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Comment by yuan43 | Hacker News Reader

> Lockdown Mode is an optional, extreme protection that’s designed for the very few individuals who, because of who they are or what they do, might be personally targeted by some of the most sophisticated digital threats. Most people are never targeted by attacks of this nature.

The list of restrictions doesn't seem to inhibiting - for those who have used it, what are the points that stand out? Is this something designed for habitual use or under specific situations?

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Been using since it came out over a month ago. The biggest annoyances are:

1. You cannot tap on any links in iMessage. You have to hold your thumb down on the link, copy it to clipboard, switch to Safari, paste

2. If someone posts a gif in an iMessage thread, it doesn't show up

3. All inbound requests for FaceTime calls seem to be automatically blocked, even when they are coming from people who are favorites in my contacts. I haven't looked into why yet. Maybe it's because I don't have their phone number saved with a `+1` prefix in my contacts?

Other than that it's hardly noticeable, and I think it's fantastic that we now have this option.

The linked article says

> Incoming FaceTime calls are blocked unless you have previously called that person or contact.

So you may have to call them first, even if they are a favorited contact.

Thank you! TIL that I never initiate calls with the most important people in my life.

Can meet in person, after all, right?

Seems well thought out. It prevents someone from maliciously adding their phone number to, say, your mom in Contacts.

It's more that there are plenty of people who have others in their contacts, who rarely or never want to receive facetime messages from said contacts.

This is a strange one. Presumably a few people in the target group for this would know a few people also in the target group - how do they intend to bootstrap trust? Or is it just a calls b, b's device reject call - b can now call a? Then after b call a, a can also call b?

If so, it sounds like a very complicated way of marking contacts as "super favorites"?

You can receive incoming calls from accounts you have called. Presumably, the bootstrap looks like two people try to call each other, one is rejected, one goes through. Then either can call the other in the future.

Is this really a feature people want? I can’t imagine any situation where I’d want to allow unsolicited FaceTime calls (99% of the time it’s some kind of spammer)

> 2. If someone posts a gif in an iMessage thread, it doesn't show up

This sounds like a positive for me. I disable animations in chat whenever it’s an option.

#1 sounds great. I hate how I can't open a link from iMessage directly in Firefox Focus, which is my normal practice. In the process of copying the link, I have to long press, which causes Messages to pre-load a preview of the page in a standard webview. I don't know what this does for privacy, but I wish there was a way to disable just this behavior.

It's possible to disable the preview, clicking somewhere on the grey bar IIRC.. at least when I used iOS.

I've been using it for the past few days. I mainly use my phone as a text-based communication device, with occasional feed-scrolling (such as reading HN or twitter).

So far, the only annoyance is that sites relying on custom fonts for icons can end up with indecipherable UI elements (e.g. a button with a "refresh" icon is now just a button with an empty square)

You can add an exception for those sites in safari

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