pranau

Google does not operate in mainland China.

I’m disappointed to see such nonsense on HN not flagged to death. Is this a troll comment that I’m too slow to get?

Seems like a story they spun with cherry-picked data to justify the removal of the dislike count.

This seems like a disingenuous whataboutism. You are free to not use Steam as a publisher. You can use Epic/GOG or choose to self-host. The biggest advantage of Steam is the convenience of payments, marketing and infrastructure. If that is not an attractive option for you, you can skip it. This option is not available for iOS at all and is quite limited on Android.

NY Times had an article covering it yesterday - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/18/technology/apple-child-ab...

The article seems to cover both sides of the argument fairly and nails the concerns over Apple's on-device scanning:

> If governments had previously asked Apple to analyze people’s photos, the company could have responded that it couldn’t. Now that it has built a system that can, Apple must argue that it won’t.

So what? When you don’t trust the actors running the system, it doesn’t matter if the crypto is perfect.

And right now, I don’t trust the maintainers of the CSAM database and Apple to do the right thing.

This happens in North Indian states as well where the state governments have gotten extremely trigger happy with cutting off internet access for trivial reasons like student exams. It’s extremely frustrating and makes me wonder how people keep voting the same morons (I’m sorry but I do not have a charitable word for them) back into power.

> it would be a cesspool like the Google play store

I would suggest you use an Android smartphone from the last 5 years before making a comment like this.

I use both iOS and Android devices on a regular basis and both the App Store and Play Store are cesspools. I would go even further and say that the App Store is more obnoxious in that it serves me a half page ad whenever I search for an app.

At least on Android, I have the choice to not use the Play Store. That is not even possible when I use iOS.

Thanks, that makes sense. Eventually, it does come down to trust then. I was under the impression that there was a technical reason as to why Amazon Sidewalk is worse than Find My.

I don't own an Amazon smart device and I don't think I ever will so I cannot comment on whether there is actually a need for a feature like Sidewalk.

Find My is also opt-out instead of opt-in

Are there any indications that the Sidewalk network can be used to relay other than device control information?

Can you please explain how Apple’s Find My is anonymous while Sidewalk is not? As far as I understand, Find My collects device location information through other iPhones and then upload them to Apple’s cloud where it can be viewed by you. Apple states that this is done in a privacy preserving way by using rotating identifiers. In the case of Amazon, they state that all the device information being relayed through your device is encrypted and capped at 80kbps.

I am not sure I understand why one is a concern while the other isn’t.

Can someone explain why there’s so much outrage against Amazon Sidewalk when it’s doing a similar thing to Apple’s Find My/AirTags which was met with almost universal praise?

Apple does this as well on iOS where certain stock apps like Books always open links in Safari even when you have a different default browser set.

>And if side-loading was alowed then every big player whose app users "have to have", e.g. Google, Facebook, Abobe, Zoom, Epic, would start their own independent app store (or distribution just for their apps).

>Users would have no recourse than to install the app for there (or do without Facebook or Zoom etc).

We are already aware of a platform that allows easy sideloading - Android. And most apps on Android are distribured through the Play Store. All "big" players still go through the Play Store.

When there is no such thing as the examples you described going on in Android, why do you expect iOS to be different?

Check today's date :')

The Google keyboard on Android (and, I think iOS) already lets you do this[1]. Go to the emoji picker on the keyboard and select an emoji or two. You get 4-5 suggestions of randomly added modifiers for the selected emoji.

https://9to5google.com/2020/12/03/gboard-emoji-kitchen-expan...

I'm surprised that this isn't a requirement for banks considering the very large number of scams going on in the US.

In India, getting an SMS/Email confirming every card usage is a legal requirement imposed by the Rserve Bank of India. The same goes for card usage itself. All credit and debit card POS transactions need the card PIN to be approved. Likewise, all online transactions require MFA.

Interestingly, I find the same to be true about people who complain about Android here on HN. And I feel it is for the same reason as you've mentioned. I cannot count the number of times I've had to laugh in pain at the shocking ignorance displayed by a large number of users when talking about Android and other associated Google products.

Genuine question - I use WebEx Teams at work too and it works perfectly fine for the most part. It's also very lightweight compared to Slack. What do you find so terrible about it?

I wouldn't be so sure to blame the OEM. Read this article [0]. Google dismissed a support ticket claiming that the OCR text selection feature was available only to Pixel devices released after 2017.

The Android Pie page [1] advertises the feature here as a standard Android feature under the system usability enhancements section.

This feature was actually available to all devices before the Google Assistant was released via a feature called Google Now on Tap.

[0] https://9to5google.com/2018/07/05/text-selection-android-p-o...

[1] https://www.android.com/versions/pie-9-0/

OCR text selection is available via Google Lens. What I'm talking about specifically is the ability to select out text from app pages where text selection is not usually possible. For example, say an app had button text or an embedded image, it is not possible to select these unless the app developer made those selectable. In Pixel devices, it's possible to go to the recent apps menu, and select these unselectable texts via OCR. This feature was previously available to all devices via Google Now On Tap but has since been limited.

I wonder how many of the features advertised here will make it onto the Android 10 release of other OEMs. In Android 9 for example, the ability to select text via OCR in the recent apps screen was limited to only the Pixel devices for some strange reason even though all Android devices had access to that feature prior to the release of Google Assistant via the Google app.

In a similar vein, Digital Wellbeing was officially limited to Pixel devices and Android One devices although it could be sideloaded onto other phones (where it ran perfectly fine) running Android 9+.

If you had made the same statement but replaced Apple with Google or Microsoft, your comment would have been downvoted to death already.

You shouldn't need an online ID to use a laptop. It makes perfect sense to use it without any sort of manufacturer provided profile.

> I've heard a lot of people in India are moving to it for personal and work chat ilo WhatsApp.

I'm from India and I had to go look up what you were talking about. Literally the first time I'm hearing about this. I am also pretty sure that not many have moved to it from WhatsApp. Truth is, after so many years I am just now seeing the slow growth of Telegram amongst the city crowd.

> turn us into weak, dispirited, sanctimonious saps.

Citation needed

> I would love to see Windows not take up 4 gigs of RAM out of the box. Let me uninstall Cortana please Microsoft. I'm sure there's other crap I don't want but I fear if I can't just hit 'Uninstall' it wont go well, or an update will bring it back.

So much misinformation in this and the replies that address this. Windows needs a minimum of 2GB RAM to run. But it scales its memory footprint according to the available memory. It will instantly swap this out when a demanding application is launched. For reference, on my Thinkpad with 8GB of RAM, Windows idles at about 3GB. On my PC with 16GB, it idles at around 7.5GB.

I get that Google is very powerful and it lives off of our data and I get how this may be construed as an attack on our privacy but the amount of misinformation and conspiracy theories I am seeing on this thread is appalling. First, Google is just implementing an electronic ID standard that will work as a replacement for traditional paper ID cards. They are also working on a mechanism to display the ID card even when the phone doesn't have enough power to boot.

I don't get the concerns about it being mandatory because you can't expect everyone to have the same set of IDs and besides it's just a convenience feature like storing our membership cards or our emergency contact information in a wallet.

There is justifiable concern over the privacy aspect as we don't know if the IDs are stored locally on the device or if it's synced to the cloud. It will be troubling if it's the latter but criticising Google about this even before the feature has been finalized and released seems perplexing to me.

In my experience (as an Indian), they ask money primarily for alcohol, cigarettes or drugs and buy food from whatever's left over. They are still not what one would call "nourished" and are pretty malnourished in most instances.

I would be more suspicious of the article as a long winded advertisement if he had mentioned the sites :)

But to answer your question, I'd say the best bet is to follow the money. Sites that rely on subscriber revenue are more likely to have good journalism standards than sites based on ad revenue.