Article says you cannot side load books on Apple Books. That is incorrect. You just send an epub to books via the share menu on Mac or iOS and it loads it. Also syncs it via iCloud if you want it to.

Perhaps the author meant you cannot download purchased books off of Apple Books.

I didn’t love them forever ago, but I rather like their new single “The Emptiness Machine”. I don’t follow music so I didn’t know they had lost their lead singer until yesterday. I heard the song and thought, “Linkin Park doesn’t have a woman for a lead singer….”

That’s why you can’t just use the version as a string. You need to use the API which correctly uses string length as a tie breaker.

I’m surprised and happy that SUSE is still doing well. I have fond memories of using SUSE in the enterprise especially around their “perfect guest” campaign for using it in virtualized environments. I thought they had very well-baked integration with large Windows networks—things just worked out of the box that didn’t with RHEL. I’m sure a lot has changed in the last decade but I appreciated their cooperative stance in the enterprise.

I would feel that it would be a reasonable if it was my local paper running the story. Arstechnica IS a primarily technical news site—I believe they should have a higher bar—otherwise they are just parroting a report and not providing useful (to me) news.

I generally think arstechnica.com does a decent job of being a non-garbage news site. I pay a couple bucks a month for the ad-free RSS feed. This story feels terrible to me. I don’t doubt a law suit has been filed, but I would expect some investigation by the reporter of the extra-ordinary claims of privilege escape the application is claimed to be capable of.

https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/news/notices/changes-medical-inadmissibility-policy-irpa-take-effect.html

I think there is some thought going on about what it means as a society to discriminate against people with disabilities during immigration.

It seems like the US would have a similar problem with people moving between states that had medicaid expansion and ones that do not. I don’t know if there are any studies on the issue.

Discriminating during immigration based on a congenital disability feels like discriminating based on race to me.

I’ve moved to WinPE for its immutability.

Surprisingly, I thought the article was a reasonable summary of the actual paper. I think some people might think this was a poke at privacy on Apple, but it really focused on how hard it is to create accessible settings despite the enormous number of options.

I have found that navigating the menus in Apple iOS is quite a bit easier than on my Android devices. Mac seems more difficult as the settings tend to be inside the individual apps and don’t surface as well through the search.

The paper hammered home the point that Siri configurations were particularly hard, but they also mention that Siri data is end-to-end encrypted. I thought all those points were fair.

I do believe settings need to be improved, but I have little faith they will ever be useful for 99% of users who will simply never change anything from the default. At this point I believe any meaningful improvements for the majority of users will come from useful defaults that include E2E encryption on basically all user data. I feel Apple is coming close with iCloud Advanced Data Protection that was introduced last year, but that needs to become a default. Maybe it cannot though—too many users will lose all their data and then the trade off of security to convenience will not be worthwhile.

I don’t think a big business should have an advantage over a small business that cannot afford that technology while using public airwaves. A better solution imo would be to prioritize all very low-bandwidth traffic.

109 devices per capita? I just walked through the house looking at what my partner and I have that plugs in. We don’t have 109 together. And it isn’t like I we don’t have stuff. Mesh wifi routers, camping gear. Heck we even have a refrigerator. What do people collect?

I agree that decrypt/encrypt is bad—it is simply not E2EE. The solution would have to be a better method of public key distribution for ‘federated’ systems.

While I don’t know anything specific about facebook messenger, E2EE doesn’t necessarily preclude what you suggest. A messaging service could store the entire chat history encrypted without decryption keys. When you get a new client you could restore the entire history in encrypted form onto your device. You would then use a recovery key you would possess to decrypt the message history on your end. At no time would the messaging service have the keys to decrypt. I’m not saying that is what facebook does.

Why do you need to control both ends for E2EE? Both ends need a public and private key to encrypt and decrypt messages. You need a method of key exchange. I would prefer to have an offline method (phone call, in-person) of validating a key (like iMessage and Signal have). But I don’t see a reason to need to control both ends.

If you enable advanced data protection apple cannot recover your account. You need your recovery keys or a designated recovery contact.

The apple doc implies (to me) that a SIM swap only works after you authenticate on an apple device (e.g. using your password) even without advanced data protection. I have never tested that.

You can use the long process (many days) to recover an account assuming you haven’t enabled advanced data protection. I’m okay with that as it is perfect for my grandparents (I had an older relative who got their account back through this method).

I get that you could SIM swap to recover other accounts (not Apple) if they have SMS as a recovery method. That sucks and it really sucks for people who don’t get that an email or SMS recovery can be a giant hole in security.

The document you linked says it requires a combination of your apple account password plus an SMS text sent to a pre-registered phone number? Seems like a pretty good setup for most people. Also has the alternative of recovery contacts and recovery keys.

It looks like turning on advanced protection would eliminate the SMS method but I am not 100% sure. Then you would need recovery keys or recovery contact.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651

My biggest worry in these cases is not that I get locked out, but rather that Apple mangles my keychain. I have a USB CSV of my passwords in my bank safety deposit box. With passkey I am not sure of how I would get a similar backup.

I will vouch for it. I use it on my iPad constantly and have few complaints. I don’t think it syncs well between iPad and Mac or Phone when using iCloud sync, but I think they have other methods and I don’t really need sync since I do my media consumption on the iPad.

arstechnica has a premium RSS for $3 a month that has no ads. I love it.

That sounds very slick. I never really used twitter so had no reason to use mastodon instead, but I am glad it exists!

If you migrate your own account to a new server, do other people follows of you automatically migrate too? Or do all your followers need to then update to follow you at the new location?