Osmium

You raise very good points, but it's not like there aren't ways to break into a house without signs of forced entry.

To my mind, privacy is often the most important difference. There are a lot more private things on my phone than in my house, honestly -- a phone these days is often almost an extension of the mind. Which is why we should hold it to a higher standard.

I personally have no problems with TouchID/FaceID, I think the secure enclave is great, but I still think there's a lot of room for improvement, better sandboxing of data, better tripwires for when data is accessed/transferred, etc.

And the choice of objective function.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-04-03

Obviously a judgement call, but I thought there were some useful comments in reply to the OP (e.g. fmihaila's comment).

While the OP's comment was unsubstantive, it highlighted an interesting quotation from the article to discuss, that a lot of people had opinions on and also wanted to discuss. Maybe the only appropriate response to a quotation like that is ridicule, which serves an important purpose in its own right.

I do appreciate this is a very difficult topic to moderate however(!) To be honest, I'm surprised the article itself was even allowed on HN and wasn't flagged for being too political.

> One cleric claimed — with no evidence — that driving harmed women’s ovaries.

Cycling can cause sexual impotence in men, yet we don't see anyone claiming men should be banned from cycling.

Arguments like this are toxic; even if true (which they obviously aren't), they expose an ugly underlying sexism with the implicit assumption that somehow it's okay for men to make these decisions for women as long as it's for a 'good reason.'

> Apple is not made of decent human beings

This just isn’t true. Most people are decent human beings. Employees of Apple are no different. Don’t box them in as “the other.” They’re just people.

> Just look at how their devices are manufactured.

This is a valid criticism. Also an industry wide problem. Apple is very transparent with problems in their supply chain, even when it reflects badly on them. This is a problem we have to confront, but it’s far larger than Apple alone.

> tax evasion

There’s a difference between tax evasion and tax avoidance. It’s not good practice for a company to pay more tax than they need to. The appropriate remedy to this is legislation.

> Sorry if I bust your little bubble of joy

You didn’t, so it’s okay :)

> They had basically nothing at stake.

Except the human cost and resulting PR nightmare if a terrorist attack happened that they could have in principle prevented (e.g. if the terrorist had collaborators, and information on the phone helped find them).

> I don't think this was a particularly difficult thing to do.

Very easy to say when you're not the one responsible for that $800bn company ... if you're a decent human being, you're probably not worried about your own wealth in that situation, but the livelihoods of all your employees and other entities that rely on you. Every decision carries weight. The value of your company is not always empowering; the higher its value, the larger the consequences if you're wrong.

Most important question here... how long has this vulnerability been around for? Was all ready to upgrade this morning...

This is scary if accurate.

For people unfamiliar with Keychain, the problem as I understand it is not that unsigned apps can do this per se (though I don't think this is a good idea), it's that they can do this without user intervention.

The normal flow for Keychain is that when an app wants access to a keychain item that was not created by that app, it has to ask for user permission to allow once or always allow access. It sounds like this isn't happening in this case.

(Aside: it used to be possible to trivially access all website passwords in Safari too (which I dutifully reported as a bug, because it was a terrible design choice), but Apple thankfully changed this to require authentication in new versions of Safari.)

It's a fair request, but there are so many areas of the OS that have small decisions like this, if there were a setting for all of them... Settings.app is already a little burdened under its own weight (though the search bar has helped a bit).

The set-up process for a new iPhone is also reaching crazy levels, with so many decisions for new users to make.

Don't really know what the solution to this is to be honest -- Linux-style config files maybe? :P

I think iOS needs to be a lot more aggressive with this, in both directions (switching because of poor LTE and because of poor WiFi). If it were better, I don't think I'd never actually need to touch the WiFi toggle.

> my phone is lying to me.

If you force touch the UI, it does say "Not Connected" when you hit the button, not "Disabled."

I can understand the confusion, because they have re-used an old UI element for a new purpose, but there's no reason the button should mean "Disable Radio" rather than "Disconnect." And as cptide mentions, the button now has three states: blue for connected, grey for disconnected, grey with a line through for disabled. Once you know this, I think it makes a lot of sense.

If you want the old behavior, it's still there in settings, where the on-off toggle will turn off the radio itself.

Personally, I much prefer the new system (I far more often just want to disconnect from the current network/devices than disable it entirely), and think the new control center is much improved over the old one.

To anyone from Booking.com reading this: I'll go elsewhere next time I need to book a room.

Dark patterns may help profits in the short-term, but they're terrible for your brand. Just ask TicketMaster.

It isn't just tech-savvy users that will catch on to this either. If an everyday user uses Booking.com, reads reviews and thinks their room will be great, but then has a bad experience, they're going to stop trusting Booking.com's reviews, and stop trusting their brand. It will only take a few bad experiences to go elsewhere.

Is there going to be a replacement for DuckDuckHack[0]?

Had a cool instant answer integration I wanted to contribute, that I hope would be useful to a lot of people (primarily students/scientists).

Seems a real shame for there to be no route to community contributions in the future.

[0] https://duckduckhack.com

> FYI, I think there's a free version of PyCharm (Community Edition).

I recently started using PyCharm CE over the last year and it really is a lovely IDE. I'm not surprised it works well in interviews, it makes it easy to get things done with minimum fuss.

I don't disagree with you, but the average consumer just doesn't know enough to care. We don't have the power to not 'give them an inch' until the consumer is educated, and pretending we do isn't getting us anywhere. Simply put, we have no leverage, the W3C has no leverage. Consumer education is the most powerful tool we have here, which is why the EFF etc. is so important, but this is necessarily a long term strategy.

> "Maybe if we wish on marshmallows and rainbows, this statement will come true this time!"

Well it worked with music... You can now buy DRM-free music in lots of places.

The music industry realized it just wasn't worth the investment to insist on DRM, and it was actually harming them (consumers were becoming confused, didn't want to buy music not knowing if it'd work on their next device, etc.)

I am so mixed about this. In principle, this is a terrible idea, and I share many of the concerns in this thread -- I am not a fan of DRM. But as a consumer/end-user, I'd much prefer a standard DRM over Flash/Silverlight any day of the week.

The real question is how we get rid of DRM in the long term. Piracy isn't going away. Hopefully content owners will one day realize the economic cost of implementing DRM isn't worth its return, and only serves to alienate paying customers. I imagine it might take some years for them to realize this however.

I appreciate your language if not your conclusions.

Just to be clear, I have nothing against hunting, only against cruelty.

And in any case, this conversation is not about hunting, but about farming, which is something that is a decidedly human invention, and so an argument towards what is and is not 'natural' is tangential. We have already left nature far behind.

Not down-voting you, because it's an interesting comment, but:

> far smarter than software engineers, by comparison.

This is just a dumb, specious statement. Would expect better from a philosopher ;)

Also, would be interested why you think:

> Philosophy of Science, I think, is almost a completely bogus field.

What makes it bogus?

> The vast majority of philosophers don't advance the field in any meaningful way.

The vast majority of people in any field don't advance the field in any meaningful way.

(Agree with both yourself and the OP: with great respect for philosophers, comparisons of 'relative smartness' of one field over another is not helpful or particularly meaningful.)

Part of farming responsibly is anticipating these problems before they happen and knowing how to deal with them.

If you need to kill animals to safeguard your livestock, and you don't have a method of killing them humanely, then you have already abdicated your responsibility and shouldn't be farming.

> Our species has been killing animals for thousands of years.

Thankfully our species has made some progress over the last few thousand years, and most of us are lucky to no longer be in the position where cruelty is unavoidable in order to survive. A lot of progress can still be made, but we can't use the past to excuse the actions of the present.

> This is a cultural signpost pointing to our society's total disconnection from the responsibilities and consequences of agriculture.

I agree with this. But note that people disagreeing with the author's actions are not necessarily against the killing of animals that threaten your livestock: this is a necessary reality. The issue is that this author does so in an apparently irresponsible, inhumane way. It is not necessary to torture animals.

> and the most humane option is illegal.

There are lots of 'humane' ways of killing animals that do not involve firearms (this is the illegal option given in the article).

Note that the author still tried an illegal method regardless (the BB gun, which is a projectile weapon).

> I had a brainwave. “I’m getting the blowtorch!” Brilliant! I could burn the possum.

I'd hope this was a poor attempt at humor, but given the actual methods attempted, who knows.

> I pathetically consulted my iPhone for ideas

If you need to consult your iPhone on how to humanely put down an animal, you probably shouldn't be doing it. Especially if you find some random advice about duck taping a knife to a broom handle and then follow it.

This whole article is horrifying.

> photorealistic masks

But it's not yet clear how much photorealism matters vs. 3D shape, which may be a lot lower fidelity.

> Faces are less private than fingerprints

Possibly, but it's also easy to pick up someone's fingerprint from anything they've touched after the fact. With faces, you have to actively record/3D scan someone. It's not clear whether e.g. security cam footage will be sufficient fidelity to reconstruct a 3D face in enough detail, but this will be interesting to find out.

In case anyone missed it, Apple claimed false positive rates for Touch ID were 1 in 50,000 and for Face ID were 1 in 1,000,000.

> Statistics about the false-positive rate are mostly meaningless in an adversarial case.

I imagine what those special effect masks were for, to test for the adversarial case. I also imagine that's why there's an IR camera too -- I'm not sure what wavelength of IR this is, but it seems distinct from the depth mapping, and would be more difficult to fool on a mask.

Great link. This is just incredible:

> However, the substance was at least a step up from earlier Russian tracking devices like radioactive nails hammered into the tires of U.S. diplomatic vehicles, allowing Russian surveillance vehicles to hang back unseen and follow along by using special equipment to track targets’ tire residue.

The method of identifying moles is ingenious too.

> And no single, sonic gadget seems to explain such an odd, inconsistent array of physical responses.

Is it possible the sounds heard were illusory, as a result of whatever caused the brain damage? So not a sonic weapon, but some other mechanism of action?

> The blaring, grinding noise jolted the American diplomat from his bed in a Havana hotel. He moved just a few feet, and there was silence.

So something that can be focused at a specific point. If not a sonic weapon, then it has to be electromagnetic?

Talk about bizarre. Whole thing reads like a conspiracy theory. Presuming the reporting is accurate, it's hard not to believe people were specifically targeted with the internet to harm them (rather than the alternative explanation of an espionage technology gone wrong), if the effects were localized on their beds (i.e. a specific physical location where they would be known to be for several hours).

> rather than GitHub?

Just to note that Swift is on GitHub[0] and has a very inclusive community.

The impression I get is that Apple isn't really interested in soliciting outside contributions for their OS/kernel code, which is why they're just code dumps.

[0] https://github.com/apple/swift

At the moment, in a country with much worse/more expensive internet than what I'm used to, though still very good by global standards.

In seriousness though, I'm optimistic for fast worldwide internet. There are new solutions for low-population density areas on the horizon. If you look at current stats, about 47% of the world are online now, up from 16% a decade ago. In the developing world it's 40% up from 8%. I actually think in some ways it's an easier problem to solve than, for example, access to clean water. I wouldn't be surprised if this reaches 90% in a decade.

I imagine bigger problems will be variance in speed and latency, and artificial restrictions on supply/metering, and product design not accounting for this. Which we're already seeing in e.g. app sizes, webpage sizes.

I agree with you, but I think syncing is itself a 'first-world problem', in that you need to be able to own multiple devices in the first place to even worry about syncing.

If you have metered/expensive internet, modern smartphones are going to present all kinds of problems, syncing aside (e.g. app download sizes for one).

It's a big enough application, I'm sure some people have issues with it under certain workloads.

I'm the same as you however -- I've never had issues with iTunes performance. I don't love the design, I'm glad they're simplifying it, but it always performed better than Spotify for me (which is the main reason I switched actually; I found the Spotify app to be terrible).