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tinus_hn

7,585 karma · joined March 31, 2016

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tinus_hn··on Apple allows some iOS apps to track user locations via lists of nearby SSIDs
No, I’m through. As mentioned elsewhere, the way you built your site makes it impossible to have a discussion if you disagree with the mob.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38725130

If you really want ‘intellectual curiosity’ and ‘discussion’ you will have to change your and your colleagues stance on using the voting system as disagree buttons and enforce it, and stop the part where people are blocked if they disagree with the mob, because everyone is pressing the disagree button (and some people the ‘super disagree’ flag button).

Of course the way you run the site is up to you but if you do not change it you will get to enjoy a boring agreefest with only hivemind opinions, endless fistbumping around rehashed ideas.

And fine if you have opinions on how I word my thoughts, but there’s also the other side of others calling disagreeing trolling and implying that you think something doesn’t work as well as they think it does means you’re too stupid to understand it. Action leads to reaction and fairness demands that calling me out means you also have to call out the other side. The other side that downdisagreed my original post, which you can’t argue is inflammatory, so far that it gets hidden and I get blocked from responding. While it is a valid point, and it ultimately gets agreed to 1 again. I don’t care about the points but you can’t have a discussion if you can’t respond to people.

tinus_hn··on Apple allows some iOS apps to track user locations via lists of nearby SSIDs
As you say, it’s a method to get a coarse location and then refined using GPS which by the way does not really take time to acquire once you have downloaded the almanac and have the coarse location.

So this ‘allows applications to track location’ actually allows applications to track coarse location which then does not allow them to refine using GPS.

tinus_hn··on Unbricking my MacBook took an email to Tim Cook
If you follow that logic the rest of the complaining, which is just your complaining, is just irrelevant whining.

And if Apple is responsible for noting who owns the devices next up you will come whining about how that mean Apple doesn’t allow you to sell your devices without informing them.

Whine whine whine from a non paying customer. You don’t like the products, you’re supposedly not going to buy them. What are you whining about, that a product exists that you don’t like? Nobody cares.

tinus_hn··on Apple allows some iOS apps to track user locations via lists of nearby SSIDs
That doesn’t mean seeing an SSID means you are at exactly that location.

If you are in a city you see 50 SSIDs at any given moment. Are you at those 50 locations at the same time? No. Is there a way to triangulate where you are exactly? No, its unreliable and not an exact science.

tinus_hn··on Apple allows some iOS apps to track user locations via lists of nearby SSIDs
Back in the real world SSIDs are a very coarse and not very reliable way of locating devices. You are exaggerating.
tinus_hn··on Apple allows some iOS apps to track user locations via lists of nearby SSIDs
One should realize that what they call ‘track user locations’ is actually ‘get a list of visible SSIDs’.

Should be behind a permissions check, but not the end of the world.

tinus_hn··on Beeper vs. Apple battle intensifies: Lawmakers demand DOJ investigation
If you think copying an authorization library is ‘obfuscated code which serves no other purpose’ you’re just wrong and this discussion is pointless.

Ultimately either Apple will successfully block Beeper permanently or they will DMCA them and the courts will have their say. We’ll see.

tinus_hn··on Unbricking my MacBook took an email to Tim Cook
No, you’re fantasizing about your philosophical position again. It’s all announced and advertised in advance, if you don’t like the way the products are advertised to work, don’t buy the products and don’t complain the products work the way they are advertised to work.

Whining about keys with Apple and thieves doesn’t change a thing about that, it’s just your philosophy. Registering the device to the owner is the responsibility of the owner. It would be nice if Apple would be more insistent, even though then you would whine more ‘because Apple is shoving advertising for its services down peoples throats’ or ‘because Apple is forcing people into accepting iCloud’ but we can just disregard your whining. As you agree it would be better and would have prevented the problem in the article. But that doesn’t change the fact the responsibility is with the owner. Not with Apple. The owner made the mistake, and he agrees with it.

And requiring Apple to be perfect just because they don’t subscribe to your lofty philosophy is ridiculous. If you buy the devices you accept the agreement which, just like the agreement that comes with any similar device, plainly states that the devices and the software they run are not perfect, the product is as-is, don’t like it return it.

If companies were beholden to your philosophies we would get nowhere. That’s why no company does that. It just doesn’t work.

tinus_hn··on Beeper vs. Apple battle intensifies: Lawmakers demand DOJ investigation
That’s a totally different kind of case where the barrier to interoperability is the ability to reproduce copyrighted content, like in the case of the DSMOS chip which contains a poem which has to be provided for the OS to work. These tactics have sometimes been successful and sometimes been unsuccessful. It’s just the legal lottery.

Here they simply provide someone else’s library to perform the authentication. That’s just basic copyright infringement, however lofty the goal.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/858511/what-is-com-apple...

https://www.theregister.com/2003/08/11/habeas_cans_spammer/

You can’t write an emulator and sell it including the bios written by Sony. Has been enforced many times. Similarly, you can’t do what Beeper is doing here.

tinus_hn··on Unbricking my MacBook took an email to Tim Cook
No, you’re missing the mark. If there is to be any kind of theft protection it is going to be a protection of the device from a user, either the proper owner or a thief.

There is no way for the device to make the distinction if the owner does not register himself as the owner and the thief does. Then the thief is the owner and the device will protect itself from the real owner. There is just no way around it. That is a mistake made by the person writing the blog, they admit it and they say Apple should have made it more obvious which is a reasonable request. Not Apple should have not made the protection, that is an unreasonable request.

You might have philosophical problems with this kind of protection, fine, then don’t buy the devices because they have it, they are advertised to have it and you can’t get them without it.

Don’t buy a device that you know doesn’t do what you want and then go whining on the internet that it doesn’t do what you want. That’s a you problem.

tinus_hn··on Beeper vs. Apple battle intensifies: Lawmakers demand DOJ investigation
They include a library from MacOS that makes it register:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38534247

tinus_hn··on Beeper vs. Apple battle intensifies: Lawmakers demand DOJ investigation
While obviously the true Hacker News opinion is ‘hurr durr Apple bad’.

Beeper is requesting money for illegally distributing Apples copyrighted code which they then use in a questionable way. Cry me a river.

tinus_hn··on Why Bitcoin is up by almost 150% this year
https://archive.is/kdjIR
tinus_hn··on Unbricking my MacBook took an email to Tim Cook
The person is praising Activation Lock and criticizing the fact you can skip setting it up. Yet you want to turn it into a claim Activation Lock is a bad thing.

Nothing more than the typical ‘hurr durr Apple bad’ commenting common on this site. Dull, pointless, not interesting.

tinus_hn··on Microsoft forced people to install their browser (2010)
Too bad for Firefox. I don’t care; if you want to use Firefox on a phone, get an Android phone. It’s not like you don’t know what you get in advance.
tinus_hn··on Fritzbox: AVM is threatened with a sales ban due to violations of Huawei patents
The idea is you have an invention and then try to have the standard require your invention. The parties that create the standard are supposed to declare the patents they have that cover the standard and then typically there is some licensing authority where manufacturers can pay a fee to have a license for all the patents involved.

On one hand it’s reasonable because the inventors spent money on researching the new things that are in the new standard. On the other hand it can be rather unfortunate, especially if it’s software, because with open-source there is no way to pay and get a license.

tinus_hn··on Microsoft forced people to install their browser (2010)
Because there are also advantages. iOS gets away with forbidding JIT execution in third party programs, so they get away with exposing no APIs that allow memory segments to be executable unless they are signed, which is a great thing from a security point of view.

Also as there is only one browser engine, the system only contains the bugs that are in one browser engine. Most operating systems have bugs in the browser engine that comes with the OS, and bugs in the engine users actually use which is more bugs.

tinus_hn··on Microsoft forced people to install their browser (2010)
Then again, iOS is a better OS because it can get away with supporting no third party browser engines.
tinus_hn··on Texas power plants have no responsibility to provide electricity in emergencies
You better not look up what was one of the historical names of the Katholieke Universiteit in Tilburg. Apparently they actually printed letter paper.
tinus_hn··on OpenAI suspends ByteDance's account after it used GPT to train its own AI model
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right

There is protection in a few notable jurisdictions so a violation would make the product illegal in those jurisdictions, which is a problem if it’s an online product.

tinus_hn··on Marvel's Copyright Battle for Spider-Man Is Over, & It's the Result Fans Wanted
Does that make it just that the estate is honored with a credit every time the character is used?
tinus_hn··on Marvel's Copyright Battle for Spider-Man Is Over, & It's the Result Fans Wanted
And now that the real creators are dead, all that’s left to fight about is money.

The people in the estate didn’t do the work, yes they have monetary rights, but it’s not like they deserve to be credited for the existence of these characters.

tinus_hn··on Swift was always going to be part of the OS (2022)
I think the Log4j debacle makes it painfully clear that we simple can’t afford to trust application developers to keep bundled libraries up-to-date.

Good idea, doesn’t work.

tinus_hn··on OpenAI suspends ByteDance's account after it used GPT to train its own AI model
It’s like company A collects everyone’s phone number and then publishes it as a phone book. And then company B copies the phone book and publishes it as their own.

It’s not a straightforward copyright issue but in many jurisdictions that is not allowed. Company A did the work, they should be allowed to profit.

tinus_hn··on OpenAI suspends ByteDance's account after it used GPT to train its own AI model
Does Bytedance allow OpenAI to train ChatGPT using TikTok?
tinus_hn··on UK court allows ANN patent saying computer programs exclusion does not apply
So the conclusion is, lawmakers decided software patents are unwanted. But I know better than them, so I’ll allow them anyway.

I hope there’s still the possibility of appeal and this bad judgement is reversed.

tinus_hn··on QEMU-iOS, an emulator for legacy Apple devices
It’s easy to have principles when you can just be strict when it’s about what someone else is doing and be loose when it’s about what you’re doing yourself.

That’s not a balance, it’s just hollow grandstanding.

tinus_hn··on Apple now requires a judge's consent to hand over push notification data
Now that the publicly available guidelines were exposed, they changed and Apple didn’t even send a notification to every journalist in the known universe. Time to gather the tin foil hats!
tinus_hn··on Apple now requires a judge's consent to hand over push notification data
Bad Apple! They don’t even fix flaws they don’t know about!
tinus_hn··on iOS 17.3 to Include Stolen Device Protection Feature
But the things that do involve Apples servers could have been implemented years ago and shouldn’t be dependent on installing an iOS update. Why would you not deserve to be protected as much as possible if you use a Mac with iCloud and an Android phone?
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