It's time for the US to end the sanctions on North Korea. The abuse workers face is a straight line result from the fact that virtually all aspects of their economy are under total embargo. North Korea is a nuclear state, and they will never go back to not being one. North Koreans have been working in China for decades and that won't change either because China is not going to let them become a failed state.
I would guess this policy is the result of ADL, other pro-Israel lobbying groups, and Israel itself, pressuring social media groups as part of their hasbara operation. And perhaps Elon Musk is a Zionist himself (he's certainly friends with many VCs who are).
Miguel de Icaza is a random person to censor. I'm sure it's just a crude, automated policy that goes off the content of the tweet and his account having a large follower count.
The Epic v. Apple trial showed that no one got special deals. And Epic v. Google did show Google gave many companies special deals, like Spotify. Ironically that played a big part with the jury deciding against Google.
Tim Sweeney is mad about having to pay Apple's App Store commission. Developers for many years believed that by having their own "payment processing" they could pay nothing to Apple. However the district court ruled that Apple is entitled to collect a commission because it wasn't just for "payment processing," it was for its intellectual property. They are just doing it in a convoluted and less efficient way as a result of the one claim Epic won in Epic v. Apple.
I think that would be the case if they were given to the US and other Western intelligence agencies. My scenario requires competition between geopolitical opponents to create an incentive to worry about defense as well.
Perhaps Apple should provide research devices directly to the US's and China's intelligence agencies and pit them against each other to help close more vulnerabilities. The agencies can decide on their own where to strike the balance between offense and defense, but I suspect it would lead to more closed vulnerabilities over time.
I'm curious to know from experts if there's anything Apple can do to create a step-change in terms of security of iPhones? Like if the going rate for a zero day is $1 million, is there anything Apple can do that can drive that up to $2 or $3 million? Or is it just going to be a perpetual cat and mouse game with no real "progress"?
There was no partnership as far as I know. Masimo met with Apple's M&A team, they didn't do a deal, then Apple hired Masimo employees to do it themselves.
This complaint of Apple meeting with some company and then stealing their technology is the narrative put forward by every company or VC that meets with Apple and doesn't result in an acquisition. As if it's impossible to know who to hire from LinkedIn, patents, knowledge of the field, etc.
It's just become a meme among tech enthusiasts (on Reddit, HN, etc) and tech journalists that "blue bubbles" are a real social problem. The origin of the meme was this amusing post by Paul Ford 8 years ago [1]. They took it and ran with it for their own purposes. For some it was to explain away the iPhone's success versus Android and for some interested actors like Epic it was part of their antitrust campaigning to illustrate the "lock in" effects. It however was never a social problem in the real world (more than, say, young people feeling depressed about seeing their peers' manicured lives on Instagram) or the reason why iPhones sell well (you only had to look to China, or now India, to see the success of the iPhone in places where iMessage wasn't the dominant messenger).
I don't see why it's impossible. It requires coordination and millions of dollars in funding by all the respective governments, but if the world thinks CSAM is a serious problem, then it's a drop in the bucket.
CSAM doesn't need to be added to the database in real-time. It can be done quarterly, giving each national agency time to deliberate on the content.
The veto system would have to require that the equivalent of Russia and China's NCMEC agrees that the image/video's signature that's going to be included in the database is actually CSAM at a low level operational level. Without that consensus, it should be technically impossible for anyone to include a signature.
This is the only compromise I would accept, otherwise I'm in favor of E2E with no backdoors. People who care about preventing CSAM and prosecuting pedophiles should consider this an improvement over the status quo.
If national legislation by Western governments provided that only signatures from this org could be included, then I'd support it. But I don't know anything about this INTERPOL list, does it actually require consensus by all of these countries? Or can one country influence what's included in practice? There has to be an effective veto by all the countries involved for anything to be included.
The only way for this system to work would be if the database of CSAM were managed by consensus by geopolitical rivals. That is, it would have to include Russia and China. This is the only way to ensure that Western governments don't abuse their access in the future to surveil dissident groups.
Trusting that NCMEC can't be compromised is a nonstarter. I would trust a system where Chinese, Russian, American, British, etc police agreed that the database only includes CSAM.
If there's going to be removable batteries for any product it will be for new product categories like the Vision Pro. Apple is definitely not going to take established products like the iPhone and change it up just to be different (which isn't a sustainable competitive advantage because anyone can do it). Even with the Vision Pro it's a compromise that Apple is likely tolerating, rather than what the 'final form' of the product will be in 10 or 15 years.
I was being charitable. It will be vastly worse for the US. And in the event of a war with China it could very plausibly be the end of the US as a unified state. There will certainly be plenty of political violence.
The US has no national security threats in its region. Conscription would only be about fighting a war with China, which would be a war of choice (like all US wars).
It's unfortunate that biotech funding also depends on the same low rate environment that tech does, because while the tech industry has mostly been spinning its wheels on nonsense after the iPhone (like crypto), there's real innovation in biotech.
All that says is that the iPhone was a uniquely good business and opportunity that will likely never be matched by any product for the next few decades. There isn't anyone claiming the Apple Vision Pro will be as big as the iPhone in terms of sales or importance. It could however be a new modern computer that takes over many functions performed on a Mac today. The TAM will expand based on its capability, much like it did for the PC during the 70s and 80s.
It's not in Apple's interests to get into military contracting because of the potential to damage their brand, as well as avoiding the geopolitical tensions that would invite.
This is an academic argument for a purist. The fact is that Apple checkmated them by allowing monetization of podcasts directly. Without being effectively countered, Spotify wouldn't just be 25% of the market, they'd be the YouTube of podcasting.
It could have worked, but only if Apple remained asleep. Paying for big shows like Joe Rogan has given Spotify a large market share in podcasts. Obviously they weren't going to offer upfronts to every single podcast. Their strategy was to bring users in with the biggest shows, and have the rest of the podcasts feel like they have no choice but to move to Spotify to monetize (via their ad-tech).
The podcasting initiative was doomed to fail as soon as Apple started allowing individual podcasts to monetize directly. That prevented them from rolling up the long tail of the podcast universe as a Spotify exclusive by just paying for the biggest shows. It was a good strategy by Apple. Then you combine the change in the macro environment, and that was the final nail in the coffin.