-access, so the extent to which such applications can be updated is quite limited.
Ex. Headlines often focus on Apple when revealing some of Foxconn's worst labor practices. But stories about Foxconn using child labor to build Alexa devices, and the person who blew the whistle on that being tortured and put in jail for revealing it, went fairly under the radar in comparison. It's definitely a good thin that unethical labor practices being used to build our stuff is discussed, just the headlines and initial focus might lead laymen to believe one American hardware company is causing this, rather than most.
Apple is going to always be under the magnifying glass because they are just so much "bigger".
https://www.wbrc.com/2021/11/18/woman-discovers-tracking-dev...
https://www.insideedition.com/atlanta-woman-cant-find-apple-...
Would you expect people to sometimes get away with committing a crime like stalking? Yes. Would you expect every single person who commits stalking in this way to always, without exception, get away with it? Of course not. The parsimonious explanation is that the vast majority of these stories are simple misunderstandings, like someone accidentally dropping one somewhere.
The uniquity of technology gives real stalkers this nice excuse. How convenient!
https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/17272409/how-stay-safe-apple-a...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jan/20/apple-air...
How many stalking victims never found out they are tracked because they used Android phones? How many perpetrators just covertly removed the AirTag after the attack? This device allows very clandestine surveillance by anyone.
I'm willing to grant that the number of people caught would be lower than the number of people who were actually successful -- we don't catch every murderer, for example. But isn't there one, just one, example of someone actually showing up? Nobody ever gets caught? Like I said, this is classic urban legend material.
A 5-day battery life is useless for keeping track of your bicycle, but more than enough for a stalker to find someone's home.
Of course, they were much less widely reported on by the press - so perhaps less known by stalkers? And only available via ebay, not off-the-shelf in reputable retailers.
This specific instance might be true, I don't know. But it seems incorrect to base an argument off Apple getting less/more coverage than a company like Amazon.
It's going to be very hard to use Tile to stalk people.
Not on the same level, but Netflix auto-playing videos and previews is also annoying, and the option to disable it is purposely hidden on their website, not accessible through the app. Ugh.
I do think AirTags should have a button like the Samsung ones, tho.
Well, Apple Airtags use the massive network of iPhones to report the location of nearby airtags to Apple.
For people at risk, it is meaningless. Your crazy stalker will just drive around locations and confirm where you are remotely.
The whole controversy is both real and bullshit. It is very trivial for people to get tracking devices for modest amounts of money in high threat scenarios.
I think the issue with AirTags is the less malevolent, but creepy scenarios. And to be honest, the issue has existed for years with “Find My Friends”, which I’m sure is widely abused by family members and others to follow people around.
If you’re using it to find stuff you want the largest possible network
I realize that this might not be a common experience and that it could be just some particular quirk about how it works with my phone specifically. But I gave up after that.
But the lack of explicit Family cross-view when other devices automagically have it is nigh unto unforgivably bad. I have heard arguments made about privacy but they are not that coherent. Expose an "opt this device out of Family sharing" during config option or whatever.
That friends have attached two different tags to their kid's backpack so both spouses can track is total fail. :|
Apple's getting a lot of flack because they're enormous, consumers are more aware, and they have a better network... but the fact that they did any stalker alerting is beyond anything the existing products in the market have done. I'd guess the product designers at Apple are probably constantly frustrated with this reality.
Apple coopted every single phone into a tracker essentially creating a biggest people following and tracking network in the world - plus they use UWB which massively more accurate than what Tile uses.
What Apple created would be Facebooks, NSAs and pretty much every spying entities wet dream to get fingers on.
>What Apple created would be Facebooks, NSAs and pretty much every spying entities wet dream to get fingers on.
The government already has this with cell phones, no?
No, Apple made it available to you. Police and intelligence agencies can buy this data from various entities or subpoena it.
It’s impressively pointless. Maybe I should buy one and annoy people with it.
I wish we had a fully open alternative with the same global tracking network.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/9/22820381/tile-life360-loc...
It's commercial proprietary tech, I definitely wouldn't be using it if I considered my location history sensitive data.
That's very strange, I wonder what is triggering it for you.
For my use case, tracking bags, kids on vacation and etc it has worked fine.